Will Rawn
English
MSU-Northern
Christina Hoff Sommers has written a book which will make everybody mad at somebody. That's too bad. Are 150,000 females, victims of our misogynistic society, succumbing to anorexia nervosa each year? Is domestic violence the leading cause of birth defects? Do eleven year old girls suffer a dramatic loss in self-esteem which damages their ability to learn? Is date rape epidemic on college campuses? The best of Sommers's work is just the sort of reasoned argument from fact, regarding questions like these, which invites dispassionate refutation or confirmation.
Sommers finds many generally accepted "truths" of the victimization of women to be based on dubious interpretations of research, poorly designed studies, or on no research. For example, she raises questions about the notion that, just to keep the patriarchy in working order, males are generally prone to violence against females. The authors of a widely reported study conclude that four million American women are battered by their partners yearly, ignoring the fact that none of their respondents report having been beaten, or having been threatened with a weapon. In another instance, when the results of a survey on hospital admissions for domestic abuse suggest a rate which isn't dramatic enough, the researchers blame their experts (nurses) rather than consider the possibility that their results might actually be reliable. Researchers who bother to check find men are almost as likely to be hit (but not as likely to be seriously injured) by their wives and girlfriends as the other way around. Lesbian relationships turn out to be about as dangerous as heterosexual relationships. And there is at least a shred of evidence from criminal records that men who beat up women aren't full time warriors in a war against women; they like to beat up men too.
Reading Sommers as she tackles a theoretician or rips through a pile of evidence is sporting. Her reasoning is lucid, the documentation impressive, and there is suspense as she moves in to score. On the self-esteem issue, for example, she catches our attention with a quick look at the excited news reports three years ago that eleven-year-old girls suffer a precipitous drop in self-esteem, reports quickly followed by projects to rescue girls from this crippling threat to future success (a threat obviously caused, according to advocates for these projects, by the schools acting as agents of the patriarchy). We readers follow Sommers, the investigator, as she tracks down the American Association of University Women commissioned study behind the reports. Mysteriously, while happy to send out "Call To Action" brochures and videos, the AAUW is not eager to release the actual results of the study. But Sommers is persistent. Her first quick look at the raw data shows that whoever has been writing the press releases has discovered just that interpretation which maximizes the self-esteem gender gap. Sommers produces comments from a number of experts, all of whom have nasty things to say about the AAUW report. Some of them report their own research shows no significant differences between male and female self-esteem, and a fair number of them have doubts that self-esteem is a meaningful concept in the first place. This far into the chapter, a reader is likely to have started asking questions like, "Whatever this self-esteem is, how do you know not having it is lousing things up for adolescent girls? Don't the girls get better grades than the boys? Aren't they more likely to finish high school? Don't more of them get to college?" Instead of dawdling over these obvious questions, Sommers moves in for the kill. Who has the healthiest sense of self-esteem, and so can be expected to be most successful? According to the AAUW data, African-American girls score much higher even than white boys. And African-American adolescent males are at the top of the heap. No need to worry about the future for these kids since most of them expect to be doctors or pro athletes.
There is a larger point to Sommers's doubting games. Her central theme is that the classical, "equity" feminism to which she is herself devoted is threatened by an enemy within, "gender" feminists who, convinced of the total oppression of women by the patriarchy, are marching as to war. The scenario she describes is familiar: angry "gender" feminists have wrested control of the movement from the liberal majority; now, armed with the sensational distortions of their advocacy research, these zealots have distracted the credulous media, soft-headed college administrators and opportunistic politicians from the real problems women face. There is something unconvincing about this aspect of Sommers' analysis. While she provides anecdotal evidence that militants are in high places, especially in education, the balance of power isn't easy to measure. And does Sommers really believe that if the nation were to save a penny on, for example, acquaintance rape posters, it would remember to spend the change on rape prevention in the inner cities? Finally, there is the ennui factor. Why is it that in the standard tale of the subversion of a liberal social movement, only the heavies ever get new parts--as Commies, Friends of Earl Warren, and now as Gender Feminists?
There is, however, a deeper voice in Sommers's outrage, a spirit far more dangerous to the tranquillity of modern wisdom than any particular complaint of wasted resources, of injustices to a few men, or even of the future of feminism. We hear that voice in Sommers' attacks on theories of women's ways of knowing, in her disdain for advocacy research, in her gleeful dissection of reports by Gloria Steinem and others of an annual death rate of 150,000 women from anorexia (Sommers suggests the actual figure may be closer to 100). Finally, in passages like the following, the heresy breaks out undisguised:
Truth brought to public light recruits the best of us to work for change. On the other hand, even the best-intentioned "noble lie" ultimately discredits the finest truth.
It is curious that the assumption of a publicly verifiable truth has come to be associated with conservatism, while many varieties of relativism are quickly named radical. Thus, those who speak of feminine lateral, connected, believing thought, and of the special revelations granted to women who open their eyes to the "sex-gender system" are seen, by themselves, as well as by their critics (including Sommers) as "new wave," "radical" feminists. Despite the fact that she calls herself a liberal feminist, Sommers, on the other hand, will certainly be seen by her critics as conservative, in part simply because of her vehement opposition to theories of inherent intellectual differences between women and men, and to theories which posit a feminist "truth" for converts. But the politics of truth are not so simple. In fact, those moderns who emphasize the intellectual differences between women and men unwittingly ally themselves with traditional, conservative thought, such as that of Aristotle, who proclaimed a difference in kind. Clearly, whoever did the hiring for the Delphic Oracle regarded gender as a qualification for knowing. And that insight which proclaims men to be doubters, women believing thinkers is stripped of any hint of radicalism as soon as we recall the traditional, patriarchal version of the first major-league believing game with the snake.
Theories which reserve knowledge to a special class of knowers, whether that class be patriarchal priests or converts to feminism, can only serve those who have something to protect; that is, such theories are not liberal, not radical, but inherently reactionary. It is people like Sommers, who assume a public truth, available to anyone, without regard to X/Y chromosome combinations or special revelations, of whom every applecart owner must be wary.