My enemy, my love

Destined to become the first "postfeminist" feminist classic, My Enemy, My Love is a landmark exposition of the intellectually and emotionally rich, little explored, often subterranean world of women's hatred of men, and what author Judith Levine calls "its more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence." Levine, a respected journalist, argues that man-hating is not an individual neurosis but rather a "collective, cultural phenomenon," and not just a problem for women or for feminism, but for men, too, who contribute to its causes and suffer its consequences. A volatile admixture of pity, contempt, disgust, envy, alienation, fear, and rage, man-hating is everywhere, shared by all women. "If man-hating is mine," states the author, "it belongs too to my next-door neighbor, my mother, and to the woman standing in front of me on line at the post office." All men are its objects: the anonymous rapist, cop, or judge, and, far more troubling, the men women love and share their lives with--fathers, husbands, lovers, friends, even sons. Culling stereotypes of men--among them the Bumbler, the Abandoner, the Pet, and the Killer--Levine shows how they articulate mixed feelings, symbolically redress power imbalances, police changing gender boundaries, and make sense, and fun, of men. After describing man-hating, the author addresses its origins in a unique examination of the family, and traces the role of man-hating in the unfolding of contemporary feminism. Finally, with anedotes drawn from in-depth interviews, she incisively yet sympathetically portrays individual women's strategies for living with "love and man-hating, cooperation and rebellion, intimacy and alienation, and all those other ambivalent pairs of feeling that relationships are made of." Certain to be controversial, My Enemy, My Love is an illuminating, accessible, witty, and engrossing analysis of the hate that dares not speak its name. It is a deeply revolutionary work that should be read by all women and men.