How anyone could believe such nonsense is difficult to explain. No one who had any experience with women in the ‘70s, ‘80s, or ‘90s could recognize this picture. The 1980s were a time of rapidly increasing female earnings, participation in the economy and in the academy. If there was an attempt, apparently largely subconscious, to push women back into being Daddy’s girl, etc., it was a dismal failure, the most pathetic excuse for a counterattack ever mounted. Perhaps recognizing the implausibility of her thesis, Faludi takes care to say that the conspiracy or counterattack was so subtle that few people were even aware of it. That takes care of all the inconvenient facts that contradict her argument.22 For some people, there can be no surer evidence of a conspiracy than the fact that no conspiracy is apparent. After all, a really effective conspiracy would be invisible. Feminists’ ideology is a fantasy of persecution. It is breathtaking that so dishonest and intellectually vacuous a book as Backlash could receive book awards, achieve a mass readership, and receive favorable reviews. That alone tells a very sad story about the politics of sex and the decline of rationality in our culture.
Carolyn Heilbrun, recently retired professor at Columbia and author of an admiring biography of Gloria Steinem, remarks that “In life, as in fiction, women who speak out usually end up punished or dead.“23 Susan Cheever, reviewing a book by Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff “Roe” in Roe v. Wade, concludes, Faludi-like, with the matter-of-fact assertion that this is a “country where the rights of women and children are still under attack.“24 Cheever must have been disappointed when McCorvey subsequently announced that she had experienced a conversion and is now pro-life, unless, of course, that can be rationalized as a successful attack on McCorvey’s rights.
These were certainly the views of most of the Western women in Beijing. The official delegations and most of the non-governmental organizations from the United States, Canada, and the European Union were firmly in the feminist camp. The U.S. delegation was, of course, appointed by the Clinton administration. These Western radicals were opposed by representatives from Islamic countries, from many Catholic countries, and from the Vatican. This constellation of forces prompts the somber thought that radical feminism and the movement of which it is a part, modern liberalism, may be the wave of the future as countries develop economically.
RADICAL FEMINISM VS. EDUCATION
There are now more than 600 undergraduate and several dozen graduate programs in Women’s Studies in American colleges and universities. At first sight that might seem odd since so much of feminism is utterly inconsistent with intellectual seriousness. In many universities today, however, intellectual integrity comes in a distant second to political correctness. It is thus only an apparent paradox that institutions which, because of their professed devotion to reason and knowledge, should be feminisms sworn enemies are instead the centers of its power.
There are also, of course, programs in African-American Studies, Hispanic Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and more. Nothing could make clearer the politicization of higher education. These so-called disciplines vie with one another in claiming victimhood, but feminism is by far the strongest and most imperialistic, its influence suffusing the most traditional academic departments and university administrations. Feminists are revising and radicalizing textbooks and curricula in the humanities and the social sciences. They have a major say in faculty recruitment. Feminists increasingly control what is taught in high schools and elementary schools as well. Speech codes and “sensitivity” training severely limit what can be said on campus. The feminists have not only done harm to the intellectual function of universities and schools, they have made campuses extremely unpleasant, especially for white males, who are subject to harassment and demands that they toe the feminist cultural and political line.
The incongruity of feminism as an academic subject is heightened by another development. Though most feminists reject the idea of difference between men and women, more recently a coterie has appeared that insists upon, and celebrates, just such difference. These women claim that rationality, sometimes called “linear thinking,” is a coercive tool of the oppressive patriarchy. That may be because they have noticed that evidence and logic are running heavily against the no-difference position. It is necessary, therefore, to identify evidence and logic with the enemy and to exalt intuitive and emotional “women’s ways of knowing.” These “difference feminists” claim to perceive all of reality through the “sex/gender lens.” Judging from their reports of what they see, that must be like peering at the world through the thick glass of a bottle bottom.
Thus, we now have what Patai and Koertge call “TOTAL REJ (total rejection) feminists” whose creed is that “Our culture, including all that we are taught in schools and universities, is so infused with patriarchal thinking that it must be torn up root and branch if genuine change is to occur. Everything must go—even the allegedly universal disciplines of logic, mathematics, and science, and the intellectual values of objectivity, clarity, and precision on which the former depend.“25 If acceptance of logic and standards of evidentiary proof are causing radical feminists to lose arguments, it is clear that they must be discarded if the feminist enterprise is not to be abandoned. But if logic and evidence are jettisoned, it follows that all of the disciplines built up on logic and evidence cannot remain intact. In the place of these oppressive disciplines and values there are to be constructed feminist alternative versions. Nobody seems to have the faintest idea, for example, what a feminist physics would look like, but the total rejectionists are sure one is out there somewhere. It seems to be assumed that a feminist physics, though different, would work as well as the version we now have. Feminist rocket scientists, apparently, could place satellites in orbit without using any of the laws of motion that are now employed.
Needless to say, there is so far not a single axiom or proposition of feminist science that explains or predicts anything or is capable of being tested empirically. When that unhappy fact is brought to a feminists attention, the reply is often that the patriarchy has had over 3,000 years to build its mathematics, logic, and science whereas women have just started. Thus, the absence of anything but oratory about the wrong-headedness of science as it is must not be viewed as an embarrassment. But there is no shortage of oratory.
Anne Wilson Schaef, for example, denounces what she calls the “White Male System” (WMS) of rationality. Schaef says this system consists of four myths. First, the WMS is the only system that exists. Second, the WMS is innately superior. Third, the WMS knows and understands everything. Fourth, the WMS believes that it is possible to be totally logical, rational, and objective. To be sure, no one with any sense has ever claimed anything like all this. The virtue of the scientific method is precisely that mistakes made are corrected by others and that one investigator’s results must be replicable by others in order to be accepted. The people involved do not think they are totally logical, rational, and objective. They know that no human is.
Radical feminist inanities about science, rationality, linear thinking, etc., rest on the allegation that knowledge and modes of reasoning are socially constructed; that is, that there are no objective truths and no single valid method of reasoning. That is a very convenient position for someone making irrational assertions. It would be rather difficult to hold an intelligent, or even an intelligible, discussion with someone holding that position, and it would be impossible to win an argument with her. That, of course, is the point of the exercise.
Take women’s studies themselves. On the evidence proffered by Sommers, Patai and Koertge, and others, women’s studies programs and courses are abysmal swamps of irrational dogma and hatred. The feminist classroom is an arena for emotions rather than intellect or analysis. Agreement with the ideology is mandatory.
A feminist professor can have enormous influence with immature young women in a forum where there are no intellectual constraints. In such a classroom emotion and opinion rule. The students are expected to recount persona
l experiences of suffering and oppression. Since feminists insist that the oppression of women by men is universal and unrelenting, a failure to have instances ready at hand for recitation is taken as insufficient understanding of the subject. The students are at an age when, male or female, they are uncertain about life, susceptible to absolutisms, and easy to persuade that they are being treated badly. The result is that young women pour out their emotions in uncontrolled fashion. It is dangerous to inflame young women’s capacities for anger and self-pity; severe emotional harm can be done. In some classes, the woman may state in advance that she does not want any of her testimony repeated outside the classroom and the others agree to honor that request. No respectable academic discipline would keep classroom discussions secret.
Feminist bias in scholarship seems indomitable. The sociologist Steven Goldberg states that on numerous occasions Margaret Mead denied in writing that her research disproved the existence of sex differences.26 Indeed, in reviewing Goldberg’s book, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, Mead wrote: “It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out, that all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed…. Men have always been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home.“27 But when Goldberg examined introductory sociology books, he found that thirty-six of thirty-eight began their sex-roles chapters with a discussion of Mead’s work as demonstrating the environmental nature of male and female behavior. These books misrepresented Mead because “[t]hey, like the discipline whose work they represent, have an ideological commitment to denying that masculine and feminine behaviors and emotions are rooted in male and female physiologies and that all social systems conform to the limits imposed by this reality.“
Feminists are transforming mainstream college curricula, they claim, in order to “make knowledge broader,” but also to fight against prejudice.28 “There is,” said a professor attending a National Women’s Studies Association conference, “a correlation between groups excluded from the curriculum and hate violence aimed at groups.” She said most “inclusion” work has focused on blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and American Indians. But in order to “fight the hatreds and ‘isms’ in the world, we have to include education about more groups than those four.” Other groups whose achievements should be taught, she said, include lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals, and issues of social class and disability should be included. “Some argue that there are different cultures of disability, like deaf culture.“
Students subjected to propaganda in the name of history will graduate with no clear comprehension of what took place and what was important. Students whose instruction is in fighting “isms” and giving recognition to different sexual groups and cultures of disability are unlikely to graduate with any knowledge that would qualify them for positions other than as sensitivity counselors. As part of their campaign to convert higher education into a propaganda tool, feminists are deforming literary studies by seeking to discover classical allusions to feminism. George Will recorded a few of the choicer items:
Shakespeare’s “Tempest” reflects the imperialistic rape of the Third World. Emily Dickinson’s poetic references to peas and flower buds are encoded messages of feminist rage, exulting clitoral masturbation to protest the prison of patriarchal sex roles. Jane Austen’s supposed serenity masks boiling fury about male domination, expressed in the nastiness of minor characters who are “really” not minor. In “Wuthering Heights,” Emily Bronte, a subtle subversive, has Catherine bitten by a male bulldog. Melville’s white whale? Probably a penis. Grab a harpoon.29
Radical feminists, then, are contributing more than their share to the dumbing of America. And not just America. Oxford University Press has announced Ideologies of Desire, “a startling new series in the cultural study of sex, gender, sexuality and power: redefining the meaning of erotics and politics!” The Press informs us that sex is not a matter of physiology but of culture. “The aim of the series is to illuminate both the play of desire in the workings of ideology and the play of ideological forces in the formation of sexual experiences—and, ultimately, to map more precisely the available avenues of cultural resistance to the contemporary institutional and discursive regulation of sex.“
That the object of these courses is to indoctrinate students with an all-inclusive condemnation of American or Western culture is shown by the frequent expansion of the feminist accusation from the victimization of females to a charge of general oppression. One feminist professor argues, “All students suffer when the more volatile issues central to feminist analysis … [such as] racism, poverty, incest and rape, battering, lesbianism, and reproductive freedom … are dropped from a woman’s studies course.“30 It seems odd at first glance, given this wide-ranging list of complaints, that the programs are not changed from women’s studies to oppression studies. Perhaps it is not so odd, however. If faculty representing all of the oppressed were brought in, feminists might lose control of the curriculum and the funds. Yet it is in keeping with feminism’s revolutionary neo-Marxism that the movement attacks bourgeois culture on many fronts.
As one might suspect from their hostility to men, marriage, and family, radical feminists are very much in favor of lesbianism. This involves more than the demand that lesbianism be accepted by society as just another “lifestyle “They want not only lawful lesbian marriages but “reproductive rights” for lesbians. That means the right to bear children through artificial insemination and the right to adopt one’s lesbian partner’s child. Since sperm is sold freely in the United States, much more freely than in other nations, there are lesbian couples raising children. It takes little imagination to know how the children will be indoctrinated.
In its effort to transform the curriculum, a National Women’s Studies Association conference, attended by about 700 administrators, teachers, and students, gave major consideration to including lesbian issues in feminist programs.31 The Lesbian Caucus was one of the largest contingents at the conference. Among the presentations were “Teaching Queer: Incorporating Gay and Lesbian Perspectives Into Introductory Courses”; “War on Lesbians”; “Lesbian Perspectives on/in Literature”; “Lesbian Theory in Poetry”; and “Dykeotomy.” Not surprisingly, there is in women’s studies programs a good deal of proselytizing for lesbianism. At the University of Washington, a women’s studies instructor showed the class how to masturbate, stating that “the preferable tool is a tongue, a woman’s tongue.“32
The objectives of radical feminists are not confined to the recruitment of converts through women’s studies programs alone. Their aims are imperialistic. The feminist influence has spread to other departments and graduate schools. It is most visible to outsiders in the process of faculty recruitment, where preference is given to women and minorities. A young man I know went to the American Association of Law Schools convention in Washington, the traditional market for those desiring teaching jobs. He entered the hotel and passed a room marked “Women’s Hospitality Room.” Through the open door he saw young women having Danishes and coffee and chatting amicably with one another. Next he came to the “Minorities Hospitality Room,” and observed the same activities. He walked on and discovered that there was no hospitality room he could enter. He and the other white males stood around the lobby until the interviewing began.
The same young man, possessed of splendid records at both Harvard College and Law School, and a clerk to a court of appeals judge and to Justice Anthony Kennedy, the sort of credentials law schools used to hunger for in their teaching applicants, applied for a position at the law school of the University of Texas. He was, however, in competition with a Mexican-American lesbian who had graduated well below the middle of her law school class. She got the job. A memorandum from a member of the appointments committee explained to the faculty that she should be hired because “She does appeal to three constituent groups.“33
The point is not merely that white males are being subject
ed to sexual and racial discrimination in higher education, though that is certainly an outrage. The point is also that faculties are lowering their standards in hiring in order to be politically correct. That necessarily lowers the quality of education they offer their students and the standards of scholarly publication. A friend of mine, a law school professor, resigned from his school’s appointments committee because the conversations he had with applicants likely to be hired were inferior in intellectual content to the conversations he had with his students.
Radical feminist insistence upon seeing slights, harassment, and male victimization of women everywhere has made campuses, workplaces, and society less comfortable places. The eagerness of radical feminists to see insult in every male action, coupled (if one dare use that word) with the spinelessness of the supposedly oppressive patriarchy, has led to so much discomfort and loss of freedom. Some of women’s complaints are merely funny, though they do reveal a mindset: A young woman at the University of Pennsylvania who wore a short skirt complained of a “mini-rape” because a young man walked past her and said, “Nice legs.”34 At the University of Maryland, some female students posted the names of male students selected at random, young men about whom they knew nothing, under the heading “Potential Rapists.” The message was that all men are potential rapists, though the men actually named probably did not find much comfort in that.
Far more serious are the accusations of actual rape when nothing of the sort occurred. A female student came to a male student’s quarters with her toothbrush, planning to stay the night. The next morning she was seen having a peaceable breakfast with the man. Later she charged him with rape and he was briefly held in jail.35 Accusations of date rape are flung freely by women who consented and later changed their minds about what they did. Universities have capitulated by creating rape-prevention and sexual-harassment workshops that offer virulently anti-male propaganda. It is little wonder that young men are uncertain about themselves and their relationship with women and, perhaps for self-protection, perhaps because they have been brainwashed, tend usually to take the women’s side of issues.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah Page 25