From: Matthew Gaylor (freematt@coil.com)
Date: Wed Jun 09 1999 - 10:36:27 MDT
Vincent is co-author of ``The Instant Intellectual: The Quick and Easy
Guide to Sounding Smart and Cultured.'' By Nora Vincent
Special to The Baltimore Sun Distributed by the Los Angeles
Times-Washington Post News Service
AP-NY-06-09-99 1118EDT
Are you a feminist? It's a question that every American female who has
come of age since the 1970s has been asked at least once in her lifetime,
and it's a question that most thoughtful girls and women have a hard time
answering.
If you say ``no,'' you're conceding that women are inferior _ or, at least
you've been conditioned by the reigning feminists of the world to think so.
If you say ``yes,'' those same feminists have, to their detriment,
convinced you that you're allying yourself with a group of mostly hateful,
hysterical demagogues whose aim for women has never been equality, but
power. The word ``feminist'' reeks of jingoism; but the word ``misogynist''
seems to be its only antonym. What's a girl to do? Or say?
The only thing left to do is break the stranglehold that hard-line
feminists have on the minds of young women, and encourage them to think and
speak for themselves.
The Cato Institute's Cathy Young (``Ceasefire!: Why Men and Women Must
Join Forces to Achieve True Equality,'' Free Press, $25, 400 pp.) has
coined the term ``dissenting feminist.'' Young argues that one of the worst
outgrowths of '70s feminism has been the conviction that women are not
simply equal to, but superior to men. In dissenting from this point of
view, Young emphasizes the common humanity of men and women.
This is an admirable stance, but the term ``dissenting feminist''
describes what you are only by saying what you are not. We need a neologism
of the type that postmodern and p.c. academics are so fond of coining.
Perhaps something such as ``heteroequiandrogynist'': a person, such as
Young, who believes that though men and women are different they are equal
and should be treated as such in the eyes of the law. ``Neohumanist'' may
be a less clumsy way of saying the same thing, but it lacks specificity.
For, if we call ourselves ``humanists,'' do we mean that though men and
women are different, they are both human, and being human is what
guarantees rights in America? Or do we mean by humanist that men and women
are androgynous _ that is, that they are made of exactly the same stuff,
through and through, but only seem different in our socially constructed
world?
The right favors the first interpretation that equal does not mean the
same _ that is, being human will get women the same basic rights as men,
but it will not obliterate gender (F. Carolyn Graglia, ``A Brief Against
Feminism,'' Spence, 1998).
The left favors the second interpretation that gender is a fiction _
that is, if you admit differences, those differences will be used against
women, as they have been throughout history (Judith Butler, ``Gender
Trouble,'' Routledge, 1990).
So, on the right you have the heart of rights-based Anglo-American
democratic politics, while on the left you have what, for simplicity's
sake, might be called the shared ideal of communism, socialism and
Jacobinism: radical equality.
The right insists, and rightly so, that equal opportunity is the most
governments and laws can guarantee _ this is freedom, there is no other _
whereas the left insists that equal outcome is the ideal that governments
and laws are made to enforce.
But radical equality has always been susceptible to one tragic flaw,
and it is the reason the French and Russian revolutions failed. Possibly
it's also the reason post-feminism has stalled: freedom and radical
equality are incompatible.
You can't enforce radical equality without repressing all forms of
dissent or difference. This is fundamentally illiberal, not to mention
deluded (differences exist, there is no denying them). Hence, what began
historically as an experiment in enforced freedom for the weak and strong
alike, ended in totalitarianism (Stalinism , Maoism, Robespierre's Reign of
Terror), and more recently the kind of mind control that is so typical of
the American left.
Orwell said this succinctly in ``Animal Farm,'' when the slogan ``all
are equal,'' became ``some are more equal than others.'' This has happened
to feminism as well. It began by saying that all men and women are equal,
but has ended up saying that women are superior to men.
In her latest screed, ``The Whole Woman'' (Knopf, $25, 384 pp.),
Germaine Greer is so churlish toward men that New York Times critic Michiko
Kakutani called the book ``as sour as `Eunuch' was exuberant, as dogmatic
as `Eunuch' was original, as slipshod in its thinking as `Eunuch' was
pointed ... a castrated book.''
Likewise, Margaret Talbot, writing in a recent issue of the New
Republic, called Greer a misogynist and, in uncanny agreement with
Kakutani, pronounced ``The Whole Woman'' ``a sour and undiscriminating
litany of charges against men - all men, men as nature created them _
wrapped around the willfully obtuse argument that little or nothing has
improved for American and European women over the last 30 years.''
All of this sounds bad enough, but there's more. Feminism has fomented
male-bashing, but it has also reinforced misogyny. In her recent book, ``A
Return to Modesty'' (Free Press, $24, 291 pp.), Wendy Shalit sees this as
one of feminism's most pernicious legacies: feminist pioneers embraced the
wrongheaded notion that for women to be equal to men, they must become men
and erase all signs of womanhood, especially the biologically determinative
ones.
(This is why abortion has been and remains so important to feminism:
abortion is the denial of reproductive capacity. Without it, women are left
with the patent truth that they, unlike men, have fructifiable wombs.)
But writers such as Betty Friedan (``The Feminine Mystique,'' 1963) and
Simone de Beauvoir (``The Second Sex,'' 1949) went even a step further in
the wrong direction, says Shalit. In making women into men, and indicting
``women's work'' as parasitism, they told us, in essence, to hate what so
many women were and (now by choice) still are: mothers, nurturers and
homemakers.
For feminists, it seemed, the only real woman was a simulated man: this
often meant a working woman. Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed this
sentiment best when, in response to criticism of her worldly lifestyle, she
sniped that she guessed she could have just stayed home and baked cookies.
Even Friedan's recent hagiographer, Judith Hennessee (``Betty Friedan:
Her Life,'' Random House, $27.95, 320 pp.), concedes that Friedan preferred
the company of men and was, at bottom, a hyper-competitive, megalomaniacal
misogynist: in short, exactly the kind of man she decried.
It seems, then, that the ideological legacy of feminism is a mess. It's
rife with proposals that are not viable, and condemnations of men and women
that will do neither sex any good.
Now, things are so corrupt that Gloria Steinem and most feminist
spokespeople are defending a president who has been accused by several
women of sexual harassment and by still another of rape. And why?
Journalist Nina Burleigh gave the all-too-honest answer when she said she
would gladly have performed oral sex on Clinton just to thank him for
keeping abortion legal. In response to Burleigh's gaffe, New York Times
op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd proclaimed the death of feminism to be a mass
suicide.
So, is feminism dead? If so, where do we go from here? Should we
abandon it, or can we give it a new name and a new direction that will
disavow its mistakes but embrace its founding principles? The answer is a
resounding yes: we must remake feminism with our fresh ideas. After all,
pace our foremothers, we are, like it or not, liberated women.
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