The Media Abhors a Leaderless Vacuum
Much of the anger directed toward feminist stars stems from a deep-rooted frustration with the way the media treats the movement. Women rise to fame not because they are lauded as leaders by other feminists (even though, like Steinem and Hanna, they might already be seen as role models), but because the mainstream media sees in them a marketable image—a newsworthy persona upon whom can be projected all sorts of anxieties, hopes, and responsibilities. A feminist’s fame is often aided by something tangential to her politics—and that something is frequently related to her looks. Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf, for instance, rode to fame on the “she’s a feminist, but she’s sexy!” angle, while Kathleen Hanna was titillating because she was a feminist, a budding rock star, and a stripper. Meanwhile, contrarians like Camille Paglia and Rene Denfeld made news by being feminists who hate other feminists. You get the idea: It’s rarely original thought or sharp intellect alone that gets a woman noticed.
These days, the feminist fame machine operates almost entirely outside the realm of feminist activism, organizing, or journalism. More often than not, the women who are held up as icons have little to do with, well, actual feminism. In fact, it takes very little feminist activity to become anointed a feminist icon. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, coauthors of
Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future
, are among those who have pointed out that feminism’s shift away from its activist roots has had serious
negative consequences—one of which is that, because feminism is so far removed from grassroots, hands-on action, it is possible for a person like Elizabeth Wurtzel or Katie Roiphe to declare herself a feminist and, with no clearly articulated politics or ideals, become someone people in the media call on when they need a feminist perspective on an issue of the day. As Baumgardner and Richards put it, “[People] have begun conflating celebrity with expertise. She who gets the most attention is presumed to be the ‘leader,’ regardless of the content of her message or her character.”
Moreover, as our culture grows ever more obsessed with celebrity, it has become harder and harder to find examples of living, breathing feminists in the media. The infamous 1998
Time
cover story that traced the history of feminism from Susan B. Anthony to Betty Friedan to a TV character who never identifies herself as feminist (Ally McBeal, played by Calista Flockhart) is the most well-known example, but it’s far from unique. (In fact, the article hardly referenced a single breathing person, instead relying on media images of imaginary women like McBeal and Bridget Jones to speak for women. The few real-life women who were mentioned—Courtney Love, Debbie Stoller, Lisa Palac—were media creators themselves, not activists.) When they aren’t fictional characters standing in for real women, public feminists tend to be either only marginally identified with feminist politics (as with the aforementioned Wurtzel) or in fact ideologically opposed to many of the tenets of feminism, as is the case with the current crop of antifeminist feminists. (Formal leaders of mainstream feminist organizations—like Patricia Ireland of NOW and Ellie Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation—have been recognized as experts when it comes to commenting on specific public policy issues relating to reproductive rights, but not much more.)
The current scarcity of feminist stars is a curious thing. It could be read as a step forward—a reflection of feminism’s evolution, a renewed interest in local activism, and the growing realization that feminism is not a monolithic ideology. It could be a sign of waning public interest in feminism or another backlash, the belief that feminism is over and our work done. It could be that, as a reflection of these conservative times, the most recognizable feminist icons are not actually feminists.
The truth is, feminism is in many ways a victim of its own successes. On the one hand, an awareness of feminism—or at least its basic principles—is
increasingly interwoven into American mass culture. But on the other hand, it is rarely explicitly discussed in the mainstream media, except for the occasional pronouncement that it’s “dead,” or in reports stating that a majority of women do not call themselves feminists.
Looking back on the lesbian-feminist movement of the 1970s, artist Terry Wolverton asks, “In letting go of our worldly ambitions … were we truly forging a female model, one that assumed our influence would be psychic, cellular, would work its way through an underground network of women’s wisdom? Or were we unwittingly participating in our own marginalization, ensuring our efforts would be lost to history? Were we redefining power or giving up on it?” Wolverton could just as easily be describing the riot grrrls or the third-wavers. It happens again and again—the radicals refuse to be co-opted by the mass culture, and so their history, too, remains obscure.
The proliferation of micromedia—independent websites, underground zines, and info-sharing networks—has infused new blood into feminist activism, as the popularity of Ladyfest and other locally based skill-sharing workshops attest. But without famous faces, or at least provocative new visages, attached to it, this kind of grassroots activism is invisible to nonfeminist media. (And with the rocky state of national feminist media these days, we can’t afford to isolate ourselves in a pro-grrrl media ghetto.) To remain vital and relevant to a larger group of women, feminism also needs a public face—or better yet, public faces.
We shoot ourselves in the foot when we punish or ostracize leaders. The lesson of Gloria and Kathleen is this: People aren’t right or authoritative simply because they’re famous, nor are they bad or bent on screwing over their colleagues. And if we don’t select our own leaders, the media will do it for us—much to the detriment of the feminist movement. Feminists have to let go of the notion that to be a public figure is to seek personal glory and personal glory alone, and realize that the desire to take feminism to the public realm comes out of a desire to help craft our own collective image.
Questioning Science’s Gender Bias
Keely Savoie / SPRING 2004
SOMEWHERE IN THE MOUNTAINS OUTSIDE OF KYOTO, JAPAN, a group of Japanese macaques are doing something they have no evolutionary right to do: having lots of hot, homo monkey sex. Every mating season, the females couple up with each other. Some of the consortships last only an hour, others more than a week. During the time they are together, these female couples mount each other tens or even hundreds of times, defend each other from male aggressors, groom each other, forage together, sleep together, and choose each other over interested males. According to Dr. Paul Vasey, assistant professor at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, among these particular Japanese macaques, the girls get it on with each other more than they do with the boys. And they get off, too: The mounter rubs her clitoris against the mountee’s back, while the mountee rubs her own clitoris with her tail, and together they enjoy wanton lezzie action with no reproductive value whatsoever.
Meanwhile, in a lab at the University of Georgia, Dr. Patricia Adair Gowaty, distinguished research professor at the Institute of Ecology, is studying fruit flies that also break the evolutionary mold. Instead of buzzing around frantically trying to mate with any available female while the females sit back and pick the cream of the crop (“Not you. Nope, not you, either … Ahhh, what nice complex eyes you have. Yes—you”), Gowaty’s males are just as choosy as females, sometimes more so—even
though everyone from Charles Darwin to Dr. Phil knows that the evolutionary mandate of males is to mate, mate, mate.
As I furiously scribbled notes during Vasey’s and Gowaty’s talks at the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), all I could think was, Finally, this week of proteomics lectures and career workshops is coming through with the ultimate payoff—sex. But while I reveled in the salacious details of monkeys’ erotic lives, Vasey, Gowaty, and other scientists at the seminar had a bone to pick with their discipline.
For all the emphasis on advancement in the field, most biologists still tend to view animal behavior through the socially conservative lens of the field’s Victorian forefathers: Sex is strictly for reproduction, and males and females have prescribed roles—a formula that conveniently reflects social values but renders Gowaty’s finicky males and Vasey’s lusty females the orphans of evolutionary theory. Biologists have known about the lesbian macaques for over forty years—and there is documented homosexuality in over four hundred species—but no one has come up with a satisfying theoretical framework for their nonreproductive sex. And Gowaty’s fruit flies are not alone in their defiance of parental investment theory, a branch of evolutionary theory asserting that females are “coy” and males “indiscriminate” due to the respective size of eggs and sperm (hence, the amount of energy each gender invests in its progeny). Yet the theory still stands as the default explanation for differences between the sexes.
Dr. Joan Roughgarden—the tireless feminist, gay, and transgender activist and eminent theoretical ecologist at Stanford University who organized the Evolutionary Aspects of Gender and Sexuality seminar that was the occasion for Gowaty’s and Vasey’s talks—says research that eschews those archaic assumptions about gender and sexuality is routinely marginalized, swept under the rug, ignored, avoided, and ridiculed. Passive and active sexism in scientific research, she says, have resulted in a skewed and incomplete picture of the world that only a feminist overhaul of existing and future research can correct. Happily, there are scientists like Gowaty and Vasey doing the work, but they face a long, hard slog, not just against die-hard scientific tenets like parental investment theory but also against the recalcitrant professional and academic institutions of science itself.
The organizers of the AAAS conference had unwittingly underscored Roughgarden’s point: The seminar was held at 8:30 a.m. Monday, the last day of the convention. Few of the attendees of America’s biggest and most venerable science conference had managed to drag themselves to the seminar—most were already on planes home, and those who remained had the difficult choice of sleeping off last night’s cocktails or getting up at the crack of dawn on the promise of having some weak coffee and hearing the voices of dissent.
Sexism in science takes many guises, some more subtle than others. My favorite example of blatant “scientification” of sexism comes courtesy of some Greek scientists who purported to solve the age-old question, Can you spot a superlong schlong by scoping a guy’s shoe size? Thanks to those gumptious Greeks, we now know that shoe size has nothing to do with the ol’ pajama python—but in case anyone really cares, the index finger is a more reliable measure of the man.
I find these studies humorous for their poignantly desperate attempts to validate male power and female subordination. But at a certain point, they take a sinister turn. When pseudoscientific studies claim to reveal the “natural basis” of double standards, they justify abhorrent sexist ideas and behavior by calling them biological destiny. It’s one thing to put your pecker under the microscope and tell everyone you’ve seen the world’s biggest prick—it’s another to co-opt the tools of science to justify barbaric behavior, claiming culture and consciousness can’t hold their own against the genetic writ of male dominance.
Biology is particularly amenable to sexist narratives. Gendered explanations and expectations of animal behavior are so prevalent that challenging them seems to be a Sisyphean undertaking. Perhaps they’re so ingrained because they so satisfyingly reflect prevailing social mores: Females are passive and males are aggressive; mothers raise the offspring and fathers’ contributions end at ejaculation; sex is for reproduction, so, by definition, anything else is unnatural. Gowaty calls these “just-so stories” that “buttress status quo notions about sex roles that … confine women to their ‘natural’ roles as mothers and subordinates to men.”
In evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology’s human cousin, these just-so stories are applied to men and women, especially to their sexual dynamics. Each new study seems to bristle with controversy and bad intentions.
They often come out in obscure journals, are filtered through the popular press, and enter public consciousness with such headlines as “Semen Makes Women Happy” and “Male Sweat Brightens Women’s Moods.” According to these studies, anything secreted from men’s pores or penises can make the world a better place.
Whenever a new study comes out claiming to demonstrate the evolutionary justification for the latest topic in the battle between the sexes, everyone from CNN to
Maxim
jumps at the chance to promulgate the same old sexist schlock: Women want love, not sex. Men only want sex. Girl babies break up marriages. Men can’t help cheating; it’s in their genes. Men can’t help raping; it’s in their genes. Dr. David Schmitt, an evolutionary psychologist from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, recently trumpeted “the most comprehensive test yet conducted on whether the sexes differ in their desire for sexual variety.” The media reported that a survey of sixteen thousand people had proved that male promiscuity is hardwired, based on the results of questionnaires Schmitt had college students fill out describing their sexual practices and attitudes.
To be fair, it’s not a crime to attempt a broad study of human sexuality. Attempting to illuminate cultural similarities and differences in sexuality and gender roles is certainly an interesting undertaking. But claiming to demonstrate that “hardwired” gender disparities evolved over millions of years on the basis of the questionnaire responses of teenagers in 2003 is stretching the limits of credibility and science. The scientists behind these studies may not intend to promote the macho ideal, but their preconceived notions—combined with a media eager for the buzz of such stories—make for an embrace of the sexist status quo.
Dr. Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University, challenges the validity of research like Schmitt’s, even while she defends him as a colleague. Although research that relies on self-reporting dominates the field, Fisher believes that asking people to answer intimate questions about their sex lives in a classroom setting is inherently unreliable. She wonders whether, if the subjects are answering questions in a public setting, they are expressing their actual feelings and experiences or responding to a perceived social pressure to abide by certain gender-specific behaviors.
Fisher and her colleague Michele Alexander have designed their own studies to guard against this sort of self-reporting bias. In one recent study,
Fisher controlled the level and type of social pressure her subjects felt as they responded to the questions. Some of her subjects were assured that their answers were anonymous, others thought that they had to hand their questionnaires to another student, and still others had to answer while hooked up to what they believed was a lie-detector machine. By manipulating the pressure students felt to either perform under the scrutiny of their peers or “pass” the fake lie-detector test, Fisher got markedly different results. Like Schmitt’s students, when Fisher’s respondents answered the questions in the company of their peers, their answers fit social stereotypes. But when students thought they were hooked up to a lie detector, the story changed. The men admitted to having fewer partners, and the women copped to more—a lot more. And both men and women, at the end of the day, had roughly the same amount of sex—which is the only thing that really makes sense, considering that all those straight males had to be finding their multiple female partners somewhere.
In light of Fisher’s study, Schmitt’s appears to be measuring not the genetic mandate for profligate men and coy women but the amount of social pressure each gender feels to adhere to cultural ideals. Fisher’s research is a powerful rebuttal to scientists whose work fails to dig below the surface and instead uncritically reflects and reinforces social stereotypes. Perhaps predictably, Fisher’s study also received press attention, but the media managed to twist her findings to fit yet another gendered stereotype: “Fake Lie-Detector Reveals Women’s Sex Lies,” squawked
NewScientist.com
. The article opened with what read like a warning to guileless men: “Women are more likely than men to lie about their sex lives, reveals a new study.”
It’s no surprise that the media tends to overreport and underanalyze results like Schmitt’s while ignoring or distorting studies like Fisher’s, but—sensationalistic reporting aside—the problem of sexism in biological research still remains a scientific, not a media, issue.
Advances in feminist research can go only so far when the very structure of academia works against the full inclusion of alternative ideas. Despite the scientific conceit of “objectivity,” the scientific community is made up of people, and each and every scientist has his or her own belief system, ingrained cultural biases, and blind spots. The scientific method may be the best way we have of achieving an objective view of the world, but it can be only as objective as the questions asked. If one group is doing most of
the asking, unseen biases—or, as Gowaty calls them, “assumptions so deep they tend to be invisible”—can creep in without anyone noticing.
Three decades after second-wave feminists began making inroads into academia, and pioneers like primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy began using feminist critiques to improve scientific theories, there is still palpable resistance to feminist perspectives in science. But contemporary biologists who cut their teeth on the scientific critiques of second-wave feminists are putting forth testable theories that are proving to be more accurate and powerful in their ability to explain the intricacies of animal (and human) behavior than much of the gender-based Darwinian dogma that preceded them.
Gowaty’s fruit flies are the perfect example. The females have huge eggs and the males have tiny sperm—which, according to parental investment theory, should mean that the females should be extremely choosy, and the males should mate indiscriminately whenever possible. But it turns out that her fruit flies, regardless of sex, employed flexible mating strategies dependent on environment—not gender. In her first trial, Gowaty found that males seemed to be slightly pickier than females when it came to approaching sex partners. In the second test, they were about the same. It might not sound so radical to a feminist, but to Darwin and his descendants, Gowaty’s conclusion would be downright shocking: In the end, “There was nothing so like a male as a female, and nothing so like a female as a male.” After more than a century of biological theory grounded strictly in gender determinism, it’s a statement that could cause a revolution—if it could be heard.
But Gowaty’s research has not been cited as often as it could have been. She believes her feminist politics, not the quality of her work, have marginalized her in the scientific community. “My willingness to speak out against things that don’t make sense has cost me,” she says. A book she published in 1997,
Feminism and Evolutionary Biology
, is already out of print, and she now believes that labeling any scientific work as feminist “is the kiss of death.”
“If you don’t name something feminist,” she says, “it stands a much greater chance of being accepted.” She spends a good deal of time and energy defending her work against the arguments of colleagues who dismiss it out of hand because of her politics. There’s a twisted logic at play here:
Science is supposed to be objective and therefore beyond politics—so any scientist who is openly political and challenges the idea of hegemonic objectivity is, by definition, unscientific.