On the Feminists Who Aren’t
Julie Craig / SPRING 2002
THE TITLE OF CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS’S FIRST BOOK ASKED,
Who Stole Feminism?
Daphne Patai gave one of her books the provocative subtitle
Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies
. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese paraphrased the women she interviewed in the title of her book,
“Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life
.” Yet all of these women call themselves feminists.
What all of them have in common is that while they label themselves feminists—and their books show up in the women’s studies section of your local bookstore—their theories are overwhelmingly hostile to feminist goals such as holding men responsible for rape and promoting gender equality in the classroom. More important, these authors’ close ties to antifeminist organizations, combined with the potent selling power of all things controversial, have made them into media darlings—and given them access to the kind of publicity that writers with more, well,
feminist
feminist views rarely get.
So who are these women? Are they outspoken feminists or traitors to the cause? Unlike the many social critics who vocally oppose feminism as a concept, these authors loudly and publicly embrace the label, despite the fact that “feminism” is a dirty word within the conservative circles that have nurtured them. They defy feminism to make some serious choices about the future of the movement and who fits into it: Can a conservative woman be a
feminist? Has feminism become so radical that mainstream proponents of equal rights are alienated by its rhetoric?
These are all interesting questions, but more relevant ones might be: Do these authors actually contribute to the body of feminist work, or do they merely perpetuate the delusion that feminism is a dangerous force with power disproportionate to the number of its adherents?
Camille Paglia: Grandstanding Contrarian
Camille Paglia is, perhaps, the original antifeminist feminist. She maintains that contemporary feminism is faltering “in a reactionary phase of hysterical moralism and prudery” and delights in baiting other public feminists. (She calls Naomi Wolf “Little Miss Pravda” and quotes approvingly another writer who said of Gloria Steinem, “Once we needed her, now we’re stuck with her.”) Of course, she purports to be the one true feminist, declaring, “My feminism stresses courage, independence, self-reliance, and pride,” and leaving no room for feminism as a more political or communal effort.
Paglia’s first book,
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,
was published in 1990; 1992’s
Sex, Art, and American Culture
and 1994’s
Vamps and Tramps
followed in quick succession (more recently, Paglia has dispensed her wisdom in a regular column for
Salon).
Riddled with forceful proclamations backed by scant evidence (as well as a harping nostalgia for the 1960s that would make even the most die-hard hippie cringe), Paglia’s critical essays on everything from music to the sexual peccadilloes of politicians are certainly dramatic, but they rarely hold up to scrutiny. Pop culture, she exclaims, is “an eruption of the never-defeated paganism of the West,” which sounds edgy and transgressive but fails to explain how today’s mass-media
Touched by an Angel
pap is an eruption of anything other than unadulterated smarm. Her platitudes might hold true for the narrow examples she chooses; everything that contradicts her arguments is ignored.
Femmes fatales (such as Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Onassis, and Madonna) are the only iconic feminists in her worldview, leaving readers to wonder how feminist political leaders, artists, scientists, and other women whose lives don’t read like a B-grade romance novel fit into her theories. She champions
male sexuality while deriding female sexuality (which is interesting, given that she is a woman) and is particularly hostile on the subject of lesbianism (which is interesting, given that her partner is a woman). “When women cut themselves off from men,” she writes, “they sink backward into psychological and spiritual stagnancy.” Similarly, she dismisses women’s art, asserting that creativity and innovation are essentially masculine traits.
But Paglia really steps on feminism’s dress when it comes to rape, as she makes it clear that the celebration of all things masculine extends to sexual coercion. “Feminism … does not see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.” (Pardon us if we just can’t understand that giddy delight.) Paglia’s hardheaded advice style, while appealing for its release from the heavy theorizing of academic feminism, lays the blame on women while adamantly refusing to suggest that men take responsibility for their actions.
Christina Hoff Sommers: The War Against Feminism
In her 1994 book,
Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women,
Christina Hoff Sommers claims that feminism has split into two competing camps: the equality feminists and the gender feminists. Under her definitions, equality feminists have fought for issues like equal pay (and, earlier in history, suffrage) but have now been effectively marginalized within the movement by more vocal gender feminists. This latter species, according to Sommers, wants a radical reworking of society—from education to economics—eliminating all structures they deem patriarchal, overhauling capitalism, and generally disrupting life as we know it. (This division between so-called equality and gender feminists sounds suspiciously similar to the long-standing split between the liberal and radical branches of feminism—with Sommers’s answer to the question “Who stole feminism?” clearly being “radical feminists.”)
Though her second book, 2000’s
The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men,
focuses on feminist reform in the elementary classroom, feminist pedagogy in the university setting (especially in the formalized context of women’s studies) is a particular bee in Sommers’s bonnet. The book makes one or two valid criticisms; for example, she rightly questions female students’ need for a sensitive, feelings-based
classroom (which, of course, plays into stereotypes of women as emotional rather than rational). But for the most part she paints a myopic portrait of women’s studies that dwells exclusively on the discipline’s worst excesses. Caricaturing the supposed radicalism of the feminist classroom, Sommers muses that women’s studies departments should be required to hand out a letter to parents of prospective students declaring, “We will help your daughter discover the extent to which she has been in complicity with the patriarchy. She may become enraged and chronically offended. She will very likely reject the religious and moral codes you raised her with. She may end up hating you (her father) and pitying you (her mother). After she has completed her re-education with us, you will certainly be out tens of thousands of dollars and very possibly be out one daughter as well.” Sommers’s shortsighted analysis ignores the diversity of women’s studies faculties and the existence of other critics of classroom radicalism, and her generalizations do not paint an accurate picture of feminist education any more than they adhere honestly to the realities of feminist philosophy.
Then there’s the right-wing connection to Sommers’s pop persona: Her works were financed by some notoriously conservative organizations, such as the Olin Foundation. She purports to be a feminist of the equality variety, but gives no evidence that she has ever participated in feminist activism or academics. (Of course, this brings up another question: Must a feminist engage in activism, or is a simple statement of belief enough?) The media attention given to Sommers’s biased and poorly researched books, which are regularly featured in the mainstream press, implies that there is both a market for—and a desire to produce—material that panders to the right wing’s most paranoid and misguided ideas about the evils of feminism.
Daphne Patai: Feministphobia
Unlike Paglia or Sommers—whose dedication to feminism has hardly been obvious or exemplary—Daphne Patai hails from inside the movement: Her career maps a transformation from feminist critic to critic of feminism. Patai cut her teeth in the rarefied world of the feminist academy with works like
The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology
and
Brazilian Women Speak
, an epic-length ethnography. But her growing discontent with women’s studies programs led to 1994’s
Professing Feminism: Cautionary
Tales from the Strange World of Women’s Studies
, which she cowrote with Noretta Koertge.
Professing Feminism
airs the proverbial dirty laundry of women’s studies departments. Two major issues emerge in Patai’s analysis: the development of a feminist orthodoxy that, in her view, stifles debate in the classroom, and the overlap of women’s studies with activism—which, she argues, transforms classes into therapy sessions riddled with agenda-driven dogma.
It should come as no surprise that
Professing Feminism
was widely embraced by antifeminists. Despite Patai’s frequent assertions that women’s studies just needs an overhaul, conservatives of all stripes (particularly the Independent Women’s Forum) frequently use her work to argue for the elimination of the discipline from university curricula. Her break with feminism was cemented with 1998’s
Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism,
which explores the relationship between feminism and what Patai calls the sexual harassment industry, or SHI. She argues that legislative reform and the network of lawyers, advocates, and consultants that has sprung up around harassment are a threat to civil liberties and academic freedom, as policy has shifted from shielding women from quid pro quo harassment (where superiors demand sexual favors in return for promotions, grades, etc.) to protection from “uncomfortable” situations.
While Patai poses some important questions—such as whether workplaces should be sex-free (when many of us meet partners in that very venue) and whether women really need protection from every off-color joke and fumbled come-on—she presupposes that all it takes to end an uncomfortable or hostile situation is to speak up about it, and that those who do so won’t be, say, passed over for promotion in retaliation. Patai’s suggestions work only for those who will suffer no consequences from standing up to their would-be harassers—an approach that does nothing to address the legal difficulty of finding a harassment policy that is effective in the broad range of situations that occur in classrooms and workplaces nationwide.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese: “I’m Not a Feminist, But …”
Like Patai, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes from within the ivory-tower ranks of the feminist academy, as the former head of the women’s studies faculty
at Emory University. Her first book, 1991’s
Feminism Without Illusions:
A
Critique of Individualism
, is a dense treatise about modern feminism’s reliance on political, economic, and social theories that place individual need above social good. She argues that feminism has unquestioningly adhered to individualist practice—to the detriment of both social communities and women’s status—and calls for a reconsideration of priorities.
Fox-Genovese’s second book, 1996’s
“Feminism Is Not the Story of My … Life”: How Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women
, addresses the question of why so many women qualify their support of equal rights with the phrase “I’m not a feminist, but …” She wonders whether feminism’s pro-choice stance turns away conservative women who might otherwise join the fight for issues like equal pay, and worries that feminism’s emphasis on self-actualization alienates women from cultures where family and community are central values. Fox-Genovese concludes with a proposal for a new “family feminism” that centers on rights for women with children—and sometimes doesn’t sound much like feminism at all.
Her contribution to
Women and the Future of the Family
, a slim volume published by the Christian-based Center for Public Justice, goes even farther, actively arguing for a return to the Christian nuclear family and a gendered division of labor. The most striking aspect of this tract is the way Fox-Genovese treats feminism as a mistake rather than an unfinished project, handing down an unoriginal list of the ways that girls have been betrayed by the sexual revolution but never considering how feminism is still struggling to strike a balance between sexual liberation for women and sexual responsibility for men. She ignores all the ways feminism tends toward communal rather than individualistic practices and vastly overestimates the protection offered to women and children by traditional families—as if domestic abuse never occurred until individualism and feminism reared their ugly heads. Moreover, she frequently confuses cases where real feminist activism alienates women with instances where women merely buy into negative portrayals of feminism in the media.
But what’s most notable in Fox-Genovese’s work is the startling hypocrisy of a childless career professor promoting a division of labor that relegates women to the kitchen and nursery—the day-to-day realization of which would certainly exclude her from the very platform from which she makes her pronouncements.
Katie Roiphe: Not Your Mama’s Feminism
The daughter of renowned feminist author Anne Roiphe, Katie Roiphe grew up surrounded by second-wave liberal feminism. But her undergraduate years at Harvard left her shocked at the divergence between her mother’s matter-of-fact feminism and what she saw as a radical ideology that carried the feminist movement onto the 1990S campus and contradicts her underlying assumption that equality has long since been achieved and further activity toward that end is superfluous.
In response, she wrote
The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus
, which was published in 1993 and got a lot of attention for questioning the veracity of the campus date-rape crisis. She casually compares the widely quoted statistic that one in four college-age women has been sexually assaulted to the total number of assaults that were reported and rumored in her college dorms, noting a discrepancy that numbers in the thousands. She attacks the perception that danger lurks everywhere for women, wondering if this unreasonable fear isn’t even reinforced by Take Back the Night marches, which highlight women’s vulnerability with endless testimonials about traumatic assault. Roiphe’s opinions parallel a point hammered home by Paglia and Patai: that stringent behavior rules, with their Victorian notions of feminine fragility, infantilize women. Also in line with Patai, Roiphe protests the chilling effect of sexual harassment rules that promise to protect women from uncomfortable situations.
She seems to think that if one-quarter of her friends have not told her they were assaulted, the statistic must be wrong. (And it’s worth noting that as a vocal critic of the entire notion of a date-rape crisis, she would probably be the last to hear about alleged rapes among friends and acquaintances.)
What she fails to realize is that forums like Take Back the Night serve as places for young women who did not grow up with feminism to discover that they are not alone in their experience, that there can be power in voicing private trauma, and that harassment includes situations that are neither quid pro quo nor simply some negligible discomfort.
In the end, Roiphe is a confident young woman lucky enough to have feminist parents and an Ivy League education; her refusal look beyond her own experience, however, makes for a myopic analysis that overlooks the fact that many of feminism’s battles have yet to be won.