Cathy Young responds to me regarding feminist hatred of men

I was thrown off my horse by strep throat, but I am planning to continue my series responding to Christina Hoff Sommers.

First, however: Over at The Y Files, columnist Cathy Young responds to part two of my series.

Cathy begins, I think, by misunderstanding what I meant when I said “If man-hating is so pervasive in contemporary feminism, why don’t men in feminism encounter it more?” Cathy responds:

Barry says he hasn’t seen any male-hating attitudes from feminists except for a few people on the Ms. boards way, way back. I’m guessing the late Andrea Dworkin, famous for such aperçus as, “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman,” or “Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life, but especially for women’s lives…”, does not qualify? 1

But — like David Cohen, who I quoted — I was talking about the feminists I’ve directly interacted with. (Was this really so unclear in context, Cathy?) Alas, I never met Andrea Dworkin.

To be sure, there are some stunning anti-male quotes from Dworkin and a few others — quotes I’ve often seen recycled by critics of feminism. (Some of these quotes are out of context or fabricated, but some are real.) Are they representative of day-to-day feminism, of most feminists, or of current feminism? Not in my experience.

But this brings up something I’ve wondered about for quite a while. When I read MRAs, as well as “conservative feminists” like Christina Hoff Sommers, a narrative history of feminism tends to emerge, which goes something like this: Once upon a time there were the suffragettes, who were libertarian or conservative and they were Good. Then came the second wave feminists in the 60s and 70s, who fought for equal pay and the like, and they were Good. But in the 1980s came the Evil “gender feminists” or “victim feminists,” who turned feminism into man-hating victimology, and feminism has been Bad ever since.

But curiously enough, when reading Sommers and others, it quickly becomes apparent that most of their examples are from 60s and 70s feminism. And so Sommers makes a big deal of the word “ovulars,” a term from the 1960s that no one but Sommers herself uses nowadays. Dworkin, Young’s example, peaked in influence and prominence in the 70s, became a hugely controversial figure within feminism in the 80s, and pretty much faded from prominence after that. Most of the feminists I see quoted as proof of how awful and man-hating feminists are (Robin Morgan, Germaine Greer , Marilyn French, etc) came into prominence in the 60s and 70s.

60s and 70s feminism was, frankly, a lot wilder, and a lot more unrestrained. This has its good side (I’m a fan of some of Firestone’s wilder digressions), but also a negative side, in the unrestrained anti-male sexism of some feminist leaders. But it’s interesting that the peak of anti-male sexism in feminism — which I’d say was when Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol — happened before many of today’s feminists had even been born. Yet according to the conservative feminist narrative, feminism now is much worse than feminism then.

It’s a new century, but conservative feminists and MRAs are still nattering on about what Robin Morgan said in the 70s, or about the super bowl Sunday controversy from over a quarter century ago. Let me ask you this, Cathy: take stock of what feminists have been doing and saying this century. Do you really think that Andrea Dworkin saying “Male sexuality, drunk on its intrinsic contempt for all life” is typical of current-day feminism?

* * *

Cathy also defends the relevance of The Vagina Monologues, which, I’ll remind readers, was the one and only example Sommers gave in her lecture to support her argument that feminist believe that “men are beasts.” I don’t find anything Cathy comes up with persuasive. Yes, The Vagina Monlogues are very popular, but it’s still fiction, and it’s still just one example. No honest person can claim with a straight face that a single work of fiction proves anything about feminism in general.

Analyzing pop culture is valuable; but to discuss a general trend in pop culture, one must analyze multiple works, and show that a pattern actually exists. Otherwise, all you have is cherry-picking — Sommers’ stock in trade.

So what is feminist pop culture? It’s Vagina Monologues, sure (and nothing wrong with that; not the greatest work of literature, but it’s funny and sexy and it’s raised tons of money for good causes); but it’s also Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the songs of Ani Defranco and the comedy of Wanda Sykes and a dozen other things. I think looking at all these things would produce a more complex, but more honest, picture of feminism than Sommers’.

When I suggested Sommers should be able to provide a couple of quotes from current, prominent feminists saying “men are beasts,” Cathy says I set the bar too high. Maybe, although I’d accept quotes that amount to the same thing (such as the Dworkin quotes Cathy recycled). But if I raise the bar too high, Cathy digs a trench and drops the bar in.

Here’s where I’d set the bar: Current feminists, please. Multiple quotes from this century. Quotes from actually published, known feminists, not students quoted in some student paper or something said in the comments section of a blog. And if you’re going to claim that these quotes represent current feminism, then the quotes should be from a representative variety of current feminism: not only white feminists, and not only radical feminists, and not only academic feminists. (Or, if the only quotes you can find are from a particular sub-group of feminists, say so, rather than falsely claiming that this represents all of current feminism.)

Is that a high bar? I’d say it’s a reasonable bar, given the extreme and far-reaching claims made by Sommers. If Sommers can’t provide reasonable evidence for her claims, then it’s up to her to moderate her claims, not up to me to lower the bar.

(Cross-posted at Blog by Barry.)

  1. The first quote is from Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, 1976. The second quote is from “The Night and Danger,” a speech Dworkin delivered in 1979. The text of the speech is reprinted in her book “Letters From A War Zone,” and is available online here. []
This entry posted in Christina Hoff Sommers. Bookmark the permalink. 

24 Responses to Cathy Young responds to me regarding feminist hatred of men

  1. 1
    Aerik says:

    You lost me at Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There’s a pseudo-feminist author (Joss Whedon) I think we could do without.

    Most humor in that show, in retrospect, is of a shallow, porn-based, sexual pun of some sort, or some other cliche.

    Xander’s constant worrying about being “Somebody’s butt-monkey.”

    Whedon can’t often create a BDSM reference that isn’t just a rape fantasy.

    Oh and let’s not forget the typical love-hate relationships, which convey the message that no means yes, especially when Buffy forgives Spike for trying to rape her and continues to love him. The dogma of forgiveness before justice, it just makes me want to vomit.

    That shit is continued in Angel’s last season when the character Harmony fights for her self-worth when Spike abuses her emotions to get into her pants. Her anger and indignity is literally turned into an illness, then at the end of the episode she’s back to her stereotypical highschool bimbo self, deriving her self-esteem from the jealousy of peon coworkers she has no real relationship with, who resent that she’s close to the boss, no different then if she was just dating the football captain. And we’re made to be happy for her.

    The episode where Xander conjures up a musical demon that won’t abide by the contract because Xander is male. Homophobia as a joke, haw haw haw.

    And now these days, Whedon cut off all the overweight original actors in Dollhouse, which perpetuates the cycle of only popularly attractive women get opportunities to grow as actors.

    ————- – – – — — — – — —

    I wish you idiots would stop popping up Buffy/Angel/Firefly (don’t even get me started on the constant rape apologia in that one) as feminist pop culture.

  2. 2
    Myca says:

    I wish you idiots would stop popping up Buffy/Angel/Firefly (don’t even get me started on the constant rape apologia in that one) as feminist pop culture.

    Hey Aerik, you’re going to need to learn not to refer to the posters and commenters here, either individually or collectively as, “you idiots.”

    Thanks!

    —Myca

  3. 3
    Denise says:

    Aerik – I think you would be hard pressed to find a feminist person or a feminist work of art that doesn’t sometimes do, say, think, or portray things that aren’t very compatible with whatever version of feminism you’re working from. From where I stand (as a feminist who is uncomfortable with things such as shaving armpits and wearing make-up) I consider Buffy to be a relatively feminist TV show.

    And yeah, people totally need to stop quoting Andrea Dworkin as a shining example of All that is Wrong with Feminism Today. As you said, she is not today’s feminism. And she is too often quoted by people who are so turned off by her style that they aren’t interested in engaging the ideas. For instance, “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman”. As I understand it, patriarchy is the system that allows men to get ahead at the expense of women. I believe we live in a patriarchy, and I don’t think this is too radical of me. So just as I believe that white people benefit from racism, men benefit from patriarchy. Is this so far from saying that men (as a class) exploit women (as a class)? Perhaps. Perhaps where it crosses the line is the implication that a specific man will exploit some specific woman (is this a clearly false implication?). But I don’t think that this quotation is so easily dismissed as mere man-hating.

  4. 4
    Brandon Berg says:

    I’m guessing the late Andrea Dworkin, famous for such aperçus as, “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman,”

    I don’t remember the details well enough to find it now, but wasn’t there a blog post a year or two ago, quoted here approvingly, that expressed a sentiment very much like the above? Something about a woman who was afraid that her newborn son would grow up to be a rapist?

    More generally, I think you’re using a double standard. You would agree, I’m sure, that misogyny comes in subtler flavors than “all women are scheming harpies”; likewise misandry comes in subtler flavors than “all men are brutes/pigs/whatever.” If we use the same standard that feminists use in deciding what to label as misogyny, then it’s not at all hard to find examples of misandry in modern feminist rhetoric.

  5. 5
    Myca says:

    I don’t remember the details well enough to find it now, but wasn’t there a blog post a year or two ago, quoted here approvingly, that expressed a sentiment very much like the above? Something about a woman who was afraid that her newborn son would grow up to be a rapist?

    Yes, this post happened.

    No, I don’t think it was ever quoted here approvingly.

    —Myca

  6. 6
    Ampersand says:

    Brandon, it was Christina Hoff Sommers who said that contemporary feminism says all men are brutes. If she wanted to say that misandry comes in more complex flavors, she could have; it’s not my fault she didn’t.

    Also, I see a HUGE distinction between being afraid a child will grow up to be a rapist (which seems to me to be saying that they’re afraid their child won’t turn out well/well be corrupted by the world, etc — a pretty common worry among parents) and saying that it’s inevitable.

    That said, I don’t remember the thing you’re talking about in detail (although I remember it vaguely), and can’t say if it was quoted here or not.

  7. 7
    Cerberus says:

    A small note, almost all of Dworkin’s oft quoted statements of “male-hatred” were from sections in which she was describing male patriarchal opinion of itself as reflected by their opinions of women. She rarely if ever in my recollection called all men brutes or similar as if it were her personal opinion of them.

    Dworkin and others of her time got into a lot of trouble because they would write entire chapters and long sections extrapolating patriarchal male belief about women and by inference their own patriarchal selves. Dworkin and others were fond of using these long sections to point out how monstrous that made patriarchal men in their own eyes. This however led to their easy use as “male-basher” examples of feminists who hate men in a deliberate campaign to discredit all women who object to mistreatment as “aggrieved harpies”.

    Oh, also, given the college survey statistics that find that 1/3 of men don’t believe no means no, a flippant worry that your son has the potential to grow up a rapist is a legitimate concern and more parents should take that as notice to stress enthusiastic consent in the sex education of their children.

  8. 8
    Maze says:

    Cerberus: Is there also a study about how many women in college sometimes mean “yes” (edit: or “maybe”) when they say “no”? I’d be happy to know that the number is really, really small.

  9. 9
    Maia says:

    I wrote this post :

    My friend has an 11 month old baby boy. When she was pregnant someone she knew was raped and we talked about the not-yet-child inside her. She didn’t know whether the Frog was going to be a boy or a girl and we didn’t know whether it was worse to raise a girl and be afraid that when she grew up she’d be raped, or a boy and be afriad that when he grew up he might rape someone.

    I think there was some kind of link from Alas (I got piled on by NZ right wing male commentors, some of whom made rape threats).

    I’m finding the tone of this comment thread really difficult. To have male feminists say “There’s no way female feminists would every say that!” about things that I believe, or understand why people believe them, makes me think we’re talking about a whole different sort of feminism.

  10. 10
    Dianne says:

    No one, absolutely no one, not even Dworkin in her most man-hating moments, hates men as much as the “traditional values” woman. Don’t believe me? Listen to them sometime. They talk about how men are brutes who can’t control their sexuality (even if they phrase it in terms of not expecting men to wait until marriage, “a wife’s duty” or “getting what you asked for” rather than double standards and rape-marital or otherwise). Feminists call on men to control their aggression and their sexual impulses. They make bitter, angry statements when men fail to meet their expectations but they are, at the bottom, asking men to act like decent human beings. Which has the correlary assumption that men can be decent human beings. Anti-feminist women simply give up on the idea that men can possibly be decent human beings and default to trying to work around the (in their world view) fact that men aren’t.

  11. 11
    Mandolin says:

    I’m finding the tone of this comment thread really difficult. To have male feminists say “There’s no way female feminists would every say that!” about things that I believe, or understand why people believe them, makes me think we’re talking about a whole different sort of feminism.

    Myca, I believe, was thinking of a different post than yours, one that had a slightly different position. Your post is very moderately stated and accurate; it is reasonable to fear these things, just as it’s reasonable to wonder how you might help a future child if sie ever became depressed, or celebrate if sie acheived something you love.

    I believe Myca was thinking of a post that was quoted here which was written by Biting Beaver, and which was cited on a previous thread about the Christina Hoff Summers assertion. I believe her post was taken down before it could ever be quoted from directly, but some of the allegations about it suggested that BB considered that her son had become in some way irredeemable because he, at age 14, had been watching pornography.

    I think, further, (though my memory of this is somewhat rusty), that she — or someone else in response to the event — made some comment like women shouldn’t raise male children because they are betrayers of women, though it’s possible that sentiment wasn’t stated as part of the conversation about BB’s post, but instead was just something I found in the course of reading about it and hand’t encountered before. I was shocked someone would say that.

    However, I am also somewhat uncomfortable with the tone of this conversation — for instance, have we abandoned the definition of sexism as a top-down structural oppression?

  12. 12
    Spotted and Herbaceous Backson says:

    I haven’t read Dworkin in a while, but it seems there’s a difference tween a rapist and a potential rapist. And most of the facile slams against men I have heard have come from women who seemed not too 1] feminist, 2] smart. They were in fact just like the remarks from other folks that blacks should go back to Africa or that gays had no sense. I called them on it every time, though I’m not sure how much good it did. Stuff that simplistic just trips the crap alarm every time. So thanks, Dianne, for saying what I could not quite get into words.
    I often think people who can’t control themselves should not be running around loose, that this lack is a lack of something crucial to being human. But that risks getting categorical or simplistic, too, in the case of the developmentally disabled or mind-shattered-by-war. Okay, I’m done with that tangent.
    But when I hear my 80-year-old-hippie parents say in unison that the world would just be better if women ran it, that there is some inherent factor in the less-testosteroneized brain, I bristle. I’ve seen too many women acting cold-blooded and just plain mean. Not all are, just like men aren’t all gutter-minded molesters.

  13. 13
    Ampersand says:

    However, I am also somewhat uncomfortable with the tone of this conversation — for instance, have we abandoned the definition of sexism as a top-down structural oppression?

    Never having embraced that definition in the first place, I can’t be said to have abandoned it.

    ETA: That was a little flip. More accurately, I do recognize that definition and understand why some feminists use it. But I don’t think it’s the only and exclusive definition of the word “sexism,” and it’s not the only definition that feminists use and have used.

  14. 14
    Mandolin says:

    I withdraw the question that was here; it’s a niggling point, and if I want to discuss it with you, I’ll do it in IM. It’s not really important to this conversation except my feeling that some of the language choices in parts of this post capitulate to anti-feminist framing. It’s true that their arguments are weak within their own frameworks (as you point out); it’s just that I also feel the framework itself has significant weaknesses that make it tricky to just ‘port their framework over. Anyway, end side point discussion.

  15. 15
    Sailorman says:

    Edit: seemed like an interesting question to me, but removing post as mandolin doesn’t want it in the thread.

  16. 16
    Mandolin says:

    Sailor, would you mind c/ping that answer into an open thread? I don’t want to derail Barry’s discussion further.

  17. 17
    Mandolin says:

    I’m happy to respond to you, Sailor, and continue this discussion with you and/or others, I just don’t want to do it here since I’m hoping people will eventually go back to more major points from the post.

  18. 18
    Myca says:

    I believe Myca was thinking of a post that was quoted here which was written by Biting Beaver, and which was cited on a previous thread about the Christina Hoff Summers assertion.

    Your belief is correct. The post I was thinking of was the infamous, “I wish I had aborted my 14 year old, because now he’s looking at porn,” post, which I thought Brandon was trying to put forth as somehow representative of feminism.

    Myca, I believe, was thinking of a different post than yours, one that had a slightly different position. Your post is very moderately stated and accurate; it is reasonable to fear these things, just as it’s reasonable to wonder how you might help a future child if sie ever became depressed, or celebrate if sie acheived something you love.

    Total agreement. I was neither attacking nor distancing myself from your post, Maia . . . I was thinking of something else.

    —Myca

  19. 19
    AMM says:

    Speaking as a man, I don’t see Andrea Dworkin’s comments quoted in the original post as being particularly “man-hating.” The quoted sentences are more absolute than I think is justified, but this seems to be what everybody expects and even demands in public discourse, regardless of the topic. However, I cannot disagree with the essence of what she is trying to say in these quotes (I wish I could.)

    Andrea Dworkin, like many feminists, is not attacking men, but rather the model of masculinity and male-female relations that is held up by our society as “the way men and women are,” what I usually call the “predator-prey” model of male-female relations. And, despite what the deniers say, she’s not making this stuff up. I’ve heard phrases like “no means yes,” and rape jokes, and “she really wanted it,” and equally misogynistic stuff all my life, and not from feminists.

    Now, if you identify with this model, especially if you’re a man whose identity is wrapped up in being what our society expects a man to be — which IMHO includes acting predatory — then of course you’re going to feel personally attacked by such comments.

    But I don’t think it’s fair to call it “man-hating,” any more than people outside the US who object to Bush’s foreign policy are “anti-American.”

  20. 20
    Desipis says:

    I think it depends what standard you use for ‘hate’. The way that many feminists throw around the word misogyny, claiming hatred of women, they do seem to set the bar quite low. For example:

    I’ve heard phrases like “no means yes,” and rape jokes, and “she really wanted it,” and equally misogynistic stuff all my life, and not from feminists.

    Apparently, having a certain sense of humor qualifies for hate. How many feminists have joked about causing harm to men?

  21. 21
    Myca says:

    Apparently, having a certain sense of humor qualifies for hate. How many feminists have joked about causing harm to men?

    Oh, give me a break. As a feminist man who’s spent a lot of time around other feminist men and women, the answer is, “not many.” At least, not many as compared to the stuff you’re comparing it to.

    —Myca

  22. 22
    DaisyDeadhead says:

    Once upon a time there were the suffragettes, who were libertarian or conservative and they were Good. Then came the second wave feminists in the 60s and 70s, who fought for equal pay and the like, and they were Good. But in the 1980s came the Evil “gender feminists” or “victim feminists,” who turned feminism into man-hating victimology, and feminism has been Bad ever since.

    You’ve just summed up why I took my leave of FEMINIST CRITICS (blog).

    God forbid you mess up that basic narrative with the facts!

    Thanks for a great post.

    Also, Dianne, word! Yesterday, a born-again conservative female at my job, snorted derisively (during a conversation about movies and ‘chick flicks’ in particular) and said “Oh, I don’t pay any attention to what MEN say!” in a pretty mean, thoroughly dismissive way that surprised me in its nastiness.

    And I thought, if I’d said that? Don’t even go there.

  23. 23
    AMM says:

    Apparently, having a certain sense of humor qualifies for hate.

    I’m not sure if you’re a troll or just clueless. Rather than try to (re-)educate, I will just point to this post on
    Finally Feminism 101

    (For some reason, their “Can’t you take a joke” page has gone missing.)

  24. Pingback: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » The Intellectual Space to Be Anti-Male Is Necessary and Desirable