Monthly Archives: April 2000

The War on Heterosexuality: A Review of Daphne’s Heterophobia

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HeterophobiaHeterophobia:
Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism

by Daphne Patai

Amazon.Com Price: $17.47

(follow link above to order)

In 1998 a sexual harassment lawsuit against a sociology professor at the
university my wife attends caused no small amount of handwringing by both the
university and the student newspaper. The paper expressed outraged that the
university tolerated sexual harassers, even though the university fired the
man after a cursory investigation. The university was eventually forced to rehire
the man after an arbitrator ruled he had been dismissed without just cause.

The professor?s alleged victim asked a court for several hundred thousand
dollars in compensation to compensate for lost income; she claimed she was unable
to continue her studies after the incident, even though she kept taking classes
and got rather good grades. The judge handling the case did eventually award
her $50,000, but that probably didn’t even begin to cover her legal fees.

The most fascinating part of the case, however, was the nature of the alleged
sexual harassment. For a young woman to be so shattered as to be unable to continue
her academic career, many assumed the harassment must have been rather extreme
? perhaps he offered to give her better grades in exchange for sex or maybe
he repeatedly asked her out implying she might not do well in his class otherwise
or maybe the professor was an inveterate pervert who laced his conversations
with foul anecdotes and obscene comments.

In fact, the charges centered on four or five statements the professor made
which the student (and the university, before the arbitrator forced it to back
down) claimed constituted sexual harassment. What sort of horrible things was
the professor saying? Once, while meeting with students before the beginning
of a class, a woman student who was pregnant complained that she felt ugly because
she was gaining weight. The professor replied that he thought pregnant women
were sexy. The student making the harassment allegation claimed that simply
overhearing this comment transformed the classroom into a den of oppression
in which no learning could take place.

On another occasion during class, the professor started to draw a diagram
on the board, stopped, joked that the drawing looked a bit too much like a penis,
erased the drawing and redrew it, and then continued with his lecture.

If that weren?t enough to send any virtuous woman screaming to be protected
from this lecher, the alleged victim suffered from a medical condition known
as “lazy eye” in which poor motor control in the eyes results in one
or both wandering. The student complained to the professor about not getting
any relief for the problem from her physician. The professor consulted a journal
on the problem and photocopied a list he found giving several remedies that
some people had found worked for them ? one of those remedies, which apparently
does work for some people with the condition, was sexual intercourse.

These three incidents were presented in courts as the depraved rantings of
a man displaying a pattern of exploitation toward his female students. On the
basis of these and similar incidents, the university tried to fire the sociology
professor from his job and a judge entered a judgment for $50,000 against him.

Welcome to the bizarre world of academic sexual harassment that Daphne Patai
dissects and exposes in her astonishing book, Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment
and the Future of Feminism. Patai is certainly not the first person to examine
how what she calls the Sexual Harassment Industry (SHI) has spiraled out of
control, but hers is the first book to go beyond the outrageous incidents and
come up with a convincing — and oftentimes unnerving — explanation as to why
sexual harassment has become such an obsession at universities and colleges.

Her provocative thesis is this: within radical feminism there is a group of
scholars and activists who view heterosexuality and heterosexual behavior as
inherently oppressive to women. In often complex ways, the views of this radical
minority are being incorporated by and in turn drive the sexual harassment witch
hunts. In Patai’s view, then, sexual harassment regulations and enforcement
is becoming the activist arm of a philosophy that seeks to deconstruct and destroy
heterosexuality (even though those obsessively pursuing sexual harassment cases
are often unaware of the origins or logical outcomes of many of the ideas and
philosophies driving their activism).

That’s quite a thesis, and to be honest it?s one I doubted Patai could deliver,
but by the end of the book not only does she deliver in spades but Patai has
written one of the most concise and penetrating analyses of radical feminism
available. This is one of the few books I’ve ever read that gave me that so-called
“click” experience feminists are always talking about — Patai gets to the core
of radical feminist philosophy and exposes its assumptions like no one else
has.

And the major assumption of radical feminism is that heterosexuality is inherently
oppressive to women. Patai concedes that the number of feminists who actively
maintain this position is relatively small (if widely and repeatedly published),
but on the other hand she demonstrates they are rather influential and more
importantly that their assumptions, if not yet their conclusions, have gradually
seeped into the world view of those waging the war against sexual harassment.

Of course the radical feminists who view heterosexuality as inherently oppressive
include the usual suspects. Patai notes University of Michigan law professor
Catharine MacKinnon’s view that sexual harassment is simply a more extreme version
of the way men normally treat women. Patai also quotes from Michigan State University
communications professor, Marilyn Frye, who summarizes the critique of heterosexuality
in straightforward language:

Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual
woman’s erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens
to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices
defined and regulated by patriarchal kinship systems, by both civil and religious
law, and by strenuously enforced mores and deeply entrenched values and taboos.
Those definitions, regulations, values, and taboos are about male fraternity
and the oppression and exploitation of women. They are not about love, human
warmth, solace, fun, pleasure or deep knowledge between people.

For those women who might profess to enjoy being heterosexual, Frye notes such
objections should be taken no more seriously than one would take a slave who
maintains he enjoys his status and thus opposes abolition. Frye’s views are
reflected in writings by other radical feminists such as E. Kay Trimberger (“‘compulsory
heterosexuality’ is part of a power structure benefiting heterosexual males
at the expense of women and homosexuals”), Andrea Dworkin (“intercourse
with men as we know them ? requires an abortion of creativity and strength,
a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death”), Robin
West (who argues women are like hostages suffering from Stockholm syndrome who
identify with their heterosexual male captors), Bell Hooks (“the context
of these[heterosexual] intimate relationships is also the site of domination
and oppression”) and others.

The genius of Heterophobia is to demonstrate how the extreme views
of these radical feminists underpins much of the current regimen of sexual harassment.
As Patai notes, the SHI is not simply interested in stopping this or that particular
incidence of sexual harassment but rather many of its advocates seek a total
transformation of society through regulation of sexual expression.

Patai gets a lot of mileage out
of the popular sexual harassment manual, Sexual Harassment on Campus: A Guide
for Administrators, Faculty, and Students edited by Bernice Sandler and
Robert J. Stoops. Like similar such manuals, Sexual Harassment on Campus
argues that sexual harassment is pervasive at universities and colleges
and so must be rooted out with particular vigor. To back up the claim that sexual
harassment is pervasive, however, it must be converted into a totalizing ideology
so that just about every interaction between men and women can be interpreted
as sexual harassment — and the book obliges with a laundry list of items from
sexual innuendoes and jokes to email with any sort of sexual content to “not
taking seriously someone who experience sexual harassment” to “asking for sexual
behavior” right through and including outright acts of violence and rape. Not
believing a woman who alleges sexual harassment is placed on a continuum with
violently raping that woman.

As Patai aptly points out, the reason for this sort of laundry list is to
make everything from a professor’s attempt to cheer up a pregnant student to
interest in a student?s academic performance seem as suspect and offensive as
a violent rape (in fact Sandler herself claims rape is just an extreme form
of peer harassment).

To cover all the bases, the SHI even invented the concept of “grooming” to
ensure any and all possible comments or actions by a professor are captured
by its net. On this charge, a professor who tells a student that a paper she
wrote is rather exceptional or that the point she made in class was very good
can be accused of “grooming” or attempting to soften that student’s
resolve in order to later take advantage of her for sexual purposes.

Once sexual harassment leaves the realm of quid pro quo arrangements, in which
a woman’s job advancement is tied to her acquiescence to sexual acts, or truly
egregious examples of hostile workplaces, and instead becomes obsessed with
the sort of sexual banter and flirtation that both men and women regularly engage
in, it is already a long way toward internalizing the radical feminist claim
that heterosexuality itself is a danger to women. If, for example, asking a
woman if she would like to have sex can be considered harassment even when there
is no hint of a quid pro quo relationship, the radical anti-heterosexual feminists
have gone a long way toward achieving their goal of stigmatizing heterosexuality
itself. The underlying assumption of Sandler and her ilk is that heterosexual
sexuality is inherently dangerous for women.

As Patai sums it up, “Two fundamentally opposing world views are currently
in collision. One of them sees sex (especially male sexuality) as a perpetual
danger. The other sees sex as primarily a source of pleasure for both women
and men.” Much of the SHI clearly endorses the former proposition, especially
in its incorporation of overtly radical feminist ideas of power. Like the radical
feminists, the SHI operates on the assumption that women are always in a subordinate
relation to heterosexual men. In fact whereas male professors are seen as harassing
their female students, the concept of contra-power sexual harassment has been
developed to explain away sexual interaction between female professors and their
male students ? even when in a relationship with someone in a superior position
on the hierarchy, it is the man who is see as having all the power.

Patai sums up the SHI project correctly when she writes that “male sexual
interest is not simply being construed, or interpreted as “power.”
It has actually been redefined as such.”

And once this happens, who?s going to risk losing his job over a stray comment?
Many of the professors my wife deals with now refuse to meet with students of
the opposite sex behind closed doors. A woman professor I remember having several
fascinating discussions with behind her closed (and locked) door now refuses
to meet with students unless the door is wide open. The SHI has introduced the
paranoid style to the world of academia. Openness about feelings, honest detailed
evaluation of a student’s progress and other important parts of human, much
less academic, interactions are being curtailed by professors who feel they
need to cover themselves rather than end up denounced in language generally
reserved for violent rapists.

Of course like other totalizing social movements this one is doomed to failure,
as Patai recognizes; radical feminists are extremely unlikely, to say the least,
to make much of an inroad into stigmatizing sexuality before both men and women
rebel against such a stultifying ideology. But before that happens the main
victim of the SHI, besides the many men and a few women destroyed by it, is
likely to be feminism itself. The SHI is doing to feminism what its ultraconservative
opponents could only dream — it is turning the young women (and men) the movement
needs into its most effective opponents. Although radical feminists blame young
women’s disenchantment with feminism on a right-wing “backlash,” in fact it
is largely due to their accurate perception that too many feminists hold their
heterosexual lifestyle choices as inherently inauthentic and oppressive. This,
I believe, explains why so many young women hold political views that are traditionally
considered feminist, but at the same time refuse to self-identify themselves
as feminists. They endorse sexual equality, but (rightly) are uncomfortable
being associated with a movement increasingly beholden to its lunatic fringe.

As the principles of the radical feminists have filtered into mainstream feminist
organizations and philosophies, the turn away from feminism by young people
(and feminist veterans such as Patai) has only accelerated. If all these men
and women turned away from radical feminism and back to the goals of sexual
equality (the demand to treat men and women as individuals and not as cardboard
cutout representatives of their gender) this might be a good thing, but many
of these people are increasingly turning toward traditionalist conservative
anti-feminists such as F. Carolyn Graglia or Wendy Shallit who locate contemporary
feminism’s errors not where it belongs, in its rejection of sexual equality,
but instead in feminism’s rejection of traditional sex roles and sexual modesty.

It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that the biggest obstacle to sexual
equality in our society comes from the radical feminists and their mainstream
allies. Unlike the radical right, ridiculing the ideas of the radical feminists
is still not considered “politically correct.” When Pat Robertson
or Jerry Falwell tell us women aren?t making authentic choices by working outside
the home, pundits rightfully lambaste them. When radical feminists and the SHI
portray heterosexuality as inauthentic, dissent is suppressed (in fact it can
be construed as sexual harassment itself) in the name of being sensitive to
women. Heterophobia cuts through the myths and exposes the SHI?s totalitarian
agenda. It is an accurate warning of the dangerous road down which feminism
and the SHI are headed down. Hopefully reason will yet prevail and get feminism
back on the road of sexual equality rather its current obsession with sexual
correctness. Heterophobia points out where to begin for those willing
to listen.

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Loftus exposes ‘The Myth of Repressed Memory’

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The
Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse
By Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham
Amazon.Com price: $11.16

Can certain forms of psychological therapy implant false memories of sexual
abuse? Beginning in the early 1980s numerous people were accused and convicted
of extraordinarily horrific acts of sexual abuse based on memories recovered
in therapy, often with the aid of hypnosis and other controversial techniques
to aid memory recall. In their book The Myth of Repressed Memory, Elizabeth
Loftus and Katherine Ketcham are careful not to dismiss the possibility of repressed
memory outright but do present an array of evidence that suggests most recovered
memories are likely byproducts of such intensive therapy rather than memories
of actual events.

According to Loftus the fundamental error made by the recovered memory movement
is the view, probably rather common, that memory is like a video tape recorder
that begins rolling the moment we’re born (or even earlier). On this view, everything
a person ever experiences is stored somewhere in the brain just waiting to be
accessed. Loftus, who by profession is an expert on memory. As she sums up the
results of her research,

My work has helped to create a new paradigm of memory, shifting our view
from the video-recorder model, in which memories are interpreted as the literal
truth, to a reconstructionist model, in which memories are understood as a
creative blending of faction and fiction.

Although recovered memory advocates continue to hold that the memory operates
much like a VCR, Loftus’ claims are reinforced by our common sense about memories.
Most of us are aware that sometimes events are remembered in radically different,
often mutually contradictory ways, but different individuals. Loftus discusses
fascinating experiments and studies designed to test the malleability of memory
that confirm this common sense view.

Recovered memory advocates claim, for example, that there is something special
about traumatic events that ensures they are encoded relatively literally on
our memory, but there is little evidence for this claim. In one study, for example,
students were asked shortly after the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger
to describe where they were and what they were doing when they heard of the
disasters. Two-and-a-half years later they were asked again to describe the
situation where they first heard of the disaster. Not a single person remembered
the incident completely accurately and over a third of the students reported
wildly inaccurate memories of learning about the Challenger explosion. One student,
for example, originally told researchers she heard about the disaster while
in class and only heard the details after going back to her room. Less than
three years later, though, she told researchers she heard about the disaster
while watching TV in her dorm room with a roommate.

Most of the students strongly resisted the idea that their memories were inaccurate,
and insisted their current memories were more accurate than what they told researchers
shortly after the disaster.

But if memories can be altered and are not necessarily a literal depiction
of the past how do we determine if memories of sexual abuse are accurate? And
if they are not accurate how are false memories created?

For Loftus the test of true vs. false memories is relatively straightforward
— such memories should require corroboration to the extent that this is possible.
Many tales of recovered memories contain details that are obviously false because
details that can be corroborated are clearly false. Yet therapists and others
continue to insist they are accurate.

Loftus opens her book up with the Souza case, for example, in which an elderly
couple were convicted of sexually abusing their four-year-old grandchild after
the child underwent therapy. The child’s memories included such bizarre claims
as that her grandparents had stuck their hands and even their heads into her
vagina. This would have left numerous corroborative evidence that could easily
be verified with a cursory medical examination, but although such an examination
provided no physical evidence of the alleged abuse, the memory was still treated
as real by the therapist, prosecutor and ultimately a jury.

Oftentimes recovered memory advocates will claim a patient or patients has
corroboration for a repressed memory, but these almost always disappear on closer
examination. Often such corroboration consists of a brother or sister undergoing
recovered memory therapy who has discovered repressed memories similar to the
patients. Almost all of the high profile court cases involving repressed memory
involve significant details which are demonstrably false and fail the corroboration
test.

Because she prefers to approach the matter scientifically, though, Loftus
is unwilling to claim that significant repression of memory over the long term
is impossible, which tends to infuriate others active in fighting the recovered
memory movement who see it as the 20th century version of the
Salem witch trials or similar such social craze.

Why, though, would anyone come to have false memories of sexual abuse? How
could such memories possibly be created?

As Loftus methodically documents, such memories are the byproduct of assumptions
and practices of some therapists that in many ways make recovery of false memories
of sexual abuse all but inevitable. Loftus describes the creation of false memories
as a multistage process. First, recovered memory therapists tend to believe
that child sexual abuse is epidemic. As Judith Lewis Herman puts it, incest
is a “common and central female experience.” By expanding the definition of
incest to include kisses from parents or the overhearing of sexual jokes, etc.,
therapists come to believe that the woman who seeks therapy who has not been
sexually abused is the exception to the rule.

Second, the recovered memory therapist tend to believe that repression of
sexual abuse is also rampant. New Age guru John Bradshaw wrote in his widely
published columns that 60 percent of all incest victims repress their memories.
Author Renee Frederickson claims literally millions of people were sexually
abused as children but repressed their memories. Research that demonstrates
repression is extremely rare is derided as an attempt to “hide truth and support
lies” (to quote from Frederickson).

Third, the therapists tend to believe that one can recover from traumas and
psychological problems by recovering memories of sexual abuse through a variety
of techniques. Often therapists use symptoms list — do you have a lack of interest
in sex? Over eat? Abuse alcohol or drugs? Feel like life has no meaning? Afraid
to try new experiences? Then you might have been sexually abused but repressed
the memory. As Ellen Bass writes in The Courage to Heal, “If you think you were
abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.”

To retrieve the repressed memories, recovered memory therapists have developed
a wide range of techniques. Of course hypnosis is sometimes used, although studies
of hypnotized subjects demonstrate the such patients tend to describe what they
expect their therapist wants to hear. Imagistic work is common — the patient
is instructed to imagine being abused. After a couple weeks such patients tend
to accept this imagined abuse as memory of actual abuse. As Loftus writes, though,
“cognitive psychologists know that when people engage in exercises in imagination,
they begin to have problems differentiating between what is real and what is
imagined.”

The same technique is used for dreams — patients are encouraged to interpret
dreams as bits and memory fragments of actual sexual abuse. Sometimes therapists
use so-called body work. Although there is no evidence for it, recovered memory
therapists believe that even if the mind has forgotten the sexual abuse it is
preserved in physiological reactions. Loftus doesn’t dwell too far into this,
but in some cases the fact that a woman had a strong aversion to white sauces
or disliked bananas, for example, has been used as evidence in court that her
father forced her to perform oral sex.

Group therapy is often used which tends to reinforce and encourage the recovery
of memories of sexual abuse. As Loftus notes, it is dangerous to mix people
who have no memories of sexual abuse into a group therapy situation with people
who have memories of sexual abuse. The very dynamic of group therapy will encourage
the creation of memories as well as provide ample building blocks to construct
false memories.

The scary thing is that if recovered memory therapists hadn’t resulted in
the bizarre tales of Satanic abuse it probably would have gone on much long
before more people looked at it with a skeptical eye. Many recovered memory
advocates, especially those active in diagnosing and treating multiple personality
disorder, are convinced there are large, multigenerational Satanic cults who,
if their patients’ claims are taken literally, are responsible for tens of thousands
of deaths in the United States annually. These tales tend to be fantastic and
stretch the credulity of most people, with patients often claiming to have suppressed
almost all of their memories of childhood to cover the activities of the cult
that usually involved human sacrifice, baby killing, cannibalism, extensive
sexual abuse, etc. The fact that no corroborating evidence for such cults can
be found is usually taken by those who believe as further proof of just how
sinister and widespread they really are.

When The Myth of Repressed Memory was first published, the recovered
memory therapists and advocates clearly held sway. Since then, fortunately,
the tide has begun to turn against recovered memory. Several therapists have
lost multi-million dollar judgments in lawsuits by patients claiming the recovered
memory techniques outlined above constitute medical malpractice. Insurance companies
have in many areas stopped paying for recovered memory therapy and questionable
multiple personality disorder claims. Anyone who wants to read a scientifically
informed look at recovered memory that helped turn sentiment against widespread
repressed memory should begin with The Myth of Repressed Memory.

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FairTest’s claim that PSAT questions show gender bias unfounded

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By Elisabeth Carnell

Are women naturally stupid?

The National Center for Fair
and Open Testing (also known as FairTest) believes so, and last week it
forced one of the most prestigious scholarship programs to go along with
its view of female intellectual inferiority.

FairTest was angry at the
College Board, the organization responsible for the Preliminary Scholastic
Aptitude Test – a test given to almost 2 million high school students
every year. The scores on the test are used as the basis for awarding
the prestigious National Merit Scholarship.

Back in 1994 FairTest complained
the test discriminated against women. According to the group, although
more women take the test, men are disproportionately represented in the
ranks of finalists for the scholarships.

Girls are being screened
out at the semifinalist level,” claimed Pamela Zappardino, executive
director of the group.

After two years of harassing
the College Board and having the Department of Education breathing down
the agency’s neck, FairTest got College Board to agree to alter its test.

So what were the horrible
sexist methods the College Board was using that discriminated against
women? The test contained too many multiple choice questions.

That’s right – it’s FairTest’s
position that multiple choice questions are inherently biased against
women, whereas essay questions are free of gender bias. The woman asked
to pick from a list of choices the significance of the Magna Carta apparently
freezes due to some genetic brain defect, but if asked to write a few
sentences about it, all of a sudden the defect is alleviated and she can
proceed normally.

This may sound a bit odd for
those unfamiliar with the current crop of fundamentalist feminists, but
it’s right in line with the shift by mainstream feminism away from the
principle of equality before the law regardless of sex to the slippery,
dangerous notion of fairness.

Equality is a rather simple
legal principle – every member of society gets treated alike regardless
of sex. It shouldn’t matter whether the new cop being hired is a woman
or a man. The important thing is to hire the best law enforcement officer
available.

Fairness is the notion that
when equality leads to a result some group doesn’t particularly like,
the government should intervene to set things right.

Fairness and equality are
principles inherently at odds with one another – feminists make a wrong
choice in rejecting equality to embrace the temporary comfort of fairness.
It can be scary realizing it is your performance, not your sex or race
or other factor which will determine how you are rewarded. It’s also an
ideal feminists used to embrace before political expediency became more
important than principle.

It does more than merely demean
women – it leads to pointless allegations. Despite its claims, for example,
FairTest has little substantive evidence that more men were semifinalists
for the National Merit Scholarship than women. In fact, according to the
College Board, while a small gap between the sexes on the PSAT did exist
several years ago, it all but vanished in the 1990s.

So how did FairTest reach
its conclusion? It had a list of the names of some National Merit Scholarship
semifinalists which did not identify the sex of the winner. It then basically
guessed at which winners had “female” names and which had “male”
names. So in FairTest’s world, Morgan Freeman is a man and so is Morgan
Fairchild. Darryl Strawberry’s a man and so is Darryl Hannah (perhaps
explaining why her relationship with John Kennedy Jr. was doomed). Lynn
Redgrave is a woman and so is Lynn Swan.

The problem here becomes evident.
In a world where feminizing traditionally male names and vice versa has
become increasingly prevalent, such a methodology is hilariously inept.

The moral of the story is
that not all women are inherently stupid – reserve that label for the
inept researchers at FairTest.

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Steinem finds ‘truth’ behind Valentine’s Day love fools

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By Elisabeth
Carnell

“You’re just another victim.”
-House of Pain

Millions of American women
will celebrate Valentine’s Day Friday with their boyfriends, husbands
and significant others, all the while completely oblivious to how oppressive,
degrading and dangerous this holiday is.

Valentine’s Day, of course,
aims at celebrating romance – that complex dance between two people falling
in love. What most women don’t realize is that romance is an unnatural
idea created by patriarchal institutions to keep women in their place.

Gloria Steinem, long-time
feminist activist, is one of the few people to see through the surface
of romance to expose the debilitating undercurrents it entails. She describes
the horrors of romance in her 1992 book, Revolution From Within.

Romance, according to Steinem,
is little more than a political ideology which reinforces the patriarchy.
“Romance itself,” she writes, “serves a larger political
purpose by offering at least a temporary reward for gender roles and threatening
rebels with loneliness and rejection.”

It’s so obvious when you think
about it – romance is a form of blackmail. Either conform to the patriarchy
or forget about having any more dates. What an insidious plot! But it
gets even worse.

“(Romance) also minimizes
the very anti-patriarchal and revolutionary possibility that women and
men will realize each other’s shared humanity when we are together physically
for the sexual and procreative purposes society needs.”

Whew! Steinem’s hit the mother
lode. Now it’s clear why men never quite seemed human. It could have been
just a misunderstanding, but now Steinem has proven it’s the oppressive
ideology of romance. Now you know too – pass it on.

By now you might be thinking
something’s strange here. Some women don’t seem to find romance such a
bad thing. A few even seem to be enjoying it! How could that be? Leave
it to Steinem to peer into our hearts and diagnose the true problem.

“The Roman ‘bread and
circuses’ way of keeping the masses happy – and the French saying that
‘marriage is the only adventure open to the middle class’ – might now
be updated. The circus of romance distracts us with what is, from society’s
point of view, a safe adventure.”

Romance is like a bad sitcom.
It lulls you to sleep so you forget how depressing the evening news was
and makes you forget you’re dating evil male oppressors. Love truly is
blind!

Romance does something far
worse than merely further women’s oppression, however. It turns them into
bloodthirsty killers. It’s amazing no one noticed the connection before.

“Though women mainly
become violent in self-defense or in defense of their children, the power
of romantic obsession is so great – and women are so much more subject
to it – that even ‘feminine’ nonviolent conditioning can be overcome.
When women do commit violent crimes, they are even more likely than a
man’s to be attributable to romance rather than economics, whether that
means the rare crime in which a woman kills out of jealousy or the more
frequent one in which a woman is an accessory to a crime initiated by
her husband or lover.”

What an incredible explanation
for violent crime by women. Why do some women kill? Romance made them
do it. Sure beats the Twinkie defense, though the famous Fuhrman-frame
up is still far and away the best answer.

This does help explain an
interesting result of studies of violence between couples. Researchers
such as Richard Gelles report that women and men tend to commit violent
acts against each other at almost identical rates. This is a mystifying
result until you realize both are slaves to the romantic impulse. Then
it all starts to fit together.

Don’t think you’re getting
off easy if you’re gay or lesbian. The problem with gays and lesbians,
according to Steinem, is that not only do they internalize the bad romantic
habits their parents might have engaged in, but some gay and lesbian couples
exaggerate romantic gender roles.

“Sometimes, gender roles
produce an exaggerated version known as doubling, in which two men together
become twice as aggressive, unempathetic, unavailable for intimacy, but
promiscuous about sex; or two women together may become twice as passive,
dependent on one another, and focused on intimacy, with or without sex.”

So this Valentine’s Day remember
– you may think you’re an independent woman and you may even think women
have made enormous progress over the last 30 years, but as far as Steinem’s
concerned, you’re just another victim.

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Joan Scott and Thomas Reid: The Problem of Historical Idealism

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Feminist historians and feminist historiography have begun to make headway
into the discipline of history. Historians such as Joan Scott are said to offer
a fresh, innovative perspective on historical inquiry.

This paper examines Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History
in which she lays out her arguments and proscriptions for a feminist theory
of history. It is the contention of this paper that rather than any new or unique
ideas, Scott’s historiography represents a regression to the ideas and
notions advocated by the idealist philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Scott merely updates and adds a few twists on George Berkeley’s extreme skepticism.

Idealism is highly suspect when applied to the direct experience of
the world, and, this paper will argue, all but incoherent when applied to historical
inquiry. As a counter to Scott’s idealism, the works of Scottish philosopher
Thomas Reid will be examined. Reid was a severe critic of the idealists and
offered an alternative which is easily adapted to a historical context to not
only refute Scott’s idealism, but also to point the way to how a positive
historiography might be formulated.

The Role of Gender and Knowledge

For Scott, as with most feminist scholars, gender is the key concept.
Scott defines gender as a special type of knowledge about sexual differences.
To understand how this differs from standard ideas of gender or sex requires
understanding Scott’s peculiar theory of knowledge.

Borrowing from French philosopher Michel Foucault, Scott makes several
claims about knowledge. First, “such knowledge is not absolute or true,
but always relative.” Knowledge, especially historical knowledge, in this
sense is not to be mistaken for apprehending in the mind facts and ideas which
correspond to things existing in the world. Instead knowledge in this sense
involves little more than knowing the socially-agreed up on “correct”
answers to specific questions.

Second, since it is not absolute and does not correspond to anything
actually existing in the world, knowledge must be wholly socially constructed
by institutions and power relationships within society. The interaction between
these various institutions of meaning creation means knowledge is “produced
in complex ways within large epistemic frames that themselves have an (at least
quasi-) autonomous history.”

The upshot of these first two claims is that according to Scott’s
view, knowledge cannot exist absent social organization. Knowledge exists only
in a social context.

After wading through all of Scott’s jargon, this boils down to
little more than the One Way Street theory of knowledge. There is, of course,
no inherent property which requires that some roads be one way rather than two-way,
nor no way to determine which roads are actually one-way rather than two-way
without appropriate signs. That a particular road is designated one way is in
all cases socially constructed knowledge — it is impossible for such knowledge
to exist a priori. What Scott asks us to believe is that almost all
knowledge is constructed in this way — exclusively through the agreed upon
arbitrary conventions developed over long period of time through the interactions
of people and institutions in particular societies.

It is this theoretical structure which leads Scott to conclude that the
concept of gender completely excludes any real biological differences between
men and women. In Scott’s view, physical and/or psychological differences
between men and women in and of themselves imply nothing about the concepts
of “man” and “woman” — any conceptual difference assigned
to the concepts by historians is entirely socially constructed. “These
meanings vary across cultures, social groups, and time since nothing about the
body, including women’s reproductive organs, determines unequivocally how
social divisions will be shaped.”

Rather than sexual difference being used to explain patterns of social
organization, it is social organization which instead explains sexual difference.
Since history and historical inquiry are part of the social organization, it
too is responsible in part for determining the particular context of sexual
difference. A chief goal of feminist historiography, then, is to deconstruct
existing history and historiography to analyze how “history’s representations
of the past construct gender for the present.”

Feminist Politics

One of the things that jumps out at the critical reader of Scott’s
book is how boldly she not only concedes but actually celebrates the fact that
the aforementioned principles are adopted by feminist historians mainly because
they serve overtly political goals. Not since the nationalist historians argued
that history was a tool to be used to promote the state/nation have historians
been as bold as feminist theorists are outlining the imperative that history
serve political ends.

Claiming that most historians in the United States are not trained to
analyze the theories of history they use, Scott explains how she delved into
theoretical considerations to alleviate her “frustration” at the lack
of progress in women’s history.

My motive was and is one I share with other feminists and it is avowedly
political: to point out and change inequalities between women and men. It is
a motive, moreover, that feminists share with those concerned to change the
representation of other groups left out of history because of race, ethnicity
and class as well as gender.

It is not enough, for example, to merely update histories to correct
for past bias which may have excluded women from consideration for not other
reason than that they were women. Instead the whole edifice of history, including
the very concept of categorizing people as “men” or “women”
must be challenged as discriminatory in and of itself (Scott 4). As Scott puts
it, “a more radical feminist politics (and a more radical feminist history)
seems to me to require a more radical epistemology.”

Scott asserts that traditional historical methodology cannot effectively
deal with the problem of gender because no “unanimity” exists for
the category of gender as it, she suggests, does for class (through Marx’s model
of economic determination and historical change) as well as a whole host of
sociolinguistic determinations and definitions that defy description of the
subject, and therefore, prevent any accurate histories from addressing it.

For the most part, the attempts of historians to theorize about gender
have remained within traditional social scientific frameworks, using long-standing
formulations that provide universal causal explanations. These theories have
been limited at best because they tend to contain reductive or overly simple
generalizations that undercut not only history’s disciplinary sense of the complexity
of social causations but also feminist commitments to analyses that will lead
to change.

The suggested analyses employed by feminist historians are only three:
the feminist attempt to discover and define the origins of the patriarchy, the
Marxist tradition of economic action and reaction, and the psychoanalysis of
history popularized by the French post-structuralists and the American object-relations
theorists. None of these, however, can be shown to consistently give the sort
of explanation that the scientific methodologically writing of history requires.

What This Means for Historiography

Taken together Scott’s position would dramatically change history
— perhaps render it both impossible and irrelevant. As Scott concedes, her
theories render history little more than a discipline entirely self-reflective
of the particular historian.

It [Scott’s attack on objectivity] also undermines the historian’s
ability to claim neutral mastery or to present any particular story as if it
were complete, universal, and objectively determined. Instead, if one grants
that meanings are constructed through exclusions, one must acknowledge and take
responsibility for the exclusions involved in one’s own project. Such a
reflexive, self-critical approach makes apparent the particularistic status
of any historical knowledge and the historian’s active role as a producer
of knowledge. It undermines claims for authority based on totalizing explanations,
essentialized categories of analysis (be they human nature, race, class, sex,
or “the oppressed”, or synthetic narratives that assume an inherent
unity for the past.

What is left of history, however, if there is not basis for any objective
knowledge? Scott claims that this sort of deconstruction does not necessarily
lead to the destruction of history as well, writing,

Although deconstruction has been labeled ‘nihilistic’ and ‘destructive’
by its critics, these epithets seem to me to be substitutes for serious evaluations
of its possibilities. It may be that some deconstructive critics pursue an endless
exposure of contradiction and are thereby unable to endorse or comfortably advocate
a political program of their own. But there are also evident examples of a politics
empowered by this approach, politics that are not only critical of existing
social hierarchies but able to point out the premises of their operations; politics
that are self-consciously critical of their own justifications and exclusions
… Their advantage is an ability to address institutional and intellectual
questions in the same way, to refuse such oppositions as those between materialism
and idealism, subjects studied and disciplinary studies of them, by approaching
all of these as aspects of the production of knowledge and power — conceived
not as a unitary process but as multiple and conflicting processes.

Certainly, however, history is left with little when the subject itself
shifts and twists in the wind, unable to be pinned down, and therefore, analyzed.

…’women’ is historically, discoursively constructed, and always
relatively to other categories which themselves change; ‘women’ is a volatile
collectivity in which female persons can be very differently positioned, so
that the apparent continuity of the subject of; ‘women’ isn’t to be relied on;
‘women’ is both synchronically and diachronically erratic as a collectivity,
while for the individual, ‘ being a woman’ is also inconstant, and can’t provide
an ontological foundation.

The Case Against Scott’s Feminist Theory of History

Is what Scott is proposing a reasonable alternative historiography? The
answer must be no. Despite her claims to the contrary it is hard to see how
the philosophical framework she suggests leads to anything but nihilism.

Like the idealists alluded to in the beginning of this paper, Scott and
her ilk end up arguing that there is no reliable based for any sort of certainty
about knowledge. As George Berkeley asserted,

…it follows, there is not any other substance than spirit, or that
which perceives … But say you, though the ideas themselves do not exist without
the mind, yet there may be things like them whereof they are copies or resemblances,
which things exist without the mind, in an unthinking substance. I answer, an
idea can be like nothing but an idea; a colour or figure can be like nothing
but another colour or figure. If we look but ever so little into our thoughts,
we shall find it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between
our ideas.

Whereas the idealists criticized sensory perception because the senses
are demonstrably fallible, Scott asks us to essentially reject the idea that
true historical knowledge is possible since the perception/creation of knowledge
almost always occurs in a social context and such knowledge is also demonstrably
fallible. Just as it is an enormous leap from the position that our senses sometimes
deceive us to the qualitatively different claim that we should never trust them,
so it is not clear that merely because some knowledge perceived/created in a
social context in the past has been erroneous and some knowledge is likely to
prove erroneous in the future, therefore we should reject even the possibility
that any true knowledge can exist in a social construct.

Deconstructionist and postmodern arguments rarely even attempt to justify
the logical leap from the rather mundane proposition that bias among historians
exists to the radical proposition that the presence of such bias makes a true
history impossible. Scott in fact seems to confuse things by imagining the two
separate propositions are identical or at the very least naturally follow from
each other. They do not.

The obvious criticisms of using this as a basis for historiography is
that those who promote it are never able to do so consistently. When Scott claims
that “such knowledge is not absolute or true, but always
relative” (emphasis added), she begs the question of just how committed
to the true relativism of knowledge even hardcore deconstructionists can be.

Consider how Scott tries to get out of the box of hardcore skepticism.
After saying all knowledge is socially constructed she runs the risk of having
critics turn her own analytical tools against her and point out that her own
claims about history are equally invalid or valid as the “patriarchal”
histories she is seeking to overturn. The best she can do is argue that the
nihilistic treadmill of successive deconstructions is actually an advantage.

It is precisely by exposing the illusion of the permanence or enduring
truth of any particular knowledge of sexual difference that feminism necessarily
historicizes history and politics and opens the way for change. If gender is
to be rethought, if new knowledge about sexual difference is to be produced
(knowledge that calls into question even the primacy of the male/female opposition),
then we must also be willing to rethink the history of politics and the politics
of history.

But of course any knowledge produced by this sort of cyclical synthesis
is also simply not true. In an effort to escape the “oppressive” edifice
of permanent truth, Scott creates a historical framework in which the carpet
is ripped out from under historians only to be replaced and ripped out again
ad nauseum with no hope of improvement. That Scott is unwilling to
characterize this process as nihilistic suggest it is she who is unwilling to
truly examine closely the framework she creates.

The other major problem with Scott’s theory of history is that it
is non-falsifiable. The principle of falsification for scientific theories holds
that no theory should be able to explain all possible outcomes; as defined by
Ronald Pine discussing philosophy and the scientific method,

…a scientific theory must be refutable in principle; a circumstance
or a set of circumstances must potentially exist such that if observed it would
logically prove the theory wrong.

The problem with such theories is that there is simply no way to demonstrate
whether they are correct or not by appealing to the evidence, because no matter
what is offered the theory will be able to explain it.

Any historiographical theory which does not adhere to this requirement
does not deserve to be considered a valid historiographical theory. Marxist
historiography or cyclical historiographical explanations are falsifiable, for
example. It is possible to examine evidence from the world and compare it to
those respective historiographical frameworks and in principle at least prove
them wrong. Many people, including this writer, for example, believe that both
the Marxist and cyclical theories of history have been falsified. Obviously
others disagree, but at least in principle neither theory explains all possible
outcomes.

The feminist theory Scott advocates lacks this feature. It is simply
impossible under any circumstances to demonstrate through evidentiary means
that the theory is false. By effectively explaining any and all such outcomes,
this sort of postmodernist theory should not be considered as a valid historiographical
theory.

Scott makes excellent use of this particular aspect of her theory. Early
on she claims that sex differences are not biological but are socially constructed.
It is possible to provide a wealth of data and information that cast doubt on
that claim, but Scott can dismiss such evidence easily by simply noting that
any evidence offered in rebuttal is also “social constructed” and
not actually true.

Of course it is also not false which brings up the flip-side of this
problem for Scott. Just as her opponents can never prove her theory false, similarly
she can never demonstrate their theories to be false. Consider, for example,
a historian who might argue that sexual difference is a result of female’s
average lower physical performance in the areas of strength and endurance. Scott
can never consistently say these theories are false — the most she can claim
is they are alternative socially constructed theories which have exactly the
same truth value as her own.

After cutting through her jargon and logic, this is where Scott’s
theory leaves us. The feminist theorists who adopts Scott’s framework can
never demonstrate that her theory is true while an objective theory of history
is false, and must inevitably concede that all possible explanations of history
are equally valid or invalid.

If this is not nihilism, at the very least it should be an extremely
uncomfortable position to end up holding.

An Alternative to the Feminist-Idealist Historiography

Thomas Reid (1710-96) is known as the founder of the “Scottish School
of Common Sense” and is best known for his critique of the idealists such
as Berkeley who, like Scott, attempted to undercut the very idea of knowledge
based on a reality accessible to human beings.

Many of Reid’s criticisms apply amazingly well to the postmodernist/deconstructionist
effort to deny any true reality. In his Essay on the Intellectual Powers,
Reid laid out a theory of judgment that provides an excellent foundational model
for any historiographical theory.

To formulate any theory of knowledge, according to Reid, we must begin
with first principles. But how do we judge first principles to determine whether
or not they are correct? Reid holds, and I believe quite correctly, that we
use a “common sense” faculty to judge first principles as believable
or absurd.

We may observe that opinions which contradict first principles, are
distinguished, from other errors, by this: — That they are not only false but
absurd; and, to discountenance absurdity, Nature hath given us a particular
emotion — to wit, that of ridicule… .

Contrary to the arguments of people such as Scott, people do appear to
inherit certain fundamental non-primitive cognitive functions, and although
there is no room here to make a sociobiological and cognitive defense of Reid’s
claim, it is difficult to imagine how such basically held beliefs, such as the
law of non-contradiction, could ever arise if they must do so entirely in a
social context.

Reid provides a lengthy discussion on how people can inspect first principles
and determine if they are true or false, but only one need concern us here –
the ad absurdum argument. As Reid explains it,

In this kind of proof, which is very common in mathematics, we suppose
the contradictory proposition to be true. We trace the consequences of that
supposition in a train of reasoning; and, if we find any of its necessary consequences
to be manifestly absurd, we conclude the supposition from which it followed
to be false; and, therefore its contradictory to be true.

I believe this has already been done with Scott’s version of feminist
history, but merely demonstrating her theory to be absurd doesn’t provide an
alternative to show how historical inquiry should proceed. Fortunately, Reid
provides the way to a positive theory of knowledge which serves this goal admirably.

Reid notes that there are two sorts of truths. The first is necessary
truth, and one hopes even Scott would not be willing to deny that a necessary
truth is necessarily true. That one-third of 33 is 11 is a necessary truth.

What historians must deal with, however, are contingent truths. They
may or may not be true, and they may or may not be true over time. A statement
such as, “Bill Clinton is the president of the United States,” is
an example of a contingent truth. The statement may be either true or false,
and its truth value will change over time (it may be true today, but will likely
not be true in 2002).

The feminist-idealist approach to the non-necessary nature of contingent
truths is simply to throw their hands up in the air and declare the existence
of truths impossible.

Instead, Reid argues that one of the first principles relating to contingent
truths is that we can rely upon the faculties of reason to distinguish between
truth and error.

Another first principle is — That the natural faculties, by which
we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious. If any man should demand
a proof of this, it is impossible to satisfy him. For, suppose it should be
mathematically demonstrated, this would signify nothing in this case; because,
to judge of a demonstration, a man must trust his faculties, and take for granted
the very thing in question.

This does not guarantee that any particular claim about a historical
fact is correct, but it does guarantee that it is at least theoretically possible
to discern whether or not a given statement about history is true or false.

At this point we have arrived at the antithesis of Scott’s claims about
historiography. If this analysis is sound, it follows that there do exist a
set of statements about history which are objectively better than all other
combinations of statements, since we can always judge competing explanations
of history and, at least in theory, objectively value the truth of statements
such as “History X is a superior explanation of events than history Y.”

Numerous obstacles both psychological and material may prevent historians
from ever reaching that plateau, but to dismiss it as a chimera and instead
attempt to construct a meaningful theory of non-meaning as Scott does takes
history in the wrong direction. Rather than take future historiographies into
the wasteland of postmodernism and deconstructionism, instead history must remain
informed by objective, scientific (thought not necessarily positivist) theories
of knowledge in order to remain relevant.

Bibliography

Berkeley, George. “Principles of Human Knowledge, part 1.”
Central Readings in the History of Modern Philosophy, Robert Cummins
and David Owen, ed. Belmont CA: Wadsworth Publishing, Co., 1992.

Breisach, Ernst. Historiography. 2d ed. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human
sciences. New York: Vintage Press, 1973.

Lehrer, Keith. Thomas Reid. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Pine, Ronald C. Science and the Human Prospect. Belmont CA: Wadsworth
Publishing Co., 1989.

Reid, Thomas. Inquiry and Essays. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Co., Inc., 1983.

Riley, Denise. Am I that Name?: Feminism and the category of ‘women’
in history. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Scott, Joan Wallach. Gender and the Politics of History. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1988.

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Elders just as intolerant of women’s rights as groups, people she criticizes

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By Elisabeth Carnell

When former U.S. Surgeon General
Jocelyn Elders visited Western Michigan University last week, she demonstrated
that so-called liberals could be just as bigoted, intolerant and misinformed
about the choices women make as any right wing Pat Buchanan-wannabe.

Elders demonstrated the problem
with current pro-choice politics – abortion rights advocates believe in
choice for women only as long as women go along with a prescribed political
platform. Some women choose, for example, to be pro-life. Not all women
agree with the position that abortion is always morally defensible.

Yet Elders, despite her pro-choice
rhetoric, believes dissent from her abortion position cannot be tolerated.
She told her audience at WMU that anyone wanting to be an obstetrician-gynecologist
should be trained to perform abortions and, “those who choose not
to perform abortions should not be OB/GYNs.”

Is this what women struggled
for in this nation for more than 250 years? To have the former surgeon
general argue to exclude women from a profession if they don’t toe the
ideological line on abortion?

Do we really need to reduce
women’s health care choices by excluding pro-life individuals from being
OB/GYNs?

Elders accuses Congress of
being too busy with “vaginal politics” to consider real health
care reform, but she is also guilty of using gender as a political smokescreen
to advance ideas harmful to women.

Elders also engages in the
radical feminist fetish for false statistical measures.

Many women’s activists apparently
don’t believe problems like domestic violence are serious or stark enough
in themselves so they insist on exaggerating their extent.

So Elders makes the ludicrous
claim that 30 percent of emergency room visits by women are the result
of domestic violence ­ five times the reported level. While emergency
room statistics do clearly underestimate the level of domestic violence
incidents they see, Elders loses all credibility with her absurdly large
figure.

The problem with using this
and other inflated figures thrown around about domestic violence, aside
from being intellectually dishonest, is the danger that when people learn
the figures are exaggerated they may discount the true severity and extent
of domestic violence.

Similarly Elders perpetuates
the myth that women make only 75 percent of what men make, leaving people
to draw the conclusion that sexual discrimination explains the difference.

In fact when educational level,
years of experience and type of work are held constant, women make almost
as much as men. For example, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
demonstrates that of people aged 27-33 who have never had children, women’s
earnings are almost 98 percent of men’s.

Elders’ sleight of hand is
like comparing a male engineer with a decade of on the job experience
to a female high school dropout staring her first job.

Yes, a pronounced difference
in income is likely to exist between the two, but blaming that difference
on sexual discrimination is absurd.

The irony of such statistics
is that women have made incredible economic gains in large part due to
the pressure and attention feminists gave sexual discrimination in the
1960s. Today women outnumber men in graduate schools, and the percentage
of women in the labor force has increased from 26 percent in 1940 to 59
percent in 1995.

Rather than take credit for
the improvement and perhaps engage in a well-deserved round of self-congratulation,
the most vocal elements of the mainstream feminists movements must pretend
women’s positions in the economy have gotten dramatically worse. Those
who disagree with this analysis are relegated to being part of a backlash
which exists largely in the imaginations of a few prominent feminist authors.

Elders is an excellent example
of this doom and gloom feminism. In her term as surgeon general and her
public appearances since her forced resignation, Elders comes across as
a mirror image of the paternalistic right-wing forces she rails against.

Like them she has little use
for the choices women actually make for themselves. Instead she prefers
to substitute her own revealed truth about how society should be ordered,
accompanied with an irrational faith in big government to accomplish her
goals.

It would be nice if people
like Elders would actually listen to and trust the women they claim to
represent rather than constantly talking past them.

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Quotes from Mary Daly

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What then can the label anti-male possibly mean when applied
to works that expose these facts and invite women to free our Selves?
… The courage to be logical — the courage to name — would require
that we admit to ourselves that males and males only are the originators,
planners, controllers, and legitimators of patriarchy. Patriarchy is the
homeland of males; it is Father Land; and men are its agents. … The
fact is that we live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic
“civilization” in which men collectively victimize women, attacking us
as personifications of their own paranoid fears, as The Enemy. Within
this society it is men who rape, who sap women’s energy, who deny women
economic and political power. … As a creative crystallizing of the movement
beyond the State of Patriarchal Paralysis, this book is an act of Dis-possession;
and hence, in a sense beyond the limitations of the label anti-male, it
is absolutely Anti-androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally
Female”
-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism

“Males do indeed deeply identify with “unwanted fetal tissue,” for they sense as their own condition the role of controller, possessor,
inhabitor of women. Draining female energy, they feel “fetal.” Since this
perpetual fetal state is fatal to the Self of the eternal mother (Hostess),
males fear women’s recognition of this real condition, which would render
them infinitely “unwanted.” For this attraction/need of males for female
energy, seen for what it is, is necrophilia — not in the sense of love
for actual corpses, but of love for those victimized into a state of living
death”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.59.

“Male hatred of women expressed in such fetishized forms
hides the deeper dimensions of envy, which remain unacknowledged. Thus
we hear one male say of another’s “project” or invention, “That’s his
baby.” We also hear men describe the books, papers, articles of other
men as “pregnant” with meaning. Such deceptive expressions provide clues
to the deeper levels of deception. They suggest that the procreative power
which is really envied do in fact belong primarily to the realm of mind
/ spirit / creativity. Yet this envy is not necessarily a desire to be
creative, but rather to draw — like fetuses — upon another’s (the mother’s)
energy as a source. Thus men who identify as mothers (that is, supermothers
controlling biological mothers) are really protecting their fetal selves.
They wish to be the fetuses/astronauts and the supermothers/ground commanders,
but not the biological vessels/spaceships which they relegate to the role
of controlled containers, and later discard as trash.”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.60

“It is impossible to miss symptoms of this male fertility
syndrome in the multiple technological “creations” (artificial wombs)
of the Fathers — such as homes, hospitals, corporate offices, airplanes,
spaceships — which they inhabit and control. Moreover, these male-constructed
artificial wombs are ultimately more tomb-like than womb-like, manifesting
the profoundly necrophilic tendencies of technocracy.”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.61

“Yet another application of this myth is the medically masterminded
maze of lethal “choices” among surgical, chemical, and mechanical solutions
to the Contraceptive Problem. It is obvious to Hags that few gynecologists
recommend to their heterosexual patients the most foolproof of solutions,
namely Mister-ectomy. It is women who choose to be agents of be-ing who
have pointed out that tried and true, and therefore, taboo, “method.” The Spinsters who propose this way by our be-ing, liv-ing, speak-ing can
do so with power precisely because we are not preoccupied with ways to
get off the hook of the heterosexually defined contraceptive dilemma.
“However, all females, from four-month-old babies to octogenarians are
potential victims in a rapist society whose male members function as “lethal
organs.”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.239

“It is also of obvious significance that other lethal purifying
medicine is working to ensure an even earlier extinction of women. Now
that the model of female moral purity has been converted into pure sexual
availability, the Purifiers have produced The Pill. This is known to increase
risks of …[long list of claims] … Premenopausal Pill-popping thus
prepares the way for premature death, the ultimate purification.”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.250

“Since women on average survive men by a significant number
of years, it should not be surprising that gynecology is functioning to
remedy this unacceptable situation.”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.260

“The gynecological profession and the popularizing media
have combined their efforts to make the poisoning of women appear acceptable.
Just as popping The Pill is both “normal” and normative for younger women,
so is estrogen replacement therapy for their mothers and older sisters.”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.286

“She [the enlightened woman] detects the pattern that is
behind the deceptive patterns; she dis-covers the necrophilic nature of
the fear in which he is fixated, which is also the fear he projects upon/injects
into his snow white victims. This is not the fear of dying but the fear
of living. As Valerie Solanas lucidly points out: “The male likes death
— it excites him sexually and, already dead inside, he wants to die.” This statement would seem to be adequately substantiated/documented by
the state of this male-controlled planet. If patriarchal males loved life,
the planet would be different.”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.352

On the Apollo space program:

“While overtly promoting the oppressive ideal of the
nuclear family, this space spectacular subliminally appealed to erotic
fantasies allegedly taboo in hterosexist society.”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.63.

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Controlling female sexuality wrong

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By Elisabeth Carnell

Opponents of Deja Vu ads in
the Western Herald repeatedly claim they act in the best interest of “our
community.” But instead, they attempt to transform Western Michigan
University into a place hostile to those who disagree with their agenda.

Like all patriarchal movements,
the Bertha Capen Reynolds Society seeks to institutionalize limits on
women’s activities and speech, and then ostracize those who refuse to
conform to its image of “womanly” behavior.

Although the BCRS is allegedly
a “progressive” group, its agenda is every bit as paternalistic
and smothering as anything proposed by the Christian Coalition of the
American Family Association.

Despite the BCRS’ assertions
to the contrary, there is a paucity of credible evidence connecting sexually
explicit materials to violence against women. Not only are there few or
no demonstrated links between pornography and sexual violence against
women, as stated in a 1993 report by The National Research Council’s Panel
on Understanding and Preventing Violence, but researchers Larry Baron
and Murray Straus have found a negative correlation between pornography
and rape in some areas. Countries that have banned pornography, such as
Iran and Saudi Arabia, often have some of the highest rates of violence
against women. Countries where pornography is easily acquired, such as
Denmark and Germany, have extremely low rates of violence against women.

The BCRS seeks to solve the
social problem of sexual violence by controlling female sexuality. Like
the Victorians before them, the BCRS claims depictions and expressions
of female sexuality are responsible for rape, violence and a while host
of other social ills. It asserts that if all sexually suggestive images
of women can be expunged from the media, all will be well.

This ideological position
is extremely discomforting.

First, this makes me uncomfortable
as a woman because the BCRS furthers the “objectification” of
women’s bodies with its claim that sexually suggestive pictures of women
by definition objectify women. This is nothing more than a new way to
say men are incapable of seeing women as anything but sexual objects.
Rather than try to change the way men think, the BCRS wishes to change
the way women look, shifting the blame for rape and violence to women.

Just as men centuries ago
dismissed the woman who celebrated her sexually as a whore, negating any
other aspect of her personality, so does the BCRS deny the notion that
someone can view a sexually attractive woman and see her as a whole person.
This amounts to little more than a contemporary, politically correct version
of misogyny.

Second, this makes me uncomfortable
as a rape survivor because the BCRS perpetuates the myth that women want
to be raped by placing the blame for rape on the sexually explicit material
men read instead of on the men themselves. If this is true, however, why
would women consent to pose for these sexually explicit images? Why would
women allow this material to exist? The implied answer is that women who
pose for or defend these images must secretly want to be raped.

If it is these sexually explicit
images of women that are responsible for the sexual violence against women,
it must be women’s sexuality that is causing these helpless men to scour
the countryside raping indiscriminately. Need women be protected from
their own sexuality? Need men be protected from women’s sexuality?

The continuing problem of
rape is one of the biggest reasons to oppose the BCRS’ agenda. If the
BCRS convinces people that it is pornography, not men, that causes rape,
the issue of how responsible men are for rape becomes a real issue.

If viewing pornography causes
men to view women as mere objects to rape, it becomes difficult to hold
individual men responsible for their actions. Already, feminist scholars
such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon have moved to theories
of crime that deny that men are responsible for such acts.

I am outraged by this attempt
to shift the responsibility from the perpetrator of the crime to a non-proven
causal agent. It is not the women in magazines or on stages that raped
me. It is not a newspaper that ran a Deja Vu ad or a videotape that raped
me.

It is those individual men
who are responsible for their actions, it is those men who raped me.

Punish crime, not speech.

Punish rapists, not women.

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Deja Vu ads under irrational attack

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By Elisabeth Carnell

“As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible
to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.”
– Jeremy Bentham

Who should decide what the
Western Herald prints? If the Bertha Capen Reynolds Society had
its way, it would be the sole arbiter of what is and is not politically
correct for the Herald to print.

This week the BCRS will hold
a protest against the Herald’s continued publication of ads for
Deja Vu, and will meet with the Herald board in an attempt to
convince the board to stop publishing these ads. Anyone who believes Western
Michigan University needs an independent newspaper must oppose these efforts
to censor.

The Herald is more than just
a newspaper – it is the only news source and public forum most students
have for information on WMU. No other newspaper or television news program
covers events at WMU with the depth and consistency that the Herald
does.

As such, the Herald
is a prime target for those who would like the paper to reflect their
narrow beliefs rather than the wide range of opinion represented on a
campus as large as WMU.

If they succeed in eliminating
a viewpoint from the Herald, they succeed in virtually eliminating
it for the entire student body.

This has dangerous implications
which the BCRS has not fully considered. They believe the way Deja Vu
depicts women is offensive. Many students on this campus, however, believe
positive images of gays and lesbians are offensive, and several of them
wrote in recently to voice their displeasure at the Herald’s coverage
of gay and lesbian student activities.

What is to stop these students
from demanding the Herald stop covering gay and lesbian events?

If the Herald board is willing
to get rid of Deja Vu ads because they offend the BCRS, how would it defend
itself if other student groups demanded that stories and ads featuring
gays and lesbians be removed because they are offensive?

Speech that people find offensive
is exactly the kind of speech that needs special protection.

Non-controversial speech and
non-offensive speech need no protection – no one will show up at Herald
board meetings to ask that ads for financial aid stop running.

It is only when speech is
potentially offensive that one person or another will stand up to ask
that it be censored.

If a newspaper acquiesces
to demands, however, it will soon find itself in a precarious position,
because almost all speech is potentially offensive to someone.
Imagine trying to produce a
newspaper that would never offend any of the thousands of WMU students,
each with their own interests and political and religious beliefs. It
would be impossible.

This should be readily apparent
to a group such as the BCRS, which claims to be acting on behalf of women’s
interests. Historically, women have been victimized by policies that kept
issues important to women outside of traditional forums.

Feminists fought to get their
viewpoints included in traditional media, while the BCRS’ efforts represent
the failed ideas that kept women silent for centuries.

At this point some members
of BCRS offer what they think is a way out – Deja Vu engages in “pornographic”
speech, and this causes violence against women.

Deja Vu ads, then, constitute
a special category that causes harm to women. Unfortunately there isn’t
a shred of evidence to back up the claim that “pornographic”
speech causes any harm to women.

No researcher has been able
to find this mythical causal link between “pornography” and
violence, because it simply doesn’t exist.

In her book, Sex and Sensibility:
Reflections on Forbidden Mirrors and the Will to Censor, Marcia Pally
concludes her exhaustive look at studies into the relationship between
“pornography” and violence by noting there is no credible evidence
linking the two.

It’s not surprising most of
the “feminists” advocating censorship of sexually suggestive
speech usually draw on resources such as the Meese Pornography Commission’s
report.

It’s the height of irony that
purportedly progressive advocates find themselves in bed with the most
reactionary element of the Reagan administration.

Of course two female members
of the Meese Commission, Judith Becker and Ellen Levine, became its sharpest
critics and strongly dissented from the commission’s conclusion that “pornography”
contributed to violence.

Without a link between “pornography”
and violence, all the BCRS has left is to ask the Herald to enshrine
its particular interpretation of Deja Vu and its ads into Herald
editorial policy.

Reasonable people, however,
can and do disagree about this interpretation. If the Herald
allows specific ideological judgments about events to govern its editorial
policy, it will be in serious trouble indeed.

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