Free Women, Free Men

by Camille Paglia

  Instead of publicly denouncing this tyrannical experiment in hurry-up social engineering, university administrations have taken the easy route of liquidating men’s sports in order to achieve a fraudulent equity that exists only on paper. As a result, over a hundred men’s wrestling programs have been terminated, and men’s gymnastics has been virtually annihilated. Men’s golf, fencing, and ice hockey also have been targeted.

  In 1993, Princeton University abruptly ended its prestigious 90-year-old men’s wrestling program, the core of the nation’s oldest intercollegiate sports league. The administration’s claim that it was motivated by economic pressures, rather than by fear of the feminist establishment, was quickly exposed as false when it refused to accept a $2.3 million gift raised to permanently endow the program by the Friends of Princeton Wrestling, an ad hoc group of concerned alumni.

  After three years of fruitless appeals, not only has men’s wrestling not recovered full varsity status at Princeton, but women’s water polo—one of the most marginal, elitist, low spectator-interest sports imaginable—has been made a team and may be elevated to varsity instead. This is how many universities have complied with Title IX: to inflate the women’s rosters, exclusive prep school sports like crew, lacrosse, and field hockey have been substituted for truly ethnically and racially diverse sports like wrestling, which cuts across social class lines.

  When the Princeton alumni were stonewalled by their intransigent administration, they turned to me for help—an ironic role reversal in which a female warrior rides to the rescue to slay the dragon. At a recent event sponsored by the Princeton Debate Panel, I attacked the corrupt master class of arrogant, overpaid administrators whose ranks have grotesquely swelled on U.S. campuses in the past 30 years and who have diverted the educational mission into a suffocating social-welfare ideology. My solution for freeing up money for college sports: fire a few deans and subdeans.

  Wrestling, the oldest sport in the world and the sixth most popular sport in high school, is in fact highly economical. It requires virtually no equipment, and practice sessions can be easily accommodated to students’ academic schedules—as is not the case with football and its all-consuming team drills. With its one-on-one encounters, wrestling is a great equalizer that embodies individualism and the democratic spirit. This ancient sport develops discipline, quickness, balance, and control. Wrestling is as much about mental preparation and strategy as physical development.

  The destruction of men’s wrestling at Princeton is an outrageous and blatant case of gender bias. Title IX was meant to eliminate sexual discrimination, not create it. Women’s liberation cannot be achieved on the smoking ruins of men’s traditions. This shameful scandal is harming feminism, not helping it. Title IX has become a license for vandalism. If it cannot be intelligently enforced, Title IX should be repealed.

  AFTERWORD

  The wrestling program was formally reinstated by Princeton University in 1997. It remained self-funded until 2004, when the Friends of Princeton Wrestling achieved its endowment goal of $3 million, restoring the program’s eligibility for university funding.

  14

  CODDLING WON’T ELECT WOMEN, TOUGHENING WILL

  WOMEN’S STUDIES PROGRAMS AND OBSESSION WITH SEXUAL-HARASSMENT RULES HAMPER DEVELOPMENT OF STRONG FEMALE LEADERS

  With the reelection of Bill Clinton, the gender gap seems here to stay in American politics. Exit polls show that while men and women supported Bob Dole in equal numbers, more women than men voted for Clinton by at least a 16 percent margin.

  Commentators are scrambling to explain this discrepancy, which is unconvincingly blamed on Republican opposition to abortion or on frantic, semimythical “soccer moms” who are less hostile than men to authority and look to government programs for relief. Conservatives lament that polls show women allegedly less concerned than men about the “character” of the president.

  [USA Today, November 12, 1996]

  The pursuit of the women’s vote, along with Democratic claims that Clinton owes his reelection to women, unfortunately has reinforced outmoded sexist stereotypes. Why is it assumed that women always vote their private interest?

  Pollsters’ clumsy questions didn’t catch the real truth about the last two presidential elections: a majority of women realistically assessed the candidates and concluded that Bill Clinton has the greater imagination, flexibility, and mental and physical energy to lead America at this historical moment.

  Discussion of the gender gap is too skewed in one direction. It’s insulting to portray women as mysterious, distracted, half-enslaved beings whom male candidates must court and fawn over. We need more attention to what female candidates must do to appeal to men.

  Women themselves must close the gender gap. Though they have advanced as governors and senators, there are still too few women in high elected office in America. Even worse, of the pool of prominent women, only a handful would make credible presidential candidates. Funding problems alone cannot explain this. The real gender gap is in the Oval Office.

  Producing a female president must go to the top of the agenda. Then it will be clear how orthodox feminism, with its third-rate women’s studies programs and its promotion of overzealous sexual-harassment regulations in schools and offices, is hampering the development of strong female leaders.

  Outrageously, even before this election, the media already had anointed the contenders for the next presidential campaign, virtually all white males. My own Democratic Party, that bastion of political correctness, should be embarrassed that the only leading exceptions—Colin Powell and Governor Christine Todd Whitman—are both Republicans. Indeed, it is hard-nosed conservative women like Margaret Thatcher who first attained national leadership.

  For all its lip service to feminism, American liberalism has been too focused on “feel good” social welfare issues to produce world-class female leaders. The Democratic Party’s anti-military bias in the post-Vietnam era has weakened the presidential chances of its own women. Until a female candidate can show she is prepared to be Commander-in-Chief and, if necessary, to wage war, she will not win the confidence of the electorate.

  Current gender-gap propaganda calls for softening up male candidates so that they talk the talk—all cooing, clucking empathy—that women supposedly want. But it’s more critical to toughen up our female candidates to set them on the track to the White House.

  We must rethink young women’s education. Future politicians of both sexes should be studying military history and tactics, which will always be needed in an unstable world. Warfare’s offensive and defensive strategies also apply to the cutthroat world of politics, where attack ads work because they genuinely embody the competitive clash of ideas.

  Women’s studies courses, which encourage resentful, separatist thinking, are a dead end. Tomorrow’s female leaders must have a broader, more universal perspective. Hence they should be studying men’s history instead and emulating the best in the human record.

  Young women also need decisive role models, who remain rare. Senator Dianne Feinstein, for example, has a deft, magisterial mind but seems to be tiring. Christie Whitman wonderfully combines personal warmth with military bearing but has been weakened by health problems. The shrill, bullying Senator Barbara Boxer represents feminist dogma at its most arrogant, while retiring Representative Patricia Schroeder, with her unctuous maternal mannerisms, represents feminist sentimentality at its most saccharine.

  Of female politicians today, perhaps Geraldine Ferraro, the only woman to share the national ticket of a major party, best exemplifies the ideal qualities of a leader. An ethnic New Yorker once thought too strident for middle America, she has been seasoned by international diplomacy and now projects a shrewd, cordial, yet tenaciously combative persona that should be a model for all young women with presidential dreams.

  15

  ACADEMIC FEMINISTS MUST BEGIN TO FULFILL THEIR NOBLE, ANIMATING IDEAL

  What is the future of academic feminism? As women’
s studies evolves into gender studies, how should we reexamine and strengthen it?

  Feminism is one of the great progressive social movements of the modern period begun by the French Revolution. Like the movements to abolish slavery and eradicate child labor, it is the fruit of the Western Enlightenment, which produced the concepts of individualism and civil liberties that have inspired insurgents against dictatorial regimes around the world.

  [The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 25, 1997]

  Because of feminism’s noble, animating ideal—equal treatment of the sexes before the law—one might expect the feminist movement to have the wholehearted support of every person of good will. That there is so much skepticism about feminism in the United States—and that, as polls show, so few young women identify themselves as feminist—can no longer be explained away with such facile formulas as “backlash” or “the war against women” (which are the titles of propaganda-filled books by Susan Faludi and Marilyn French). Instead, it’s time for every American feminist to admit that both mainstream and academic feminism have been guilty of ideological excesses that require correction.

  The reform wing of feminism to which I belong burst into public view in the early 1990s, but it actually has a long lineage. The most radically pro-sex of us began our struggles with the puritanism and groupthink of feminist leaders from the moment the women’s movement revived in the late 1960s, after its dormancy following the winning of suffrage in 1920. The innovative, prankish dance critic Jill Johnston, for example, personified a feisty, libidinous, pugnaciously physical 1960s feminism that was erased from cultural memory. This process occurred both in the mainstream feminism of Ms. magazine and in the new bureaucratic-minded women’s studies programs of the 1970s.

  To establish itself as a discipline and quickly prove its own academic legitimacy in the ’70s, campus feminism became addicted to theory, which took two principal forms. The first, derived from Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), reduced complex artworks to their political content and attacked famous male artists and authors for their alleged sexism. That atrocious book, which appeared while I was a graduate student, drove every talented, young, intellectual woman I knew away from the women’s movement. Millett, who is responsible for the current eclipse of D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Miller in the college curriculum, did enormous damage to American cultural life. She made vandalism chic.

  The second major theoretical style adopted by campus feminism was a French import, derived from the highly abstruse and convoluted deconstruction and poststructuralism. These approaches invaded literature departments in the 1970s and later spread to other fields in the humanities. While the practitioners of French theory professed leftist and even Marxist values, they had little connection to actual politics and none whatever to ordinary people, who were condescended to and excluded by theorists’ elitist jargon. Why the shifty, cynical, and verbose psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan—a classic white, European male—became the idol of so many credulous Anglo-American feminists remains a mystery. Simple careerism may explain it: from the late 1970s through the 1980s, attaching oneself to feminism or to French theory guaranteed employment, promotion, and, at the top, huge financial rewards. The academic marketplace reinforced cutthroat ambition and herd behavior, eventually seriously compromising the direct, sympathetic study of literature and art that should be the humanities’ proper mission.

  In the 1980s, the feminist law professor Catharine MacKinnon’s implacable opposition to pornography, as well as her advocacy of stringent sexual-harassment regulations, became a dominant strain in academic feminism. The increasingly powerful deans of “student life” and their proliferating subdeans—spawned by expensive American colleges and universities trying to attract tuition-paying parents—were converts to MacKinnonism and its dated scenario of male oppressors and frail female victims. By the end of the 1980s, MacKinnon’s feverish rhetoric and totalitarian politics had helped produce an epidemic of date-rape hysteria, to which colleges nervous about bad publicity responded with secret kangaroo courts that suspended the civil rights of male students and faculty members.

  Feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s was, virtually without exception, social constructionist, attributing gender differences entirely to social conditioning. Hormones did not exist. Even the psychologist Carol Gilligan’s hazy, sentimental, bourgeois notions of woman’s innate moral superiority carefully avoided the taint of biology. Any reference to nature was buried in kitschy, sanitized “Goddess” figures or automatically dismissed as “essentialist”—a sloppy term used by amateurish academics innocent of philosophy.

  Women’s studies programs were thrown together in the 1970s and 1980s without the most basic consideration of science. Sweeping generalizations about gender were made by humanists with little or no knowledge of endocrinology, genetics, anthropology, or social psychology. The anti-science bias of poststructuralism worsened matters, producing the repressed doublespeak of Foucault followers (such as the derivative and unlearned “queer theorist” Judith Butler), who substituted turgid wordplay for scientific inquiry.

  A massive sea change in the 1990s has begun to reduce the campus prestige and influence of the French and feminist theorists. Most undergraduate students are no longer paying attention to them—even though our ossified system of lifetime tenure will allow them to drain the treasuries of their institutions and distort graduate education and department hiring for at least the next fifteen years. What are the reasons for this recent cultural shift? The unmasking in the late 1980s of the deconstructionist pioneer Paul de Man as a Nazi sympathizer sent shock waves through the humanities and did much to discredit deconstruction. Sudden scrutiny by journalists sent star professors accustomed to conference high jinks scurrying underground. The present atmosphere in many humanities departments is cautious and demoralized. Still, some theorists continue to hurt themselves. For example, the recent brazen memoir by Jane Gallop, a leading Lacanian feminist—with its casuistical defense of her sexual affairs with her professors and graduate students—has cast a glaring light on the intrinsic amorality of French theory.

  Academic feminism, as well as the mainstream feminist establishment, lost control of the discourse on gender when a series of controversial issues spilled into the media and became a focus of raging national debate on op-ed pages and radio and television talk shows. The first was date rape, featured in cover stories of news magazines in 1989 and 1990. The next was workplace sexual harassment, dramatized by Anita Hill’s charges during Clarence Thomas’s stormy Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991.

  Such practical matters, for which campus theorists were ill-prepared, were discussed and developed with great speed as talk shows multiplied on CNN, CNBC, and PBS, amplified by the refreshingly unedited coverage of lectures and public events by C-SPAN. Scores of lively women across the political spectrum could now be heard, without the censorship of the New York–based network news shows, which had long been under the thumb of Gloria Steinem and the National Organization for Women, with their intimate ties to the Democratic Party. The free exchange of ideas on the expanding Internet was also crucial in ending the era of political correctness.

  The election of the Southern centrist Bill Clinton in 1992 removed the Reagan-Bush administration officials whom many academics, in their smug sense of enlightened leftism, loved to deride, and it also began to break down the outmoded polarity of liberal versus conservative. Again, academic feminism (which was overinvested in liberal, social-welfare doctrine, sometimes approaching overt socialism) failed to keep pace with changes in the real world, here or in the former Soviet Union. It completely missed the rise of libertarianism (my own philosophy as a Clinton Democrat), which opposes government intrusion into private behavior and combines endorsement of a modified capitalism with adamant support of free speech (no minor matter in the early 1990s, when campus speech codes were spreading).

  Because they were locked into the slower pace and the exclusivity of acad
emic conferences and scholarly journals, campus feminists also have had little to say on most other controversial issues and public figures of the 1990s: Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs and the attack on the National Endowment for the Arts; gays in the military and gay marriage; Hillary Clinton; Paula Jones; partial-birth abortions; sexual harassment and adultery in the military.

  Arcane French theory, based on linguistic paradigms predating World War Two, looks pretty foolish these days, when most people are concerned with bread-and-butter issues such as childcare, the divorce rate, drug use, and decaying public education. And by a delicious irony, hormones are back, as the baby-boom generation hits menopause. Germaine Greer, the most wonderful of the early feminists before she turned against sex, has devoted an entire book, The Change, to declining estrogen levels in aging women.

  Furthermore, science has ceased to be the enemy for women seeking earlier warning and intervention for breast and ovarian cancers and for career women who postponed pregnancy and are experiencing fertility problems as their biological clocks run down. And for HIV-positive persons who are putting their faith in the new protease inhibitors and, beyond that, in a future AIDS vaccine. And for gays who (much too prematurely) claim that a handful of limited studies have confirmed the existence of a “gay gene,” thus proving homosexuality inborn, natural, and not a moral issue. In view of these pressing developments, the absence of science in the gender studies curriculum seems all the more outrageous.

  The arrival on the national scene in the early 1990s of a new generation of young feminists has also helped shift the center of gravity away from academic feminism toward real-life issues. The early books of writers such as Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi, despite sometimes haphazard research and skewed reasoning, at least addressed the real society we live in, with its omnipresent media and conflicted sexual relationships. As Ivy League graduates, both women were heavily influenced by academic feminist ideology, from which Wolf began to move away in her later books. As girlish new personalities with strong opinions, Wolf and Faludi made the older, established American feminists seem tired and out of touch. Perhaps inadvertently, they also tolled the death knell for absurdly idolized French feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, whose tedious works had been forced down the throats of American women students in the 1980s.