Sex Matters

Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense by Mona Charen, 238 pages

Over the course of the last fifty years, all of the leading indicators show that American women have become more unhappy, both absolutely and relative to men.  According to nationally syndicated columnist and bestselling author Mona Charen, it is no accident that this coincides with the cultural triumph of a feminist movement that values empowerment over love even as the sexual revolution brought into being a new order founded upon lies, resulting in a pornography-soaked hookup culture which leaves unsatisfied the deepest desires of both men and women.  In Charen's analysis, the antihumanism of the sexual revolution is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of sex as something self-referential rather than intrinsically other-directed.

Charen is a political pundit, not a philosopher, and while this book barely mentions Republicans or Democrats it is suffused by the techniques of the social sciences as the method by which political legitimacy is asserted in the modern world.  As always in such cases, the response of readers to the book is likely to be a combination of their prejudice for or against the central thesis and their evaluation of how accurately such an approach models reality.