04/10/2023

This incisive compilation of previously published essays and interviews by cultural critic Sontag (1933–2004) showcases her striking intelligence and continued relevance. The seven pieces contemplate feminism and women’s roles in society, as in “The Third World of Women” when she urges the women’s liberation movement to focus on transferring institutional and economic power from men to women, writing that “all women live in an ‘imperialist’ situation in which men are colonialists and women are natives.” In “Fascinating Fascism,” she condemns Nazis’ “contempt for all that is reflective, critical, and pluralistic” and criticizes the depiction of women as “breeders and helpers” in the photos and films of Nazi director Leni Riefenstahl. The most revealing pieces are Sontag’s interview with Salmagundi magazine and her exchange with Adrienne Rich in the New York Review of Books, in which Sontag mounts nuanced critiques of what she saw as the feminist movement’s “demands for intellectual simplicity, advanced in the name of ethical solidarity.” Though the selections date from the 1970s, the insights remain topical and serve as a window into a brilliant mind whose analysis continues to provoke. Over 40 years after their initial publication, these selections have a lot to offer. (May)

2023-03-08
A crisp new collection of early Sontag pieces on gender, sexuality, and feminism.

The energetic pacing and well-chosen variety of pieces (kudos to editor Rieff, the author’s only child) highlight both Sontag’s ideas at the peak of the women’s movement and the breadth of her boldly ranging rhetoric. “The Double Standard of Aging” reads like a transcript of ambient social attitudes: “Society is much more permissive about aging in men,” while “everyone finds the signs of old age in women aesthetically offensive.” In “The Third World of Women,” Sontag speculates about the means and possibilities of gender and class revolution. “The liberation of women,” she writes, “is a necessary preparation for building a just society—not the other way around, as Marxists always claim.” Writing about “Fascinating Fascism,” the author advances an argument about the lingering endurance of fascist aesthetics with an engrossing evidentiary walk-through: Leni Riefenstahl’s public comeback via a popular paperback on SS uniforms glimpsed at an airport newsstand. Later, in “Double Standard,” Sontag writes about how “beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement. Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.” Trading open letters with Adrienne Rich, the author is forcefully eloquent. “Virtually everything deplorable in human history,” she writes, “furnishes material for a restatement of the feminist plaint (the ravages of the patriarchy, etc.), just as every story of a life could lead to a reflection on our common mortality and the vanity of human wishes. But if the point is to have meaning some of the time, it can’t be made all the time.” To move through this collection is to watch Sontag practice what she also preaches to cultural critics and to liberated women: “lead the fullest, freest, and most imaginative life she can” and always maintain “her solidarity with other women.” Merve Emre provides the foreword.

A potent Sontag capsule compounded of legendarily smart prose and clever editorial decisions.