I Will Read This Book

I've known it was coming for awhile and I am excited to hear it is almost out: Stan Goff is publishing a new book called Sex & War.

Book Description:

The notion that war is intrinsic to man’s nature is dealt a powerful setback in Stan Goff’s Sex and War. Goff, a former Special Forces sergeant, argues persuasively that rather than being born that way, men are made into killers by governments, corporations, and systems of power. Drawing both on his experiences in the military and on his reading of feminist writers such as Patricia Williams, bell hooks, and Chandra Mohanty — and as the father of a son stationed in Iraq — Goff journeys through wars, ideologies, and cultures, revealing the transformation of men into killers. His story encompasses not just the battlefield and the book, but the Swift Boat Veterans controversy, the eros of George W. Bush, pornography, the Taliban, and gays and lesbians in the military. Goff’s remarkable ability to connect his own personal experiences to contemporary feminist criticism makes for a provocative discussion of war and masculinity.

Recommendation from Robert Jensen:

Men should thank Stan Goff for this loving challenge to us to reject all aspects of the male dominance of our society. In his riveting blend of personal experience and thoughtful analysis, Goff stares down the most brutal aspects of masculinity without flinching, as he opens up a crucial discussion about how we can get beyond being “real men” and beyond the cruel institutions and practices men have created.

Recommendation from T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting:

In Goff’s hands, the language of militarism, redemption, violence, sexist-misogyny, and war are prosaic yet poetic grenades, lobbed at American empire, television, the Hollywood cinematic machine with its mind-numbing trifles, religion, and neo-cons and iconoclasts like Condoleeza Rice, Rumsfeld, and Michael Moore –the sacred and the profane are thrashed out in this opus on sex and war. Like prophesied deliverance, Goff’s insights should move those of us hitherto wishy-washy liberal-leftists, complacent hard leftists, and the seeming voices-in-the-wilderness race-gender-class radicals to rethink our strategies for bringing about a new human condition.