It's a little more complex than that, but not much. The title of the article is, Ladies,* You Should Know Better: How feminism wages war on common sense.
Once again I find myself wanting people to read Mary Gaitskill's wise thoughts about date rape. She explores exactly this issue, and quite "critically" I think you'll find:
Feminists who postulate that boys must obtain a spelled-out "yes" before having sex are trying to establish rules, cut in stone, that will apply to any and every encounter and that every responsible person must obey. The new rule resembles the old good girl/bad girl rule not only because of its implicit suggestion that girls have to be protected but also because of its absolute nature, its iron-fisted denial of complexity and ambiguity. I bristle at such a rule and so do a lot of other people. But should we really be so puzzled and indignant that another rule has been presented? If people have been brought up believing that to be responsible is to obey certain rules, what are they going to do with a can of worms like "date rape" except try to make new rules that they see as more fair or useful than the old ones?
But the "rape-crisis feminists" are not the only absolutists here; their critics play the same game. Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae, has stated repeatedly that any girl who goes alone into a frat house and proceeds to tank up is cruising for a gang bang, and if she doesn't know that, well, then she's "an idiot." The remark is most striking not for its crude unkindness but for its reductive solipsism. It assumes that all college girls have had the same life experiences as Paglia, and have come to the same conclusions about them.
By the time I got to college, I'd been living away from home for years and had been around the block several times. I never went to a frat house, but I got involved with men who lived in rowdy "boy houses" reeking of dirty socks and rock and roll. I would go over, drink, and spend the night with my lover of the moment; it never occurred to me that I was in danger of being gang-raped, and if I had been, I would have been shocked and badly hurt. My experience, though some of it had been bad, hadn't led me to conclude that boys plus alcohol equals gang bang, and I was not naive or idiotic. Katie Roiphe, author of The Morning After: Fear, Sex, and Feminism on Campus, criticizes girls who, in her view, create a myth of false innocence: "But did these twentieth-century girls, raised on Madonna videos and the six o'clock news, really trust that people were good until they themselves were raped? Maybe. Were these girls, raised on horror movies and glossy Hollywood sex scenes, really as innocent as all that?" I am sympathetic to Roiphe's annoyance, but I'm surprised that a smart chick like her apparently doesn't know that people process information and imagery (like Madonna videos and the news) with a complex subjectivity that doesn't in any predictable way alter their ideas about what they can expect from life.
Roiphe and Paglia are not exactly invoking rules, but their comments seem to derive from a belief that everyone except idiots interprets information and experience in the same way. In that sense, they are not so different in attitude from those ladies* dedicated to establishing feminist-based rules and regulations for sex. Such rules, just like the old rules, assume a certain psychological uniformity of experience, a right way.
The accusatory and sometimes painfully emotional rhetoric conceals an attempt not only to make new rules but also to codify experience. The "rape-crisis feminists" obviously speak for many women and girls who have been raped or have felt raped in a wide variety of circumstances. They would not get so much play if they were not addressing a widespread and real experience of violation and hurt. By asking, "Were they really so innocent?" Roiphe doubts the veracity of the experience she presumes to address because it doesn't square with hers or with that of her friends. Having not felt violated herself--even though she says she has had an experience that many would now call date rape--she cannot understand, or even quite believe, that anyone else would feel violated in similar circumstances. She therefore believes all the fuss to be a political ploy or, worse, a retrograde desire to return to crippling ideals of helpless femininity. In turn, Roiphe's detractors, who have not had her more sanguine "morning after" experience, believe her to be ignorant and callous, or a secret rape victim in deep denial. Both camps, believing their own experience to be the truth, seem unwilling to acknowledge the emotional truth on the other side.
I get irritated by the kind of straw man feminism I see invoked by articles like the one linked to above, because people like Gaitskill and others have been exploring just these issues for years, in complex ways, but are pretty much ignored.
When feminism is brought up in the mainstream media, it is almost always derided in just this way: there's Andrea Dworkin (the most convenient straw woman ever invented, apparently), and then there's the rest of the feminists, who apparently all insist that women are just like men.
The odd thing is that feminism may be partly to blame. Time magazine reporter Barrett Seaman explains that many of the college women he interviewed for his book "Binge" (2005) "saw drinking as a gender equity issue; they have as much right as the next guy to belly up to the bar."
Note that this is college women, not necessarily feminists. (Indeed, many college women will make exactly this kind of claim just after saying, "I'm not a feminist but...") And note that they are not saying, "Women can drink as much as men." I hear them saying that bars should not be seen as "male" territory.
Second, even assuming that the women are talking about consuming alcohol as a mode of expressing feminism, I am not convinced that they are getting this idea about consuming as empowerment primarily from feminism but from a kind of marketing that feminists have been critiquing for at least a decade. Look at the way, e.g., Virginia Slims cigarettes were so long marketed: "you've come a long way baby." They deliberately use the language of freedom and equlity that feminist argument is grounded in to sell the idea that smoking cigarettes equals a kind of freedom. The tactic is typically masked more sophisticatedly in ads today, but it's the underlying argument of much of marketing directed at women. Susan Bordo makes an excellent argument to this effect, using dozens of ads in her book Unbearable Weight, and Jean Kilborne does a much less nuanced case, but with tons of examples, in her videos, Killing Us Softly.
Leaving biology aside--most women's bodies can't take as much alcohol as men's--the fact of the matter is that men simply are not, to use the phrase of another generation, "taken advantage of" in the way women are.
Why is this? Their bodies are permeable, in fact, but adult men's bodies are socially constructed as much less permeable in most Western cultures. Why is that?
Radical feminists used to warn that men are evil and dangerous. Andrea Dworkin made a career of it. But that message did not seem reconcilable with another core feminist notion--that women should be liberated from social constraints, especially those that require them to behave differently from men. So the first message was dropped and the second took over.
The radical-feminist message was of course wrongheaded--most men are harmless,
(Hmmm. Most people are quite capable of inflicting harm, isn't that her point? And almost anyone who is in a position where they have virutally unquestioned power is likely to be dangerous--look at Abu Ghraib. Those people were not "brutes" but nor were they "harmless" in that situation. But hasn't her claim been that to not realize that people are not in fact "harmless" is to be devoid of common sense?)
even those who play lacrosse--but it could be useful as a worst-case scenario for young women today. There is an alternative, but to paraphrase Miss Manners: People who need to be told to use their common sense probably didn't have much to begin with.
Aren't they silly? Why it's just so obvious that life is more complex than what these crazy feminists say! Feminism is thus, conveniently, both laughably silly and dangerous: Stay away from anyone who calls herself as feminist! She's crazy! (If a feminist looks you in the eyes, she can hypnotize you, you know!)
*Much as I like Gaitskill, I really hate the word "ladies" in any context, even though in context this usage makes a little sense. Here, as in the WSJ article that inspired this response, it still seems designed to insult/belittle an argument rather than to take it on its own terms. |
