How many adults save up to take theory of history courses?
How many adults save up to take physics courses?
How many adults save up to take philosophy courses?
How many adults save up to take mechanical engineering courses?
And for that matter, how many scholarly history, or mathematics, or poetry books are on the best-seller lists? I sure see a lot of them in libraries, though, and they seem to make up the bulk of the stock at my local Barnes & Noble. Someone must be reading them, and even buying them!
But, feminist books used to be best sellers.
Feminism’s bubble is shrinking.
Ah, but some of them still are. Did you read Susan Faludi’s Backlash? It created quite a stir, and not so many years back. And what about Gloria Steinem’s Revolution From Within?
Not based on any “evidence” you have presented.
There are at least two aspects of the situation to consider:
Friedan’s book became a best seller because it had no competition; there was nothing else like it on the market. Today, there are many publications (both book and periodical) that address feminist issues. No individual will buy every publication on the subject, so it is more difficult for any specific book to become a “runaway bestseller.”
The whole approach has matured and diversified. Many books are specifically focused on particular issues. Friedan’s book was a single call to consider the whole situation. There is no point to repeat that kind of publication, since the issue has been brought to the consciousness of the general public, so each new publication will, by the nature of the situation, be more tightly focused and appeal to a smaller population within the movement.
(Go read Stephen J. Gould’s discussion of .400 hitters in major league baseball for a statistical analysis of the same phenomenon.)
There is also the likelihood that since many of the initial issues have been addressed, there is less widespread interest in the subject. That does not make it a fad or a bubble, it simply means that the audience will be smaller and more academic. Do you suggest that Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Popper, and others were simply contributors to the diminishing bubble of Metaphysics and Epistemology and, thus, had nothing constructive to say about language or science? How many best sellers have they pumped out?
Feminism ain’t never gonna go away until sexism does, just as the civil rights struggle is gonna go on until racism goes away. The one provokes the other.
There are still deep, nasty pockets of sexism and racism in our society and they’re gonna have to be cleaned out.
Baloney. Look at the best seller list for the last 5 or 10 years. There have been any number of conservative books on it. Rush Limbaugh’s success didn’t prevent Sean Hannity’s or Ann Coulter’s. In fact, their books supported each other’s success. Books go in fads and cycles.
Or, new publications will be bogus, because Friedan, de Beauvoir and a few others have said pretty much all the real stuff.
I would like to. Do you know where I can find it?
Fair point. Modern feminist theory’s declining public popularity doesn’t necessarily prove that it lacks academic or theoretical value.
Well, you got the last sentence right, anyway. Limbaugh is a humorist. Coulter is up there simply because she is deliberately provocative. Hannity is the only one whose book might remotely be described as a serious work in the vein of Friedan’s and his time on the bestseller list can be measured in minutes. And none of these authors are addressing a specific world view beyond liberal bashing. Neither Limbaugh nor Coulter actually address issues or lay out a philosophical statement of direction. They pretty much epitomize the term “reactionary.” (And I do not use the term in the manner of Left-Wing, knee-jerk responses to the “Establishment,” but as a descriptor of what they actually write. Without liberals to bash, Limbaugh and Coulter would be nearly silent. Hannity appears capable of presenting a genuine perspective, but his book chose a reactive approach, as well.)
And you miss the point entirely by trying to equate conservatism with feminism. Conservatism is a general perspective that can be found in many disciplines–including opponents and proponents of feminism. What discipline of study do your champions support?
Sorry. Gould’s examination of statistics and baseball was the principal subtext of his Full House.
I was not trying to equate conservatism with feminism. I was demonstrating the incorrectness of the excuse you offered for the recent lack of feminist best sellers, namely:
My point was that have been a goodly number of runaway best sellers among conservative books during recent years, even though these books had considerable competition from other conservative books.
Thanks. I found a summary of his theory via google. He asserts that the variance in the normal distribution that describes batting averages has shrunk. The bell curve is skinnier, but it has the same mean.
I am not entirely sure that this is a useful analogy for best sellers. However, I am grateful to you for pointing me to his book.
In other words, you were equating conservatism (in all its various manifestations–especially humor and diatribe) with feminism. If feminists had more humorists (a charge that may be legitimately lodged), they might be able to get more bestsellers out there, as well. How many serious conservative works have been bestsellers since, say The Bell Curve (another single-issue work whose success has not been repeated)?
I believe that both Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter have had #1 best sellers. If you count Bill O’Reilly as conservative (which he denies), then he also had a #1 best seller. IIRC there have been other conservative books that sold quite well, but I cannot dredge up the names from my rapidly shrinking number of brain cells.
Serious conservative works, not pop conservative fun. Surely you can tell the difference between doing an insightful intellectual study and producing something like “Broken Windows” vs. doing some poorly thought-out Lexis-Nexis searches, demonizing your opponents, making up “facts” and just generally carrying on: which is fantastic for book sales, but not exactly the sort of game someone thoughtful would do. Can you really compare Coulter’s tripe to Friedan’s work? To a book like Nickled and Dimed?
My point was that feminism is waning. The reason is that it has pretty much succeeded in overthrowing the 2nd class citizenship that women were forced to endure. When The Second Sex became popular, it was a revolution in viewpoint – a paradigm shift. Today’s feminists have relatively little new to point out.* So, their books don’t sell.
You can disparage Coulter, et. al as being pop conservatives. Maybe Friedan is on a higher plane. But, where are the pop feminists on the best seller list?
*Actually they do point out a lot of new things, but many of them are not true.