Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  In his 1988 book, Feminism and Freedom, philosophy professor Michael Levin characterizes feminism as an “antidemocratic, if not totalitarian, ideology” without a single redeeming feature. “Surely no body of ideas is wrong about everything, as I imply feminism is,” he writes. “Yet while feminism may have accomplished some good per accidens, I would no more pander to the reader by straining to praise rape crisis centers than I would strain to praise the punctuality of trains under Mussolini were I discussing fascism.” His motives for writing this work are purely high-minded, he assures. “I have felt compelled by conscience to present feminism as I see it.”

  Levin’s work sets forth the standard tenets of ’80s backlash “scholarship.” He makes the following key assertions: (1) Women with successful careers sacrifice marriage and motherhood. (2) Sex roles are innate: women naturally prefer to cook and keep house, and men naturally don’t. (3) Men are better at math.

  He supports these propositions with dense, footnoted passages about !Kung boys and girls, hermaphrodites, hypogonadics (men with shriveled testicles), and castrated rhesus monkeys. For example: “The Hier-Crowley study of nineteen male idiopathic hypogonadics supplies further physiological evidence of the innateness of spatial ability in males.” Or: “!Kung juvenile play-groups are single-sex; boys spend far more time than girls in exploring technology (e.g., digging up termite mounds with arrows), and play rough-and-tumble play.”

  Plodding through these pages, one can’t help but wonder why they feature so many eunuched monkeys and idiopathic hypogonadics—yet no contemporary men and women. A visit to Levin’s house clears up the mystery.

  • • •

  “IF YOU want to interview Michael tomorrow, you can’t,” his wife, Margarita Levin, is explaining over the telephone, a few days before the visit. “That’s my teaching day and he has to watch the boys.” This, it turns out, is no one-time event. Despite his position in Feminism and Freedom that, genetically, “women prefer to care for children more than men do,” in the Levins’ dual-career household, child care duties are routinely divided in half. Margarita Levin has her career to consider. She’s a professor at Yeshiva University, teaching philosophy—and, her specialty, the philosophy of math.

  “My wife does the cuddling; all I’m good for with the boys is rough-housing,” Michael Levin emphasizes a few days later, leading the way into his living room in the family’s apartment in Manhattan. He picks his way through the clutter of children’s toys and settles in an armchair. Sure, he looks after the boys, five and eight, when his wife is away, he says, “but there are certain things that are out. . . . Cleaning up and food preparation are still my wife’s job. I don’t like to cook. That’s just the way men are.” Men find they lose “tremendous status if they start adopting things that women do,” he explains. In fact, “I feel I’ve lost a lot of status just talking about [feminism].” But he feels he must address it—to “reclaim my genitalia and my masculinity.”

  Levin recalls that he was moved first to take a stand against the women’s movement many years earlier, when some feminist-minded women he knew began calling on men to alter their behavior. “I won’t forget” one particular incident, he says: a friend’s liberated girlfriend was talking about women’s rights, “and she gave me this look and said, ‘Men will have to change.’ It was very totalitarian. I found myself really stewing about it.”

  As he’s speaking, his son Mark races across the room, clambers on his father’s knee, and demands “a hug.” Levin gives him one, then, seemingly mindful of his no-cuddling posture just a minute earlier, shoos his son in the direction of mother. But the little boy will have none of it; throughout the conversation, he makes periodic leaps into his father’s lap.

  “Did you see Michael on ‘Geraldo’?” Margarita, who has joined them in the living room, asks. Talk show host Geraldo Rivera recently asked Levin to serve as an expert on an episode about why men prefer women who aren’t their equals. “If a man does not feel dominant, he won’t feel sexually aroused,” Levin recalls telling them. “It diminishes his masculinity. That’s why we are seeing the growth of impotency among younger men.” But how does he know there’s a “growth of impotency”? Levin shrugs good-naturedly. “It’s just my impression.” A pause. “I suspect it.” Another pause. “I think I saw a magazine article once about it.”

  Michael Levin’s marriage does not exactly fit his ideal domestic model. “My wife is smarter than I am,” he says flatly. She is not only a philosophy scholar but a gifted mathematician. And she is even an intellectual partner in his antifeminist writings. But Levin has managed to reconceptualize their relationship in terms that restore, at least in his mind, the traditional balance between man and wife. He maintains that he is actually the dominant one because, “when we met, I was the teacher and she was the student.” Lest the point be missed, he takes pain to repeat it, several times: “She was a former student of mine, so I don’t feel threatened by it,” he assures. This tutorial myth of their marriage is preserved years after it has lost its relevance, and Levin actively promotes it—as if he must advertise the cover of this marital fiction all the more forcefully now to disguise its hollow content.

  As Levin is speaking, his other son Eric appears in the living room, clutching a frying pan. He wants to know if his father will help him cook rice. Maybe later, he’s told. Michael Levin confesses that cooking is currently his son’s “favorite activity.” Mark, meanwhile, has fallen down and is crying, and Michael goes into the other room to comfort him. Margarita seats herself in the patriarchal armchair—to tell the story of how she became a math whiz.

  She discovered her aptitude in grammar school in the early ’60s—when girls were not typically pushed in the direction of algebra. Margarita, however, says she was fortunate enough to fall into the hands of a few enlightened teachers who recognized her talents: “No one ever said to me, ‘don’t do it,’ so I just kept going.” She majored in math at City College of New York, where Michael teaches. Then she moved on to the University of Minnesota’s graduate program, where she got her Ph.D. in the philosophy of mathematics. (The summer she wrote her dissertation, Michael stayed home to watch the kids.) “I think I’m better at math than the majority of men,” she says.

  But the example of her own intellectual abilities has not led Margarita Levin to reject her husband’s biological argument about the sexes—only to define herself, like Connie Marshner did, as “an exception.” The hard sciences, she says, just have “very few female worthies.” Not only does she endorse her husband’s views on women, she is, as Michael points out, “even a bigger antifeminist.” She says her opposition to the women’s movement began on campus, where university women were questioning their underrepresentation in certain male enclaves. “It was the feminists’ attack on science that really lit the fuse under my rockets,” she says. “I just don’t tolerate fools.” In a 1988 article in the American Scholar, she struck back, warning that if feminists were granted admission to the science departments, a host of unreasonable demands would surely follow—preferential treatment for female students or even extra space in scientific journals for “nonmasculinist” writing. Perhaps what “lit the fuse” under Margarita Levin was, indeed, the possibility of a feminist column in an academic magazine—or perhaps it was a more personal encroachment that ignited her. If there were more women in the math department, her achievement might seem less spectacular. If women reached parity on the faculty, she might no longer be one of the “very few worthies.” Or maybe she was simply seeking to distinguish herself in a less scholastic fashion: “I’d love for us to become the most famous feminist bashers,” she sighs. “I’d love it if we were on the cover of the New York Times Magazine.”

  Margarita Levin soon expanded her antifeminist crusade beyond the sciences. She found a welcoming forum in Newsweek, which published her essay deploring the “feminist excesses” of children’s books that depict a “unisex” world of female doctors, traffic officers, and auto mechanics.
These books, her article contended, “clash so blatantly with real life.” If these writers keep this up, “our children may find themselves confronted with Long Jane Silver and a Wendy who fights Captain Hook while Peter Pan stays home to care for the boys.” . . . Or maybe, one can’t help thinking, even a math professor named Margarita, who fights faculty feminists while husband Mike stays home to watch the kids.

  Rejoining the conversation, Michael Levin complaints that, until recently, it’s been hard to get the mass media’s attention. He sees promising signs—asked for an example, he cites Beautiful perfume’s bridal ads—but still, he says, it’s tough going for antifeminists. “The feminists have a lockup on the media,” he says, and the tone in his voice suddenly turns rancorous. “They control advertising. They have taken over the universities—it’s occupied territory for feminists.” Once Levin gets going in this vein, there’s no stopping him. The affable professor is suddenly red in the face. “A guy gets a Ph.D. in philosophy,” he says, “and even if he’s the best, he’s going to lose out to a woman. Feminist headquarters is the women’s studies department on every campus. It’s command central. And what they produce, it’s fecal matter. Maybe a little urine mixed in, but mostly fecal matter.” His scholarly geniality has given way, though not his scholarly diction.

  Just then, Eric interrupts the conversation. He still wields the frying pan, and again seeks his father’s assistance. Levin, his temperature returning to normal, follows his son into the kitchen. Margarita continues to hold forth from the armchair on her career’s development. At the end of the interview, Michael Levin emerges from the kitchen to say good-bye. He looks a little chagrined—he’s wearing an apron.

  WARREN FARRELL: THE LIBERATED MAN RECANTS

  “Men are hurting more than women—that is, men are, in many ways, actually more powerless than women now.” Warren Farrell pauses to sip from the coffee mug that his female housekeeper just handed him. In another room, his female secretary is busy typing and tidying his files. “The women’s movement has turned out not to be a movement for equality but a movement for women’s maximization of opportunities,” he says.

  This morning, Farrell is on his way to teach a “men’s issues” class at the University of California School of Medicine at San Diego. The subject: “male powerlessness.” The text they will be using: Farrell’s new Why Men Are the Way They Are, a book that, among other things, takes feminism to task for “blaming” men for inequality and for encouraging women to focus excessively on their own independence. Feminism may have improved female lives, he asserts, but for some women, “the deeper the feminism, the more closed the women were to men.” So far, Farrell says, the book has sold more than a hundred thousand copies in hard cover. “We are in an era now where men don’t feel understood by women,” he says. It’s gotten so bad that middle-aged women seeking husbands might even benefit from the shortage of sensitive young ladies. “Older women who are looking to get married could really compensate for their loss of looks by understanding men.”

  Farrell picks up his leather jacket and heads for his leather-upholstered Maserati. The sports car’s vanity plate reads Y MEN R. He slides behind the wheel and guns the motor; the tires screech as he rounds the suburban street corners of Leucadia, California.

  In a medical school classroom, he takes a seat before fifteen pupils. “Okay, so as we discussed last week, until the sixties, women were economically secure in marriage. As long as it was a lifetime arrangement, the system worked. This has been true in almost every society. . . . It was not a bad system. It helped survival for thousands of years. The women were getting the men who were the best protectors and hunters, and the men competed for the most beautiful women.”

  A young woman raises her hand. In some societies, she tells the teacher, “the females did the gathering and provided for the off-spring. Hunting was a minor part of their diets.” That, Farrell explains, was just a “deviation from sex roles.” She tries again: “No, the point I’m trying to make is, in many cases it wasn’t so much that the men were ‘the providers’ as that they were controlling women’s access to food and land.” Farrell frowns slightly. “That would be a pejorative interpretation,” he tells her, and quickly moves the history lesson forward to the 1970s.

  “Now it all broke down the moment divorce made that system insecure. . . . And then, once that got started, the anger carried inside the woman added another level of distance from her goal of marriage,” he explains. “The anger drove men away.”

  Again, a hand shoots up. “But I thought the anger of women came from their feeling that the old system had worked against them,” a student says, looking confused. Farrell shakes his head. “No,” he corrects. “The system was built for the benefit of both men and women, and worked most to the advantage of women. Men were slaves to the work force, in some respects more enslaved than women.”

  This was not exactly the conclusion that Farrell had reached a decade earlier. In the early ’70s, in fact, he had been drawn to the feminist movement precisely because he had been troubled by the effect that “system” had on women trapped in claustrophobic or destructive traditional marriages. In particular, he witnessed the system’s toll on one woman he knew well—his mother. “I had seen her move in and out of depression,” he would later write. “Into depression when she was not working, out of depression when she was working. The jobs were just temporary, but, she would tell me, ‘I don’t have to ask Dad for every penny when I’m working.’” When her jobs came to an end, the gloom returned and deepened. She took prescription drugs to control it, but the medication only gave her dizzy spells that made her stumble and fall. One day, when she was only forty-nine, she fell to her death. As Farrell recalls:

  Soon after my mother’s death, the women’s movement surfaced. Perhaps because of her death, it made sense to me in an instant. I could not miss the sense of self that I saw in my mother when her work brought her both income and adult human communication, when it brought her a sense of purpose and a feeling of having some rights.

  As a young graduate student in New York, Farrell heard other college men mock the goals of the women’s movement. “I was surprised when I saw men trivialize the intent of what women were struggling to articulate. I soon found myself at the homes of emerging feminist friends in Manhattan, plopped in front of their husbands with instructions to ‘tell him what you told me.’”

  Eventually, Farrell’s devotion to the cause expanded to his professional life. He changed his dissertation to a feminist examination of changing sex roles, quit his job as an assistant to the president of New York University, and began writing what would become a celebrated male feminist tome, The Liberated Man. He organized hundreds of men’s groups, counterparts to women’s consciousness-raising sessions, in which men were encouraged “to listen [to women] rather than dominate,” to explore the political underpinnings of their marriages and relationships, and to expose links between machismo and violence. And he encouraged the men’s and women’s groups to meet regularly and seek common ground. Feminism, he said, would free men, too: from the economic burden of supporting a family alone and from the physical and mental strain of proving and reproving masculinity and repressing “feminine” emotions. “A boy who is not taught to fight to display his manhood is psychologically much freer to walk away from a potential fight,” he wrote in a 1971 op-ed piece in the New York Times. “As an adolescent man he is freer to drive a car carefully rather than ‘peel out’ and display the ‘horsepower’ of his car—a vicarious display of his own power.”

  This message was repeated in popular books by male feminist writers in the ’70s, works that questioned the precepts of American manhood. “The truth is that men are not very happy with the world they have created,” Michael Korda wrote in his 1973 Male Chauvinism. Neither sex profits from the traditional masculine ideal of “obsessive competitiveness” and “invulnerability,” Marc Feigen Fasteau proposed in his 1974 The Male Machine; not only is it bad for women, it un
healthily restricts men, too, to “all but a narrow range of human contact.” Within this literary camp of men’s liberation, Farrell presided as the undisputed leader. He founded sixty “men’s liberation” chapters of the National Organization for Women, was elected three times to NOW’s New York City board, and was hailed in the Chicago Tribune as “the Gloria Steinem of Men’s Liberation.” A four-page flattering profile and photo layout in People featured Farrell and his wife, Ursie, a mathematician—a Love Story couple tossing a football in Central Park and whipping up an omelet in their West Side co-op. He mingled with media luminaries like Barbara Walters, dined with Gloria Steinem, and played tennis with fellow male feminist icons Alan Alda and Phil Donahue. He appeared on Donahue’s show, he says, seven times.

  But as feminism lost its media glitter, Farrell’s enthusiasm seemed to fade, too. Perhaps the changes he said he had made in himself were superficial, little more than cosmetic touch-ups to enhance his stardom in the short-lived ’70s liberation drama. Or perhaps mounting a challenge to traditional manhood, a monumental project in the best of circumstances, seemed a thankless and impossible task to Farrell once the cultural supports were yanked out. As Farrell himself warned in his 1971 New York Times essay, “the image of masculinity is so all-pervasive” that “it is easier to use surgery” to change a man’s sex than it is “to undo the social and cultural conditioning.”

  In any event, by the mid-’80s he decided it was time to start standing up for men, the new downtrodden. Independent women were venting too much anger at men; they were criticizing men’s behavior just to “confirm their number-one status,” he grumbles in Why Men Are the Way They Are. Soon, he was running workshops that emphasized female re-education, sensitivity training sessions to teach women to hear, and heed, men’s grievances against them. In Why Men Are the Way They Are, Farrell reverses the feminist picture; he depicts a world of gender where women exert “enormous leverage” over slavish men, who have been reduced to “success objects” by achievement-obsessed women. Men who want to be secretaries, he charges, are now the ones who face discrimination from these haughty female professionals, who use their male typists for one-night stands and then rebuff their pleas for long-term commitment. In Farrell’s new cosmos of oppressed and oppressors, the most domineering are the independent women with good careers. “Executive women have begun to discriminate against nonexecutive men,” he says. “Successful women, I find, are often married to their career. Many men don’t feel they are getting the devotion of the women.”