Where in the world is ...

I’ve been pretty busy these past weeks what with a new job and trying to buy a house. So far everything looks good on the job and house front, and I finally managed to finish the book I was reading. I’ve been told I have “interesting” taste in books. I use quotations because I’m not always sure of the intention of that “compliment.” I do take it as a compliment, as I imagine it is usually intended. And even if it isn’t it pisses the person off that I see it as such. In fact I consider myself to have interesting, or what I call varied and broad, taste in many types of things, not just books. It is not nearly as varied as I would like, but time is a constraint. In nonfiction I find myself drawn to history books and books that challenge conventional or powerfully growing schools of thought.

That brings me to why I decided to read Who Stole Feminism?: How Women have Betrayed Women by Christina Hoff Sommers. The first book I read from Sommers was The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. I heard of that book in Scientific American, and it intrigued me so much that I sought out this one after finishing it. I’ll ramble on about WSF? and other things for a while.

A few weeks ago I was reading America’s Women: Four hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines by Gail Collins. My mother and brother saw it and mother commented on it. My brother said, in jest to my mother, that I was a feminist. In return I said, “Well yeah I am, but I’m an old school feminist that believes both sexes should have essentially the same rights and opportunities.” It’s kind of funny that WSF was the next non-fiction book on my list to read.

Sommers is a self described feminist. However, she talks of a rift that has formed in the feminist movement creating what she calls gender feminists and equity feminists. She sees herself in the latter category. Equity feminists are the more traditional of the two, and are the category to which I would ascribe myself. Basically EFs want the same rights and opportunities that men have traditionally had in society. They are the ones that fought for the right to vote, own property, get educations, and work at the same level and with the same respect as the men in society.

Gender feminists are the more recent addition. I’m not sure I can sufficiently describe where they are coming from, and being a male I think many of them would say that it is impossible for me to understand it. I’ll take a shot at it none the less. GFs seem to feel that the entirety of current western based society, art, science, math, etc. are constructs of a patriarchal history that has excluded all meaningful input from women and therefore can never represent women equally. They seem to feel that everything in society is arranged to ingrain into men and women that women have a certain place. The only way the situation can be rectified is to throw out all the long held standards of science and art theory and start over creating new standards that put women and “women’s ways of knowing” at the center. If you don’t know what “women’s ways of knowing” are don’t feel strange. I’m not sure I get it either, and I read the book. I think it refers to the idea that women have natural ways of “knowing” things that are different from the male ways on “knowing” that current science, historians, philosophy, etc. use. That’s part of the reason all knowledge needs to be reconstructed.

If you find that previous paragraph strange, then you should be prepared for more throughout the book. Sommers does the same job in WSF? that she does in TWAB. She systematically goes through explaining and deconstructing the arguments and goals of the gender feminists. She shows how they differ from the traditional feminist goals of equality between the sexes, and the feelings of most women and men in the US when it comes to equality. She covers the GF cry for and work towards a deconstruction of the current system, while they offer no clear idea of what should replace it. They just “know” that it will come about. Frankly it sounds like a bunch of idealist hooey to me.

The scary part is the stories of the most prominent studies being designed to give sensational results that support the GF point of view. There is the culpability of the media in republishing the sensational results without checking the validity of the studies or getting comments from experts on both sides, and the lack of experts and respected members of the university system who will stand up to the deconstruction of the curriculums of some institutes of higher education. I don’t blame some of them, because they are generally labeled as anti-feminist and discriminatory. Careers have been ruined by the mere mention of such things.

Anyway, I enjoyed the book and would recommend it and The War Against Boys to anyone interested in feminism or disturbed by some of the recent trends caused by a very vocal and powerful minority of women.