The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone
Published 1970 · 240 pages · 60,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Feminist Literature, Nonfiction, Philosophy
How hard is The Dialectic of Sex to read?
The Dialectic of Sex scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 40 out of 100
- Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist theoretical vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Dense, argumentative prose. Logical and systematic.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Highly abstract theoretical argument about biology, reproduction, and revolution.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Dense with theoretical argument, historical analysis, and speculative proposal.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Direct, thesis-driven. Builds argument chapter by chapter.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Biology as destiny and its abolition as liberation.
- Ironic distance: 100 out of 100
- Fierce, earnest, and utterly serious about revolution.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Firestone provides a clear revolutionary program, however radical.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Ten chapters building from diagnosis to revolutionary program.
How The Dialectic of Sex is regarded
The Dialectic of Sex holds a literary regard score of 53 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.