SOURCE: Reitter, Paul. “Gender Unbender.” Nation (23-30 July 2001): 39-42.

In the following essay, Reitter comments on Bourdieu's Masculine Domination and examines the reasons behind his immense popularity with the French media.

Pierre Bourdieu's newsworthiness has become news. The profile of him in the New York Times deals more with how bright his star is than with its substance, and quite a bit of the attention Bourdieu receives from the French press has to do with the attention he receives from the French press. What set this cycle into motion? In France, where academics play a much larger role in public life than they do here, academic visibility is neither rare nor strange. So why did Bourdieu's particular brand of it become a media spectacle?

There are a number of reasons, some of which are obvious—for example, volume. Bourdieu gives televised addresses on the ills of television. He...