The women’s studies programs on American college campuses that began to be established in the early 1970s and increased exponentially by the end of that decade were thrown together without regard for scholarly integrity or oversight. They began as political cells, and they continue as political cells, untouchable and sacrosanct. Women’s studies should have been constructed with required coursework in science—genetics, anatomy, neurology, endocrinology—accompanied by rigorous training in high-level historical analysis. Instead, the need for a missing technical grammar would be fulfilled by pernicious poststructuralism, which invaded American universities in that decade. Arcane, bombastic wordplay became a substitute for common observation and deep learning.
The one place nature impinged on early feminist theory was in the sentimental goddess cult, which began outside the academy but swept into it with one poorly researched book after another claiming there once was a happy, pacifist, agrarian age ruled by goddesses, an Arcadia overthrown by nasty men, who introduced war and invented male gods to make rigid rules circumscribing sexuality. A trace of this fantasy can be found in the flimsy books of a lionized psychologist and professor of gender studies at Harvard that assert woman’s moral superiority to man. Of course there never was such a paradise in human history. Only the smallest, most isolated tribal cultures were free of recurrent war and conflict, and they tended to be stagnant and intellectually repressive, making no major, lasting contribution to art or thought.
The great goddesses were always dual, like the Hindu Kali both cruel and kind. In trying to reconnect female identity to nature, I am not saying that we must yield to nature. On the contrary, I have constantly maintained in my work that everything great in human history has come from resisting nature and protesting against it. I call art itself a line drawn against nature. But nevertheless, every woman inhabits a mysterious, complex, procreative mechanism, which science still does not fully understand because female hormonal chemistry changes from hour to hour and day to day.
Much of female identity, from puberty on, is occurring below the level of consciousness—which we were taught to plumb by Freud, the seminal theorist of the twentieth century and another male genius whom callow feminists have sought to overthrow. From the moment of puberty, a woman is out of control of her own body. Something else takes over, something greater than you. The more a woman tries to fight it, the more stressed she is, the more her hormonal system will misfire. It’s like riding a wave in the night. The oceanic metaphor is built into female experience. Early in second-wave feminism, overlapping the hippie 1960s, there was much more talk about exploring and rediscovering your own body, including the menstrual flow. There was a grittily physical quality to much early feminist writing. But by the 1970s, academic abstraction arrived, a clinical removal from the squalid facts of nature.
I want to return to first principles. In the office, women must be treated exactly like men, as the equals of men. But women are much more than men. There is one place where men can never equal women and where female power is at its height—the realm of procreation. More honor must be given to it. Maternity, in fact, is where sex war begins. All misunderstanding between the sexes begins there. We become social or political beings later, long after we emerge from a woman’s body. It may be that technology will eventually mimic and usurp conception and fetal development, but until that happens, we’re stuck with the present system, with its incredible psychological complexity. I believe there is something magical about procreative power, which proves that woman is in mysterious tune with natural rhythms. It’s no coincidence that the word “menstruation” is related to the words for month and moon. Woman’s yoking to celestial cyclic pattern remains unnerving.
Many would object to the identification of woman with nature, on the grounds that it consigns her to a lower realm. But this is a Judeo-Christian way of interpreting and scorning nature. I want to recover metaphors from the older traditions of paganism and even Hinduism. The effort by feminist theorists to detach woman from nature, or to admit nature only by sanitizing it, has over the long run diminished woman’s status and power. And it has made it difficult if not impossible to understand human sexual psychology, which begins in early, murky family relationships.
I view a great deal of criminal behavior by men against women as related to an obscure memory of or fixation on the mother figure. There is a kind of sexual theater going on, produced by the fear of being reabsorbed by the mother. I see a shadowy image of the mother behind many sex crimes. It’s no coincidence, for example, that Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho took such hold of the popular imagination. It is about the vampiric maternal domination of a son’s psyche. Separation from the mother is a crucial stage in male development. I view many cases of rape as a form of attack on mother-power. I speak here not of individual mothers, who are usually blameless, but of the inescapable priority of maternity in every male life. Woman possesses the greatest power that exists. In my system, woman is strong, and man is weak. Most successful heterosexual women know this and have pity on and compassion for men. They like men. They want men to be strong, and they know that the only way to make them strong is to pay attention to them. What most men are looking for is female attention and female approval. How simple men are! When women are encouraged to think that they are powerless, we are destroying their ability to recognize reality and to triumph in their own terms.
At the end of the century, we are in enormous sexual confusion, thanks partly to the homogenization of middle-class professional roles, which can be performed equally well by either sex. Going to war or to sea or taking up manual trades used to give men a natural sense of masculine identity. I am old enough to remember the very masculine men who had just come home from the battlefields of World War Two. Most of my college students have never seen such men and must try to imagine them via pumped-up action-adventure films. My high opinion of men certainly dates from my early admiration for those veterans and what they had achieved.
My confidence in women’s inevitable advance is tempered by the fact that history moves in cycles and that permanence and continuity are never assured. If there is ever a serious destabilization of the world’s economies, perhaps through some sudden climate change that affects food production and leads to a breakdown of law and order, history shows that everything will regress. We will have to rely on men once more to protect us and to put things back together again.
We also must be cautious about the complacency with which we export Western feminism. There are serious psychological stresses in the Western world, which impel so many people to medicate themselves with legal and illegal drugs. Where women are treated like chattel in the Third World, we must improve educational opportunities and provide legal support. But Western feminism is not a perfect instrument. Untempered, it can be arrogant and destructive of traditional local beliefs and practices. It suffers from an evangelical secularism. The old leftist roots of contemporary feminism are clearest in its hostility to religion. This is one of the primary areas where feminist leaders have become woefully out of touch with the masses of ordinary women, who tend to be religious as well as to identify strongly with conventional family life. Though I am an atheist, I am profoundly respectful of religion, which I recognize as far more spiritually sustaining to culture and helpful to child-rearing than anything that the intellectual elite has yet produced. People need gods. The academics who pushed Jehovah and Jesus out the window ended up throwing open the door to Marx and Foucault. A purely secular culture risks hollowness and, paradoxically, sets itself up for the rise of fundamentalist movements that ominously promise to purify and discipline.
In some ways, contemporary feminism is a house built on sand, because its ideology is so removed from practical reality. One of the signs of current instability in sexual relations is a rise in the incidence of homosexuality. As an open lesbian and libertarian, I feel that every person should be free to express his or her sexuality in private consensual relationships and that the
state has no business intruding. But at the same time I reject the simplistic formulas that the gay movement has learned from feminism. First of all, the idea that anyone is born gay is ridiculous. This is a misreading of very sparse and contradictory evidence. Homosexuality is an adaptation to social conditions. The present spread as well as openness of homosexuality is coming from a fatigue or discontent with the failing traditional sex roles. Homosexuality is a rejection of the conflicted state of heterosexual relations, which is also evidenced in the soaring divorce rate of the past 30 years.
There is an enormous bitterness among contemporary heterosexual women toward men, whom they blame for not understanding them, for not communicating well, for shirking responsibility, for exchanging their aging wives at midlife for younger trophy wives. Here is nature’s injustice once again. A man can sire children until his seventies, but nature removes women from the sexual race relatively early. In the old days of the rural village, women gained power by moving into the grandmother role, where they could boss around their sons’ young wives from the apex of the extended family. But today aging women are edged off the map. Isolated by the nuclear family, scattered in the suburbs, surrounded by strangers with no sense of their past role or contribution, aging women now experience cultural abandonment.
Another area in which feminism has misplayed its hand is in the abortion rights campaign, as it was conducted in the United States. I favor unrestricted access to abortion. As a member of the two major pro-choice organizations in America, I strongly feel that no one may intervene in a woman’s control of her own body. Nevertheless, this issue has become inflamed in the United States because of the clumsiness with which feminist leaders pursued the pro-choice argument, falsely portraying pro-life proponents as fundamentalist, “anti-woman” fanatics. Again, there was needless disrespect shown toward religious values, which after all were making the highly ethical argument that the fetus is a fully human individual with a right to life.
Thus as we assess sexual relations at the present moment, we see many areas that require rigorous rethinking and a general redress of grievances. Though I have often spoken of the need for a bisexual responsiveness to life and art, I don’t think that bisexuality per se is necessarily the answer to our problems. This is another area where civilizations have gone through recurrent cycles. There are many parallels between our time and that of the Roman empire. Whenever you get cosmopolitan cultures that are very tolerant and permissive, where women begin to move forward, where there is open homosexuality, it seems to be the case that such cultures are ripe for collapse! So we must negotiate a very fine line here. Too much tolerance too fast can produce a puritanical or fascist backlash. The creative drive in great cultures has often been religious or spiritual. Romanticism, for example, in rebelling against organized religion, reverently embraced nature and art. But contemporary feminism and poststructuralism, in discarding religion, have rejected nature and defamed art. In my view, the intellectual elites, in both Europe and America, have become corrupt. I want a more practical and less theoretical feminism that helps women achieve personal responsibility. I don’t want a situation, particularly in regard to date rape, where women are relying on the protection of nanny figures of the state, of grievance committees and law courts. Each woman must fight for her place in the social hierarchy.
If it is true, for example, as reported in the United States, that new women members of the House of Commons were recently so distressed by sexist jeers from male members of the opposing party that they appealed to Madame Speaker to intervene, then we are going backwards fast in feminism. I think the opposite: strong women leaders must nourish themselves on the brilliant British tradition of raillery and push the men back with their own weapons. Good heavens, women, use your wits! Find the scathing riposte to impugn your opponent’s manhood, ancestry, or tatty receding hairline!
My mission as an Amazon feminist is to strengthen the will power of the individual woman to show her how far she can go on her own. Political organization and legislative reform are necessary, but we must beware of the depressive cultural effect of authoritarian bureaucracy. Women must not feel that they can only be strong under the aegis of the all-seeing state.
As for men, they must learn that the genie will not go back in the bottle. Women are here to stay. But women must be prudent in their demands. And they must be more honest about men. Until feminism can admit the great things men have done in art, science, and technology in creating the modern industrial world that liberated women from the home and thus made feminism possible in the first place, the sexes will not be reconciled. We will remain at war, and it is young people who will pay the price.
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AMERICAN GENDER STUDIES TODAY
WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ASKED FOUR LEADING, VERY DIVERSE, AMERICAN FEMINIST CRITICS FOR THEIR PERSONAL VIEW OF THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PRESENT TRENDS IN GENDER STUDIES.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: At present, the women’s movement is in radically different stages in different regions of the world. Hence many misunderstandings exist, even between British and American feminism, despite their mutual influence and support in the historical campaign for suffrage.
There are, in my analysis, two primary spheres of future action: first, basic civil rights and educational opportunity must be secured for Third World women; second, the education and training of Western women must be better designed to prepare them for leadership positions in business and politics. Women’s studies programs, as structured in the United States, have not proved that feminist ideology helps women to understand life or to function in the real world, where men must be dealt with as friends or foes.
[From “Symposium” in Women: A Cultural Review (U.K.), vol. 10, no. 2, 1999]
As a classroom teacher of nearly thirty years, I am committed to identifying and developing the factual material and practical strategies that the next generation of women will need to exercise power and, one hopes, to head nations. Military history, not feminist theory, is required: without an understanding of war, few women will ever be entrusted with topmost positions in government. In the United States, for example, the president also serves as Commander-in-Chief and thus must win the confidence of the armed forces.
American feminism has experienced cataclysmic changes in the 1990s. My wing of pro-sex feminism, which was ostracized and silenced through the long period ruled by anti-pornography activists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, has made a stunning resurgence. As a free speech militant, my thinking is grounded in the 1960s sexual revolution. Most of the positions for which I was pilloried when I came on the scene a decade ago, with the publication of my long-delayed first book, are now scarcely controversial at all, so sweeping has been the victory of libertarian feminism, which is in tune with a younger, sassier generation of feminists.
Popular culture, particularly rock ’n’ roll, is no longer the enemy—as it was when I was at war with fellow feminists in the late 1960s for my admiration of the “sexist” Rolling Stones. Fashion and beauty are of interest again, instead of being automatically labeled as oppressive tools of patriarchy. Hormones and biological sex differences are slowly returning to the agenda, after a quarter century of rigid social constructionism. Labyrinthine poststructuralist feminism is increasingly recognized as an ahistorical dead end. The disintegration of the Soviet Union undermined the fashionable Marxism of bourgeois intellectuals like the propagandist Susan Faludi. Capitalism’s central role in the modern emancipation of women is starting to be seen.
American campus feminists, who rode high for twenty years, have been gradually marginalized in this decade: few played much role in the public debates that have raged about sexual harassment in the workplace, a vital issue that swept away the victim-obsessed date-rape hysteria of the late 1980s. From the 1991 Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings to today’s bitter quarrel over the president’s affair with a young intern, the prominent campus feminists have been irresponsibly silent, demonstrating the inadequacies of convention
al feminist theory when grappling with thorny contemporary questions.
The Clinton scandals have also exposed the political biases of women’s groups like the National Organization for Women: the obtrusive collusion of present and past presidents of NOW (plus Gloria Steinem) with the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party has seriously damaged the women’s movement, which should in my view be a big tent that gathers in women of every political and religious affiliation. As a registered Democrat and a member of pro-choice groups like Planned Parenthood, I contend that the women’s movement should have no ideological litmus test about abortion or any other issue.
Most feminists abroad have little conception of the way American feminism veered toward tyranny after its early successes in the late 1960s. What looks like “anti-feminism” has really been a rebellion here by insurgents like myself who are equity feminists: that is, we believe that only equality of the sexes before the law will guarantee women’s advance. We vigorously oppose all special protections of women (as in anti-pornography legislation) as inherently infantilizing. This is an old argument within feminism: Susan B. Anthony, for example, promoted the temperance movement (which demanded prohibition of the public sale of alcohol because drunken men impoverished and endangered women), thus endorsing a puritanical intrusion of the state into private life.
Even though recent polls show that most American women refuse to describe themselves as feminists and often have a negative view of movement leaders, I am convinced that feminism, for all its internal dissension, is alive and well and will continue to be a major cultural force around the world in the twenty-first century.
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