Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality.

• Author: Vincent, Norah
• Position: Review

by Cathy Young, New York: The Free Press, 368 pages, $25.00

Reality is inconvenient. Especially for that much vaunted and much maligned whirligig, the Western mind, which, we all agree, tends to think too much. We, the plodding possessors of such minds, are determined to organize our world and make sense of it. Even the declared nonrationalists among us (though they'd rather die than admit it) are living by the rules of reason: still counting their chickens, still putting too many of their eggs in that one basket, and, like everybody else, still mulling over which came first. But to make sense of something complex is always to oversimplify it, curtail it, misrepresent it. Invariably, there are stubborn loose ends in experience that never quite fit the patterns we've devised for them. So, for the sake of clarity or logical consistency, we just snip them off or tuck them away somewhere.

Not surprisingly, intellectuals are always doing this; and of course they're the very people who should know better. But they don't. So we end up with shelves and shelves of briefs and dissertations, polemics and apologia, all of them designed to convince us that the answer to A, B, or C must be X, Y, or Z - and all of them wrong. Kant explained why a long time ago: Reason is just too crude, too curtly organized, to reflect the world as it really is. And yet how could it be otherwise? Like Churchill's democracy, rationality is the worst kind of thinking we have, except for all the others.

Which brings us to Cathy Young. Though it may seem so at first, her new book, Ceasefire!, is not ultimately about sexual equality. It's more about this messy thing called reality, and how in sexual politics - as in race politics, gay politics, and all manner of other special interest politics in America - we've lost sight of it. Young's explanation for this harks back to Kant: Our diagnoses of the race problem, the woman question, and the gay agenda are too simplistic. Our arguments on both sides, left and right, are mired in the same unhelpful mentality: Us vs. Them. As Young writes in the early pages of Ceasefire!, "Life confounds all dogmas, whether of sameness or difference."

Since the publication of Susan Faludi's Backlash in 1991, we've seen a rash of vehement books about the collective female in society, many of them written by young newcomers, or "third wave feminists," as they've since been dubbed. The rough (and by no means all-inclusive) chronology goes like this...