In response to:
The War Between Men and Women from the December 11, 1975 issue
To the Editors:
It is disappointing when a so-called book review fails entirely to mention the most important features of one’s book and discusses only peripheral details.
This was the case in Diane Johnson’s review of my book Rape: The Bait and the Trap, together with Susan Brownmiller’s book and a criminal justice system report.
Ms. Johnson quite overlooked my book’s main contribution to the study of rape: an analysis of the social aspects of group rape, which make group rape completely different from pair or single rape. No other work in print has done justice to this subject, which involves at least half of all rape offenders.
And of course I was disappointed that Ms. Johnson failed to deal with the pernicious sex-role stereotypes embodied in my title The Bait and the Trap.
Finally, it is curious that Ms. Johnson, a teacher herself, has such a poor opinion of education, and that she equates sexual activity with middle-class husbands, when the evidence is that there is a lot more sex going on in this country than is provided by that particular group.
Jean MacKellar
Novato, California
This Issue
April 1, 1976