Desperate Houseflies: The Magazine

Feel free to pull out your trusty fly swatter and comment on what is posted here, realizing that this odd collection of writers may prove as difficult to kill as houseflies and are presumably just as pesky. “Desperate Houseflies” is a magazine that intends to publish weekly articles on subjects such as politics, literature, history, sports, photography, religion, and no telling what else. We’ll see what happens.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

What's Wrong With The F-Word? Part One

Hi all, I apologize for not posting last week. I had an insane week at work and a busy weekend before that. If I was only the type who could write a short post (of the sort that Al has been posting lately)...

Anyway, I have been trolling Salon and Slate for material in lieu of drawing from books I have read recently, and today I hit pay dirt. Salon posted an interview with Kate O’Beirne, who I had never heard of before today, but apparently she’s the big-shot editor of the National Review who has a new book out about the ways in which feminism has ruined all of our lives. More specifically, she names individual feminists who have wrought catastrophic changes on the previously-idyllic balance between men, women, and the universe.

The most interesting thing about the interview is that in many ways, O’Beirne is not really anti-feminist. Rather, she just attributes all social changes of the past few decades that she doesn’t like to feminism, seemingly without regard for whether “feminism” (assuming that there is any such unitary phenomenon) actually caused those changes or whether “feminists” as a group can fairly be said to hold any of the purportedly canonical “feminist” views she abhors.

Because Salon is a pay site and because the interview is long, I went through it and wrote down the main topics of discussion and the views that O’Beirne espouses during the interview and reproduce them here. Of course, the link to the article is above in case anyone wants to check my accuracy. You can get free access to Salon by getting a “day pass” that involves watching an advertisement. Because this is a blog post rather than a book, I will just briefly voice my objections and qualifications to O’Beirne’s views (not all of which I disagree with, incidentally). And, because of my verbosity and the length of the interview, this is going to have to be a two-parter. Here’s part one:

1. O’Beirne hates being called “weak-minded,” a “tool of the patriarchy,” or “self-loathing” for making decisions that others disagree with. I see her point here, but one caveat: the implicit notion that these kinds of accusations come solely from feminists, or that they come from all feminists, is just wrong. (Okay, maybe the "tool of the patriarchy" one, although I don’t think anyone has actually used that phrase since the 1970s).

2. O’Beirne trots out the ubiquitous “equal pay” statistics that are, arguably, misleading, in order to bash feminism. Everyone has heard them, you know, women make 72 cents for every dollar men make? The misleading part is that people hear that and assume that employers are hiring women for the same jobs and paying them less. But the data is aggregated, and what is hidden inside of it is massive job segregation according to sex. Professions that have more women than men are not as highly paid, in general, than professions that have more men than women. Even within what is arguably the same profession, like for example working at Wal-Mart, women are concentrated in certain departments (jewelry, clothing) and men in others (automotive, hardware, electronics). And employees in the departments women work in are paid less than employees in the departments men work in. When women enter a field in large numbers, the prestige and pay in that field is diminished. Primary and secondary education is a good, though not particularly recent, example of this. But, what the data show still indicates that there is a problem regarding workplace equality for women. Attempts to explain it away (“women choose to go into lower-paying fields,” “women choose to work fewer hours when they have children and that’s why they are paid less”) simply beg more questions rather than providing answers. But people have trouble with blame that they can’t lay at the feet of one person or one entity. If it’s more diffuse than that, it makes people’s heads hurt and they say “the hell with it, there’s nothing we can do.”

3. Next, O’Beirne picks up on the second of the explanatory attempts from the previous paragraph and asserts that women want to stay home with their children because they are biologically programmed to do so. According to O’Beirne, this is not a result of social conditioning because she did it (stayed at home and worked part time), and she didn’t feel socially conditioned. Moreover, she says, women are better than men at caring for children – it’s all men can do to keep the children alive while the woman is out of the house. (And they say feminists hate men??) Feminists, she says, have always judged women harshly for being SAHM, have denigrated motherhood, and say that the only responsible choice is to work full-time.

Now, I could write a whole book on this topic, and, for obvious reasons if you've read my prior posts, it is one that has been very much on my mind lately. But, just to quickly address O’Beirne’s points: if I’ve come to any one conclusion in my thirty years of life, it’s that the nature versus nurture debate is not an either-or proposition. The answer to the nature-or-nurture question is always “both.” There is research to be done and conversations to be had about the relative weight of these things with respect to various issues, including sex differences. However, I think these conversations are largely academic, because no matter what science discovers about predetermination of outcomes based on biology, it’s not going to change my feelings about morality one iota. The probability that this kind of research will change people's views about how we should treat each other in this world is why every time a new study comes out (like the monkey one from a few weeks ago), it makes me grimace and make gagging noises.

Second, this is one instance where assigning all feminists one viewpoint is truly misguided. The debate about SAHP versus working (versus various other options) is very much alive within the ranks of women who call themselves feminists. There was an article in The American Prospect last month (December 2005 issue) about the issue by a feminist professor, Linda Hirshman, lamenting that SAHP was something that many young women today want to do. I was surprised at how strongly I disagreed with some of Hirshman’s prescriptions for women (go for the money over meaningful work, for example). Hirshman absolutely does not represent all feminists. As a young professional woman and a feminist who has “meaningful work,” I can tell you that the idea that working is more fulfilling than spending time with your family absolutely mystifies me. I can’t believe that anyone feels that way. Now, granted, I have not yet experienced any of the trials and travails that come along with parenting, so it’s possible that my perspective will change somewhat. Maybe it’s just that I often find my job stressful and unrewarding (as I sit here writing this instead of working) and SAHP seems like a lovely escape. But I know myself, and I know it’s not just those things. I honestly believe that people who view the world as Hirshman does are devaluing children, devaluing parenting, and devaluing caretaking in general ... are so brainwashed by the capitalist view that non-producers are a drag on society and that more money and status automatically means “better” that they can’t see how ultimately inhuman and, yes, antifeminist, that view really is.

4. On the same topic, while O’Beirne doesn’t personally have a problem with it, she says that society will never validate men who care for children full-time. Ever, ever, ever. To want to change this is “baying at the moon.” The next thing she says is that whatever men do is the high-status job. The interviewer points out that this is exactly the problem and that saying that “things have always been this way” does not make it okay. O’Beirne’s answer to that is that men are more concerned about status than women – they want it and we don’t.

To the extent that this is true (which I think is dubious), then I think men are the ones who have a problem that needs to be solved. Caring about “status” is a fool’s game, as far as I’m concerned. The old adage that there will always be somebody better, smarter, more attractive, richer, younger, whatever quality is considered desirable in a society at any particular time, is repeated often for a reason. Until our society learns to place a higher value on caretaking and the bonds that human beings form with each other, we are going to continue to make ourselves unhappy by spending too much time pursuing things (like money and status) that don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. And, to demonstrate that this is not a product of my chromosomal makeup, let me add that my husband agrees with me on this point.

All right, this is already pretty long, so I’ll stop here. I hope that discussion of these issues stimulates some interesting and, as always, respectful, conversation.

7 Comments:

Blogger Al Sturgeon said...

Thanks, Sandi!

An interesting title for a discussion of feminism.
:-)

My wife has worked "outside the home" since she was 15, and her brief foray into SAHP-dom just about drove her bonkers. So I agree firsthand with the nature/nurture characterization as a both/and instead of an either/or.

And as to the validation/status discussion, I'm afraid it still all comes down to money, the world's #1 value. Even our arguments that teachers are more valuable than professional athletes is punctuated by our proposal that "teachers should get more money." Like money validates them.

I'm about to get into the political theory question I offered today, so I'll quit for now and allow the "real" columnist from today to drive the discussion.

11:42 AM  
Blogger Sandi said...

Judith Warner (author of the book Perfect Madness) has a blog on the New York Times and posted today about Hirshman's article. And to what she said, I say, damn skippy. So check it out: http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/?8hpib

Oh, hell, I forgot that access to this is through Times Select. I'll just copy and paste it onto the blog.

11:46 AM  
Blogger Michael Lasley said...

It's hard to talk about feminism because there is so much attached to that word. It mostly seems to turn people off, even if they would agree with many of the feminist movement's goals. I have nothing to add here, except a question of audience. I have always thought that part of the problem is the theoretical writings of many feminists, which are then taken up by mainstream media personalities, like Limbaugh, who don't seem to try to understand where these writers are coming from or why they are writing. I'm not saying this very well, but there is a completely different lens through which one must read theory, and I think feminism has suffered from some readers not understanding how to read a theoretical text. Obviously, feminism isn't just a theoretical enterprise, but many of the influential writers are theorists. And there writings often sound radical or even nonsensical if not read through a theoretical lens. I'm still not saying it well. It's late. All of that to say that I think feminism has a PR promblem.

Also, I think it's important to point out that there are a lot of lazy people in any movement, such as feminism. People who don't do there homework and just spout off things. But a movement such as feminism shouldn't be discarded or discredited when one of these people speaks out.

Anything there make sense?

11:35 PM  
Blogger Sandi said...

Well, to respond to Malki, there absolutely is not one phenomenon called "feminism" in the sense that all feminists would agree on a set of views or even one view with respect to any particular subject. Let's take abortion as an example -- there are feminists who are not pro-choice. Anyone who has studied feminist theory can tell you that there are many strains of feminism, some of which are in conflict with each other. To say that there is one thing called feminism is like saying there's one thing called Christianity -- it's an umbrella term for a lot of different sets of viewpoints that may be quite different.

Even to try to make broad categorizations about different types of feminism -- liberal, radical, cultural -- is difficult. The only way I have found to get around this is to be as specific as possible.

And to address Michael's point, AMEN!! A perfect example of this is the old canard that Catharine MacKinnon once said that all heterosexual sex is rape. Never happened. It was never said by anyone to whom it has been attributed. Rather, it was a misinterpretation of Andrea Dworkin's book "Intercourse."

From Wikipedia: In Intercourse, Dworkin argued that sexual subordination was central to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse in a male supremacist system. She argued that depictions of intercourse in mainstream art and culture portrayed it in violent or invasive terms; that the cultural emphasis on heterosexual intercourse as the primary or only kind of "real" sex enforced a male-centric view of sexuality; and that the depiction of sexuality, when combined with the material conditions of women's lives in a sexist society, made intercourse itself a central part of women's subordination. (Dworkin's critics often claimed that she had argued that "All heterosexual intercourse is rape" in Intercourse; Dworkin rejected this interpretation of her work as a serious misunderstanding.)

Undoubtedly, feminism is a loaded word. However, I did not think that "equality" was ... Malki, I am disturbed by your statement that you don't think women are equal. Are you misunderstanding the word "equal" to mean "identical" (and thus invoking notions of essential sex differences that, if you define equal as identical, would preclude using the word equal) or is that statement to be taken at face value?

1:38 PM  
Blogger Al Sturgeon said...

Drumroll, please...

1:53 PM  
Blogger Al Sturgeon said...

I don't think I'm thinking of the exact same story as you, but Lois Lowry's "The Giver" is similar. It was a Newberry Medal winner, and a great story.

5:47 AM  
Blogger Sandi said...

I think that Malki and Joe's points bring up an interesting question about how we define equality in a political and social sense. What both are trying to point out, as I read them, is that people are different from each other, often by nature's design. We cannot correct these differences. For example, height is a difference between people that is largely attributable to genetics. And culturally, we tend to believe (or at least act as though, if we do not consciously embrace this as a view) that taller is better. Why do we as a culture believe that taller is better? Is this a legitimate belief? Is it just (fair) that shorter people (particularly men) have different, and some would say worse, life outcomes (employment, marriageability) than taller people?

It's not the differences that are the problem -- it's our beliefs about what those differences mean. That's true with respect to height, with respect to race, and with respect to sex (gender). Of course we don't want to erase people's differences; it would be very limiting for everyone to be the same. But I just can't buy that physical differences of this kind should affect the assessment of a person's moral worth and the level of respect, dignity, kindness, etc., with which she or he should be treated. That's what I mean by equality. To be specific. :)

7:41 AM  

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