The mermaid and the minotaur Book

"To realize that one is female, destined to compete with other females for the erotic resources of males, is to discover that one is doomed to renounce one’s first love.”

I was attracted to this book after reading the title in another book and then upon reading the first review on Amazon in which the review told how the book had changed his life so much so that he bought 88 copies to give to people that he knew, and at least 8 of those people came back to tell him that it had also changed their lives. If that isn't great publicity, I don't know what is.

Prior to reading this, I had mostly stayed away from psychoanalysis because of what I knew of Freud's deep chauvinism....I learned about penis-envy in high school and had been turned off ever since. Because of my unfamiliarity with the topic, some of it seemed a little dense, but well worth the work. Dinnerstein argues that Freud and other more contemporary psychoanalysts such as Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown are very correct in their observations, but overlook a key aspect of their theories. That all of their obervations and conclusions are the product of societies and households in which infants are mother-raised. They took this as an inevitable and "natural" structure and did not bother to examine the ways that that particular aspect affected their ideas, and to what extent a change in the way children are raised would produce not only new relations between the sexes, but a new psychology, a new way of interacting with and understanding the world. I could go on and on, because most everything I read was pretty mind-blowing and deserves full description, but basically Dinnerstein discusses the effects that female-dominated childhood has on society and the possibilities that emerge out of that understanding toward a less alienated, healthier society. If you are still wondering, you should read it!