For more than 300 years, writers have been telling us that we are getting more stupid. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations argued that a worker with a dull, repetitive job would inevitably degenerate until "the torpor of his mind made him incapable of taking part in a rational conversation or of conceiving any generous or tender sentiment".

Jane McLoughlin targets women not men, and popular culture not dull jobs, but the message is the same – we are becoming more stupid.



She argues that the majority of women don't think any more. They let characters in soaps like Neighbours, facing similar dilemmas, guide them through their personal problems. Popular culture, which emerged in the Sixties, now includes film, television, blockbuster novels and the internet, and it has, the author argues, channelled women towards greed and simplistic emotional reactions. This has resulted in today's young people being full of their own importance, seeing luxury as necessity, and lacking empathy and the ability to form relationships.

The book contains interesting ideas but too many sweeping statements and a condescending tone. At times the reader needs to excavate the prose to get at the nub of the argument: the writer seems to have forgotten the skills she learned as a journalist. The book seems to be leading nowhere – except for treating us to a queasy-making picture of today's young – then on the last page there is a hurried reference to McLoughlin's fear that "ordinary" women could be leading us in the direction of a totalitarian state.

"There is a bleak prospect that women… might look to a person or system prepared to take and use power without bothering them with the effort of making their own rational decisions."

This is not quite what the "libbers" of the Seventies had in mind, but they were at fault for not thinking beyond a desire for a bigger slice of the existing male-baked pie.

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