The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy

Rating:
Summary: who's to blame?
Review: This is an excellent book because he does not enforce a man-hating policy. Instead, he addresses everyone who participates in the patriarchal society. So many men and women resist feminism because everyone's looking for the people to blame, and no one wants to feel guilty. He states simply that we are all to blame if we do not examine how we live our lives. I know now that even though i'm a woman, i too was to blame. Patriarchy is bigger than all of us, and to say that Johnson hates men or is self-loathing is ignorant and only goes to prove the point of his book. If you have the chance to see him speak--do so. It's worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Hard, compelling truths
Review: When I first read this book a couple of years ago, I was not prepared to accept the full sweep of Johnson's arguments. It was not that I disagreed with his reasoning -- his logic is as sound as his prose is lucid! But I was not prepared for the implications of what he had written for my own life -- as a man who professed to be active in the feminist movement, I was for some time not prepared to make the changes in my private life which were necessary to unravel my own "gender knot". But I have grown, I have changed, and as I mature both as a man and an academician, I realize just how fundamentally right on Johnson is. His words haunt me: "That I don't rape women doesn't mean I'm not involved in a patriarchal society that promotes both male privilege and male violence against women." Men need to remember that.

Rating:
Summary: Hard, compelling truths
Review: When I first read this book a couple of years ago, I was not prepared to accept the full sweep of Johnson's arguments. It was not that I disagreed with his reasoning -- his logic is as sound as his prose is lucid! But I was not prepared for the implications of what he had written for my own life -- as a man who professed to be active in the feminist movement, I was for some time not prepared to make the changes in my private life which were necessary to unravel my own "gender knot". But I have grown, I have changed, and as I mature both as a man and an academician, I realize just how fundamentally right on Johnson is. His words haunt me: "That I don't rape women doesn't mean I'm not involved in a patriarchal society that promotes both male privilege and male violence against women." Men need to remember that.