Big Sister: How Extreme Feminism Has Betrayed the Fight for Sexual Equality

Geoff Hamilton is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
British Columbia.

In chapters on pornography, sexual harassment, sexual assault, domestic
violence, and tolerance, Boyd argues that the influence of “extreme
feminism” has produced unfair legal rulings across Canada and the
United States, while also undermining support for legitimate social
reforms. Using examples from roughly the past two decades, Boyd makes
the claim that “radical feminists are creating the backlash of which
they accuse their critics. They are undermining and jeopardizing a
century of significant progress.”

This is, overall, a provocative, persuasive, and timely book. Boyd’s
examples of the travesties of justice made possible by “extreme
feminism” are credible and disturbing, and he makes a strong case for
broad legal reforms in such areas as the censorship of pornography and
the testimony allowed in sexual assault cases. Boyd is particularly
effective in his debunking of so-called “recovered memories” in
regard to childhood sexual abuse—“there is no evidence that the
repression of trauma occurs”—and in his warnings about the dangerous
implications of the use of the “battered woman syndrome” to justify
homicide: “women who are battered may be entitled to kill their
abusers with impunity, even if there is no imminent threat of death.”

Boyd’s assessment of the power wielded by radical elements within
feminism can, however, seem a little overstated at times:
“Unfortunately, this narrow, extreme fundamentalist position is
accepted wholesale by a significant percentage of society today. The
leading lights of the Big Sister view of gender relations are all taken
very seriously.” Criticism of “Big Sister” has, of course, been
well under way for more than a decade, and the biggest of big
sisters—Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin—have, in fact, been
widely attacked from various quarters. Boyd’s most important
contribution here is his demonstration of the way in which our legal
systems have failed to correct their own excesses.