One attacks great political causes with great risk, even when one has the same political goal.
Christina Hoff Sommers — Interview
Christina Hoff Sommers can’t recall the first time she saw the statistic, but she knows that it instantly struck her as incredible: 150,000 anorexia deaths annually, the vast majority of them young women. “I don’t carry numbers around in my head,” notes the 44-year-old professor of philosophy at Massachusetts’ Clark University, “but I recalled from driver’s ed that something like 50,000 people die a year in car accidents. And I thought, Gee, three times more anorexia deaths? If that’s true, at places like Wellesley College, they’d have to have ambulances permanently on call.”
As she began looking into it, she realized that the statistic was being repeated endlessly, by everyone from Gloria Steinem to Ann Landers. It had made its way into serious journals and college texts. And, almost always, it came with a subtext — that this terrible tragedy was a result of the sexism permeating American life. Best-selling feminist Naomi Wolf was actually moved to write of this “vast number of emaciated bodies starved not by nature but by men….”
The truth, readily available through government agencies, proved a revelation: The actual number of anorexia deaths was around 100 a year.
The gross misrepresentation by certain feminists of statistical data — and the anorexia case is only one of the more dramatic examples — ultimately provided the basis for Who Stole Feminism? Sommers’s highly controversial book. Heavily supported by original research, she paints a devastating picture — not merely of intellectually dishonest ideologues fiercely pursuing an agenda, but of a compliant media that routinely lets them get away with it.
Not surprisingly, Sommers now finds herself high on radical feminists’ enemies list. Their reach has stunned even her. In many key publications, her book has been reviewed — viciously — by the very people it attacks. Partly as a result, distribution has been spotty; in some places it’s all but impossible to find. Sommers was asked to appear on only one network show, CBS’s “Eye to Eye With Connie Chung,” and the week before the segment ran, the show was subjected to unprecedented pressure to kill it; indeed, Chung was contacted directly by Gloria Steinem.
“Feminist classrooms try to turn sensitive young women into hate-intoxicated little zealots. ”
Sommers herself would appear a most unlikely target of such vitriol. Good-humored and courteous, measured in speech and uncomfortable with imprecision, she seems very much a product of traditional academic life. Talking with her in the tidy house in the Boston suburbs she shares with her husband and children, interrupted by workmen moving furniture into her son’s bedroom or the family dog barking at the front door, one’s first impression is of contented domesticity.
But get her on the subject of orthodox feminism, and her eyes literally brighten. In fact, far from retreating in the face of the onslaught, as so many do, she clearly relishes the fight. For Sommers sees herself not so much as attacking feminism as trying to reclaim it. The distinction she makes is between what she calls “equity” feminists like herself, who believe in promoting genuine equality between the sexes, and “gender” feminists, zealots whose worldview is shaped by a profound hostility toward men. The latter believe, as she writes, “that all our institutions, from the state to the family to grade schools, perpetuate male dominance. Believing that women are virtually under siege, gender feminists naturally seek recruits to wage their side of the gender war.”
Not that she is without a sense of humor on the subject. Early on, she launches into a story about a particularly vicious wrangle she was involved in a few years back. Having written a piece for an academic journal in which she joked that, like it or not, many women were going to continue to find the scene of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O’Hara up the stairs in Gone With the Wind the opposite of objectionable, she found herself under brutal attack at a philosophical conference. When given the chance to respond, she notes, smiling, “I just went further. I told them that, like it or not, there’s a philosophical distinction between being raped and being ravished, and that this was a distinction they as feminist philosophers might want to look into, since most women are well aware of it. They were horrified. One woman stood up and said that Rhett Butler brought to her mind Richard Speck, the mass murderer who killed all the nurses, and there’s nothing sexy or funny about Richard Speck. She demanded to know if I thought women would enjoy that scene if they knew that Rhett Butler had urinated on Scarlett.”
Sommers sits back for a moment in perplexed amusement. “I mean, all I could think to say was, ‘Gee, did she read the same book I did?’” But a moment later, she is serious again. “That’s the thing: When you deal with people like this, you eventually begin to take this looniness for granted. You can almost forget how destructive they are, and how dangerous.”
Was there a watershed moment for you — a time when Christina Hoff Sommers realized she was in this fight and there was no retreat?
Sommers: Well, the first encounter that truly opened my eyes involved a session of the American Philosophical Association. This was in ‘87 or ‘88, a few years before the Rhett Butler episode. I read a paper there, criticizing what I took to be some of the more eccentric feminist positions on the family. One woman, for example, had spoken in favor of hormone treatments that would enable men to lactate. She said perhaps someday soon, gender differences will be erased and men can have babies and lactate and so forth. Well, I found this grotesque and indicated I thought that most women would think so, too. I said the failure of such an argument was precisely that — that people find it grotesque.
And it was your expectation that it would be met as a reasonable argument and responded to reasonably?
Sommers: That’s right. I thought they might have some good points and we would not necessarily agree, but in the end we’d go out and have drinks, as you often do at the A.P.A., and afterward part as friends. Well, this time we clearly weren’t going to part as friends. I had never seen anything like it. They were hissing. Hissing! Booing. Then they started cursing at the men in the audience. They all felt they were witnessing something that was intellectually criminal. And I think it might have crossed some of their minds to call hotel security and have me taken away. Well … suddenly, I realized they had never been criticized before. It was a new and shocking and illegal act. Of course, they see it differently, that I was being incendiary and provocative and so forth. But I wasn’t — I was merely doing my job as a philosopher. I thought their arguments were sloppy and had all sorts of failings, not only logical but moral and ethical. But then it began to hit me: This is not your run-of-the-mill academic debate, this is a religious movement that I didn’t know existed. I didn’t know that there were religious dogmas that I wasn’t supposed to violate.
And that you were, in fact, a heretic?
Sommers: I was a heretic; that’s right. And officially hated and excommunicated and called names. Women are very punishing. Some of these women, I think, reinforce the worst stereotypes about women, because they behave in a truly hysterical manner, almost like teenage girls, very cliquish. They run in packs. Immediately, they wanted to punish me, and the way they punish is by calling me a right-wing crank and a handmaiden of the patriarchy, that kind of thing.
How did you react to that?
Sommers: Well, at first it was disorienting, because I’d never been that unpopular before. I had never had enemies. I mean, as a philosopher I’d always given papers that were fairly uncontroversial. But, like the Rhett Butler thing, this is so typical of how these people see things, always looking for the most bizarre — if not sinister and lurid — interpretation of male-female relationships. Now, of course, feminists are all in a dither about what to do about the fact that so many women enjoy Harlequin Romances, the so-called bodice rippers. For a while, editors in New York apparently attempted to get the writers to write about women who were helicopter repair-women with androgynous relationships, but those books didn’t sell. So now we’re back to the alpha males.
Let’s backtrack just a bit. Tell us some of your history, how you evolved. Is it true that you started out fairly politically correct?
Sommers: Right. I grew up in L.A., a flower child, a war protester. My best friend in high school changed her name and became Star Hock, a radical-feminist witch. But then I went to college in New York, to N.Y.U. This was 1969: Had there been women’s studies departments back then, I might have majored in witchcraft or “women’s ways of knowing,” and I probably would have loved it. I was an irrational member of the counterculture. But there was nothing like that available, so I studied philosophy, which was …
The closest you could get to the irrational?
Sommers: The closest I could get to what I thought was the occult — only it turned out to be the anti-occult. I was there with a bunch of analytically trained philosophers, several of them from Oxford University. I thought we were there to discuss our philosophy of life and read poetry, and instead I was learning about consistency and how to avoid fallacies. And it changed me. I mean, I got hooked. I just developed respect for clear thinking and became concerned about the irrationality that seems to flourish in so many ways everywhere. But still, politically, I continued to count myself as very liberal. In fact, my first publication was in The New England Journal of Medicine, for animal rights and against vivisection.
So I was Miss Politically Correct. But then the chairman of my department asked me if I would teach a course on women in philosophy. I thought, Well, I’m a woman, I’m in philosophy, I guess I can. I thought feminist philosophy would be really high-powered, clever arguments for and against comparable worth, affirmative action, abortion. So I sent away for textbooks and began to receive one after another with titles like Women and Domination and Oppression. I read these and I thought, These women are paranoid. This just doesn’t have any relation to American society as I know it. Most of this stuff was basically warmed-over Marxism, where they crossed out class arid put in gender. So suddenly, women were an oppressed group. We weren’t individuals who wanted rights and wanted to be treated with respect. We were members of an oppressed, silenced, diminished class that needed to have its consciousness raised.
What really annoyed me is that Big Sister was there-the feminist philosophers and feminist theorists who would raise our consciousness because they were the revolutionary vanguard. So they awarded themselves a very esteemed role. And yet I would watch these women in action, and they clearly had a very melancholy worldview. They did not seem to speak for anyone but themselves and they were flourishing in this world of militant feminism. Their political life was their social and personal life. There was a militant-feminism industry. So the whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way.
Early on, was there any temptation to try to smooth it over, get back in with the pack?
Sommers: No. That was impossible. As a philosopher I’m committed to telling the truth, though the advantages if I’d gone along with the sisterhood would have been enormous. People say, “Oh, you gain so much by criticizing feminists.” Are they crazy? The path to academic success is to totally go along with feminist dogma. I’ve seen women from obscure colleges, community colleges in Maine, go right to the Ivy League.
So opposing it would seem to be a real career drag.
Sommers: Look, Camille Paglia, one of the most brilliant, original thinkers in this country, is basically teaching at a museum school in Philadelphia, while women with a fraction of her talent, a fraction of her originality and intellect, are tenured professors at major universities. And still they claim to be victims and powerless. It is so pathetic. It’s such a mockery.
How has it affected your career?
Sommers: Well, by the time I really got into it, I already had tenure. Whether I’d have done it before, I really don’t know. I mean, was I suicidal academically? Because in that world, to criticize the sisterhood really is to invite excommunication.
What’s been the reaction to your out-spokenness on your own campus?
Sommers: Well, fortunately, in my department, my colleagues are freethinkers. Philosophy departments tend to be that way. I suspect it would be a lot tougher if I were in English or history, because at most places those departments are just P.C. enclaves.
Do you have any sense of the way students and, particularly, women students, react to this stuff? We hear about this epidemic of sexual harassment and date rape on campus.
Sommers: I think there’s a very serious problem with about 15 percent of women students who take the gender propaganda seriously. At Ivy League colleges — Mount Holyoke, Smith, Mills, places like that — it might be higher. You get freshman women, in “Intro to Women’s Studies,” being told: “One in four of you will be victims of rape or attempted rape. You will earn 59 cents on the dollar. You will be depressed. You will lose your self-esteem. Two-thirds of you will be battered by your husbands or boyfriends.” Well, of course sensitive young women who believe this will be stunned by the injustice of it all. They will begin to believe America really is a kind of Bosnian rape camp. They will mistrust every young man they meet as a potential batterer, potential rapist, an oppressor. Enough time in the feminist classroom, and they will become hate-intoxicated little zealots. But I think the vast majority of young women know it’s nonsense; to them feminism seems unpleasant because they recognize it stands for hating men and being a victim.
What about date rape? Isn’t that a real problem on campuses?
Sommers: Look, obviously, those things really do occur sometimes. But to say it’s normal dating practice — to teach young women that there’s a one-in-four this will happen to them — is just insane. The truth just isn’t what the feminists would like it to be. The truth is, you can’t stereotype women. Women are also capable of being aggressive, violent, and cruel. And guess what? We can lie! I know it’s a shock to my sisters who believe we are the pure and moral sex, but women lie. And what a great way to get back at a guy, to accuse him of something like this.
Are there certain personality types among female students who are particularly susceptible to the orthodox-feminist line?
Sommers: Absolutely. If I had a daughter who was strong-minded and thoughtful, I’d happily send her to Wellesley College or Smith College and simply tell her, “Be careful, there are some silly courses that could waste your time.” But if you have a daughter who’s suggestible, fragile, prone to depression, be very careful, because the women in the women’s studies departments will prey upon her with the same techniques used by modern-day cults, manipulating their emotions through what can only be described as propaganda.
The women’s studies textbooks are full of these phony statistics, these outrageous untruths about American society, about men, about male-female relationships, about women’s victimization. In doing my book, I went through every category that I could find of where women were supposedly oppressed-harassment, rape studies, battery, eating disorders, depression, wage differentials. In every case where feminist advocates or researchers were in charge of the information, it is unreliable. I found egregious statistical errors, methodological unsoundness. And I also found that in the background, there are real experts on these issues, serious scholars who have completely different numbers. Generally speaking, these numbers make a very different case. They establish that in American society overall, women have made enormous progress in recent decades. The truth is, the eighties were not a backlash period for women at all, it was a period where it all started to come together for women. When historians look back on this period, they won’t ask why women were so oppressed by the backlash and the gender war, but how we made so much progress in so short a time.
And yet you do continue to identify yourself as a feminist.
Sommers: Because I’m not willing to give up the term to these extremists. As I say, feminism, in the best sense, is a great American success story. I think with great sadness of how many women in my mother’s generation and before were denied an education. And I’m so happy that in twentieth-century America, that’s changed. But the tragic irony is, just at the moment that women find themselves with genuine opportunity, women’s studies moves in. So, as someone put it, our foremothers fought for the right for women to compete on equal terms — to study science and philosophy and Latin — yet now that we’ve achieved that, we’re told it’s more valuable for women to sit around reading from their journals, honoring their emotions, and valorizing their feelings about the menstrual cycle. To me, that’s the worst kind of male-chauvinist fantasy, a bunch of women sitting around whining about their feelings. It’s a disgrace.
When and why did that flip occur?
Sommers: I think that at a critical stage, right at the beginning, the women’s studies movement took a wrong turn. They insisted on finding “the lost women geniuses of history.” They insisted there must be buried away there some great philosopher, or Shakespeare’s sister, who wrote great plays.
Part of the feel-good, self-esteem thing?
Sommers: That’s right. Only they couldn’t find them. There simply isn’t a woman on a par with Descartes or Socrates or Einstein. But instead of saying, “Well, that’s too bad, historically, women didn’t have a chance to compete,” they began to challenge the very notion of genius. They said, “We’re not finding these people because men have defined genius in a male way that favored their style of thinking, their aggression, their tendency toward hierarchical organizing.” And so it got absurd, so that now you find people like Peggy McIntosh, at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, and Janis Bell, an art historian at Kenyon College, talking about the glories of quilting and bread-loaf shapes, implying that these may rival the great cathedrals for their expressiveness. And they’re taken seriously! I mean, c’mon. I like quilts as much as anyone, but no quilt rivals a Titian!
So the attack on men was seen as a kind of self-validation?
Sommers: Exactly. There was just this effort to characterize all things male in negative terms. They look at the men who are rapists, men who are brutal, deadbeat dads. But do they ever look at the men who helped women? Look at how they talk about medicine. They paint a picture of male behavior within the medical profession as unremittingly oppressive — a bunch of doctors forcing women into all sorts of hysterectomies and the like. It’s so unfair, so irresponsible. What about all the ways the medical profession has saved women? What about the fact that until recently, millions of us died in childbirth? What about the fact that, on average, women now live seven years longer than men? Look at the funding for breast cancer as compared to prostate cancer, which, among men, is almost as prevalent. The only way to explain it is that these people are guided by great animus. The anger courses through the entire discussion.
But why is the anger so intense? Why, in some cases, does it seem so hard to get past?
Sommers: I never am quite certain, except that in the lives of a lot of these women, gender feminism takes the place of religion. It becomes a solution to the problem of evil. If they are depressed or melancholy, it organizes their depression, it gives them someone to blame. After all, like any conspiracy theory, there are some grains of truth behind their world-view. Historically, the world has been patriarchal, it has not been gender fair. It’s not hard to see how people can get worked up about that. But as an equity feminist, sorry as I am about past injustices, I’m also upset by sexist bullying by women.
Is there anything to the notion that this anger comes from recognition, on some level, of their own dishonesty, that so much of what they claim has so little basis in people’s experience?
Sommers: Yes …. But I’d add that there are also enormous benefits. Establishment feminism now is a multimillion-dollar business. A lot of these people, their careers depend on creating a crisis environment. There are professional feminists who offer workshops; they have titles like “gender-equity expert” or “harassment facilitator.” There’s money and privilege there. So if I come and question the hysteria, they’re threatened not only spiritually but economically. That’s why the feminist establishment has worked so hard to try and discredit me.
How have they gone about that?
Sommers: Well, at first I think they hoped to discover that I was the illegitimate daughter of two right-wing fanatics or something.
Ms. Rush Limbaugh?
Sommers: Right. And that didn’t quite work. For one thing, my mother’s a big A.C.L.U. type. And my only foray into organized politics was at one point trying to become a speechwriter for Dukakis. So I just didn’t make a very convincing right-wing fanatic. At this point they’re at the stage of scanning the book for infractions, desperate to show that I’ve made mistakes. They’ve found only a very few — small ones, like identifying the date of the ‘93 Super Bowl as January 30 instead of the 31st. I’m actually grateful, because it’s going into its second printing free of even those mistakes. In fact, the book is now probably as free of mistakes as any book could be, because it’s had 500 hostile critics, desperate to find any errors.
No one has challenged you on the important stuff — the false figures on anorexia, for instance?
Sommers: Of course not, they can’t. Which is very frustrating to them. It’s really as if the feminists want it to be 150,000 deaths. Not literally, of course, but because it’s a perfect illustration of what the patriarchy does to women. They want to prove to American women that what they know in their bones is so: that we’re trapped in a vicious and deadly patriarchal culture, where men routinely starve us to death. It’s the same with the phony claim that battering causes more birth defects than all other causes combined — one of the most vicious libels against men. What could be more hateful? By the time I read that statistic, I knew that damage inflicted by battering is relatively rare, and birth defects are not that rare. Battering causes more birth defects than Tay-Sachs, spina bifida, Down’s syndrome, alcohol, combined? But it was put out all over the place, attributed to the March of Dimes.
“These gender feminists are at war with male lust. And I’m sorry, but the majority of American women are really not grateful to them for this.”
So I called the March of Dimes. They said, we’ve never seen this research before, it’s not true, but the rumor is spinning out of control. Their office had been flooded with phone calls from governors, journalists, Senator Kennedy’s office. That’s the interesting thing: Everyone wanted that report. Not only are they libeling men, but everybody wants it. There is a market for incendiary statistics that implicate men as monsters. Pretty soon it’s going to be, men caused the plague, men caused AIDS. I don’t know …. Why don’t we just round them all up, put them in a ghetto, and be done with it? We’d be rid of all the ills that afflict our society.
You talk about the pivotal role of journalists in all this.
Sommers: Absolutely, that’s key. Journalists want sexy stories, and feminist-victimology claims make good copy.
Is that the only reason? Isn’t there also sometimes a kind of ideological kinship?
Sommers: Sure. With some journalists, the two things come together. And we’re getting a lot of that-women who go into journalism because they want to save the world. They don’t want to get the facts, so they don’t check very carefully. They find a fact they like and run with it. But it’s not only women. When Peter Jennings convenes a group on ABC to talk about date rape, there is Susan Faludi, Naomi Wolf, Catharine MacKinnon! How dare they put Catharine MacKinnon up there as a spokesperson for anything but fruitcake feminism! And look how the American journalist community loved all these studies showing massive gender bias in the schools. Well, it turns out that the research documenting that is chockfull of errors and misstatements.
Yet not one journalist, not one, discovered that it was a hoax. In fact, it’s a tragic hoax, because if the truth be told, it’s boys that are most at risk educationally, especially African-American boys. They’re the kids most vulnerable to dropping out, failing grades, not going to college. More girls than boys go to college. Girls get higher grades. More girls than boys are valedictorians, more girls than boys are on the yearbook, in the orchestra, on the newspaper. In the achievement areas, it’s girls, girls, girls. Boys are overrepresented in all the categories of pathology. More boys drop out, more boys are alcoholics, drug abusers, criminals. Far more boys than girls commit suicide. In fact, in just 1991, approximately 25,000 men and boys committed suicide; for women it was 6,000. Now just imagine if that were reversed. In England now, even the feminists have declared that it’s a crisis, that boys are three or four years behind English girls in reading. The same thing is happening here, but not one journalist has called significant attention to it.
So you’re saying the same kind of hostility that exists toward men is now being aimed at boys?
Sommers: Well, why did we take our daughters to work and not our sons? We did it because of these phony studies about girls and self-esteem. So we marched off to work with our girls, while the boys were abandoned to the tender mercies of Big Sister. They had to do exercises, prepared by the Ms. Foundation, on how girls are repressed and how they contribute to the oppression of girls.
In other words, re-educated.
Sommers: Exactly. They had to do exercises like, for instance, imagining they were in a box, unable to get out-and told this is what girls experience every day. What nonsense. What girls are they talking about? I think it’s a lot of middle-aged women with inaccurate memories of their own childhoods, because I sure don’t remember that. My friends and I always thought girls were smarter than boys because we were more mature and got better grades. And now they have the Gender Equity in Education Act, which makes money available for gender-equity facilitation, whatever in the world that is — people coming to schools and talking to students and teachers, getting little girls angry and alert to how they’re being cheated and shortchanged.
So they want to make little girls like middle-aged, bitter feminists. They want girls as young as first or second grade to know they’re being harassed by the boys. I mean … all right, if boys are flipping up girls’ skirts, that’s a behavior problem. But why turn it into sexual harassment? I’ve heard some of these sexual-harassment facilitators say they’ve talked to serial killers, and many of them harassed girls — implying that the average little boy teasing a girl is a potential serial killer. But no one in Congress dared to question this, because if you question Big Sister, you are in for grief. I really just think we have to start standing up for the young men, because what’s going on is very cruel.
Of course, the same argument has been made about Ted Bundy and pornography, by people like Andrea Dworkin. What about this whole attack on pornography?
Sommers: Well, I’d be interested in seeing the research that shows a correlation. I mean, the feminists are really in a bind here, because some of the most viciously patriarchal societies don’t allow pornography. I don’t think you’ll find a lot of pornography in the streets of Tehran; it’s a phenomenon of freedom. As a parent, I do worry about glorifying violence. But celebrating the beauties of the female body? It seems to me that, now that we’re liberated, women are as capable of objectifying the male body.
Of course, a case can be made that that’s nonsense, that men and women do look at things differently and that’s okay, because that’s nature.
Sommers: Well, the truth is, these gender feminists are at war with male lust. And I’m sorry, but the majority of women in America are really not grateful to them for this.
This goes to another phony statistic you talk about in the book, which is the supposed increase in violence on Super Bowl Sunday.
Sommers: Right. And the excitable media went right along with them. They want to impugn the average guy who enjoys contact sports as part of the male predatory class. And the thing that’s such a lie here is that the men who batter are anything but average. No question, too many women are at risk for serious violence; we all need to support antiviolence laws. But we’re dealing with a tiny minority of men who behave in these ways. To the average man, beating up a woman is contemptible. This is a terrible calumny against men.
But again, it’s made men much more defensive. A lot of guys will no longer even risk being chivalrous toward a woman because he’s sure it’ll be taken the wrong way.
Sommers: Well, chivalry had its patronizing side, obviously. But it seems to me that the courtesies by which men expressed respect for women, opening doors and so forth, had real value. For example, on a first date, I think the man should pay. Every woman I know, if she goes on a first date with a man, and he splits the check, she doesn’t think he’s emancipated; she thinks he’s cheap. It’s just a kind of symbolic courtesy.
Feminists wouldn’t agree with that.
Sommers: That’s okay. Because again, there’s just a vast gulf between the views of those people and the mass of women. That’s where I think moderate women have to become organized and challenge their hegemony.
Why hasn’t that happened?
Sommers: It’s not easy. In any movement, it’s always the extremists who have the most energy. Extremism generates fanaticism, and fanatics get a lot done. Those in the sensible middle are always at a disadvantage, because most of us just want to go about our lives. But for extremist feminists, male and female, it’s a permanent state of mind, it’s the total of their being. I wonder sometimes, what must it be like being married to these people — those guys must check their masculinity at the door. And what they do to their children! My stepson hung posters from Sports Illustrated, Paulina Porizkova, all over his wall. Can’t you just see the thought police marching in and forcing their sons to put up women helicopter pilots or something? And to be their daughters! I read one feminist describing how her 14- or 15- year-old girls were flirting with a lifeguard and how furious it made her. Well, what’s wrong with that? It’s a perfectly natural stage of adolescence. These women take something that’s completely normal and healthy and turn it into sick behavior. Over and over, natural phenomena are taken as perverse and pathological.
Of course, there’s also hostility toward women who, instead of pursuing careers, invest themselves in their children full-time.
Sommers: Exactly. This was supposed to be a movement about offering women choices, but if you don’t make the choice that your feminist mentor wants you to make, then you’re incorrect. That’s another thing I can’t understand about the feminist establishment: Where do children figure in this? Is there ever an occasion where children’s interests are paramount?
But doesn’t it seem to you that people are at last starting to react against the more obvious feminist excesses?
Sommers: I hope so, because so much of this stuff is truly awful. If the same kinds of things were being said about anyone else that are routinely said about men, it would immediately be seen as the most appalling kind of bigotry.
How, in your estimation, do all these things affect the average guy on the street? Is he aware of it, does he understand what’s going on?
Sommers: Well, I think he’s becoming more aware of it. I mean, look, women are now 55 percent of college enrollments. Suppose this figure goes up to 60 or 70 percent? Is that going to be fair, finally, to the feminists? I mean, what do they want? When do they admit success and move on to another area, or admit maybe we’d better put some of our resources into our sons?
Is that message beginning to get through at all?
Sommers: I think there are an increasing number of women who are feminists, but for whom feminism stands for fairness, not women becoming the bullies that men once were. I can feel that happening. What we can’t understand is why some feminists seem to think that a woman being oppressed is intrinsically more painful and horrible than if a man is oppressed. The thing is, if the gender feminists don’t have their propaganda — their advocacy statistics — if they lose this catechism of oppression, they’re going to have a lot more trouble recruiting new troops. They need their atrocity stories.
So already, I think, the feminists are losing the younger generation, and that’ll happen more and more. Because, basically, young women don’t want to dislike men. And to them, that’s what feminism has come to be about. One of the great myths of feminism is· that women’s interests are critically connected to the sisterhood. But the truth is that women’s interests are far more congruent with their husbands, their fathers, their sons. Women love men. So the fate of men is their fate.
It always comes down to how one defines “becoming equal” in a setting, does it not? At the very least, Christina Hoff Sommers has a marvelous ability to make one think, which has become a sadly rare attribute in modern society. You can find “Who Stole Feminism?” much more easily now, and Ms. Sommers has a much newer book, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men” out now too. Take a look at the disenfranchised young male vote in the last national election, and you may decide that she again displayed some uncanny prescience. Sometimes you just wish really smart people had better news, right? … Feel free to so some further research, though. It may help to have some yummy cookies nearby when you do, however.
