According to many of its critics, gender feminism, the latest strain of feminism to emerge on campus, is composed of people who are actually damaging the movement for women's equality. They do not want to listen to any criticism, however well-founded and just it may be, and refuse to acknowledge their own failures, however blatant they may be. Inability to take criticism is not a major flaw if that is the only problem, since that may be only human, but gender feminists are known for alienating and ostracizing those within the Women's Movement who point out the numerous factual errors and hyperbole upon which their movement is based.
Christina Hoff Sommers, known best for authoring "Who Stole Feminism?," addressed a large group of Dartmouth students about a month and a half ago on the problems she believes are rampant in current feminist discourse. She spoke of an alarming level of deliberate misinformation stemming from those she refers to as gender feminists, who see the world through the ideologically colored lens of gender.
In speaking of gender feminism, Sommers noted that the "sex/gender system is suited to temperament rather than intellectual insight," and asked, "Who do these engaged and enraged women speak for?" She described the new feminists as "articulate, prone to self-dramatization, and chronically angry."
Pronouncing that the women's movement has lost its bearings and is completely misguided is a very strong charge indeed, but Sommers is not alone in this contention. A recent "Firing Line" debate concerning the women's movement highlighted this fact. All eight of the debate participants, including women such as Betty Friedan, Judge Karen Burstein, Camille Paglia, Kathryn Colbert and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, conceded in some measure that the women's movement currently seems to be sufferring from its excesses.
In answer to cross-questioning by William F. Buckley during the "Firing Line" debate described above, Camille Paglia, known for her outspoken criticism of gender feminism, voiced her opinion concerning Women's Studies programs. She contrasted them with the women's movement as a whole, saying, "The Women's Studies programs -- a lot of crap is coming out of them. I believe the whole thing should be demolished. Do not confuse the Women's Studies program with the feminist movement. The feminist movement is much larger than those horrible women on campus and I blame not the women's movement, but rather, the servility of the administrators on campus and the self-castration of our American faculties that have permitted the creation of those cells of non-feminist women -- fanatics, doctrinaire, Orwellian women who are indeed guilty of the perversion of language that you have so well spoken to."
What would make Camille Paglia so angry towards the Women's Studies programs? Only Paglia could say for herself, but in Christina Hoff Sommers' recent lecture at Dartmouth, she listed her own reasons for disenchantment with gender feminism. Among those reasons are gender feminism's striking resemblance to "worn-out Marxism" where class is replaced by gender, total inacceptance of criticism, close-mindedness, and gender feminism's twisted view of language, to name but a few. Regarding language, Sommers gave such examples as a professor who used the term ovular instead of seminar and the belief that names such as the Big Bang Theory turn off young women to science.
Prior to the lecture, a couple of students were handing out papers attacking Sommers, which were drawn from FAIR, a media research organization. During Sommers' lecture, some students were muttering, cursing under their breath and passing notes to each other in obvious agitation. It seemed as if some of the things which Professor Sommers said had disturbed many of them. Why? What dangerous blasphemy was she preaching?
Her main message was that sound policy is based on truth. Is this a dangerous message? It appears it is when much of what one has been taught and believes in is based on misinformation, false numbers and half-truths, held together by a faulty ideological premise.
It remains to be seen what will come out of this confrontation, but there is hope that good will emerge, although ideology alone does not often allow for goodwill.
