The Feminine Mistake has unleashed the wrath of the Oprah set. Turns out hegemony really really works and millions of invisibly-shackled thralls to the patriarchy would rather remain under house arrest than face reality about what their relationships with the world mean.

The explosion of commentary on blogs and elsewhere about “The Feminine Mistake” joins a growing list of similar fracases stirred up by books that touch on the perennial dilemma of mostly upper-middle-class women: return to work or stay at home with the kids. But the truth is that, with rare exceptions (and it’s too early to say whether Ms. Bennetts’s book may be one of them), these so-called mommy books fail to transform their talk-show and blogosphere buzz into book sales. Talk, it turns out, is much cheaper than the $24.95 cover price.
…

Recent mommy books that have not lived up to the promise of their publicity include Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,” which sold only 11,000 copies in hardcover and 2,000 in paperback, according to BookScan, despite the book’s appearance on “60 Minutes,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and the covers of Time and New York magazines.

And last year Caitlin Flanagan’s “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife,” a collection of essays that said, among other things, that when a woman works, something is lost, generated a media and Internet frenzy, but sold only 9,000 copies in hardcover, according to BookScan.

What is striking about these limp sales figures is that these books cover a topic that raises fierce passions, as anyone who has spent time on a playground or near an office water cooler knows. But that may get at the heart of why women are not buying books about these subjects.

“I always felt it was something that women didn’t want to look at too closely,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, who was editor in chief at Talk Miramax Books when Ms. Hewlett’s book, which suggested that women who pursued high-powered careers could end up childless, was published five years ago. “It was a problem that touched very complicated feelings, so while they read a magazine article or watched a segment on ‘Oprah,’ they didn’t want to read a whole book about it because it was such a difficult subject.”

Ah, humanity. Put your fingers in your ears and sing LALALALALA! Hey, it’s easier than getting a divorce and starting over. (This post means in no way to devalue the choice to stay home and raise kids. Rather, it devalues the mechanisms that drive people to be so invested in ignoring their own marginality that they in essence destroy themselves and their chances at experiencing the rest of life for an illusion. With that, I open the comments. Let the crackpots commence cracking pots.)