Slouching Towards Gomorrah (34 page)

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.
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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.

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 more 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 Women
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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.“
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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.
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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.“
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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.“
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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.

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.“
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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 personal 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.
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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.“
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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.
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“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.“