ANA MARIE COX reviews Katha Pollitt’s new book, Virginity or Death!

There’s a certain preserved-in-amber quality to some of the thinking here. For example, Pollitt herself confesses that the opinions that underpinned her most controversial column — against displaying American flags after 9/11 — were formed during the Vietnam War; she despairs that her pro-flag daughter cannot see “the connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a world away.” I’m not sure if she’s right about that, but it’s significant that Pollitt would see the world outside her window through a scrim of 30-year-old lefty rhetoric. She simply rejects the argument that the meaning of the flag (like the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance, which was composed by a 19th-century socialist) might change.

That 30-year-old (or 40-year-old, really) lefty rhetoric is blinding a lot of people. The reader reviews at Amazon are quite positive, though.

UPDATE: Eric Scheie is defending ovarian independence.