Neil Boyd opens Big Sister, a supposed exposé on how extreme feminism has “trampled important human rights and simple common sense,” with the story of how an encounter between a Hollywood producer and a girl Friday ended in a six-figure sexual harassment settlement. That Boyd considers the travails of big-time producers and their lackeys to be in any way representative of the lives of the majority of the population goes a long way to explaining the failure of his book.

Boyd takes on the big ideological fronts of North American middle-class feminism with such inflammatory chapter headings as “Sexual Harassment: If You Feel Uncomfortable, You’re a Victim” and “Domestic Assault: Fact and Fiction,” making it pretty clear where his own ideological biases lie. His panicked arguments range from irrelevant to implausible. For instance, Boyd suggests that the increase in Americans who believe that viewing sexual materials leads people to commit rape is related to feminist anti-pornography rhetoric. He doesn’t seem to consider that the connections between sexual violence and the culture from which it springs have long been a part of the mainstream dialogue, as any viewer of Oprah can tell you.

As a professor of criminology, Boyd is too often mired in the bickerings of academia, the litigious lives of middle North America, and the agendas of 1980s liberal and radical feminists. Boyd blames radical feminism for sociological trends to understand the average woman’s struggle for equality that are more arguably accounted for by laziness and inexperience in developing policy, ideological pendulum swings in the justice system, and sheer human greed and stupidity. Boyd also seems oblivious to such ongoing and more pressing feminist struggles for affordable childcare, literacy, and unionized work.