Thomasma does not rule out the relevance of the Nazi experience. The comparison is extravagant, but there are some similarities in the progression. Hitler signed into law permission for designated physicians to kill patients judged “incurably sick by medical examination. “This was billed as merciful. But the practice soon focussed on the retarded and mentally ill, then moved on to include the elimination of Jews, gypsies, and socialists. In the United States, while we will never adopt genocide, we are already discussing euthanizing the demented elderly. There is, moreover, a coming crisis in health care created by an increasingly elderly population. Persons over 85 years of age will increase fivefold in the next fifty years, from 3 million to 15 million. There will be fewer of middle age to bear the heavy costs. “The phenomenon of the elderly (seventy to eighty-five years of age) caring for the ‘old old’ (those over eighty-five) has already begun.“27
The proponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide offer a few case histories to show how free the choice is and how compassionate is the process. We have already seen that the claim of free choice is given the lie by the frequency in the Netherlands of unconsented euthanasia. There is no reason to think such killings will be less frequent here. But even where consent is in some sense given, the claim of autonomy is dubious. Hendin says that even the selected model cases proffered by proponents show the discrepancy between theory and practice.28 He watched a 1994 film shown on Dutch television in which a patient, Cees van Wendel, who had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), was put to death. He expressed a wish for euthanasia after his disease was diagnosed. Severe muscular weakness confined him to a wheelchair and his speech was barely audible. When this segment was shown on Prime Time Live, Sam Donaldson called it “a story of courage and love.” Hendin says it is that “[o]nly for the most gullible viewer.” The doctor is the primary figure. “The patient is nearly invisible.” In the doctor’s two house calls, it becomes apparent that Cees’s wife, Antoinette, wants her husband to die.
The wife appears repelled by her husband’s illness, never touches him during their conversation, and never permits Cees to answer any question the doctor asks. She “translates” for him, although Cees is intelligible, able to communicate verbally although slowly, and able to type out messages on his computer. The doctor asks him if he wants euthanasia, but his wife replies. When Cees begins to cry, the doctor moves sympathetically towards him to touch his arm, but his wife tells the doctor to move away and says it is better to let him cry alone. During his weeping she continues to talk to the doctor. The doctor at no time asks to speak to Cees alone; neither does he ask if anything would make it easier for him to communicate or if additional help in his care would make him want to live. Cees keeps putting off the date of the euthanasia, and his wife becomes impatient. Finally, he is given the lethal injection.
Was this the affirmation of the autonomy of the patient that euthanasia supporters insist is their object? “From the beginning, the loneliness and isolation of the husband haunts the film. Only because he is treated from the start as an object does his death seem inevitable.“29 If this was selected as a model case, it must be true that many such deaths at the hands of doctors are even less stirring examples of patient autonomy.
The systematic killing of unborn children in huge numbers is part of a general disregard for human life that has been growing for some time. Abortion by itself did not cause that disregard, but it certainly deepens and legitimates the nihilism that is spreading in our culture and finds killing for convenience acceptable. We are crossing lines, at first slowly and now with rapidity: killing unborn children for convenience; removing tissue from live fetuses; contemplating creating embryos for destruction in research; considering taking organs from living anencephalic babies; experimenting with assisted suicide; and contemplating euthanasia. Abortion has coarsened us. If it is permissible to kill the unborn human for convenience, it is surely permissible to kill those thought to be soon to die for the same reason. And it is inevitable that many who are not in danger of imminent death will be killed to relieve their families of burdens. Convenience is becoming the theme of our culture. Humans tend to be inconvenient at both ends of their lives.
11
The Politics of Sex
RADICAL FEMINISM’S ASSAULT ON AMERICAN CULTURE
Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica is a “rape manual” because “science is a male rape of female nature”; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony expresses the “throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release“1 These and other ludicrous pronouncements may incline sensible people to dismiss today’s feminism as a mildly amusing but utterly inconsequential fit of hysterics. That would be a mistake.
Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the Sixties. This is a revolutionary, not a reformist, movement, and it is meeting with considerable success. Totalitarian in spirit, it is deeply antagonistic to traditional Western culture and proposes the complete restructuring of society, morality, and human nature. Radical feminism is today’s female counterpart of Sixties radicalism. The feminist program is in its main features the same as that of the disastrous Port Huron Statement,2 modified to accommodate the belief that the oppressors, the source of all evil, are men, the “patriarchy” rather than the “Establishment.” All else remains the same. “Feminism rode into our cultural life on the coattails of the New Left but by now it certainly deserves its own place in the halls of intellectual barbarisms.“3
America has seen women’s movements before, reform movements seeking for women the political and cultural privileges held by men. They represented what best-selling author and professor of philosophy Christina Hoff Sommers calls “equity feminism” to distinguish them from “gender feminism,” the radical variety. She identifies herself as an equity feminist.4 It would be better, I think, to drop the word “feminism” altogether since the movement no longer has a constructive role to play; its work is done. There are no artificial barriers left to women’s achievement. That fact does not mollify the radicals in the slightest. Revolutions, it is commonly observed, often break out not when circumstances are next to intolerable but when conditions begin rapidly to improve. There are now more female than male students in universities, and women are entering business, the professions, and the academy in large numbers. Yet this seems only to fuel the rage of the feminists.
Indeed, Midge Decter thinks improvement is precisely the problem. She asks “why there should have been an explosion of angry demand on the part of women who as a group were the freest, healthiest, wealthiest, longest-lived, and most comfortably situated people the world had yet laid eyes on.”5 She answers that “It is a freedom that frightens her [today’s woman] and disorients her and burdens her terribly…. The appeal to her of the women’s movement is that in her fear and disorientation, the movement offers her the momentary escape contained in the idea that she is not free at all; that she is, on the contrary, the victim of an age-old conspiracy that everything troubling to her has been imposed on her by others.” Decter has a profound point. A woman who formerly had a constricted range of choices “must now decide everything essential to her.” Whether to be serious about a career, whether to marry, whether to divorce, whether to bear children. Everything is in her hands “to a degree possibly unprecedented in the history of mankind, a degree experienced by her as bordering on the intolerable. “The responsibility is too much, the choices too many.
The radical feminist movement not only explains that any dissatisfaction she may experience is the fault of others, namely men, but also comforts her with a sense of solidarity and common purpose in the way that some men find the battalion a welcome relief from the freedom of civilian life. There is probably more to it than that, however. Radical feminism is not merely a way of discovering that a woman is not free. It is also a cause that creates an orientation and a meaning in her life that unstructured freedom destroys. Radical feminism is thus similar to causes s
uch as the identity politics of the racial and ethnic programs on campuses.
FEMINISMS PAST AND PRESENT
Some of today’s feminist dissatisfaction is due to the lack of adequate recognition of the immense contribution women have made to Western culture. That is changing, but, oddly enough, it is the feminists who continue to denigrate the role women played in the past.
There was a time, of course, when feminism had real tasks to accomplish, real inequities to overcome. Feminism achieved major victories in the last century and the first part of this one. Though they take the credit, feminists, radical or otherwise, actually had little to do with the progress of women in the latter half of this century. The trends that would of themselves produce today’s results were in place at least by the early 1960s. Once such things as the right to vote and the right of wives to hold property in their own names had been won, the difference in the opportunities open to women has been largely due to technology. I am old enough to remember my grandmother washing work clothes on a scrub board, mashing potatoes by hand, and emptying the water tray from the bottom of the ice box. There was simply no possibility that she could have had both a family and a career. Were she young today, she would find that shopping, food preparation, laundering and much else have been made dramatically easier so that she could, if she wished, become a lawyer or a doctor or virtually anything that appealed to her.
Many people suppose that feminism today is a continuation of the reform movement of the past. They occasionally notice a ranting Bella Abzug or an icy Gloria Steinem but imagine them to be merely the froth of extremism on an otherwise sensible movement. That is not the case; the extremists are the movement. What the moderate academic feminists Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge write about radical feminism in the universities is true of the movement as a whole. Today’s radical feminism is
not merely about equal rights for women…. Feminism aspires to be much more than this. It bids to be a totalizing scheme resting on a grand theory, one that is as all-inclusive as Marxism, as assured of its ability to unmask hidden meanings as Freudian psychology, and as fervent in its condemnation of apostates as evangelical fundamentalism. Feminist theory provides a doctrine of original sin: The worlds evils originate in male supremacy.6
Carol Iannone was drawn into feminism in graduate school in the mid-Seventies. “I enjoyed, reveled in the utterly systematic property feminism takes on when used as a tool of analysis, especially when to the exclusion of all others. Like Marxism, feminism can explain everything from advertising to religion by following its single thread, the oppression of women.“7
Feminists call their grand theory the “gender perspective.” “Gender” is a code word in the feminist lexicon. The enormous importance the radicals place on that term became apparent during the preparation for and conduct of the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September, 1995. (The Beijing conference will be mentioned frequently because it demonstrated most of feminism’s least attractive features and its worldwide aspirations.) The object was to debate and adopt a set of proposals relating to women (the Platform for Action), which the various nations would, presumably, be under a moral duty to implement. Each nation sent an official delegation, and many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), accredited by the United Nations to lobby the delegates, were present. The Beijing conference revealed the political and cultural agenda of the movement as a whole. At a preparatory session in New York, Bella Abzug, the head of a major NGO, denounced “retrogressive” developments:
The current attempt by several Member States to expunge the word “gender” from the Platform for Action and to replace it with the word “sex” is an insulting and demeaning attempt to reverse the gains made by women, to intimidate us and to block further progress.
We will not be forced back into the “biology is destiny” concept that seeks to define, confine and reduce women and girls to their physical sexual characteristics.8
This heated oratory may seem puzzling—referring to men and women as sexes would not seem to “reduce” either to their “physical sexual characteristics.” What seemed to be nitpicking, however, is part of a larger feminist strategy. In feminist jargon, “sex” is merely biological while “gender” refers to roles and is claimed to be “socially constructed,” which means that everything about men and women, other than their reproductive organs, can be altered by changes in the social and cultural environment. One of the major implications of this view is that human sexuality has no natural form but is culturally conditioned. Radical feminists concede that there are two sexes, but they usually claim there are five genders. Though the list varies somewhat, a common classification is men, women, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. Thus, heterosexuality, being socially constructed, is no more “natural” or desirable than homosexuality. It is not surprising, then, that one of the most active groups preparing for Beijing was the Lesbian Caucus.
Changes in the social and cultural environment to make the roles of men and women identical are what the feminists intend. This explains the Platform’s incessant harping on “gender.” While I am not sure of the final count, at one point there were 216 references to it. Unfortunately, many people who would dislike the radical feminists’ project assume that “gender” and “sex” have the same meaning. They do not. Their attempt at Beijing was to incorporate the “gender perspective” into an internationally accepted document that would impose at least moral obligations on the governments of the world.
The gender perspective of radical feminism is easy to ridicule but it must be taken seriously. It attacks not only men but the institution of the family, it is hostile to traditional religion, it demands quotas in every field for women, and it engages in serious misrepresentations of facts. Worst of all, it inflicts great damage on persons and essential institutions in a reckless attempt to remake human beings and create a world that can never exist. As we will see, among the institutions being severely damaged by radical feminism are the American educational system and the American military.
THE INTELLECTUAL COLLAPSE OF RADICAL FEMINISM
Perhaps the first thing to point out, however, is that radical feminism in its largest aspirations is doomed to failure. That makes the harms it inflicts on people and institutions in pursuit of its unattainable ends all the more inexcusable. Radical feminism shares the most destructive idea in the original draft of the Port Huron Statement: human nature is infinitely malleable and hence infinitely perfectible. This idea, encrypted in the substitution of “gender” for “sex,” is essential to the feminist enterprise of removing all differences between men and women in the roles they play in society. If certain talents are predominantly male and others predominantly female by nature, that enterprise is defeated. Hence, feminists insist that the differing roles of the sexes have nothing to do with biology. What a society’s culture can construct, it can deconstruct. Culture is everything and culture can be changed so that all male-female differences, other than in their reproductive organs, will disappear. Women will then appear in every profession and occupation in proportion to their representation in the population at large. The statistical imbalances we see today are merely the results of conditioning and discrimination.
Even if this feminist contention were correct, its totalitarian implications are obvious. Culture is a stubborn opponent. To defeat it requires the coercion of humans. The Soviet Union attempted to create the New Soviet Man with gulags, psychiatric hospitals, and firing squads for seventy years and succeeded only in producing a more corrupt culture. The feminists are having a similarly corrupting effect on our culture with only the weapon of moral intimidation. The contention that underneath their cultural conditioning men and women are identical is absurd to anyone not blinded by ideological fantasy.
Males are almost always larger, stronger, and faster. Females are almost always the primary carers for the young. It must be counted as curious that, starting, as feminists suppose, from a condition of complete equality in all ma
tters, males always became the “oppressors” in every human society. What is true of human societies is almost always true in non-human species, from animals to insects. The feminist case for female physical equality or dominance would have to rest, rather uncomfortably one would think, upon such examples as the black widow spider, the praying mantis, and the hyena pack.
The ineradicable differences between the sexes are not merely physical. “Men are more aggressive than women, “James Q. Wilson writes. “Though child-rearing practices may intensify or moderate this difference, the difference will persist and almost surely rests on biological factors. In every known society, men are more likely than women to play roughly, drive recklessly, fight physically, and assault ruthlessly, and these differences appear early in life…. As they grow up, men are much more likely than women to cause trouble in school, to be alcoholics or drug addicts, and to commit crimes.9
The early kibbutz movement in Israel had the same ideology as today’s radical feminists: sexual equality meant sexual identity, and sexual differentiation was inequality. For a brief period, the ideologues attempted to raise children apart from their families and to raise boys and girls in ways that would destroy sex roles. The program was as extreme as the most radical feminist could want. But it collapsed within a very few years. Boys and girls returned to different sex roles. The American sociologist Melford Spiro, who studied the kibbutz, wrote that he had wanted to “observe the influence of culture on human nature or, more accurately, to discover how a new culture produces a new human nature.” He “found (against my own intentions) that I was observing the influence of human nature on culture.“10
Slouching Towards Gomorrah Page 23
