by Lisa Jervis
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.
Wend Shalit: Putting Feminism Back in the Closet
Wendy Shalit made waves in conservative and feminist circles alike with the publication of 1999’s A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, which asked women to voluntarily climb back into a closet of ankle-length skirts and early curfews. Shalit posits that modern female woes can all be blamed on the lack of modesty allowed to women, claiming that unisex bathrooms, sex education in elementary schools, and free condoms on college campuses are among the phenomena that force girls to give up the natural blushing ways that once protected them from harassment, rape, anorexia, depression, unpleasant dates, and pernicious ogling.
While Camille Paglia uses literary, celebrity, and pop culture figures to study the archetypes of the Western imagination, Shalit does her one better by actually holding up these fictionalized characters as models for the way that humanity (particularly the female half) should conduct itself. She seems peculiarly oblivious to the fact that Cary Grant movies and Jane Austen novels do not represent anybody’s reality, and—like Fox-Genovese—she appears to think that Cosmo is a realistic barometer of American women’s thoughts and opinions. She blows right past the fact that throughout the history of Western civilization, chivalrous courtship rules have only applied to wealthy (and usually white) women, since the sequestering of affluent females was facilitated by the economic contributions of slaves and working-class women. Shalit’s version of modesty is available only to the minority upper crust—not coincidentally, the same class that she brags about belonging to.
But Shalit’s most egregious move is to set up a startling new blame-thevictim … paradigm: Not only does a woman deserve individual blame if she’s attacked, but, by extension, all women are to blame due to a general lack of modesty that leads to wanton male behavior. Even if her dubious claim that modesty protects against sexual violence were true, she ignores how modesty’s complement, shame, has historically served to imprison sexual-assault victims in a mire of guilt and social condemnation. Furthermore, Shalit leaves no room for personal choice: A critical mass of women, she implies, must join the modesty club if men are to be browbeaten into civilized behavior (otherwise, modesty will simply be mocked by men who can still get free sex from loose women).
Shalit shares with Camille Paglia a view of masculinity as violent and ruthless, especially when it comes to sex. But here Shalit parts ways with both feminism and her fellow antifeminists by advocating an extreme version of the infantilizing behavioral prescriptions that both Paglia and Roiphe rail against; indeed, she specifically rejects both women as too dismissive of the campus date-rape crisis, but turns around to berate mainstream feminists for failing to recognize how women’s immodest behavior contributes to their eventual rape. Mostly, though, Shalit’s views fall narrowly in line with those of Fox-Genovese: Both see sexual liberation as a victory of men over women, and both call for women to move backward to reclaim lost ground—a plan that leaves many feminists cold. Shalit wants to be protected from the unseemly parts of life without giving up the rights and privileges that have accompanied women’s emergence from the confines of modesty—a have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too whine that few realistic feminists have the time or patience to indulge.
EACH OF THESE WOMEN ADDS A UNIQUE (IF WRONGHEADED, misinformed, or just plain grating) voice to the debate over women’s roles both past and future. If nothing else, these authors force feminists to take a serious look at how we identify ourselves and how we define participation in the feminist movement. They stretch the limits of whom we include under the rubric of feminism, and their criticisms expose areas where feminist work is incomplete, pointing the way to important questions that remain unanswered: What’s the best way to balance the reality of modern workplace interpersonal relations with an adequate sexual harassment policy? How can we ensure that girls and boys are treated equally in the classroom? Isn’t it more crucial to challenge ideas of “natural” male aggression than it is to teach females to restrict their lives in order to avoid it?
Unfortunately, their faux-feminist rhetoric makes it easy for readers to encounter “feminism” without ever encountering actual feminist views and activism. As such, their presence will serve only to take attention away from women whose goals transcend the endless disparagement of feminism itself and create a distraction from the real questions of equality.
Celebrity Jeopardy
The Perils of Feminist Fame
Rachel Fudge / WINTER 2003
ANY CASUAL READER OF THE POPULAR PRESS WILL HAVE NOTICED the recent avalanche of books boldly declaring that (are you ready for this?) women are not always nice to one another. In case you were laboring under a misconception, it isn’t all hearts and roses and sisterhood—women can be, like, rilly mean to each other. Not only that, what is rarely acknowledged is how badly allegedly liberated women can behave toward one another in the service of feminism. Feminists have long tried to keep their own bad behavior safely behind closed doors, relegating their infighting to the pages of movement-only journals or snarky comments made during group meetings. But the truth is, we feminists seem to have a particular taste for devouring our own. We have such high hopes for one another and for the mythical sisterhood that it’s especially distressing when a sister misbehaves or doesn’t live up to her potential.
Nowhere is this complicated dynamic as apparent as in the anointing, revering, and trashing of feminists who achieve a modicum of celebrity. Woe to the woman who becomes singled out by the media, portrayed as a star or spokesperson or symbol—for she has to answer not only to a public that is at best wary of (and often downright hostile to) feminism but also to the community of feminists who nurtured her. Second-wave feminists’ memoirs are rife with bitter tales of “star feminists” being told by their sisters not to shine, yet the pattern repeats itself with each new resurgence of activism. Although they are by no means the only representations of these conflicts, the parallel careers of über—women’s libber Gloria Steinem and queen of the riot grrrls Kathleen Hanna demonstrate that one is not born but rather made a famous feminist.
Women have long been conditioned to shun the spotlight and instead seek gratification from motherhood or from nurturing menfolk. For a very long time, there were few places for women in the public sphere at all, let alone venues for women to seize the stage. A key tenet of feminism, from the nineteenth century onward, has been the simple but radical notion that women should have equal access to the public realm, to the world of work, money, power, politics, and influence. Yet at the same time, feminism has advocated for a kinder, gentler, less masculinist conception of that realm, in essence arguing that women are (or should be) less interested in success and power as they’ve traditionally been defined.
But by claiming that women should eschew success or power, we’ve done ourselves a disservice. Vilifying leadership and fame results only in our icons being chosen for us—not by us—and so we end up either with overtaxed activists like Steinem and Hanna as the lone voices of a movement or, as is more common these days, with pseudofeminists like Elizabeth Wurtzel or Katie Roiphe as our media-anointed leaders. It also ensures that the public representation of feminism will continue to be created by a scandal-hungry, nuance-rejecting media that has a hard time perceiving women as three-dimensional creatures.
Feminism Abhors a Leader
From its inception, second-wave feminism, aka the women’s liberation movement, or WLM, was painstakingly egalitarian in both theory and in attempted practice. Activist and consciousness-raising groups swore by the decision-by-consensus paradigm that’s now a caricature of feminist organizing. At its best, the “structureless” approach (so dubbed in 1972 by feminist author Joreen, otherwise known as Jo Freeman) prevented aggressive personalities from dominating groups and allowed everyone to be heard and, of course, validated. The movement’s lot system, which aimed to ensure that each woman would have a turn at each task, from running meetings to making public appearances, was also a way for women to tap into
undiscovered skills and talents.
This antistructure, antileader stance was a deliberate reaction against the charismatic leadership of the male-dominated civil rights and antiwar movements. It was also an earnest attempt to make literal a central feminist principle: that instances of sexism, whether institutionalized in laws and employment or embedded in interpersonal relationships, are not the complaints of individual women but rather injustices suffered by all women. Appointing one woman as a spokesperson would not only disrupt the committee approach but, more fundamentally, obscure the ingrained, systemic nature of sexism.
However, as it quickly became apparent to many in the movement, the problem with this utopian vision was that some women were better public speakers than others, had more contacts within the media, or quite simply were more ambitious. In the early days of the WLM, few women were bold enough to declare their own desire to be in command or in the public eye, yet the dreaded charismatic figures nonetheless emerged. Women like Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Susan Brownmiller, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Flo Kennedy, and Betty Friedan were smart, articulate, passionate feminists who were particularly adept at communicating both with the media and with other feminists. But other, equally hardworking women resented their “star power” and argued that these individual women were elitists who had no right to speak for the movement as a whole.
