In a 1989 essay, "Coming Down Again: After the Age of Excess," from a newly edited collection of her writings, the late American critic Ellen Willis discussed a dilemma the women's movement faced in the '70s. With the advent of the '60s counterculture came so-called free love, a throwing-off of social mores that stifled sexual expression, and Willis welcomed it. But when feminism arose in tandem, she realized true sexual liberation couldn't happen without confronting the male mind-set, because many of the men who embraced the free sex ethos didn't appreciate women's interpretation of it if it meant challenging their own impulses.

"There were all those 'brothers' who spoke of ecstasy but f-cked with their egos," she wrote, "looked down on women who were 'too' free, and thought the most damning name they could call a feminist was 'lesbian.'" Though Willis didn't say gender trumped political will, she suggested it was more basic to her outlook, that solidarity starts with anatomy before it extends to sensibility.

This dilemma informs the new book by Minori Kitahara and Park Sooni, "Okusama wa Aikoku" ("The Wife is a Patriot"), which looks at the current right-wing movement as advanced by women, specifically married women. Last January, an Asahi Shimbun reporter accompanied Kitahara, a prominent essayist on women's issues and the owner of a shop, Love Piece Club, that sells sexual paraphernalia, on a visit to Yasukuni Shrine. She talks about Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's recent "surprise visit" to the shrine and how it enraged China and South Korea, who see Yasukuni as a sanctification of Japanese aggression during World War II. Abe insists they misunderstood his intentions, that he goes there to pray for peace, but Kitahara thinks that if Abe believes this he is fooling himself, because what is diplomacy if not the ability to "sense the internal logic of one's counterpart?" Kitahara sees Abe's "inability to communicate" as being "characteristic of Japanese men," which is why his administration was shocked when the U.S. expressed disapproval of the visit, despite the fact that the Americans had tried to talk him out of going beforehand.