Audrey Wollen in Harper’s Magazine:
Legends, fairy tales, and myths are rife with the constraints of prophecy: the necessity of surrender before the all-powerful grammar of future time; the hubris of trying to manipulate destiny; the shock of having already fucked your mother, despite your best efforts not to. Myth assumes that the future is like walking into a narrow tunnel, and the light at the end is neither train nor sunshine, but some terrifying third thing, blinding in its inevitability. Don’t even bother trying to guess. In these stories, the witch is always right, always in the wrong way. But what of the seers themselves? Are they never burdened, heartbroken by the unexpected shape of their own accuracy? Do they ever look at the world they predicted and say, That’s not what I meant? That’s not what I meant at all.
I must begin in the register of the mythical to discuss Shulamith Firestone, because that was the deliberate and unabashed scale of her project. It is often observed that The Dialectic of Sex, the work of theory she published in 1970, at the age of twenty-five, verges on the silvered edge of science fiction. The book floats like an opaline shape behind silhouetted winter branches, a cross-hatched, shining sky-thing, confounding yet airborne.
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