Kate O’Beirne’s new book, “Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports,” will turn out to be one of the most important books this year. It’s a highly readable take on what feminism hath wrought and how it wrought it.
As Kate explained in an interview with National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez:
“The modern women’s movement is totalitarian in its methods, radical in its aims, and dishonest in its advocacy. Coercion is employed through the courts to enforce its unpopular agenda, on issues like abortion and gender quotas. Radical feminists warn of the perilous gender gap threatening any politician who doesn’t knuckle under to their demands, but rarely seem able to win elections. They confidently predicted the defeats of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush at the hands of angry women.”
O’Beirne has hit a nerve, and now these same angry women are trying to sink the book-though we predict they’ll have about as much success with Kate as they had defeating Reagan and G. W. Bush. Their tactic: an apparent smear campaign on Amazon.com.
The anit-Kate campaign may have been inspired by Kate’s success in a place feminists tend to fail: the marketplace of ideas. Indeed, as Lopez noted, O’Beirne’s book was ranked 67 on Amazon, whereas a tome by feminist icon Kate Kichelman was 44, 064. (Anything under 10,000 is considered good, which put our Kate ahead of their Kate.)
As of this morning, Kate had a whopping 491 “reader” reviews on Amazon, many angry one-star reviews by readers who: (1.) appear to be angry feminists, and (B.) do not appear to have read the book.
A sample:
“Kate Kate Kate
You sad pathetic author
Please go back to your bathroom
and flush your misogynist fantasies down the toilet
where you belong.”
Bearing the headline, “Self-hating woman trashes her own Gender,” one reader comments that “this book was the worst peace of trash i ever picked up in a book store! DON’T GET IT!” (Note to “reader:” You are supposed to take the book home and read it before reviewing.Just a hinty-winty.)
And this:
“The women who really make the world worse are people like Kate O’Beirne, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Phyllis Schlafly, Laura Ingraham, and others like them.”
But the Amazon attack by the amazons (and the guys they’ve battered into being their handmaidens) isn’t working! Not only is Kate’s ranking–133 this am–still in the stratosphere, but numerous Kate admirers have also written Amazon reviews. One of these, Judith K. Warner (who gets extra points for using her own name, and who, like me seems to have read and loved the book), expressed my sentiments exactly, noting that conservatives don’t “organize campaigns like this against left-wing books, but then conservatives are tolerant of dissent and the left is not.”
Kate will be speaking at IWF on February 23. Meanwhile, consider posting a review on Amazon-but read the book first. It’s very smart.