Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  It should be unnecessary to say (but with feminists at large one cannot be too careful) that male-female differences do not suggest positions of superiority and inferiority. Occupations such as professional football aside, women compete successfully with men almost everywhere. But the evidence does mean that equality must not be confused with identity: there will continue to be statistical disparities in men’s and women’s presence in various activities and endeavors. Those disparities will come about through the free choices of men and women about the kinds of work they want to do.

  The evidence also means that the enterprise of remaking humans in the preferred feminist image is doomed. (So disheartening is that message that some feminists have actually said that research on sexual differences should not be done.) That does not mean that the feminists’ attempt to recreate real humans in their image and likeness has not caused, and will not continue to cause, a great deal of institutional damage and human suffering.

  THE POLITICS AND MOOD OF RADICAL FEMINISM

  The political complexion of feminism ranges from very liberal to hard left. Some of it, though vicious, is mildly amusing, at least if you are not the target. Feminists will not, for instance, recognize the accomplishments of conservative women. They frequently even refuse to accept them as women. Jeane Kirkpatrick has repeatedly been denied status as a woman because of her political views. One critic wrote that she is “without a uterus,” an odd remark about a woman married for thirty-nine years with three children. But sex is now a matter of politics, not biology. Although, as our Ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan administration, she was the highest-ranking woman in the history of American foreign policy at the time, Kirkpatrick was dismissed by a female professor, in the keynote speech at a conference on the history of women, as “not someone I want to represent feminine accomplishment.“11 One wonders why not. At the United Nations, Ms. Kirkpatrick was a forceful defender of United States interests and ideals. That is probably why not.

  During the battle over my confirmation, the Brinkley Sunday morning television show scheduled a discussion of the subject. The program’s scheduler called a prominent feminist to ask if she might be available. She said yes, but when she heard nothing further, she called and asked why. Told that the panel was filled, she said, “But you have to have a woman.” Brinkley’s scheduler replied, “We do. Carla Hills.” The feminist shot back, “She’s not a woman.” Ms. Hills was Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the Ford administration and United States Trade Representative in the Reagan administration. In addition to five genders, radical feminists apparently recognize three sexes: men, women, and people who might otherwise have qualified as women but have chosen to be Republicans instead.

  In keeping with its progenitor, the New Left of the Sixties, feminism is fiercely anti-capitalist and pro-socialist. That, too, was on display at Beijing. It was not merely that capitalism was routinely denounced in the meetings. The Platform claims that every economic and social ill falls most heavily on women and demands that governments act to alleviate their difficulties. Government control over human activity would then be nearly limitless. The document complains of governments’ inadequate control of economic development, which is said especially to harm women. The same claim was made of environmental policies, education, health care, poverty, unemployment, and so on and on. Even war is said to be especially harmful to women. Governments are to rectify all of these asserted special problems of women. The prescription, then, is for an enormous increase in the size of government, its powers, and its centralization.

  Given its aspiration to remake humanity, radical feminism could not be anything but totalitarian in spirit. Patai and Koertge note “feminism’s explicit assault not only on hierarchies generally but also on the boundaries between the public and private, the emotional and the intellectual.“12 Radical egalitarians necessarily hate hierarchies. They attack institutions that are hierarchical by nature. That is why feminists are, as we will see, anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, anti-family, anti-religion, and anti-intellectual.

  Erasing the line between the public and private is essential to politicizing the culture. Radical feminism is totalitarian because it denies the individual a private space; every private thought and action is public and, therefore, political. The party or the movement claims the right to control every aspect of life. Radical feminists must regard it as unfortunate that they lack the power and mechanisms of the state to enforce their control over thoughts as well as behavior. As we will see, however, the movement is gradually gaining that coercive power in both private and public institutions.

  The reason for insisting that the boundary between the emotional and the intellectual be obliterated is, as it was with the New Left and the European fascists, the realization that intellectual analysis would reveal that radical feminism is false. The convert must not be brought to doubt by logical argument. When the evidence and the logic are both against you, it is necessary to claim that evidence and logic are counterrevolutionary props of the status quo. In the feminist case, facts and rationality, when inconvenient, as they usually are, may be dismissed as “patriarchal constructions of knowledge.” (A college student rejected criticisms of her paper on the ground that the criteria applied were “masculinist”) Intellect imposes hierarchies. The way out “is to feel and think everything all at once, without any hierarchical ordering. This mulligan stew approach to life is seen as the Answer To It All.“13 Emotion must be allowed to trump intellect if the whole enterprise is not to be revealed as the hoax it is.

  Even the language of the movement mirrors the mood of fascism. The apocalyptic and hate-filled rhetoric of radical feminists expresses their eagerness to inflict harm. A radical magazine, using the acronym for the National Organization for Women (NOW), declared on its cover:

  NOW is the time to take back control of our lives. NOW is the time to make reproductive freedom for wimmin of all classes, cultures, ages and sexual orientations a reality. NOW is not the time to assimilate to bureaucratic puppeteers who want to control, degrade, torture, kill and rape our bodies. NOW is the time to drop a boot heel in the groin of patriarchy. NOW IS THE TIME TO FIGHT BACK. NO GOD, NO MASTER, NO LAWS.14

  That short paragraph expresses the rage, the nihilism, and the incoherence of feminism today. “Wimmin” (a word ending in “men” must be avoided) have lost control of their lives, though it is not stated when they had control and how they lost it. “Reproductive freedom” means abortion on demand for heterosexuals and artificial insemination for lesbians who want to bear and raise children. Then comes the standard feminist tactic of raising up male straw monsters. Nobody has ever come across the “bureaucratic puppeteers” of this fantasy, for the very good reason that such men simply do not exist. Nor does anybody know, and most of us would prefer not to find out, what it means to drop a boot heel in the groin of the patriarchy. The exclamation “no God” presumably refers to the feminist illusion that religion was invented by men to control women. The message is utterly disconnected from any recognizable reality. The rage is a ritual, an institutionalized version of a child’s tantrum.

  Christina Hoff Sommers tells of attending a feminist conference at which the speakers, female professors tenured at good universities, were each introduced as “enraged.” Nothing in their professional situations would seem to explain why women so fortunately placed are furious, but that is a requirement for membership in the radical sisterhood. It is precisely the disconnection between reality and feminist claims that requires constant rage and hatred to keep the movement viable. And rage must be stoked with falsehoods and irrationality. Try to imagine writing a reasoned statement about bureaucrats who want to torture, kill, and rape women’s bodies. It cannot be done. Attempting to construct such a statement would reveal the sentiments for the childish shams they are.

  Sometimes feminist rage is served with a large dollop of self-pity. Thus, Anne Wilson Schaef writes of the “Original Sin of Being Born Fe
male”: “To be born female in this culture means that you are born ‘tainted,’ that there is something intrinsically wrong with you that you can never change, that your birthright is one of innate inferiority.“15 This is a literary version of Karen Finley’s “performance art.” Before an audience, she would strip to the waist, smear her body with chocolate (to represent excrement) and sprouts (sperm), and wail about what men have done to women. The fact that this was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts illustrates the corruption feminism, and political correctness generally, have introduced in our cultural institutions.

  Finley’s self-pity is common among feminists. It is, indeed, common among humans, but the feminist version is particularly destructive because it comes as part of an ideology and a program. It is inane to attribute victimhood and low self-esteem to all women and it is vicious to preach it to young, impressionable women. That may prevent them from maturing into the strong, self-confident women we see in business, the professions, and the academy. Rage and self-pity are much easier than accomplishment, of course, but they can hardly be satisfactory as a career.

  FEMINISM VS. FAMILY AND RELIGION

  Many feminists are particularly hostile to the traditional family. Martha Nussbaum, a much-touted classical scholar, writes:

  It is in families … that the cruelest discrimination against women takes place…. [T]he patterns of family life limit their opportunities in many ways: by assigning them to unpaid work with low prestige; by denying them equal opportunities to outside jobs and education; by insisting they do most or all of the housework and child care even when they are also earning wages. Especially troubling are ways that women may suffer from the altruism of marriage itself… [A] woman who accepts the traditional tasks of housekeeping and provides support for her husband’s work is not likely to be well prepared to look after herself and her family in the event (which is increasingly likely) of a divorce or an accident that leaves her alone.“16

  It would be foolish to deny that there is some truth in Nussbaum’s argument, though it is inaccurate to depict the family as denying women equal opportunities to outside work and education. The question is what to do about the problems she describes, particularly those arising from the altruism of marriage. Feminists have cooperated in creating the problem by establishing no-fault divorce, and, in their celebration of female autonomy, can hardly agree to make divorce difficult once more. This is one instance of many where feminists have done damage to women. There is no apparent solution to the problems of divorce and widowhood other than denying women the right to choose a traditional family role. The feminist solution is: All women must work.

  That was the position taken by the ur-feminist Simone de Beauvoir in her interview with Betty Friedan: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.“17 Feminism is not about giving women freedom to choose; it is about taking away choices of which feminists disapprove. And one choice they disapprove is participation in a conventional family.

  In The Hite Report on the Family, Shere Hite calls for a “democratic revolution in the family.“18 That involves, among other things, “[c]hildren brought up with choice about whether to accept their parents’ power.” The extreme aggression in society is brought about, she says, by a family structure in which “in order to receive love, most children have to humiliate themselves, over and over again, before power.” Most social scientists seem to have overlooked this cause of our crime wave. Giving children the choice of whether to accept their parents’ power will move the crime wave off the streets and into the family. Hite claims that since the personal and political go together, political democracy cannot flourish without a democratic personal life. The family is a political institution created so that a man could “own” a woman and thus be sure that the children were “his.“

  Before the patriarchy took over about 3,000 years ago, Hite contends in a burst of bogus history, mother-child societies existed. (Feminists find it useful to fictionalize the past; for example, that pre-historic Europe was a peaceful, egalitarian, matriarchal society that worshipped the goddess, but patriarchy was forced upon these societies by conquering horsemen from the east.) She seems pleased that there are a large number of fatherless families today because, contradicting all the social science evidence, she thinks males raised without fathers will treat women better. The family is not a religious institution and there is no need to “show respect and reverence for a ‘religious’ tradition which has as its basic principle, at its heart, the political will of men to dominate women[.] This is not religion, this is politics.” She continues with the basic feminist fallacy: “There is no such thing as fixed ‘human nature.’ Rather, it is a psychological structure that is carefully implanted in our minds as we learn the love and power equations of the family—for life. Fortunately the family is a human institution: humans made it and humans can change it.“

  These attitudes are not merely the personal idiosyncrasies of these writers. At the Beijing conference, for instance, the word “family” was not to appear in the Platform. Instead, the word “household” was used. The significance of this is to be found in the feminist insistence upon use of the word “gender.” There being five genders, unions or marriages involving any gender or genders are legitimate. These unions can be called households. The traditional family is then presented as a household, just one form of living arrangement, not superior to any other. Indeed, since feminists view the family as a system of oppression, and since feminism contains a large lesbian component, the marriages of men and women are often seen as morally inferior to unions involving the other three genders.

  The hostility towards the traditional family goes hand in hand with the feminists’ hostility towards traditional religion. They see religion as a male invention designed to control women. The final version of the Platform for Action ran to 180 pages. Earlier drafts mentioned religion only when warning against “religious extremism.” Due to pressure from traditional believers, a paragraph was finally added in Beijing defending freedom of religion and acknowledging that religion can contribute to women’s lives. The feminists in Beijing opposed even that. Diane Knippers, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, reports that in Beijing feminists built a shrine to the Goddesses out of red ribbons in the shape of a Christmas tree decorated with paper dolls representing the goddesses.19 Women were invited to make and add their own goddesses. The organization headed by Bella Abzug (a former member of the United States House of Representatives) held daily programs, each one dedicated to a different goddess—Songi, Athena, Tara, Pasowee, Ishtar, Ixmucane, Aditi, and Nashe.

  FEMINISM VS. FACTS

  There is a great deal of reckless disregard for the truth in radical feminism. Some of it is so blatant that it certainly deserves to be called lying, but some of it appears to reflect the delusions of paranoia. What is worrisome is that so much serious misrepresentation passes into the realm of “truth.” One might think that misrepresentations about checkable facts could not survive long in an open society, but they can and do, probably because the press and the academy are very pro-feminist. When a sensational report about the amount of domestic violence against women appears, newspapers, magazines, and even textbooks relay the news, and it quickly becomes established folklore. The attitudes formed as a result are embedded in the culture. Yet the facts, for those who care about them, indicate that these reports are wild exaggerations or flat misrepresentations.

  Many people believe and repeat that there are 150,000 female deaths annually from anorexia nervosa because women starve themselves to be attractive to men. The real number turns out to be less than one hundred and the imputed motivation is to be doubted. Domestic violence against pregnant women was, falsely, alleged to be responsible for more birth defects than all other causes. The major news media trumpeted the fact that mo
re women were the subject of domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year. The theory was that the violence of the game incited men to attack their wives. The story was without any foundation. Ken Ringle of the Washington Post and one or two others checked and prevented the wife-beating of Super Bowl Sunday from passing into the vast realm of myths that everybody knows to be true.

  Journalist Susan Faludi, whose book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women20 was an enormous best-seller, provides an example of the sort of misrepresentations that are largely accepted in our culture. She argued that the culture of the 1980s attempted to take back all the gains women had made in the 1970s. The counterattack, she said, was especially insidious because it was not organized but diffuse, was invisible to almost all people, and operated most effectively by influencing women’s minds so that they enforced the backlash on themselves. “Taken as a whole, however, these codes and cajolings, these whispers and threats and myths, move overwhelmingly in one direction: they try to push women back into their ‘acceptable’ roles—whether as Daddy’s girl or fluttery romantic, active nester or passive love object.“21