We Were Feminists Once

by Andi Zeisler

  Is this really a big deal? Well, yes. It’s easy to see the backlash inherent in kids’ toys, room décor, and media that’s so explicitly gendered. The generations of youngsters to whom these products are aimed are growing up with the fruits of feminism, gay liberation, antiracism, and growing transgender acceptance in evidence around them. Many of these kids take for granted that they will be afforded equal educational and extracurricular opportunities. They likely have two working parents, whether or not those parents are still together. And yet the world around them is ever more divided by sex, insisting that they see themselves as one of two discrete categories with attendant aesthetics and interests. Advertising and marketing philosophies that thrive on emphasizing “natural” differences don’t stay in the realm of advertising and marketing—they spill into how we justify sexism and racism at every life stage.

  Keep Your Chick Beer Away from my Bronuts

  A marketplace that pushes Scotch tape and pink-labeled “Chick Beer” to women, or sunscreen for men and “bronuts”—that’s doughnuts for men, in case regular doughnuts are too girly for you—is not just harmless free-market fun. There’s a big difference between acknowledging that boys and girls and men and women are different by virtue of both nature and nurture, and encouraging them to conform to binary, sex-specific stereotypes with products that suggest such stereotypes are universally applicable. Let’s say you’re a woman-born-woman over the age of twelve and you like pink; maybe it’s not your favorite color, but it’s fine. Is it reasonable to assume that you want your pens, tissue packets, power tools, earplugs, beer bottles, ice cube trays, and freaking glue sticks to be pink because you’re a woman? Unless your name is Barbie and you already live in a pink plastic townhouse with a pink plastic hot tub and a pink Corvette in your pink-gravel driveway, probably not. Meanwhile, all Brogurt does is reify the idea that being female is a bad thing. (My own slogan, “Yogurt is a Gender-Neutral Food, Dummies” has not yet caught on, but here’s hoping.)

  The past three decades have generated something of an eruption in research that justifies gender essentialism as something that has a sound scientific basis and, in fact, is the key to happiness and understanding between the sexes (or, at least, the two sexes that are acknowledged in this binary construction). The big daddy of gender-essentialist media is John Gray, whose book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus whizzed to the top of bestseller lists in 1992, and soon afterward begat a multimillion-dollar empire of follow-up books (Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, Mars and Venus in the Workplace, Truly Mars and Venus), workshops, games, relationship-counseling retreats, a short-lived talk show, and more. The crux of Gray’s theory was the unsourced claim that “men’s and women’s values are inherently different”; he went on to paint a picture of Why Those Crazy Kids Just Can’t Get Along using examples that even a beginning stand-up comic would reject as too cliché. What’s with men not asking for directions, am I right, ladies? (“Mary had no idea that when Tom became lost and started circling the same block, it was a very special opportunity to love and support him”); Guys, don’t you hate it when your wife won’t stop talking? I mean blah, blah blah (“Just as a man is fulfilled though working out the intricate details of solving a problem, a woman is fulfilled through talking about the details of her problems”). With no real gender analysis to offer context, Gray didn’t acknowledge that fixed-gender mindsets might, more than actual communication differences, be the thing gumming up the works. All Gray’s binary constructions, as well as similar ones laid out by Deborah Tannen in her bestselling ladies-vs.-gents guides, were ones that complemented already-existing beliefs in What Men Do and What Women Do. They’ve been echoed in the rash of scare-tactic tomes pushed on black women; in addition to Steve Harvey’s, there are Jimi Izreal’s The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can’t Find Good Black Men, Hill Harper’s The Conversation: How Black Men and Women Can Build Loving, Trusting Relationships, and advice books from serial-dating musicians Ray J and Musiq. As journalist Joshunda Sanders points out, these are books written by unmarried, famous black men—a phenomenon that suggests “that everyone but all the single black ladies knows how to be in a committed relationship.”4

  Elsewhere, as new technologies began broadening the possibilities for understanding the structures and workings of the human brain, the topic of biologically-based sex differences moved from the realm of pop psychology to the more dignified sphere of hard science, with a rash of high-minded tomes that put the imprimaturs of numerous eggheads on Gray’s Mars-Venus dualism. A Natural History of Rape, published in 2000, echoed Camille Paglia in suggesting that male sexual violence toward women is an evolutionary legacy that’s not a crime of power, as feminist theorists would have it, but one of sexual desire. Simon Baron-Cohen’s 2003 book The Essential Difference: Men, Women, and the Extreme Male Brain mainstreamed the concept of “hard-wired” sex differences, explaining that women’s brains are wired for empathy and connection while men’s are wired to explore and build systems—autism, he concluded, is more prevalent in boys as an “extreme” version of this biological wiring. Two thousand six’s The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter, by investigative journalist Katherine Ellison, made the case that though a woman’s post-baby mind often feels like a sieve, the stress and compulsory multitasking actually yields a healthy brain loaded with synapses firing like lawn darts. (No word on how fatherhood affects men’s brains—parenting is a woman’s job, silly!) Authored by neurobiologist Louann Brizendine, 2007’s The Female Brain also leaned on hard-wiring as an explanation for supposedly inherent female traits like nurturance and emotional sensitivity, arguing that “girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys.” Susan Pinker, author of the 2008 tome The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap, explained gender gaps in workplace achievement with the assertion that women are—say it with me—“wired for empathy,” rather than ambition. Her brother Steven’s 2002 book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, had similarly argued that biological difference, rather than socialization or acculturation, explained why early in life, girls play with kitchens and boys favor more physical games. Later, he lofted the weirdly specific assertion that women “are more likely [than men] to choose administrative support jobs that offer lower pay in air-conditioned offices.”

  The often common thread of these books was their authors’ contention that they were taking a bold, even heroic stance in challenging a radical-feminist orthodoxy that was leading kids and adults astray, making them sadder, harder to educate, and stuck with toys they had no interest in. Naturally, this narrative of taboo-smashing scientific crusading was instant media crack. Occasionally, reviews of the books would note offhandedly that some evidence for the claims anchoring them was iffy or unsupported, but that was ultimately beside the point. The corporate media outlets that covered the books weren’t too interested in the nuances of their findings or the flawed methodology that often undergirded them, though more skeptical and science-driven publications were. Nature, for one, fact-checked The Female Brain and reported that the book was “riddled with errors” and “fails to meet even the most basic standards of scientific accuracy”; others noted that, much like John Gray and Deborah Tannen before her, Brizendine conveniently ignored the existence of both transgender and intersex people, given that acknowledging them would decimate her strict binary.

  Baron-Cohen’s widely embraced theory of hard-wired sex differences, meanwhile, was based on a study of day-old babies that found boys fixated on a mobile, girls more focused on nearby faces. Day-old babies, don’t forget, can barely keep their eyes open to begin with, and also can’t hold their heads up by themselves; as media critics Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett noted, the fact that the infants were not acting independently but physically influenced by the parents who were holding them was a crucial complicating factor that Baron-Cohen glossed over.5 The study was never replicated, and was subsequently debunked by several fellow scientists: one,
neuroscientist Lise Eliot, emphasized that “kids rise or fall according to what we believe about them, and the more we dwell on the differences between boys and girls, the likelier such stereotypes are to crystallize into children’s self-perceptions and self-fulfilling prophecies.”6

  But corporate media still regularly invokes studies like these, and the conclusions they reach, when considering gender difference as an essential, objective measure of what people are “naturally” inclined to do in relationships, workplaces, and families. It’s not the quality of the science that makes them resonate, but the fact that their authors’ broad claims can be used to justify long-held viewpoints on sex, gender, power, and potential—all of which inform how our culture and institutions value women’s and men’s participation. (To say nothing of how we sideline people who identify as neither.) Gray, for one, made his bias apparent when he stated—with the extremely rational reasoning he ascribes to Martians/men—“The reason why there’s so much divorce is that feminism promotes independence in women.” Pinker’s contention that women flock to administrative jobs and lack the mettle to work without the benefit of proper air conditioning contributes to the conservative party line that what all those testy feminists call a wage gap is really just the result of women’s personal choices. It also, notably, ignores the fact that “choice” in jobs is actually not an option for large numbers of women who certainly might want administrative jobs in climate-cooled cubicles, but work instead in factories or fast-food restaurants so they can feed their families and keep the lights on.

  None of this is to say that intrinsic brain differences between born sexes don’t exist; Rivers and Barnett note that, with more sophisticated brain-research methods than ever before now available, there’s considerable evidence that there are. But let’s return for a moment to women’s teeny-tiny gorilla brains, as Gustave LeBon characterized them. Despite a resounding lack of evidence to support his theories and those of his ideological brethren, women were kept out of higher and even secondary education for decades because such theories were in line with what was already an approved narrative about women. In less extreme forms, that tail still wags the dog. When Harvard president Larry Summers asserted to a 2005 meeting at the National Bureau of Economic Research that women lag behind men in scientific education and careers because their feminine minds are just more focused on families and relationships, he was giving credence to that prejudice. Ten years later, when Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt announced to the World Conference of Science Journalists that “girls” don’t belong in science labs alongside men (“Three things happen when they’re in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry”), he was asserting the same ideas in an even more ham-fisted way. (Hunt later tried, unsuccessfully, to pass his words off as a failed attempt to satirize himself.) It’s not a secret that there are tons of people who are smart and accomplished and progressive and who nevertheless think this way. The issue isn’t that they exist, but that they are continually offered media airtime and/or validation simply because the combination of gender essentialism and feminist antagonism translates into attention, readership, and sales.

  This goes the other way too, in a spate of recent books, talks, and self-help seminars that urge women to harness some of the worst features of men’s supposedly hard-wired personalities to succeed in traditionally gendered spheres. 2014’s The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance was penned by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, two female news professionals who theorized that a “confidence gap” among women was responsible for their inability to get to the highest echelons of the corporate sphere. The authors admitted that a vicious cycle was at play: the persistence of gender essentialism means that girls are socialized differently than boys, which makes them look less confident than male colleagues who—to pull from one of their examples—might just drop by a boss’s office to make a pitch rather than scheduling an appointment. Men’s socially approved tendency toward confidence, even when it’s at odds with competence, fuels their sense that they’re capable of anything; that go-getting attitude in women is frequently a source of suspicion or dislike.7

  And yet the thrust of The Confidence Gap’s self-help prescription was “Be more like guys who may not know what the hell they’re doing but just act like they do.” This directive bypassed over a crucial complicating factor: almost every problem in current American economics was caused by arrogant, overconfident attitudes like those the authors were encouraging. But having as much unearned female confidence at the top as there is unearned male confidence isn’t progress, it’s just a recipe for more jackasses of all genders with the power to do untold damage to everyone below them.

  The rise of the difference industry results in a lot of contradictory ideas and directives. Women are take-charge, Third Metric-ing, networking career powerhouses who can bloviate with the big boys, as the new prevalence of lady-power conferences and advice books would have it. But according to the allegedly maverick biological determinists of neuroscience, our innate empathy and passivity make us poor risks for workplace longevity. The career executives among us should be pushing to emulate male colleagues, but we should also revel in our pink sphere, enjoy our women’s granola and Bic for Her pens, and bask in our glorious, Venusian womanity. Media and pop culture phenomena, meanwhile, seem increasingly to suggest that not only is gender essentialism a good basis for happiness in work, love, and family, but that embracing such essentialism is, in fact, a thoroughly modern and superior form of feminism that women reject at their peril.

  Bizarro Feminism

  Marketplace feminism, as a buffet of adjectives and at-will definitions, has fostered a media realm in which the word “feminism” is used as a stand-in for “strength,” “authority,” “wealth,” “happiness,” and any number of other characteristics and descriptors that exist independent of a larger ideology. Pop star Katy Perry was reluctant to call herself a feminist, for instance, until she decided that feminism, for her, was defined as “lov[ing] myself as a female and lov[ing] men.” Elle UK, in its December 2014 “Feminism” issue, asked a handful of contributors to share their definitions of feminism, to which one writer (the husband of British author Caitlin Moran), offered the truly head-scratching response, “good manners.” A blog post published on Huffington Post Women asserted, in defense of a recently-gone-public Caitlyn Jenner, that “We get to choose how we define what it means to be a woman and we also get to define feminism.” It’s a fill-in-the-blank approach to feminism that has in recent years found an unlikely new home: the realm of right-wing conservative politics.

  Take Sarah Palin, whose choose-your-own-feminism adventure began after the 2008 election in which a cynical GOP ploy—get a woman, any woman, on the ticket—backfired spectacularly. During the run-up to the election, Palin had demurred when she was asked about feminism in an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, saying that she wasn’t “going to label [her]self anything.” By 2010, however, Palin had pivoted, most notably with a breakfast-meeting address to the antichoice advocacy group the Susan B. Anthony List. In a speech larded with references to “grizzly mamas” and “pro-woman sisterhood,” Palin urged supporters to join her in shaping an “emerging, conservative, feminist identity”—an identity which specifically involved only backing candidates who took a strong antiabortion stance.

  Headlines like The Economist’s “Sarah Palin: Feminism Is for Everyone” suggested that Palin was valiantly exposing the hypocrisy of Democratic feminists in claiming the term and watching them freak out. Within days, pundits who had never invoked feminism except to rail against it could not get enough of what Palin was peddling. “Pro-life Feminism Is the Future!” enthused the Washington Post. “Is the Tea Party a Feminist Movement?” queried Slate. “Sarah Palin, Feminist,” announced the L.A. Times. It was a full-tilt Opposite World media moment. By the strange magic of conservative logic, feminists working toward policy that prioritized such things as reproductive autono
my, access to contraception, informed and comprehensive sex education in schools, fair family and medical leave, a living wage, marriage equality, law enforcement oversight, financial institution oversight, and prison reform—were exposed as, in fact, working against women’s interests, all because of their interest in keeping abortion legal. Nutty, right?

  Yes, actually, it was. As writer Kate Harding asked, “In a series that begins with ‘anti-choice feminism,’ ‘Tea Party feminism,’ and ‘Sarah Palin feminism,’ what comes next? ‘Phyllis Schlafly feminism?’ ‘Patriarchal feminism?’ ‘He-Man Woman Hater Feminism?’ I mean, how long until the Washington Post publishes a ‘feminist’ argument for repealing the 19th Amendment (there’s no truly pro-woman party anyway, don’t you know?), or widening the pay gap (so more men can be sole breadwinners again and more women can freely choose to stay home) or, I don’t know, reclaiming the word ‘chattel’?”8 While that hasn’t happened yet, there remains a conservative push for women to recognize that the real feminists are those who don’t believe in abortion. This argument blames Big Abortion for selling women a bill of goods: “the result,” wrote one earnest male columnist, “of a systematic effort by abortion activists to mislead vulnerable women. They’re waging an emotional and psychological ‘war on women.’”9