CALL ME A masochist, but I spent last weekend reading a book called "Women Who Make the World Worse: and How their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports."

O'Beirne, the Washington editor of the National Review and former vice president of the Heritage Foundation, is by many accounts a charming and witty person. In a recent interview with Salon.com, she justified her views by saying, "I think we were better protected by traditional mores and chivalry than we are by laws and lawsuits."

Fair enough. But between the hard covers of her book (illustrated with caricatures of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and "Sex and the City's" Carrie Bradshaw that border on the anti-Semitic), this sentiment apparently translates into the notion that all assertive women are litigious, motherhood-resistant and either oversexed or undersexed. Peppered with didactic pronouncements — "the modern women's movement is totalitarian in its methods, radical in its aims and dishonest in its advocacy" — and chestnuts from the fringes of 1970s-era extremism (she refers to feminist scholar Catharine MacKinnon's line about all heterosexual sex being rape, which is actually a notorious misquote), O'Beirne's book did for me what no book had done in a long time. It made me want to dust my ceiling fan.

Perhaps that was her aim — sneaky gal! For a brief moment, I abandoned all my professional goals and castration fantasies, seized by the urge to clean.

But no sooner did I go in search of a feather duster than I stumbled on another book I'd been meaning to read. This was Karenna Gore Schiff's "Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Changed Modern America," which studiously chronicles the achievements of women such as anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones and United Farm Workers' organizer Dolores Huerta. Realizing I had no feather duster, I lay back down on the couch, read about 50 pages and promptly fell asleep.

I had the strangest dream: The women who made the world worse were in a roller derby match against the women who changed modern America. The "worse" women, unencumbered by the Industrial Revolution-era corsets of some of their opponents, were at a distinct advantage. This was thanks not only to the athletic opportunities afforded them by Title IX (which O'Beirne believes "exacted a heavy toll on the despised sex" — which is to say, men) but because of Carrie Bradshaw, who used her Manolos as a weapon (technically illegal, but man-hating sisters don't care).

Meanwhile, Mother Jones and her posse, armed with monikers like MoJo Vixen and Ida B. Slammin', skated haplessly around the rink like Tolstoy characters. Surely there's a revolution to be fought, they were thinking, but what's with all the exposed bra straps?