Kerry Howley profiles Kathleen Parker:
, Kathleen Parker’s 2008 polemic on sexual permissiveness and libertinism, contains the following euphemisms for vagina: “inner sanctum,” “familiars,” “you know what,” “very private parlor,” “sacred vessel,” “vestal vestibule,” and “hirsute abyss of God’s little oven.” We will be, laments Parker in her obligatory chapter on Eve Ensler‘s The Vagina Monologues
, so “awash in vaginaism,” that we are nothing beyond “vaginas on the plain seeking out other vaginas with which to hold hands and gaze unlongingly into the silky night of a manless moon.” We have abandoned a better, gentler America, a place where women were “above this sort of thing,” a nation where men did not “talk about vaginas in public.”
For a woman who clearly loves to talk about sex but feels compelled to deride the vulgarization of public discourse, there is perhaps nothing to do but write a book about the hot, wet, carnal sins of Ensler and Lindsay Lohan. And Save the Males‘ contribution to the culture it professes to despise is only the most obvious of its internal contradictions. It adheres to no known ideology, which is to say it resembles the thinking of the vast majority of Americans. Its only organizing principle is that most enigmatic of moral guideposts, “common sense.”
