Our Bodies Ourselves was first published in 1970 by the Boston Women's Health Collective and is now available in a 600-page edition published by Simon and Schuster. In the October Atlantic Monthly, feminist writer Christina Nehring takes on the new version.

“This women's health classic,” writes Nehring, “has become a compendium of the curses and clichés that beset modern feminism – curses and clichés that feminism must discard or else render itself obsolete.”

That is probably a fait accompli, as this column has often pointed out, but please allow me to review Nehring's review. In my view, she makes the case and has a good time doing it. Her first target is the feminist attack on beauty.

The new wide-body version of Our Bodies Ourselves analyzes magazine ads as though such ads were the last word on the subject. The book concludes that any woman who looks attractive thereby signals submission to men and a desire to gain their approval. Nehring is having none of it.

Women cater to their own sense of beauty, not men's, she says. In the same way that women decorate a dorm or a dining room, they decorate themselves. In feminist circles, “pretty” is an insult, “as though one had to choose beauty or truth, style or substance.” Concludes Nehring: “It is not freedom from beauty that needs defending but freedom for beauty.”

Next target: female solidarity, which hinges on the use of the word “us” in Our Bodies Ourselves.

“In many cases women have more to fear from other women than from men,” Nehring writes. “This is a truth strenuously resisted by feminists who pretend that all women are compassionate, supportive, and united against men.” Nehring thanks the Our Bodies ideologues for assertions that women make friendlier doctors than men, and more generous lovers. She takes this as a form of “infantilization,” like calling indigenous people “noble savages” or those in the lower economic ranks “the virtuous poor.”

Our Bodies also has a lot to say about sex, and Nehring finds it a target-rich environment.

“The world we encounter in Our Bodies is so strongly politicized as to be nearly fabricated and therefore worthless. Except, of course, when it is worse than worthless, as is the case when the authors plunge into disquisitions about sex.” Nehring finds the hundreds of pages dedicated to it, “more repellant than enlightening.…If George W. Bush wanted to start a wave of abstinence, he couldn't do better than to place this book in hotel rooms across the country.” One instructional section “sounds like a macabre combination of high-level surgery with elementary art class.”

In the end, the Our Bodies authors “sink us in banality and boredom” and replace provocative truths with “dull lies such as female solidarity and 'safe sex'.” It “represents the end of honest inquiry and the end of curiosity. It represents the death of passion.”

There goes the mail. The Atlantic Monthly is published in Boston, and the Boston Women's Health Collective will be on the march, in lockstep. In the ranks of the militants, no diversity is allowed.

I consider it a good sign that a woman who calls herself a feminist can demolish something like Our Bodies in a major publication. Hopefully this will encourage other writers and publications to consider no feminist tract, or feminist celebrity, to be off limits. After all we don't want to give special treatment to any person or group.

Christina Nehring, meanwhile, has more to say on the subject. She is the author of the forthcoming Women In Love: A Feminist Defense of Romance. One gets the feeling that this book will be well worth picking up.

Sally Pipes is President and CEO at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.