by Bruce Bawer
Women’s Studies is old enough now that faculties that once consisted of women trained in “real” fields of study—so that there was at least the possibility that a Women’s Studies department might offer some hint of traditional liberal education—now consist largely of women whose only real training is in Women’s Studies itself (sometimes, to be sure, in combination with one or more other identity studies). The increasing replacement of interdisciplinary Women’s Studies programs with stand-alone departments also tends to ensure students’ insulation from materials and approaches identified with other fields with longer histories.
I have mentioned that the 2010 NWSA conference in Denver was dubbed “Difficult Dialogues.” Yet if any of the “dialogues” were “difficult,” it was because even the slightest deviation from absolute orthodoxy (such as Willingham’s frank account of those Muslim women’s aggressiveness at the UN practicum) is regarded in these circles as thorny, awkward, discomfiting. Though Women’s Studies was supposed to give a voice to “silenced” women, all too many women who dissent from its orthodoxy have themselves felt silenced by intolerant professors—and students, too. Indeed, while some (generally tenured) older professors like Willingham do dare to challenge Women’s Studies dogma, younger initiates, whether students or greenhorn instructors, often act as fierce enforcers of dogma, reiterating it (as did Tholen and Alder at the Beijing +15 session) with all the zeal of fresh converts to a fundamentalist faith and bristling at any violation of Holy Writ. Patai and Koertge quote professors who complain about students being “zombified” by Women’s Studies, turned into “ideologically inflamed Stepford Wives” who “utter . . . stock phrases” and are plainly “terrified of a thought because if they ever had a serious thought, they might start reflecting on this stuff they’re taught to repeat.”
Indeed, though in its early days the discipline tended to treat Friedan, Millett, Greer, and company as honored prophets, by the mid-1980s, says Chesler, their books had dropped off the reading lists because, in a field increasingly preoccupied with intersectionality, social constructionism, and other postmodern ideas, they had come to be seen as guilty of ideological impurity. Nowadays, it’s not unusual to hear some of those iconic second-wave pioneers denounced as unorthodox. In 1995, conservative columnist Mona Charen interviewed Friedan and was surprised by how much they agreed on: “The author of The Feminine Mystique,” wrote Charen, “is a bit out of place these days. Never persuaded by the ‘gender’ feminists that date rape and sexual harassment were the most serious problems facing women, she admits that when she teaches now, she is not comfortable in ‘women’s studies’ departments. ‘I got into too many arguments,’ she sighs.” Friedan died in 2006.
When I was a graduate student, two women named Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar were the stars of feminist literary criticism and the makers of the new feminist literary canon. They cowrote a foundational second-wave text, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), and have co-edited several editions of the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (the first of which appeared in 1985). Yet as Kwame Anthony Appiah notes, Gubar ended up being attacked by Women’s Studies colleagues “as a troglodyte” because, in their view, she was insufficiently theoretical and hadn’t included enough writing by lesbians and women of color in her new canon. Then there’s Michèle Barrett, who ventured to suggest, in her introduction to the first (1980) edition of Women’s Oppression Today, that the word patriarchy was not entirely useful because, as she quite sensibly put it, “How useful is it to collapse widow-burning in India with ‘the coercion of privacy’ in Western Europe, into a concept of such generality?” Yet in the book’s second (1988) edition, having been lambasted for this heresy, Barrett crawled back to orthodoxy and proffered a cringing mea culpa: “Many feminists suggested to me that it was completely wrong to suggest the abandonment of such an eloquent and resonant concept. . . . What is at stake here, which I later came to see, was the symbolic status of using the concept of ‘patriarchy’ as a marker of a position that in general terms I was in fact taking—that we recognize the independent character of women’s oppression and avoid explanations that reduced it to other factors.”
The 1990s brought a widespread backlash against this rigid feminist orthodoxy. For many, it was personified by Camille Paglia, a professor at an obscure university in Philadelphia, who, in her 1990 book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, as well as in scores of essays and interviews, dismissed women’s contribution to Western civilization (“There are no female Mozarts”) and mocked the “weepy, whiny, white-middle-class ideology” of the “Stalinist” women’s movement under Gloria Steinem, which Paglia reviled for its intellectual vacuity, sexual puritanism, and hostility to men—not to mention its obsessive victim mentality, which, in her view, only served to reinforce Victorian sexual stereotypes. For Paglia, women, far from being the weaker sex, were gifted by nature with an innate power over men—the power of sex.
The backlash continued with The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus (1994), in which Princeton grad student Katie Roiphe reported on feminism in the academy. She focused particularly on rape-crisis feminism, which preached to female college students that they weren’t responsible for their own actions, and could thus legitimately claim to have been raped if they decided the next day that they’d made a foolish personal choice. Roiphe also mocked feminist literary criticism, recalling a male fellow student who had described Edith Wharton’s characters as “antifeminist because within the hegemonic male discourse, it is impossible for the female voice to be empowered” and a female fellow student who cared little for literature but was passionate about postmodern literary criticism: “Her conversation is peppered with words like inscription, appropriation, hegemonic, and transgress. In her world, things don’t just exist, they are ‘constructed.’”
The same year saw the publication of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, in which Christina Hoff Sommers criticized contemporary Western feminists for their “self-preoccupation,” their tendency to “speak of their personal plight” in words more appropriate “to the tragic plight of many American women of a bygone day and of millions of contemporary, truly oppressed women in other countries.” Apropos of Women’s Studies, she observed that “equipping students to ‘transform the world’ is not quite the same as equipping them with the knowledge they need for getting on in the world.” Sommers noted that art courses were now focusing more on “female” arts such as quilting and less on painting and sculpture in order to “even out” the curriculum and that great male writers were being replaced on the syllabi of literature courses with female mediocrities. “What motivates the revisionist efforts to rewrite History or to revise the standards of ‘greatness’ in a manner calculated to give to women victories and triumphs they never had the opportunities to win?” asked Sommers. “We now have those opportunities. Why can’t we move on to the future and stop wasting energy on resenting (and ‘rewriting’) the past?”
These reactions to an increasingly rigid and institutionalized feminism had a major impact on mainstream American society, and help explain why so many ambitious, intelligent, and independent-minded young women today choose not to identify as feminists. The feminist establishment, however, chose not to learn from but to vilify Paglia and company. And Women’s Studies, unable to answer them, all but ignored them.
On my way to Denver for the NWSA conference, I wondered whether members of the organization would be staring at me, wondering what a man was doing in their midst. As it turned out, there were more men at the convention than I expected. Not many, but some. There are, in fact, males who major in Women’s Studies and males who teach it; at the conference, three or four of the presentations at the sessions I attended were given by men. Since these men’s devotion to Women’s Studies presumably betokens rejection of the patriarchy, one might expect that their female colleagues
would welcome their involvement with unalloyed delight; but in fact more than a few women continue to view such men as accomplices (however unwilling) in the patriarchy—for whether the men like it or not, their sex, in the eyes of Women’s Studies, confers privilege and power.
Outside the academy, the man-hatred that was a feature of second-wave radical feminism has dissipated. But it hasn’t disappeared, and there are still plenty of feminists today, in and outside of universities, who prefer not to mix with men. I’m provided with a vivid reminder of this fact at the Cultural Studies conference at Berkeley, where, at a session sponsored by the Critical Feminist Studies Division, Amy Barber of the University of Wisconsin at Madison discusses women’s music festivals as “alternative spaces to heteropatriarchy.” Perky, skinny, and boyish, Barber looks as if she’s leapt out of the pages of Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel’s popular comic strip about hip young lesbians. Barber’s talk, based on her dissertation, is about the annual, weeklong Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in rural northwest Michigan, which draws thousands of women annually, is isolated from the outside world, and, Barber exults, provides “one of the few opportunities to live in a woman-only space.” (She quotes a friend’s enthusiastic description of it as a “completely female-worshipping environment.”) “Women rearrange their lives and careers,” Barber notes, to spend a week walking around bare-chested in a “community by and for women” where “women build everything.” (When a platform needs to be constructed or a tent erected, the organizers go out of their way not to hire men.) If under “rare circumstances, men must enter the land”—for example, to “clean the port-o-janes”—the man in question is “always escorted” and everyone is warned beforehand so that naked or half-naked women can cover up and those who don’t want to see a man can escape into the woods until he disappears. Some women, to be sure, decide not to run away or cover up: “I’m not putting my shirt on for any man,” they’ll say. “This is our space.” (Barber’s paper, by the way, is titled “‘I’m Not Putting My Shirt on for Any Man’: Body Politics at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival.”)
Which brings us to Barber’s point: for a week every year, these women can “feel good in their own bodies,” free of “patriarchal expectations of how female bodies should look.” They’re encouraged to develop positive relationships with their own and other women’s bodies. Most of the attendees are lesbians, but the festival isn’t about sex—it’s about the “right to be naked without being objectified.” If “heteropatriarchal culture” makes women feel “uncomfortable in their own bodies,” so that their bodies “serve as a source of oppression in everyday life,” at the festival women are freed from the “threat of the male gaze.” Not that “the male gaze” alone is threatening: women’s gazes, too, Barber admits, can also be “judging” and “objectifying.” After all, there’s “lots of flirting, lots of sex” at the festival. “But I’m not going to keep down that path,” Barber says. (Why not? Because it might lead to heresy?) The important thing, she insists, in a seeming contradiction, is that the Womyn’s Music Festival “is a space where I can’t be objectified.”
Whatever. The bottom line is this: the festival is about much more than music. There are workshops in which women can “explore their feelings about their bodies” and ponder the question: “Are we oppressed and in what ways?” There’s “fat activism and fat pride”—though not as much, Barber says, as there was back in the 1980s. (This decline seems curious, given that one of the fastest-growing new “identity studies” in recent years, as we shall see, has been something called Fat Studies.) Barber cites T-shirt slogans that are popular at the festival: “Fat Is Beautiful.” “The Goddess Is Fat.” “Your Diet Soda Oppresses Me.” She notes that the festival is a “sex-positive place” where “public sex is acceptable,” and that some of the workshops are “hands-on” affairs at which you can learn “how to find your g-spot” and find out about “sex toys” and “female ejaculation.”
There have, however, been controversies. Sadomasochism, for example, has occasioned disagreements as to the appropriateness of “women policing what other women do with their bodies.” Another source of contention, since 1991, has been the question of whether transgendered women should be admitted to the festival. The long-standing policy that “the festival is only for women born women” is protested annually, Barber says, and, she adds, is “definitionally problematic,” given that “many transgender women feel they were born women.” But other women reject this claim, pointing out that “transgender women have never had to worry about pregnancy or periods.” Quoting a statement by Judith Butler—the postmodernist colossus whom we will meet again in the chapter on Queer Studies—to the effect that a fixed definition of the word woman can inhibit feminism, Barber asks what it means to have a woman’s body, given that “biology itself can be ambiguous.” (This seems a classic case of feminists tossing out social constructionism and embracing biology when it suits their purposes—about which more later.) One proposal floated at the festival has been a “no penises” policy. This might be a positive measure, Barber suggests, because if it were implemented then “no one would ever have to see a penis.” But there are two problems with this idea, one of them being that it’s “classist” because of “the cost of transitioning” (rich transsexuals can afford to have their penises sliced off, while poor transsexuals can’t) and the other being that “there are women who identify as trans women” for whom surgery would, for one reason or another, be too dangerous.
Barber sums up her portrait of the festival by saying that it’s about “women feeling safe”—because men, after all, are by nature violent. But she acknowledges that black women can also feel threatened by white women, fat women by thin, and so forth. The problems, in short, never cease; the dream of a space in which one can be certain of feeling entirely unthreatened, entirely comfortable in one’s own body, remains elusive. She notes that women used to be allowed to bring their sons, as long as they were under seven years old, because the organizers figured that a seven-year-old boy was “presumably not old enough to oppress women.” Then a seven-year-old boy “harassed” a little girl (Barber provides no details), so the age limit was lowered to five. To be sure, there’s an “independent camp” where mothers can stow their male children aged five and up; there’s also an area reserved for women with disabilities and, rather incredibly, “a woman-of-color-only space.” By the end of Barber’s talk, this event she’s celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury—a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference.
In any event, to say that Women’s Studies is intrinsically hostile to men is not an exaggeration but an understatement. For the field is antagonistic not just toward men themselves, but also toward a wide range of traditional academic phenomena that are considered “masculinist” or “patriarchal” or “phallocentric.” Among the elements of academic life that are widely reviled as relics of outdated, male-identified ways of thinking are the bestowing of grades, the setting of deadlines, the presentation of logical arguments, the enforcement of prescriptive language rules, and regard for the scientific method. Some women in the field are uncomfortable with the power they wield as professors, because the very idea of being in positions of authority seems to them uncomfortably masculinist, and for this reason they refuse to make up syllabi or reading lists, to lecture, to take a leadership role in the classroom, or to admit to being more knowledgeable about anything than their students; instead, their classrooms become settings for undirected discussion about one’s feelings. More generally, the widespread antagonism toward male-identified traditions results in a slovenly approach to the whole business of teaching: a lack of preparedness, sloppily written syllabi, and the like. Some Women’s Studies practitioners actually profess to reject the entire edifice
of civilization out of hand as a product of male culture (not that they disdain, in practice, any of the products of civilization, from indoor plumbing to PowerPoint). If Friedan and Greer encouraged women to charge boldly onto formerly male-dominated playing fields and to strive for excellence in competition with men, in Women’s Studies today the very concept of merit, whether aesthetic or intellectual, is often viewed with suspicion as offensively masculinist and as a threat to communal harmony and universal self-esteem.
Then there’s “the math problem.” Many female students have trouble with math and science—and while teachers of these subjects may encourage them to work harder, Women’s Studies professors are likely to inform them that the problem lies not in their own shortcomings but in the fields themselves. Math and science, they’re told, are of limited value because these subjects are based on “male” ways of knowing—on, that is, rationality, a male social construction that ignores “female” (that is to say, emotionally rather than intellectually centered) ways of experiencing and understanding the world. Indeed, many Women’s Studies students are taught to be suspicious of strictly intellectual endeavors—of endeavors, in other words, that don’t involve or prioritize feelings. (Typical of this perspective is Andrea Nye’s statement in Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic that logic is a tool of male oppression and “in its final perfection is insane.”) Christina Hoff Sommers quotes one professor’s complaint about “students who have been trained to take the ‘feminist perspective’”: “For them reason itself is patriarchal, linear, and oppressive.” In other words, Women’s Studies agrees with the Victorians that women are the less intellectual sex; the difference is that in the view of Women’s Studies this doesn’t make them inferior but superior.