Feminism in the late 20th century had one great idea: to open the world of professions to women, ending the days when men made decisions and women made coffee. To kill off the notion that women’s place in the office was in taking dictation, and not having ideas of their own.
None less than Sarah Palin once tipped her hat to Gloria Steinem for making a world in which the mother of five could become a state governor. Arizona Rep. Martha McSally could lead a flight squadron in battle, and women in high public office could now be seen as valid presidential contenders, along with the usual men.
Unfortunately, feminism didn’t stop there, moving on from liberating the realms in which sex differences did not make a difference — politics, medicine, journalism and the arts, for example — into pretending the differences don’t exist. It was a step beyond to try to turn women and men into androgynous creatures, whose roles should be similar, and whose emotions and actions are identical.
“Our society devotes tremendous resources, psychic as well as actual, to the attempt to make men and women alike,” says conservative writer Mona Charen in her new book, Sex Matters. “Young people learn that they are expected to spend the same number of hours at work, to engage in sex in the same spirit, to study the same subjects in the same numbers, to change the exact same numbers of diapers, and to divide all the [same] jobs.”
After years of this, only 26 percent of Americans call themselves “feminist,” or seem all that happy with much that has happened, and nobody seems to know why.
Basically, the main idea behind the now-universal androgyny project has been to make men socially much more like women — risk-averse, cautious, and sociable — while making women sexually much more like men. It begins with what Christina Hoff Sommers has called “The War Against Boys,” in which they are told at the start that their maleness is “toxic,” and their spirit of adventure a lethal disease to be cured. As she writes, “boy-averse trends: the decline of recess … zero-tolerance policies … and a misguided campaign against single-sex schooling” have conspired to damage male children. “As our schools become more feelings-centered, risk-averse, competition-free and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic sensibilities of boys.”
At the same time, in their tolerance and/or furthering of the “hookup culture,” schools are moving further and further away from the “characteristic sensibilities” of girls and/or women, pushing them into an aggressive, self-centered, emotion-free promiscuity they neither admire nor want.
“Early feminism urged women to model their sexual conduct not just on men, but on the worst men,” Charen tells us. “The sexual revolution progressed rapidly from ‘young people in love should not have to wait for a piece of paper to have sex,’ to ‘what’s wrong with you if you’re not bedding strangers after a night of heavy drinking?’” And it did so with such speed that it left uneasy young women with no recourse except to cry “rape” when depressed and/or disappointed.
This led in turn to the odd set of rules about sex that have to be negotiated by a team of attorneys before getting from point A to point B. What men need, of course, is to be loved for their strength while women need to cherished for their particular selves by men who respect them — two basic and primitive needs that the androgyny project have left unattended. It is really too bad for all of them.
