Heterophobia:
Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism

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.

The War on Heterosexuality: A Review of Daphne’s Heterophobia is a post from: EquityFeminism

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Defending
Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights

If it weren’t for the feminist war on pornography, this web site probably wouldn’t
exist. Several years ago, feminists at the university my wife and I attended
at the time decided to target the student newspaper demanding that it stop carrying
advertisements for local strip clubs. The feminists were joined by several local
leftist activists and an odd mix of Christian conservatives from the community
who had long been trying to pass laws to ban pornography in the area.

Perhaps the most surreal scene I ever witnessed in college was watching these
feminist students marching arm in arm with extreme conservatives chanting, “You
see free speech, I say free women.”

Fortunately the feminists were routed, in no small part due to our efforts
and a hilarious conflict among the anti-pornography crowd. I had previously
made a presentation to the paper’s board of directors pointing out that the
paper ran numerous controversial ads and articles and if it caved in to pressure
from the anti-pornography groups it would soon find itself besieged from all
sides.

The anti-porn group proved this point when they finally addressed the board.
With about 20 or 30 people showing up to support the anti-porn position, the
chairman of the paper’s board pointed out an ongoing controversy in the paper
over abortion and said he didn’t want to be besieged by “pro-abortion” activists
demanding an end to pro-life articles or ads or vice versa. One of the feminists
in the crowd immediately objected to the term “pro-abortion” saying she preferred
to be called “pro-life”. Before the chair could finish his apology, the feminist’s
erstwhile conservative allies corrected the feminist, saying it was “pro-abortion” and while they were supposed to be making their case for getting rid of the
ads, they sat and fought amongst themselves about proper nomenclature for those
on opposite sides of the abortion issue. Needless to say with that example fresh
in their minds, the board voted down the proposal to get rid of the ads.

At the time my wife and I were mystified as to how feminists ended up taking
an anti-pornography position. Weren’t they aware of the history of the state
using censorship against women? Didn’t they see how limits on men and women’s
free expression undercut the dignity of the individual, which surely was at
the heart of any feminist view of politics? Had either of us read Nadine Strossen’s
excellent book on the anti-porn wars, Defending Pornography: Free Speech,
Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights, we would have better understood the
tragic and wrongheaded course that feminism, driven by its most radical elements,
has recently embarked on.

Solidly at the steering wheel are author Andrea Dworkin and University of
Michigan Law professor Catharine MacKinnon. As Strossen recognizes it is not
so much sexual speech that Dworkin and MacKinnon ultimately seek to banish,
though that is indeed one of their goals, but at a more basic level what Dworkin
and MacKinnon want to eradicate is heterosexuality itself.

This would seem absurd if they both hadn’t put themselves on record to this
effect on numbers occasions. As Dworkin puts it in one of her milder moments,
“It’s very hard to look at a picture of a woman’s body and not see it with the
perception that her body is being exploited.” Why? Because heterosexual sex
dehumanizes women and makes it all but impossible for anyone, man or woman,
to look at women as whole beings. As Dworkin sums up this view, “Physically
the woman in intercourse is a space invaded, a literal territory occupied literally;
occupied even if there has been no resistance; even if the occupied person said,
‘Yes, please, yes, hurry, yes, more.’”

Dworkin reels from the claims made by her opponents that she equates all heterosexual
sex with rape, but in doing so she is merely playing semantic games. Her work
is infused with the view that women are harmed by heterosexual sex, that they
can’t really consent to such sex and that heterosexual sex should be (must be)
transcended to move beyond the war against women — after all this is the same
Dworkin who once wrote that “unambiguous conventional heterosexual behavior
is the worst betrayal or our common humanity.”

MacKinnon has made similar statements, likening women who dare to disagree
with her to “house niggers who side with masters.”

Strossen thoroughly documents this anti-sex presumption throughout Defending
Pornography, though her presentation lacks a systematic look at Dworkin
and MacKinnon’s philosophy, which is one of the biggest general problems with
her book — she tends toward quick, scattershot effects with fact after fact
and quote after quote often without much to unify her efforts. Defending
Pornography could have benefited from another rewrite or two.

But Strossen does se through the current anti-porn effort. As she sums it
up, “We are in the midst of a full-fledged ‘sex panic’ in which seemingly all
descriptions and depictions of human sexuality are becoming embattled.”

The anti-liberal basis of radical feminism

Although she never delves very deep into it, Strossen also lays out the
case that radical feminism is fundamentally anti-liberal. By liberalism here
I mean a basic respect for the dignity and autonomy of the individual. To MacKinnon
and Dworkin liberalism is anathema — it is sleeping with the enemy.

This explains why the anti-porn feminists arrive at what seems to Strossen
and other observers a bald contradiction. On the one hand, radical feminists
maintain that American institutions are extremely patriarchal. On the other
hand, MacKinnon and Dworkin would grant that patriarchal state even more power
to censor women. Can these two views be reconciled? Strossen doesn’t seem to
think so, but in fact her own analysis reveals these two ideas are perfectly
compatible.

First, it must be kept in mind that Dworkin and MacKinnon both reject liberalism
as itself patriarchal. Women who disagree with them are nothing more than brainwashed
collaborators who are acting against their own best interests. As Strossen documents,
MacKinnon has no problem arguing the legal system should treat women in the
same way that it treats children. Strossen thinks this view “presuppose[s] an
infantilized woman incapable of knowing what is in her own best interests, and
needing the protection of the state…,” which is a pretty good summation.

In fact co-opting the state is the only way Dworkin and MacKinnon will ever
be able to get very far in their war on heterosexuality. As they both recognize
there are too many female collaborators who claim they enjoy being heterosexual
for heterosexuality to simply disappear by itself. To really get anywhere will
require harnessing the state (most radical feminists nominally oppose “power” as a patriarchal male concept except when it can be used to further their
own political goals.)

Sometimes Strossen seems to get it and other times she seems to ignore this
possibility. She wonders, for example, why pro-censorship feminists focus on
pornography when there are plenty of examples of extremely sexist speech that
is not pornographic. But of course this is how radicals always get their ideas
accepted by the greater society — first they conceptualize some extreme version
of what they seek to abolish. Once they get wide agreement on that, they gradually
expand their definition of the social ill as far as they possibly can. Strossen
is incorrect to think that MacKinnon and Dworkin exempt non-pornographic sexist
speech — they simply are smart enough to know that the most likely way to get
their views embedded in laws is through an attack on pornography. Once erotic
images that show women in a “subordinate” position (which is how the duo define
pornography) are banned, the effort to go after non-erotic images that “subordinate” women would be the logical next step.

Strossen devotes a chapter to the area where, to date, the pro-censorship
feminists have been most successful — sexual harassment law. MacKinnon pioneered
sexual harassment law, of course, so it’s not surprising that it has begun to
incorporate her particular view of heterosexuality and sexual expression. As
Strossen writes, sexual harassment now includes a “misguided emphasis on sexually
oriented expression [that] has diverted the attention of policy makers from
sexist conduct to sexual speech, and has shifted their focus from gender-based
discrimination to sexual expression.”

Many sexual harassment policies, especially those used in academic institutions,
are quite clear that as Strossen puts it, “the mere presence of sexual words
or pictures in the workplace or on campus is somehow inherently incompatible
with women’s’ full and equal participation in those areas.”

Strossen includes an excellent chapter surveying the lack of evidence for
the claim that pornography causes or contributes to violence against women.
Of course as she also points out, most of the procensorship feminists aren’t
really concerned with empirical niceties. MacKinnon, for example, has retreated
to the position that no one has proven that pornography doesn’t cause
harm and so one can assume it is dangerous until proven otherwise, which is
a standard that could be used to ban just about anything.

Defending Pornography is an excellent, comprehensive look at the many
facets of the debate over pornography. Anyone who wants to find out how radical
feminists are trying to undermine the principle of free speech and inquiry through
their attack on pornography will find Strossen’s book a great place to start.

The Feminist Assault on Free Speech: A Review of Nadine Strossen’s Defending Pornography is a post from: EquityFeminism

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Ceasefire:
Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality
By Cathy Young
Amazon.Com price: $17.50 (click on link above to buy)

At the end of the 20^th century two versions of the same ages-old idea still dominate most public
discussion of the sexes — namely that men and women are radically different.
On the one side are conservative activists reacting against feminism’s
inroads who claim children are harmed if their mothers work outside the
home or that women are harmed by a lack of “modesty” in sexual
relations. On the other side are many feminists and their sympathizers
who have simply reversed antiquated sexual stereotypes about women and
applied them to men.

Whereas throughout much of
human history women were often viewed as less than human and relegated
to demeaning stereotypes, so much radical feminism and even mainstream
feminism has simply replaced those old stereotypes of women with new and
equally pernicious stereotypes about men. Some go so far as to reject
important advances such as the scientific method simply because men originally
created them and maintain that men and women even think differently. Whereas
once men used women’s alleged irrationality to pigeonhole and debase women,
today some feminists agree that women’s thinking is less rational than
men’s but instead view this as a positive thing.

Into this fray steps Cathy
Young whose book Ceasefire argues that men and women aren’t all
that different after all and that many of the problems often described
in the media as men’s or women’s problems are, in fact, problems common
to all humanity regardless of sex. As Young aptly puts it in the title
of her first chapter, “Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth.”
That in many circles this is still a fundamentally radical idea is testament
to how pervasive sexual stereotyping in all its varieties remains.

As Young points out, although
early feminism was committed to a more egalitarian view of the sexes,
radical feminism has come to “reject the principle of equal treatment,
either because legal standards are inherently ‘male’ or because one cannot
treat oppressor and oppressed as equals. All divide humanity along gender
lines.” Her book does an excellent job of illustrating just how widespread
this division along gender lines has become.

Violence, for example, is
an area where media and feminist treatment tends to differ radically depending
on the sex of the victim. Although data from the National Crime Victim
Study show men are the victims in about 15 percent of all assaults by
current or former partners (and men make up 25 percent of the victims
of aggravated assaults), rarely is violence by women against men described
in terms of domestic violence. Young points to the coverage of the murder
of actor and comedian Phil Hartman by his wife. Unlike the coverage of
OJ Simpson’s assaults and alleged murder of his wife, Nicole, nobody described
Hartman’s murder or evidence of earlier abusive incidents as “domestic
violence.” Much of the media coverage focused on how despondent and
depressed Hartman’s wife was and focused on her problems with drugs and
alcohol.

Of course to support this
sort of gender bias, both the media and feminists try to claim there are
fundamental differences between men and women, and in the process often
end up producing a series of bogus statistics. Ceasefire excels
at debunking more feminist fictoids that you can shake a stick at. Young’s
analysis of Susan Faludi’s Backlash is simply devastating. Young
shows Faludi’s book to rely almost from top to bottom on extremely poor
scholarly standards, egregious misquoting of primary sources and a whole
host of other questionable procedures. She even catches Faludi making
a claim in Backlash that Faludi herself had debunked in an earlier
newspaper profile! Ceasefire takes the process of demythologizing
feminist claims that Christina Hoff Sommers began in Who Stole Feminism? and carries it to the next level. The level of detail is enormous here
– I have no idea how Young keeps track the huge amount information that
she brings to bear to cut through so much nonsense. Ceasefire would
be worth reading if this was all it did.

But Young aims higher and
doesn’t pick solely on feminists for their many miscues – she also picks
apart many of the claims made by some in the Men’s Movement and outright
conservatives such as Wendy Shallitt and F. Carolyn Graglia whose rejection
of feminism leads them to adopt views every bit as noxious as the radical
feminists (in fact Graglia approvingly cites radical feminist Andrea Dworkin’s
critique of heterosexuality).

At the very end of her book,
Young offers 12 suggestions to get past the gender wars, but her first
suggestion should be the only guiding principle anyone needs – “when making
judgments that involve gender, try a mental exercise reversing the sexes.” The beauty of this standard is that it asks people to treat others not
as stereotypical representatives of their respective gender but as individual
human beings. It is a call for a world where, except for a few exceptions,
gender is treated as a neutral matter that has no place in influencing
moral or legal judgments.

It is strange that today this
simple idea (really just a restatement of the liberal idea of the rule
of law) is despised by many of the intellectual leaders of both conservative
and feminist camps. Ceasefire is a plea to rescue humanity from
the narrow box of gender that both camps want to force it into. Young’s
book an impassioned and illuminating appeal for a true equality of the
sexes.

Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth?: A Review of Cathy Young’s Ceasefire is a post from: EquityFeminism

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