My Enemy, My Love

Book excerpt: Women want change: egalitarian sexual relationships, families, and workplaces. But women, like men, also fear change—to achieve it, both men and women will sacrifice what are now thought of as prerogatives. In intimate interviews with eighty women, Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Judith Levine grapples with the negative stereotypes of men that, in “naming the enemy”—Mama’s Boy, Bumbler, Betrayer, Seducer, Brute, Prick, Killer, and others—both militate for change and self-protectively maintain the status quo. My Enemy, My Love makes clear that gender roles, the social definitions of masculinity and femininity, the culture’s assignment of certain exclusive traits to each biological sex, have imprisoned us on either side of a divide. She writes: “Gender allows a person citizenship in only one country.” This timely investigation of man-hating, misogyny, ambivalence, and accommodation ends with the hope that “When better-than and worse-than give way to different-from, and different-from ceases to be a signal for enmity, categorical hatreds will lose their utility, and we will be disarmed.”