Daily Inspiration Quote by Helen Reddy

Helen Reddy’s swipe at Fear of Flying isn’t a book review so much as a refusal to genuflect. Erica Jong’s novel had become a shorthand for a certain brand of 1970s sexual liberation: cheeky, confessional, marketed as transgressive, treated by admirers as a cultural permission slip. Reddy’s blunt “pieces of crap” punctures that aura in one shot. The phrasing matters. She doesn’t argue with Jong’s thesis; she attacks the object, the experience of reading it, as if to say: you don’t get to conscript me into your canon just because it’s labeled feminist or daring.

The intent reads as boundary-setting. Reddy, a pop-facing actress and singer who was herself turned into a symbol (“I Am Woman” did not exactly arrive quietly), had every reason to resent the way movements flatten women into mascots. Her disgust suggests a subtext: liberation can become another script, another performance, one that prizes a particular kind of outspoken sexuality and calls it progress. By condemning the book, she’s also condemning the social pressure to applaud it.

Contextually, it’s a clash between two modes of female celebrity in the post-sexual-revolution marketplace: the literary provocateur and the mass-cultural figure who has to live inside the slogans people paste onto her. Reddy’s line lands because it’s unsentimental. It insists that solidarity doesn’t require aesthetic obedience, and that “important” art isn’t immune to being, sometimes, just bad.