In the early years, feminism was torn between radical and assimilationist tendencies. In fact, our first sense of division was between the “bourgeois” feminists who wanted to scale the occupational hierarchy created by men, and the radical feminists who wanted to level it. Assimilation won out, as it probably must among any economically disadvantaged group. Networks replaced consciousness-raising groups; Michael Korda became a more valuable guide to action than Shulamith Firestone. The old radical, anarchistic vision was replaced by the vague hope (well articulated in Feminine Leadership) that, in the process of assimilating, women would somehow “humanize” the cold and ruthless world of men. Today, of course, there are still radical feminists, but the only capitalist institution they seem bent on destroying is the local adult bookstore.
As feminism loses its critical edge, it becomes, ironically, less capable of interpreting the experience of its pioneer assimilationists, the new corporate women. Contemporary mainstream feminism can understand their malaise insofar as it is caused by sexist obstacles, but has no way of addressing the sad emptiness of “success” itself. Even the well-worn term “alienation,” as applied to human labor, rings no bells among the corporate feminists I have talked to recently, although most thought it an arresting notion. So we are in more or less the same epistemological situation Betty Friedan found herself in describing the misery—and, yes, alienation—of middle-class housewives in the early 1960s; better words would be forthcoming, but she had to refer to “the problem without a name.”
Men are just as likely as women to grasp the ultimate pointlessness of the corporate game and the foolishness of many of the players, but only women have a socially acceptable way out. They can go back to the split-level homes and well-appointed nurseries where Friedan first found them. (That is assuming, of course, they can find a well-heeled husband, and they haven’t used up all their childbearing years in the pursuit of a more masculine model of success.) In fact, this may well be a more personally satisfying option than a work life spent contemplating, say, the fluid dynamics of catsup. As Paul Goodman explained, with as much insight as insensitivity, girls didn’t have to worry about “growing up absurd” because they had intrinsically meaningful work cut out for them—motherhood and homemaking.
There is no doubt, from the interviews in Women Like Us as well as my own anecdotal sources, that some successful women are indeed using babies as a polite excuse for abandoning the rat race. This is too bad from many perspectives, and certainly for the children who will become the sole focus of their mothers’ displaced ambitions. The dropouts themselves would do well to take a look at Peggy J. Berry’s Corporate Couple, which advises executive wives on the classic problems such as: how to adjust to the annual relocation, how to overcome one’s jealousy of a husband’s svelte and single female coworkers, and how to help a husband survive his own inevitable existential crisis.
Someday, I believe, a brilliantly successful corporate woman will suddenly look down at her desk littered with spreadsheets and interoffice memos and exclaim, “Is this really worth my time?” At the very same moment, a housewife, casting her eyes around a kitchen befouled by toddlers, will ask herself the identical question. As the corporate woman flees out through the corporate atrium, she will run headlong into the housewife, fleeing into it. The two will talk. And in no time at all they will reunite those two distinctly American strands of radicalism—the utopianism of Goodman and the feminism of Friedan. They may also, if they talk long enough, invent some sweet new notion like equal pay for…meaningful work.
What Abu Ghraib Taught Me
Los Angeles Times, 2004
Even those people we might have thought were impervious to shame, like the secretary of defense, admit that the photos of abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison turned their stomachs.
The photos did something else to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the US mission in Iraq—whatever exactly it is—but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women.
Of the seven US soldiers now charged with sickening forms of abuse in Abu Ghraib, three are women: Specialist Megan Ambuhl, Private First Class Lynndie England, and Specialist Sabrina Harman.
It was Harman we saw smiling an impish little smile and giving the thumbs-up sign from behind a pile of hooded, naked Iraqi men—as if to say, “Hi Mom, here I am in Abu Ghraib!” It was England we saw with a naked Iraqi man on a leash. If you were doing PR for Al Qaeda, you couldn’t have staged a better picture to galvanize misogynist Islamic fundamentalists around the world.
Here, in these photos from Abu Ghraib, you have everything that the Islamic fundamentalists believe characterizes Western culture, all nicely arranged in one hideous image—imperial arrogance, sexual depravity…and gender equality.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so shocked. We know that good people can do terrible things under the right circumstances. This is what psychologist Stanley Milgram found in his famous experiments in the 1960s. In all likelihood, Ambuhl, England, and Harman are not congenitally evil people. They are working-class women who wanted an education and knew that the military could be a stepping-stone in that direction. Once they had joined, they wanted to fit in.
And I also shouldn’t be surprised because I never believed that women were innately gentler and less aggressive than men. Like most feminists, I have supported full opportunity for women within the military—(1) because I knew women could fight, and (2) because the military is one of the few options around for low-income young people.
Although I opposed the 1991 Persian Gulf War, I was proud of our servicewomen and delighted that their presence irked their Saudi hosts. Secretly, I hoped that the presence of women would over time change the military, making it more respectful of other people and cultures, more capable of genuine peacekeeping. That’s what I thought, but I don’t think that anymore.
A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. It was a feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. Rape has repeatedly been an instrument of war and, to some feminists, it was beginning to look as if war was an extension of rape. There seemed to be at least some evidence that male sexual sadism was connected to our species’ tragic propensity for violence. That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action.
But it’s not just the theory of this naive feminism that was wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy and vision rested on the assumption, implicit or stated outright, that women were morally superior to men. We had a lot of debates over whether it was biology or conditioning that gave women the moral edge—or simply the experience of being a woman in a sexist culture. But the assumption of superiority, or at least a lesser inclination toward cruelty and violence, was more or less beyond debate. After all, women do most of the caring work in our culture, and in polls are consistently less inclined toward war than men.
I’m not the only one wrestling with that assumption today. Mary Jo Melone, a columnist for the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, wrote on May 7, 2004: “I can’t get that picture of England [pointing at a hooded Iraqi man’s genitals] out of my head because this is not how women are expected to behave. Feminism taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal from men, we were morally superior to them.”
If that assumption had been accurate, then all we would have had to do to make the world a better place—kinder, less violent, more just—would have been to assimilate into what had been, for so many centuries, the world of men. We would fight so that women could become the generals, CEOs, senators, professors, and opinion-makers—and that was really the only fight we had to undertake. Because once they gained power and authority, once they had achieved a critical mass within the institutions of society, women would naturally work for change. That’s what we thought, even if we thought it unconsciously—and it’s just not true.
Women can do the unthinkable.
You can’t even argue, in the case of Abu Ghraib, that the problem was that there just weren’t enough women in the military hierarchy to stop the abuses. The prison was directed by a woman, General Janis Karpinski. The top US intelligence officer in Iraq, who also was responsible for reviewing the status of detainees before their release, was Major General Barbara Fast. And the US official ultimately responsible for managing the occupation of Iraq since October 2003 was Condoleezza Rice. Like Donald H. Rumsfeld, she ignored repeated reports of abuse and torture until the undeniable photographic evidence emerged.
What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn’t mean gender equality isn’t worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman’s right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It’s just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world.
In fact, we have to realize, in all humility, that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of female moral superiority is not only naive; it also is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism. Self-indulgent because it assumes that a victory for a woman—a promotion, a college degree, the right to serve alongside men in the military—is by its very nature a victory for all of humanity. And lazy because it assumes that we have only one struggle—the struggle for gender equality—when in fact we have many more.
The struggles for peace and social justice and against imperialist and racist arrogance, cannot, I am truly sorry to say, be folded into the struggle for gender equality.
What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them, only by consciously deciding to fight for change. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no—not just to the date rapist or the overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or the corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself.
In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.
To cite an old, and far from naive, feminist saying: “If you think equality is the goal, your standards are too low.” It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.
Making Sense of
la Différence
Time, 1992
Few areas of science are as littered with intellectual rubbish as the study of innate mental differences between the sexes. In the nineteenth century, biologists held that woman’s brain was too small for intellect, but just large enough for household chores. When the tiny-brain theory bit the dust (elephants, after all, have bigger brains than humans), scientists began a long, fruitless attempt to locate the biological basis of male superiority in various brain lobes and chromosomes. By the 1960s, sociobiologists were asserting that natural selection, operating throughout the long human prehistory of hunting and gathering, had predisposed males to leadership and exploration and females to crouching around the campfire with the kids.
Recent studies suggest that there may be some real differences after all. And why not? We have different hormones and body parts; it would be odd if our brains were a hundred percent unisex. The question, as ever, is, What do these differences augur for our social roles?—meaning, in particular, the division of power and opportunity between the sexes.
Don’t look to the Flintstones for an answer. However human beings whiled away their first 100,000 or so years of existence, few of us today make a living by tracking down mammoths or digging up tasty roots. In fact, much of our genetic legacy of sex differences has already been rendered moot by that uniquely human invention: technology. Military prowess no longer depends on superior musculature or those bursts of aggressive fury that prime the body for combat at ax range. As for exploration, women—with their lower body weight and oxygen consumption—may be the more “natural” astronauts.
But suppose that the feminists’ worst-case scenario turns out to be true, and that males really are better, on average, at certain mathematical tasks. If this tempts you to shunt the girls all back to Home Ec—the only acceptable realm for would-be female scientists eighty years ago—you probably need remedial work in the statistics of “averages” yourself. Just as some women are taller and stronger than some men, some are swifter at solid geometry and abstract algebra. Many of the pioneers in the field of x-ray crystallography—which involves three-dimensional visualization and heavy doses of math—were female, including biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, whose work was indispensable to the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA.
Then there is the problem that haunts all studies of “innate” sex differences: the possibility that the observed differences are really the result of lingering cultural factors—pushing females, for example, to “succeed” by dummying up. Girls’ academic achievement, for example, usually takes a nosedive at puberty. Unless nature has selected for smart girls and dumb women, something is going very wrong at about the middle-school level. Part of the problem may be that males, having been the dominant sex for a few millennia, still tend to prefer females who make them feel stronger and smarter. Any girl who is bright enough to solve a quadratic equation is also smart enough to bat her eyelashes and pretend that she can’t.
Teachers too may play a larger role than nature in differentiating the sexes. Studies show that they tend to favor boys by calling on them more often, making eye contact with them more frequently, and pushing them harder to perform. Myra and David Sadker, professors of education at American University, have found that girls do better when teachers are sensitized to gender bias and refrain from sexist language, such as the use of “man” to mean all of us. Single-sex classes in math and science also boost female performance, presumably by eliminating favoritism and male disapproval of female achievement.
The success, so far, of such simple educational reforms only underscores the basic social issue: Given that there may be real innate mental differences between the sexes, what are we going to do about them? A female advantage in reading emotions could be interpreted to mean that males should be barred from psychiatry—or that they need more coaching. A male advantage in math could be used to confine girls to essays and sonnets—or the decision could be made to compensate by putting more effort into girls’ math education. In effect, we already compensate for boys’ apparent handicap in verbal skills by making reading the centerpiece of grade-school education.
We are cultural animals, and these are cultural decisions of the kind that our genes can’t make for us. In fact, the whole discussion of innate sex differences is itself heavily shaped by cultural factors. Why, for example, is the study of innate differences such a sexy, well-funded topic right now, which happens to be a time of organized feminist challenge to the ancient sexual division of power? Why do the media tend to get excited when scientists find an area of difference, and ignore the many reputable studies that come up with no differences at all?
Whatever science eventually defines it as, la différence can be amplified or minimized by human cultural arrangements: The choice is up to us, not our genes.
Outclassed:
Sexual Harassment
The Guardian, 2017
With Alissa Quart
The number of women in the entertainment industry coming forward with charges of sexual harassment is starting to feel endless. They include stars like Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie but also heads of tech start-ups and journalists, gallerists, and producers.
But it is women working in far less glamorous occupations who really bear the brunt of male lechery and assault: the housekeepers, waitresses, and farmworkers. A paper in the journal Gender, Work & Organization, based on interviews with female workers at five-star hotels, found almost all experiencing some kind of inappropriate
sexual advance from a guest. In another study, 80 percent of waitresses reported sexual harassment. A mind-boggling 88 percent of female construction workers did, too.
If you look at these numbers, you recognize that most victims are not so glamorous.
And yet, the current conversation about harassment is deeply skewed by social class. There are far too many think pieces about high-level actresses and far too few about the waitress at your local diner.
Why? For starters, most working-class women don’t hire publicists or lawyers, and they aren’t able to cultivate friends in high places. (They are very rarely applauded for that word of the year, “bravery,” in public forums.) Most of these women never go public at all. After all, if you’re earning $8 to $10 an hour, you cannot afford to go without a paycheck for the weeks it would take to find a new job. Any expression of dissatisfaction with a hostile workplace can lead to a legal firing on the grounds of, for example, having a bad attitude.
Blue-collar and retail workers may well be happy to see the issue of sexual harassment getting attention, yet they might also be irritated at celebs receiving all the attention and respond accordingly. Talk to a hairdresser, a waitress, or a domestic worker, and you’re likely to encounter a deep vein of resentment.
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