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Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant Absurdist Dystopia--must read for all MEN
Review: I suppose a work like this is valuable mostly for its reinterpretation of standard strains of Western (masculine) thought. Ms. Firestone makes astute observations that illustrate the failures of Marxism and the Psychoanalytical movement at understanding what women want. Men will never get it and any system devised by men will never get it. Quite honestly, most men don't want to get it. The mystery is the thrill. This is why marriage is such a drag. It takes away the thrill of it all and replaces it with slow, creeping death. It also creates stability. Something that Ms. Firestone's proposed solutions do not offer. Children need stable environments to reach their potential. How a commune would provide this, I don't know. I agree with Ms. Firestone that childhood should be abolished. Mostly because I do not see how children benefit from our paternizing treatment of them. Children ought to be treated as adults and given the same rights. However, I do not agree that they should experience "as much genital sex (with adults) as they are capable of", as Ms. Firestone suggests near the end of her book. What would stop adults from taking advantage of the child's smaller physicality in these instances? What kind of paradise allows the wholesale sexual abuse of its children? Or, perhaps, sexual perversion (along with art, music, poetry and religion) would also be eradicated? I recognize that I will never be pregnant. I know it hurts worse than anything I could ever imagine. But, it isn't barbaric. It makes sense that Ms. Firestone was 25 when this came out. Most women I have known around that age were decisively against ever having a baby. Somehow, though, 5 years on, they found themselves wanting a baby. Conditioning? Undue pressures from family members and the media? Or is it simply that women are biologically constructed to desire the experience of childbirth. Maybe that's Firestone's whole point. We need to figure out a way to rewire women so they don't ever reach the point where babies make them swoon. Sure. I would like to get a glimpse at what a futuristic polymorphous world would look like, I would like to imagine a world without sexual repression or war. But I recognize the instincts that create them. Because I also know that they are the same instincts that create great tragic art. For all its evils, Western civilization has allowed us to explore our inevitable mortal death. Firestone's contention that there will be no death is preposterous. Without the threat of death, life is not worth living. The struggle against death has created us. It has created all that we are.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Absurdist Dystopia--must read for all MEN
Review: I suppose a work like this is valuable mostly for its reinterpretation of standard strains of Western (masculine) thought. Ms. Firestone makes astute observations that illustrate the failures of Marxism and the Psychoanalytical movement at understanding what women want. Men will never get it and any system devised by men will never get it. Quite honestly, most men don't want to get it. The mystery is the thrill. This is why marriage is such a drag. It takes away the thrill of it all and replaces it with slow, creeping death. It also creates stability. Something that Ms. Firestone's proposed solutions do not offer. Children need stable environments to reach their potential. How a commune would provide this, I don't know. I agree with Ms. Firestone that childhood should be abolished. Mostly because I do not see how children benefit from our paternizing treatment of them. Children ought to be treated as adults and given the same rights. However, I do not agree that they should experience "as much genital sex (with adults) as they are capable of", as Ms. Firestone suggests near the end of her book. What would stop adults from taking advantage of the child's smaller physicality in these instances? What kind of paradise allows the wholesale sexual abuse of its children? Or, perhaps, sexual perversion (along with art, music, poetry and religion) would also be eradicated? I recognize that I will never be pregnant. I know it hurts worse than anything I could ever imagine. But, it isn't barbaric. It makes sense that Ms. Firestone was 25 when this came out. Most women I have known around that age were decisively against ever having a baby. Somehow, though, 5 years on, they found themselves wanting a baby. Conditioning? Undue pressures from family members and the media? Or is it simply that women are biologically constructed to desire the experience of childbirth. Maybe that's Firestone's whole point. We need to figure out a way to rewire women so they don't ever reach the point where babies make them swoon. Sure. I would like to get a glimpse at what a futuristic polymorphous world would look like, I would like to imagine a world without sexual repression or war. But I recognize the instincts that create them. Because I also know that they are the same instincts that create great tragic art. For all its evils, Western civilization has allowed us to explore our inevitable mortal death. Firestone's contention that there will be no death is preposterous. Without the threat of death, life is not worth living. The struggle against death has created us. It has created all that we are.
Rating:
Summary: A powerful argument for radical feminist revolution.
Review: Shulamith Firestone's 1970 text calling for a radical re-thinking of the basis of modern social structures remains a powerful analysis of the state of patriarchy and the feminist movements of the Twentieth Centry. Firestone's central claim is that only in abolishing the sexual differences rooted in biology and reproduction can women, and by extension all humans, free themselves of the sex caste system which privileges men over women and children. In her book, she takes on important thinkers such as Freud and Marx, exposing their oversights and/or oppositions to a true revolution of sex. She ultimately looks to technology (cybernation) as the means by which humans can finally take control of reproductive necessity and correct the accident of Nature that insists on sexual difference and differential power dynamics.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic Text of the Women's Movement
Review: Shulamith Firestone's now classic work was an important influence on, and manifestation of, the 1970's women's movement. Firestone, an active participant in the Chicago and New York radical feminist scenes, captures the spirit of the movement, and the historical moement, in this work. Combining a material and feminist analysis of women's status in Western society, Firestone makes a case for revolution that may seem extreme to today's reader. However, this text is essential for understanding 1970's radical feminism and it is wonderful to have it back in print.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic Text of the Women's Movement
Review: Shulamith Firestone's now classic work was an important influence on, and manifestation of, the 1970's women's movement. Firestone, an active participant in the Chicago and New York radical feminist scenes, captures the spirit of the movement, and the historical moement, in this work. Combining a material and feminist analysis of women's status in Western society, Firestone makes a case for revolution that may seem extreme to today's reader. However, this text is essential for understanding 1970's radical feminism and it is wonderful to have it back in print.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing book!
Review: This book is full of insight into human behaviour in general and gives a lot of reasons as to why our society is the way that it is. This book takes you back to when it all started! You can't truly understand feminism until you've read it. Shulamith Firestone doesnt just point the finger at society she gives us reasons as to how we got to where we are.
Rating: 
Summary: The Worst Kind of Nihilist Insanity
Review: This is the sort of raving that gives men like Rush Limbaugh ammunition in their rhetorical war of feminism. In this book, Shulamith Firestone argues that women are doomed to oppression by men as a result of female biology and that only the cybernetic mutilation of the human race can free them from the tyranny imposed on them by Nature, and more specifically their own nature. That this is nihilism should be self-evident to any thinking woman or man. How, exaclty, are women going to free themselves if they use technology to obliterate the very charcateristics that make them women? What "self" will be left in Firestone's dystopia when the cybernetic-sexual revolution has taken place? The only possible answer would have to be based on the kind of discredited Cartesian mind-body dualism that so much better feminist thought has assailed. The kind of self-hatred that this book embodies is staggering. It might make an interesting psychopathological study, but it is not a program for sane political action. Hopefully one day a brand of feminism will arise that is dedicated to helping women be *women* without fear of external domination. Perhaps then this kind of insanity will be laughed at; for now, it seems more worthy of fear.
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