The Perils and Prudery of Victim Feminism

Bora Zivkovic is a Belgrade-born scientist and writer who settled in North Carolina after doing research at NC State. Slightly built, with round wire-rim glasses, poofy graying hair, and a prominent nose, he’s friendly, energetic, and passionate about science and science writing. Photographed from certain angles, he has the look of a cartoon owl.

A man who helped organize the popular ScienceOnline conferences in the Research Triangle near Raleigh, Zivkovic earned the nickname “Blogfather” for his role as editor of the Scientific American blogs network. He also served as series editor of a yearly anthology of the best online science writing. Well-known for promoting science journalism, Zivkovic assisted numerous young science bloggers, and took pride in his efforts to encourage and support women interested in writing about science.

One day Zivkovic was having a smoke outside a Manhattan bar with writer and Scientific American blogger Hannah Waters. He bought a rose from a street vendor for his wife, who was waiting for them inside. The vendor handed him two.

“What’s that, one for the wife, one for the concubine?” Zivkovic joked to the vendor.

I find that funny. It made Waters uncomfortable. She said nothing at the time, but later, in a 2013 blog post on Medium, she deemed this and similar behavior sexual harassment. The article subhead read: There wasn’t any touching or overt sex talk. But it was still harassment.

That same year, two more Scientific American bloggers, Monica Byrne and Kathleen Raven, published posts accusing Zivkovic of sexual harassment, citing interactions from previous years they said made them uncomfortable.

But none of Zivkovic’s behavior came close to meeting legal standards for sexual harassment. There was no quid pro quo promise of advancement for a sexual favor, he didn’t issue a threat (such as warning of professional trouble if sex was not granted), and what he did wasn’t “severe and pervasive,” leading to a “hostile work environment.”

In the incident Byrne referenced, she said she’d known Zivkovic for about a month. She invited him to coffee in September of 2012, looking to interest him in her writing. Seated at the cafe with him, she mentioned visiting a strip club. Zivkovic then “began describing his own experience of going to a strip club,” she wrote.

After that, he got personal, talking about sex in his marriage and how he nearly had an affair with a younger woman. Byrne later emailed Zivkovic to tell him she was uncomfortable when the talk turned to sex. He emailed her an apology, and that was that. Or so he thought.

Something worth noting when it comes to Bora Zivkovic: He exhibits symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, which involves difficulty reading and decoding social cues and understanding appropriate responses. Though he hasn’t been formally diagnosed, his wife and a psychiatrist who knows him, along with many in the science-writing community, have expressed the opinion that he does suffer from it.

Zivkovic has the Aspie’s tendency to laugh at the wrong moments and natter on endlessly about whatever’s on his mind. He doesn’t always seem to sense when his presence is no longer wanted. For example, he and Kathleen Raven were attendees at a science journalism conference in Helsinki, Finland. He’d arrived at the hotel late in the evening and texted, “Can I come by and see you now?” Raven texted back, “No, I’m afraid we have to wait until tomorrow morning. My husband is already in bed, sorry.”

Shortly afterward, there was a knock on their door. Zivkovic said, “Hi!” and marched into the hotel room. Her husband “sat shocked” in their hotel bed, Raven wrote. She added, “Bora grabbed me in an embrace, picked me up, swirled me around, and kissed me on the cheek. After a few minutes of small talk, he left.”

Weird, awkward, and annoying behavior? Sure. But sexual harassment? In some other zeitgeist, no. But in our current moment, many people would say yes, it qualifies.

After the women posted their accounts in 2013, an unfortunate number of those trained in careful, evidence-based thinking — science writers who knew Zivkovic — credulously and without compassion accepted that he was guilty of sexual harassment.

He was pushed out at Scientific American and ostracized by the science-blogging community he loved and helped build. In Zivkovic’s terms, he lost everything.

Of course, he’s just one of many men recently deemed guilty without legal or even social due process. What his accusers have in common — and they’re not the only women today to demonstrate this quality — is a festering passivity that can turn poisonous.

Such behavior did not emerge in a vacuum. In fact, it’s a product of twenty-first-century feminism. Feminists have gone from fighting for equal rights to demanding that women be treated like eggshells. Feminism is now a movement that disables women, ruins men’s lives, and destroys professional and romantic relationships between the sexes.

Understanding this is the single-best way for a man to avoid social and professional disaster.

AMERICAN women had some seriously legit grievances back in the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth. They were denied voting rights, and once married, they had all the legal and financial autonomy of their husband’s hat or his goat.

Pioneering feminists rose up in the mid-1800s and began a battle that led to women getting the vote in 1920 and gaining greater legal recognition of their personhood.

Second-wave feminism — aka the women’s liberation movement — took off in the sixties and carried onward until the late eighties. But women no longer had a single unifying goal, like getting the vote, and feminism eventually splintered into factions.

There was a well-to-do white-lady feminism, famously embodied by Betty Friedan’s 1963 best-seller The Feminine Mystique, a socio-ballad of frustration capturing the existence of the cocktails-and-tranquilizers set: middle-class and wealthy housewives, bored and dissatisfied by traditional marriage, homemaking, and child-rearing.

Black women — already busy being ignored for leadership positions in the civil rights movement — were not happy that Friedan claimed to speak for a sweeping feminism yet excluded their experiences and interests. This led them to form their own feminist faction in the sixties and seventies. Latin women and other female minority groups did the same.

The 1960s also saw that mass uncrossing of women’s legs — the sexual revolution — and before long, up popped some female authoritarians with their sex-panic feminism. The most prominent? Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, a man-hating neo-prude who insisted that the male sex lived to oppress, degrade, and dehumanize women.

Dworkin saw heterosexual sex as an act of violent aggression perpetrated by a man on a woman. (“Penetration is Violation,” a classic Dworkin-inspired slogan goes.) The purpose of pornography, Dworkin argued, was not to get off but to make women “inferior, subhuman.” (How porn for gay men might do that she never got around to explaining.)

Dworkin characterized women who didn’t share her views as dumb bunnies — basically idiots “colluding in their own oppression.” The argument involved a broad-brush diminishing of women, foreshadowing the infantilization of women by today’s feminists.

The nineties launched a third-wave feminism, a movement still with us. Once again there was factional splintering. However, the most powerful third-wave strand — still extremely influential today — is what I call “women as weaklings feminism.”

It grew out of academic feminist theory — the stuff of women’s studies and gender studies classes. Its intellectual foundation was a convoluted bullshit-osophy known as “postmodernism,” a body of thought as easy to grasp as a greased goldfish in a bathtub.

In truth, there wasn’t that much to accomplish after the European Enlightenment philosophers did their thing, rebutting superstition, embracing reason, and questioning how we know what we know. But in the 1970s, French philosophers tossed science and reason in la poubelle — the trash can — and announced there’s no real knowable truth. They wanted to out-radical the Enlightenment’s revolutionary thinkers. And they came up with a pronounced relativism. They argued, essentially, that whatever someone says is true is true — though it’s even truer if it comes from an oppressed class.

As pointed out by England’s Helen Pluckrose, a literary scholar turned critic of these French-spawned modes of thought, in postmodernism the intention of the speaker — what the speaker means to say — “is irrelevant. What matters is the impact of speech,” or how the listener feels after the communication is made.

Yes, welcome to the origins of “Sexual harassment is whatever we say it is!”

In postmodernism, you can pin a crime of thought, speech, or social behavior on anybody. You simply claim that something a person wrote, spoke, or did made you feel harmed or “unsafe.” And once you take offense, you can run with it.

Postmodernism has a race-based intellectual sister — “intersectionality.”

In a celebrated 1989 law journal article, African-American law professor and social theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw argued that black women get extra scoops of discrimination. Like white women, they’re discriminated against because they are women. But they’re also discriminated against on the basis of race.

As Crenshaw explained it, the intersection of these two marginalized identities compounds the discrimination black women experience.

As a legal point, this claim had enormous potential significance. In discrimination suits, taking both sex and race into account could increase the redress received by black female plaintiffs. But Crenshaw additionally called for “expanding feminist theory and anti-racist politics” by “embracing the intersection” of forms of discrimination.

Women’s studies and gender studies faculty jumped at this. They turned intersectionality into an identity-politics cudgel — one swung in the direction of white people, especially white men. In a reversal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to judge people “by the content of their character,” intersectionality became a pissing contest of victimhood and oppression. Under intersectionality, high status is not earned — it’s granted through one’s group membership. How many boxes can you check on the “marginalized” groups ledger? Lesbian? Black? Missing a limb? You get to talk. White women, shut up and “check your privilege.”

Of course, this is a kind of social original sin. You can’t control your color or whether you’re born with all the usual limbs — you can only control what you do.

For feminist academics, victimhood has become the new hustle, a way to have unearned power over others. They’re pushing a viewpoint (ironically, a paternalistic one) that effectively tells the world women cannot make it without coddling and special treatment. It’s why contemporary feminist activists feel it’s their mission to force men, governments, and businesses to provide for women.

But for this argument to fly, women must be viewed as weak, fragile, and easily victimized. So, like a rehab facility maintaining its patient base by giving away bags of heroin at a table in its parking lot, academic feminism has become a force for female disempowerment. It pushes women to identify as victims — an identity formed not by what they’ve done but by what’s been done to them — and to demand not equal rights but special rights, perks, and protections. (Notice us coming full circle, anyone?)

THE jihadi feminists of academia have had help spreading their dogma — from phenomena such as overparenting, the decline of religion, and the rise of the internet and social media. Academic feminists’ rejection of science has also played a major role.

Helicopter parenting — the perpetual parental hover — took off in the early nineties, galvanized by TV news-driven paranoia that every stranger who said hello in the mall was plotting to kidnap their kid. And now it’s given way to “snowplow parenting” — adults clearing every possible obstacle in their child’s path — in school, at work, and beyond.

Young people who’ve grown up having all conflict in their lives magically removed by an authority figure are, as you might guess, proving to be less independent and self-sufficient than previous generations. Yes, in 75 years, we’ve gone from the Greatest Generation, storming the beach at Normandy, to the Gripey-est Generation, with Mommy calling her grown child’s boss to complain on their behalf. Not surprisingly, today’s young women are ripe for a feminism acting in loco parentis.

Contemporary victim feminism operates like a fundamentalist religion without the God stuff. Women’s attraction to it is understandable, given the sharp decline in organized religion in America. Like traditional religions, this kind of feminism offers comfy, pre-chewed black-and-white beliefs — us and them, right and wrong, good and evil.

It also seems to fill a major psychological hole in people. We appear to have an adaptation pushing us to join groups — behavior probably coming out of how there were distinct survival advantages to living cooperatively in ancestral times.

Behavioral scientist Clay Routledge, who studies the evolutionary roots of what motivates us psychologically, theorizes that secular movements now function as a substitute for religious belief. He cites studies finding that “people who score low on commitment to a religious faith” are more likely to turn to “extreme political tribalism.”

As for how they’ll wave the flag of their allegiance — how they’ll signal their tribal affiliation — in lieu of religious worship and church socials, well, there’s…social media.

SOCIAL media platforms are today’s stages for communicating a belief system. It can be done quietly by posting a photo of oneself complying with a group dress code — such as when a woman dons a pink pussy hat and circulates the image on Instagram. But it can also be done aggressively by attacking a common enemy online. Within minutes on Twitter, hundreds, thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of ideological fellow travelers can be mobilized against a perpetrator of wrongthink.

As a bonus, this virtue signaling — conspicuously displaying your moral righteousness, your commitment to the cause — requires little actual effort or commitment of time. Why get all sweaty marching when you can just tweet?

Welcome to the Age of Endarkenment.

Like many actual religions, victim feminism rejects certain forms of scientific knowledge. Most consequentially, it denies research identifying basic differences between male and female psychology and behavior. Its argument, boiled down, is basically, Sex differences? That’s bro science. Without evidence, academic feminists insist that differences between men and women are largely (if not entirely) socially constructed. They claim that a “toxic patriarchal culture” determines sex differences in societal outcomes, such as how women tend to be kindergarten teachers and not oil rig workers.

But in reality, research shows men are far likelier to take physical risks — such as working on an offshore oil platform. Findings on sex differences like this are some of the most robust in behavioral science. The fact that these differences show up across cultures (and even in apes and other nonhuman primates) demolishes feminist arguments.

While overall, men and women are more alike than different, the sex differences we do see align with men’s and women’s differing physiologies. The late psychologist Anne Campbell explained that women seem to have evolved to avoid physical confrontation, which could damage their reproductive parts and leave them unable to fill their role as an infant’s primary caregiver.

Campbell believed that female self-protectiveness led to women’s tendency to be indirect — using hints and manipulation, instead of assertive speech, to achieve their goals. She likewise believed it was why women score much higher than men in “agreeableness” — a personality trait manifesting in being kind, generous, warm, and motivated to have positive interactions with others.

This is vital information for women. But thanks to feminist academia’s dissing of evolutionary research, women who might recognize the need to override their natural inclinations are instead flying blind — hinting and hoping men will suss out what they want and comply. Combined with women’s internalizing of feminist notions about their supposed powerlessness, this makes for a toxic stew. It can lead to things like young women, experiencing morning-after sexual regret, deciding they were a victim of rape.

WE’RE now living under two new norms — a pair of academic-theory-driven expectations for thinking and behavior dictated by our intersectional feminist overlords. Perniciously, these standards are secret. Yet those who don’t adhere to them put themselves at risk — of losing their job and being exiled from their social world, as Bora Zivkovic was, or being bullied by countless people on social media.

(Academic Feminism) Secret standard No. 1:
Women Are Children

Women must now be treated like they’re very young. They cannot be expected to assert themselves or tend to their own needs, including their need for personal safety.

For good reason, we don’t let 4-year-olds act without supervision. We don’t let young children ride their Big Wheel solo to the ice-cream parlor. Instead, we make decisions about what our children need.

But today’s academic feminism conveys the idea that adult women lack autonomy when interacting with a man on a date, at a party, or over business drinks, and hence it’s up to the man to guess what the woman would be comfortable with. It’s up to the man to be the parent in the interaction — even with a woman he’s just met.

And just as we don’t use adult language around children, it’s no longer appropriate to use such language around grown women. A University of Utah professor, Nick Wolfinger, discovered this after committing the speech crime of telling female colleagues over drinks that he’d proposed to his wife at a strip club. Mere mention of an adult-entertainment venue led to a complaint filed against him with his employers — a decade after he told the story. It cost him five months and $14,000 in attorney’s fees to clear himself.

Finally, women, like children, cannot be expected to be personally responsible for their safety. Simply suggesting a woman take steps to prevent sexual assault (like not getting blackout drunk) is now a thought crime. Propose this and you’ll be angrily countered by how men “should” behave, which changes how some do behave (rape-ishly) not in the slightest.

(Academic Feminism) Secret standard No. 2:
Men Are Sex Predators — Even In Their Sleep

A male Amherst College student, drunk off his ass, was accompanied to his room by his girlfriend’s female roommate. He passed out. While he was passed out, this female student gave him a blowjob. After her roommate discovered what she’d done and this friend found herself ostracized, she then accused the male student of sexual assault, claiming she withdrew consent at some point during the sexual act. Yes, that’s right, she said she withdrew consent for the act she was performing on an unconscious man. Since he’d been conked out, he couldn’t contest the claim and Amherst expelled him.

When we widen the lens to consider the behavior of (conscious) men and women in the sexual arena, we come up against a reality: Male sexuality is more variety-seeking, while female sexuality, generally speaking, is more commitment-seeking. One is not better than the other. They’re just different.

Because women can get pregnant from sex, they evolved to prefer men who are willing and able to “invest” in any children. But under this new “men are sex predators” standard, classic male pursuit — which is not the same as rape — has been demonized.

Men are horny mofos in a way most women are not. They evolved to “spread their seed,” not, oh, “save it for that special someone.” Truth be told, I suspect Bora Zivkovic would’ve catapulted himself into bed with any of his three accusers, had they given him the thumbs-up.

Ultimately, I think Zivkovic was a lonely guy hungry for human connection, willing to take whatever these women were willing to give. It’s like my dog. If you’re offering bacon, she’ll eat bacon. If you’re offering a dental chew bone, she’ll eat that. Whatever you’re serving, she’s eating.

A cloud of suspicion now hangs over male-female romantic interactions. Men are would-be perps and women are would-be accusers. This has led to “affirmative consent” policies on college campuses (and there’s talk of states making it law).

The edicts require that people ask for and receive verbal consent each time they move on to some new form of sexual activity. “May I kiss you? May I rapidly lick your clitoris?” Such protocols fly in the face of how sexual activity works in the real world — with adults sensing what move to make next. Personally, my boyfriend is my boyfriend because, three hours after we met, he walked me to my car, grabbed me, and kissed me.

In eliminating this spontaneity, we lose a good bit of the sexiness of sex, and for women, the feeling of being wildly desired. That’s gone when a guy brings in a notary with consent documents for you to sign. That sounds absurd, but it’s on the mind of many men, worried that they’re one unwise choice of sex partner away from life in prison on a rape charge.

For men right now, the best defense is a good offense.

Take precautions. Don’t be alone in an office with a woman with the door closed. Think twice about drinks with female coworkers. And finally, seek women as friends, colleagues, and romantic partners who don’t seem to go for the women-as-eggshells feminism.

Real change has to come from women.

There are women — like me — who refuse to buy into the victimthink. We speak out, despite the potential social and career costs. In time, I hope we can persuade other women that academic feminism’s denial of innate differences between the sexes is doing harm to women. As anthropologist Jerome Barkow puts it, “Biology is only destiny if we ignore it.”

Imagine if women were told that they might have an evolutionary propensity to be “pleasers” and that this is nothing to be ashamed of — it’s simply a function of what worked for the females of our species in ancestral times.

If a woman knows she might have a tendency to say yes when she means “Hell, no!” she’s prepared to stand up for herself in a way she isn’t when guided by empty girl-power talk like “The future is female!” and other such slogans (interspersed with complaints about how the patriarchy is keeping women down).

Unfortunately, feminist activists keep focusing on the wrong people, telling men, “You can’t say this,” or “You can’t do that.” We can’t control others’ behavior — we can only control our own. Until feminism — on campuses and everywhere else — stops being blame-oriented and starts being truly empowerment-focused, the future will not be female. It will be feminism’s future — at the expense of all the women it claims to be advocating for and all the men it criminalizes in its wake.

Amy Alkon is an award-winning columnist and author who specializes in turning the insights of science, especially behavioral science and anthropology, into practical advice. Her latest book is Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence. Check out her podcast, HumanLab, where she interviews experts on human behavior. You can also follow her on Twitter at @amyalkon, and find her columns at advicegoddess.com.