chap2

From:  Feminism and Freedom -- by Michael Levin -- 1986


                   Chapter 2: What is Feminism?


                         ~Characterizing Feminism~

An adequate characterization of feminism should meet four conditions. First, it should be acceptable to those who call themselves feminists and consistent with the understanding of feminism held by sympathetic outsiders. Second, it should construe feminism, which presents itself as a critique of some of the broadest features of society, as comprehensive and systematic. Third, it should construe feminism as more than a platitude which no reasonable person would dispute but which has no practical consequences. Fourth, it should construe feminism as a view that is taken seriously by a significant number of people.

The third and fourth conditions present certain difficulties. The ban on triviality rules out the most commonly offered definitions of feminism, such a "justice for women" and "opposition to sexism", insofar as the crucial term *sexism* is defined as "failure to give equal consideration on the basis of sex alone." Consider "justice for women". The pure principle of justice, that similar cases are to be treated similarly, is empty and tautological, its meaning entirely dependent on the criterion used to determine the similarity among cases and the evidence considered relevant to whether men and women satisfy the criterion chosen. Thus, to determine whether history textbooks emphasizing male statesmen are just, it must first be decided whether justice is the distribution of equal shares to all, to the equally needy, to those faring equally well in laissez-faire competition, or perhaps some other standard altogether. It must then be determined empirically whether men and women are equal in the sense specified, and if they are, whether androcentric history textbooks fail to provide shares equal in the sense specified. To demand just treatment for women is to demand nothing in particular about how women should be treated; this platitudinous demand therefore cannot be what anyone has in mind by "feminism." For similar reasons it is unavailing to characterize feminists and their critics as agreeing about ends--the equitable treatment of women--and disagreeing only about means. Equity is too vacuous to be anybody's goal; it is a goal given substance by the means chosen to it. Disagreement about such matters as quotas, textbook censorship, and comparable worth are disagreements about the feminist conception of equity itself, hence disagreeing about ends.

The fourth condition creates difficulties inasmuch as it seems to imply that feminism cannot be absurd, for much that feminists say seems too absurd for anyone to take seriously. Thus Richard Wasserstrom endorses an "assimilationist ideal" for society in which sex "would be the functional equivalent of the eye color of individuals in our society today."

"Just as the normal, typical adult is virtually oblivious to the eye color of persons, for all major interpersonal relations, so the normal, typical adults in this kind of non-sexist society would be indifferent to the sexual, physiological differences of other persons for all interpersonal relationships."

One is reluctant to attribute to a distinguished legal philosopher the view that in an ideal society many people would not know the sex of their spouses, but if what Wasserstrom is saying does not imply this, what is he saying? When considering feminism, it is useful to balance the charitable maxim that no one should be saddled with a belief that is too silly, with Hobbes's observation that "men believeth many times impossibilities." Satisfying the third and fourth conditions simultaneously presents further problems since, as we will see, any substantial criticism of sex roles risks commitment to unviable empirical assumptions.

Mindful of these difficulties, let us begin with selections from the full range of feminist thought: two texts historically central to anything deserving to be called feminism, a more contemporary classic source, a radical feminist, aphorisms from two mainstream activists, documents of the U.S. government and the United Nations, and the work of seven academic feminists writing for serious publishers.

"What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing -- the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. . . . [N]o class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by the relations with their masters." 
---  John Stuart Mill, 1869

"The great danger which threatens the infant in our culture lies in the fact that the mother to whom it is confided in all its helplessness is almost always a discontented woman: sexually frigid or unsatisfied; socially she feels herself inferior to men; she has no independent grasp on the world or on the future. . . . [In a world] where men and women would be equal, [a girl] will be brought up from the first with the same demands and rewards, the same severity and the same freedom, taking part in the same studies, the same games, promised the same future, surrounded with women and men who seem her undoubted equals." 
---  Simone de Beauvoir, 1948

"[T]he standards of femininity, however suitable they may have been in the past, may now be dysfunctional. They are not standards of good mental health."
---  Jessie Bernard, 1971

"The sexes are inherently in everything alike, save reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, orgasmic capacity, and genetic and morphological structure."
---  Kate Millett, 1970

"If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution, I would use it."
---  Shulamith Firestone, 1970

"We're talking about a revolution, not just reform. It's the deepest possible change there is."
---  Gloria Steinem, circa 1972

"I want to have a part in creating a new society. . . . I have never reached my potential because of social conditions. I'm not going to get the rewards. I'm crippled."
---  Member of NOW, 1974

"When we ask why women and girls come to choose courses of study and occupations that lead them to a segregated and disadvantaged role in later life, part of the answer is 'socialization'. Somehow, the social environment conveys the message that some activities are appropriate, and some inappropriate, that girls and women possess certain capabilities and lack others."
---  U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 1980

"The States Parties to the present Convention, aware that a change in the traditional role of men as well as women in society and in the family is needed to achieve full equality between men and women, have agreed to adopt apporpriate legislative and other measures, including sanctions where appropriate, to modify the social patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women."
---  United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (signed by the United States 1978).

"A sexually egalitarian society is one in which virtually no public recognition is given to the fact that there is a physiological sex difference between persons. This is not to say that the different reproductive functions of each sex should be unacknowledged in such a society nor that there should be no physicians specializing in male and female complaints, etc. But it is to say that, except in this sort of context, the question whether someone is male or female should have no significance."
---  Alison Jagger, 1974

"Change in women's roles means change in every aspect of society.
---  Judith Long Laws, 1979

"Feminism is in its nature radical. . . . It is the social institutions of which we complain primarily. . . .  If you consider the past there is no doubt at all that the whole structure of society was designed to keep women entirely in the power of men. This no doubt sounds like pure feminist rant, but it is not."
---  Janet Richard, 1980

"Whatever sex differences in behavior now exist and whatever their origins we have no reason to assume that they would be barriers to any egalitarian society we may want to build."
---  Marian Lowe, 1983

"[B]ecause the sexual division of labor around childbearing prevails and defines women's position, a policy emphasizing material benefits and services to encourage childbearing may ease the material burdens of motherhood; but it may operate to perpetuate the existing sexual division of labor and women's social subordination. . . . A feminist and socialist transformation of the existing condtions of reproduction would seek. . . . a new set of social relations. The changes we require are total."
---  Rosiland Petchesky, 1984

"If we could imagine a culture free of values and constraints concerning sexuality, human beings would probably express their sexuality, physicality, friendship and loving emotions in a variety of ways that would not be necessarily influenced by others' biological sex. . . . In particular, the institutions and ideologies of heterosexuality (i.e. heterosexism) are the primary force in the maintenance of patriarchal rule and the social, political and economic subordination of women."
---  Ruth Bleier, 1984


The Lowe and Bleier citations are particularly noteworthy for being taken from works in Pergamon's Athene Series, "An International Collection of Feminist Books, "  described as follows by the publisher: "The ATHENE SERIES assumes that all those who are concerned with formulating explantions of the way the world works need to know and appreciate the significance of basic feminist principles." Anyone who dismisses Lowe or Bleier as typical of feminism must deny that the editors of the Athene Series know what feminism is.

As it emerges from these sources, feminism in its contemporary form has four central tenets:

1. Anatomical differences apart, men and women are the same. Infant boys and girls are born with virtually the same capacities to acquire skills and motives, and if raised identically would develop identically.
2. Men unfairly occupy positions of dominance because the myth that men are more aggressive that women has been perpetuated by the practice of raising boys to be oriented toward mastery and girls to be oriented towared people. If this stereotyping ceased, leadership would be equally divided between the sexes. Sexist socialization harms boys as well as girls by denying both the full range of possible aspirations, but on the whole boys get the better of the deal because they grow up to run everything.
3.Human individuality and fulfillment will come about only when people view themselves as *human* repositories of talents and traits, and deny that sex has any significant effect on one's individual nature. Traditional femininity is a suffocating and pathological response to women's heretofore restricted lives, and will have to be abandoned.
4. These desirable changes will require the complete transformation of society.

Clause(1) may appear too sweeping, in light of the verbal assent to innate nonanatomical sex differences given by a number of writers who call themselves feminists. These writers say merely that any differences which exist are irrelevant to extant rigid sex roles, which are produced by conditioning as per clause (2). Some of the passages cited above are consistent with this seemingly less extreme environmentalism , as is "stage two" feminism to be considered presently. It might seem that a view of this sort could be accomodated by replacing (1) by (1a): None of the observed traits of human beings can be explained as manifestations of innate sex differences. These differences, while perhaps real, are irrelevant to the nature of society and the possibilities of social change.

In fact, however, (1) and (1a) are equivalent. Clause (1) obviously entails (1a) -- non-existent differences cannot explain anything -- and, together with the principle of parsimony used elsewhere in science, (1a) implies (1). If innate sex differences do not affect the individual and group behavior of human beings, they do not affect the only phenomenon they are likely to affect, and positing such differences is pointless. Nothing distinguishes a world with an inefficacious cause from a world without it. Thus, whether someone genuinely accepts innate sex differences depends entirely on whether he believes they help to explain general features of society. Anyone who says he grants innate sex differences but goes on to deny that they are explanatory is merely giving lip service to them. We will have occasion later to catalogue the protean forms this lip service can take; for now we may continue to identify feminism with the original four tenets.

This account of feminism is explicit in the writings of feminists themselves and informed observers. One figure who has had participant observer status is Alice Rossi, at one time a feminist and also a past president of the American Sociological Association. She may be presumed to speak with authority. In 1964 she wrote:

"It will be an assumption of this essay that by far the majority of the differences between the sexes which have been noted in social science research are socially rather than physiologically  determined. . . . It will be a major thesis of this essay that we need to reassert the claim to sex equality. . . . By sex equality I mean a socially androgynous conception of the roles of men and women, in which they are equal and similar in such spheres as intellectual, artistic, political and occupational interests and participation, complementary only in those spheres dictated by physiological differences between the sexes. [It includes] equivalence and substitutability [as] part of the general definition of the parental role. . . . [The liberated women's] intellectual aggressiveness as well as her brother's tender sentiments will be welcomed and accepted as *human* characteristics, without the self-questioning doubt of latent homosexuality that troubles many college-age men and women in our era when those qualities are sex-linked. . . . If a social movement rests content with legal changes without making as strong an effort to change the social institutions through which they are expressed, it will remain a hollow victory."

Note that Rossi took the social causation theory to be an "assumption" not worth questioning, and the sex differences themselves to be findings of  "social science research" rather than part of the lore of every culture. By 1977, Rossi had developed serious doubts about her proposals, and with considerable intellectual courage published a partial recantation in which she described feminism in more objective language as "an egalitarian ideology that denies any innate sex differences and assumes that a 'unisex' socialization will produce men and women that are free of the traditional culturally induced sex differences" and which shares with much social science "an extreme emphasis on cultural determinism."

Muriel Carden, a sociologist commissioned by the Ford and Russell Sage foundations to study feminism, characterized it similarly:

"Far too much has been made of the biological differences between men and women. Different socialization processes account for a larger part of the observed differences in men's and women's behavior, while biology plays only a minor part. Thus their [feminist's] argument for equality is based upon the belief that the biologically derived differences between the sexes are relatively minor and that a most inequitable system has been built upon the assumption that such differences are basic and major. . . . [A]lmost everyone co-operates in this "oppressive" socialization or conditioning. Parents, teachers, toy manufacturers, and writers of children's books encourage girls to be "feminine."

The claim that feminism functions as an ideological belief system has been empirically tested by Claire Fulenwider. Following standard social scientific usage, she defines an ideology as a system of beliefs (as opposed to a set of attitudes) which "describe present reality. . . . explain present reality--that is, show how it has developed historically [and prescribe] in what ways it is good or bad [and] posit a plan for changing present reality." Minimizing the differences between radical, socialist, and reform feminism, Fulenwider finds all feminist writers agreeing that

"women are unjustly treated, that they are maintained in subordinate roles and positions, and that they are consistently removed from most vital decision-making opportunities of society. Furthermore, this discrimination against and exploitation and oppression of women are seem by feminists as rationally justified by a dominant sexist ideology. . . . Overall, however, [despite differences in emphasis by reform, socialist and radical feminists], values and goals of the women's movement show fairly widespread agreement. The eradication of sexism -- in practice and in attitude -- is probably the most basic goal. Commitment to expanding options for women in all spheres of society is another shared aim, as is freedom from oppression and gender-role stereotyping. . . . Feminists concur that major structural changes -- in the economy, in politics, and in social practices and expectations -- are essential."

To test this hypoethesis, Fulenwider first asked over 2,000 respondents to score their agreement with eleven statements, including: "Women should have an equal role with men in running business, industry, and government"; "Our society, not nature, teaches women to prefer homemaking"; "Men have more of the top jobs because society discriminates against women [rather than because] men have more drive"; and "Women must work together to change the laws and customs that are unfair to all women' -- essentially tenets (1) through (4). A panel of judges concurred that strong agreement with these statements is a criterion of agreement to feminism. Fulenwider then predicted that if feminism is an ideological framework for interpreting social reality, a high combined score on the criterion should constrain views about other political issues, a high score on one criterion statement should predict high scores on the others, and finally, that scores on the criterion should depend on  a single underlying variable.  Fulenwider's data bore out these predictions and, especially for women, scores on the criterion variable correlated highly with self-positioning the single "abstract ordering dimension" of "role equality"." The "overriding conclusion" was that feminism "gives clear evidence of centrality, rationality, and constraint," and serves as a "political ideology."

Once all nonanatomical sex differences are taken to be social in origin, an analogy between women and racial minorities is inevitable. The supposed powerlessness, confinement, and poverty of women, and the prevalence of stereotypic beliefs about them, must be caused in much the way that the similarly inferior social position of American Blacks is is caused. That the condition of women is universal while that of American Blacks is temporary and local--Blacks run everything in Black African countries--is taken to show the very pervasiveness of sexist conditioning. I will use this analogy in an operational definition of "feminist": A feminist is anyone who takes seriously the analogy between Blacks and women. Anyone who compares the present status of women to that of Blacks in the antebellum south, and the outlook of nonfeminist women to the slave mentality, is a feminist. So too is anyone who thinks that raising children to disregard gender is as easy and important as raising children to disregard skin color. Here are three feminists, one self-described, one a legal scholar engaged in popular debate, and one a philosopher writing for his peers in a professional periodical:

"The kind of feminine self-image which lowers aspiration and permits the acceptance of dependent status [is] similar to the defeatist attitude of other minority groups."

"Not so many years ago, black probationary firemen were looked on with disdain and fear. And when Jews, some with college degrees, turned to firefighting during the Depression, their value in action was seriously questioned. . . . Are women really in such a different postion?"

"The treatment of our western European ancestors accorded North American Indians, blacks, and the native people of Mexico remains the barbarous deed that it always was. The systematic exploitation of women in our (and other) societies is not any less wrong."

The dissent in Frontiero v. Richardson written by Justice William Brennan and joined by three other justices is feminist in this operational sense: "The position of women in our society was, in many respects, comparable to that of blacks under the pre-Civil War slave codes." Four of nine positive scores from the Supreme Court indicates an operational test sensitive to an important social phenomenon.

                                         ~ Refinements~

The four central tenets of feminism must be expanded in a number of ways. First, it must be emphsized that the inequity of the sexual division of labor is said to be two-fold. The horizontal division of tasks into male and female, overlap notwithstanding, largely confines women to domestic tasks while allowing males to do everything else. The vertical divsion of tasks into subordinate and superordinate reserves for men topmost postions of prestige and authority in all spheres, including those in which men and women participate jointly. In the United States, men are chief executives and women are secretaries; in the Kalahari desert, men do the high-status hunting while women do the low-status gathering. A specific task may be considered male in one society and female in another, but it always enjoys higher status when it is male.

A second refinement, or perhaps gap that needs filling, concerns the process by which sex roles have come to be assigned. Many feminists treat the present order as a male conspiracy. Others, who recognize the unlikelihood of a universal conspiracy, argue that sex stereotypes perpetuate themselves: Each generation, having been raised to accept conventional sex roles, raises its own children to those same roles. But this more sophisticated theory merely postpones the problem, which reemerges in the following form: If women originally wanted power just as badly as men, how did sex stereotyping *begin?* Did patriarchy emerge independently many times, or did it radiate to all societies from a single central source?

However often it happened, how did prehistoric women as well as men come to be convinced that women do not want power as much as men do, and how did power come to be monopolized by men? As we will see, any noncircular version of feminist environmentalism must posit an historical moment at which men used their superior physical strength to wrest control.

The third salient feature of feminism is its attention to the family. The attribution of inequalities to socialization naturally generates suspicion about the chief instrument, the family, and its accompanying emotions. Juliet Mitchell and Nancy Chodorow reject love between men and women "enculturated in patriarchal society" as an inauthentic product of  "social ideology." For Mill, the family was a "school of despotism" (a judgment that may reflect Mill's own unhappy upbringing by a tyrannical father). Chodorow again:

"The social organization of parenting produces sexual inequality, not simply role differentiation. It is politically and socially important to confront this organization. Even though it is an arrangement that seems universal, directly rooted in biology, and inevitable, it can be changed. . . . The elimination of the present organization of parenting [so that] children could be dependent on the outset on people of both genders. . . . depends on the conscious organization and activity of all women and men who recognize that their interests lie in transforming the social organization of gender and eliminating sexual inequality."

Simone de Beauvoir yokes the family with private property as the two chief sources of human misery:

"Since the oppression of women has its cause in the will to perpetuate the family and to keep patriarchy intact, woman escapes complete dependence to the degree to which she escapes from the family; if a society that forbids private propery also rejects the family, the lot of women in it is found to be considerably ameliorated."

Letty Pogrebin urges "action on all fronts" from "the first millisecond of birth" on

". . . everything we do with, to, for and around children--our speaking habits, living styles, adult relationships, chores, academic standards and our way of dealing with punishment, privilege, religion, television, sex, money and love. . . words, actions, reactions, attitudes and patterns of behavior--your own, your children's, and everyone else's--until you become, almost without trying, proudly and irresistibly antisexist."

The allusion to speaking habits is prompted by research indicating that parents address male and female babies differently. Pogrebin advises parents to cancel this effect by practicing their full vocal ranges in talking to infants of either sex, "to learn to *hear* sexism before it rises in our throats."

Simone de Beauvoir, like the vast majority of feminists, regards the radical alteration of parenting as more than a utopian fantasy. She finds it "easy to visualize a world where men and women would be equal,"

". . . for that is precisely what the Soviet Union promised: women trained and raised exactly like men. . . . [M]arriage was to be based on a free agreement that the spouses could break at will; maternity was to be voluntary; pregnancy leaves were to be paid for by the State, which would assume charge of the children, signifying not that they would be *taken away* from their parents, but that they would not be *abandoned* to them."

De Beauvoir is so far from being alone among feminists in admiring Marxist-Leninism that this admiration, together with hostility to "capitalism," can be considered virtually a further distinguishing mark of feminism. The main criticism offered of the Soviet Union is that it has not gone far enough. Kate Millett sides with Trotsky against Lenin because "there was no realization [on Lenin's part] that while every practical effort should be made to implement a sexual revolution, the real test would be in changing attitudes."

To be sure, feminists are attracted primarily to the ideas that the Soviet State proclaims itself as embodying, rather than to the Soviet regime itself, but with that understood, a great many well known feminists, including de Beauvoir, Millett, Firestone, Bleier, Mitchell, Chodorow, MacKinnon, Steinem, Sheila Rowbotham, Margerest Benston, Angela Davis, Eli Zaretsky, Evelyn Reed, Barbara Ehrenreich, Vivian Howe, and Rayna Rapp identify themselves as socialists or Marxists of some sort. According to Germaine Greer,  "the forcing-house of most of the younger women's liberation groups was the university left wing." Catherine MacKinnon explains the link between feminism and Marxism in more general terms:

"As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of others defines a class--workers--the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality is its structure, gender and family its congealed forms, sex roles its qualities generalized to social persona, reproduction a consequence, and control its issue. [Marxism and feminism] argue, respectively, that the relations in which many work and few gain, in which some fuck and others get fucked, are the prime moments of politics."

There is no doubt that the founders of Marxism were feminists. In The Origin of the Family, Engels wrote:

"It will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex into public industry and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society. Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of one sex by the other. . . . The emancipation of women will be possible only when. . . . domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant portion of her time."

Now, there is nothing in Marxist *moral* theory that demands identical treatment of the sexes. If each is entitled to what he needs and owes what he can produce, men and women have different entitlements and obligations if they differ biologically in their needs and abilities. At the same time, the Marxist axiom that economic factors are the sole cause of social and personal relations, by precluding any biological factor, does lead immediately to the factual assumption of feminism. Marxists must, in logical consistency, be feminists.

                                ~Feminism and Freedom~

The claim by feminists to be proponents of liberation, together with widespread feminist sympathy for a tradition hostile to individual liberty, raises the question of just what feminists mean by freedom. The notion of freedom assumed in everyday expressions like "a free afternoon" and "freedom of speech" is noninterference. Speaking freely is saying what one wants to without constraint. This is also the idea of freedom behind everyday ascriptions of responsibility. It has been developed by a long philosophical tradition, and seems to me correct. More pertinently, it is also the idea of freedom implicit in the feminist demand that women be given power and control over their lives. Like all demands for power and control, this one is directed against forces thought to prevent women from doing what they want. Women are unfree under patriarchy because patriarchy prevents them from doing what they want.

One may wonder how women can be said to be unfree in this sense when so much characteristically female behavior is, as it seems to be, quite voluntary. In reply, feminists straightfowardly deny that women like doing most of what they do, and claim that women do it because they are made to. Ruth Bleier maintains that in the past "for many (most?) heterosexual women, sex was either to be neutrally endured or painful or forced and obligatory." Female compliance with male demands is extorted by the threat of rape, wife-beating, and other forms of violence.

An answer somewhat more faithful to the realities of experience (but still a radical answer) is that, while women under patriarchy may be doing what they want, the conditions under which their wants were formed were constrained. Women have had no chance to acquire different wants. Now, that women have not chosen their wants is insufficient to deny that women are free, since no one, male or female, chooses his wants. Everyone's wants would have been somewhat different had he been raised differently. If a woman doing what she wishes to do is nevertheless unfree because her wishes were influenced by factors beyond her control, then no one is free. (Some philosophers have drawn precisely this conclusion, but the conclusion that free will is completely illusory is obviously irrelevant to whether women *alone* are unfree, or less free than men.) Still, there are cases in which, because of the nature and origin of the motivating want, doing what one wants is nonetheless unfree, and it is to these cases that the ostensibly free actions of women are compared. A brainwashed prisoner does not sign a confession freely, although he may have come to believe in his country's guilt and wish to expose it, because his willingness to sign was forced on him. An Epsilon docilely carrying out his duties in Huxley's Brave New World is unfree because somebody engineered his personality. Women are said to be similarly unfree when they "voluntarily" subordinate themselves to their husbands. They have been brainwashed to want to.

"In a review of the mechanisms for constructing a "difference" and dominance relations beween males and females, it becomes clear that such an effort can be effective only if an entire society, particularly the parents, is in agreement with the ultimate goals. Whether there are or are not biological, psychological or genetic differences, as defined by the "average" male versus the "average" female, is really irrelevant to the task of rearing specific individuals to serve specific functions. A society has the infinite capacity for flexibility, and the socialization of its members can maximize or minimize any differences that might exist. One is reminded of Huxley's Brave New World, where differential treatment is carried to any extreme: where individuals are born and bred to specific tasks and are isolated from any alternative life style. They have no option to choose. Value systems can be designed to promote acceptance of the difference and roles. Value systems can isolate individuals of different groups from one another. We are not approaching a brave new world. We have been living in it, although it is not quite as efficient as Huxley's nor as complex in its groups and role projections."

Before the brainwashing hypothesis can be examined directly, its empirical and conceptual presuppositions must be extracted. Several factors distinguish a victim of brainwashing from ordinary people, whose preferences have also ultimately been caused by external forces. The most salient factor is the contrast between his posttreatment personality and his considerably richer original personality which, but for the treatment, he would still have. Had things been different, the prisoner would not be confessing, zombie-like, to imaginary crimes. The zombie-like manner is itself a major element in the popular idea of brainwashing. Huxley's Epsilons are less than autonomous not primarily because someone limited their preferences by impoverishing their prenatal environment, but because their range of activities is abnormally narrow. If the prisoner emerges clear-eyed and responsive from the brainwashing sessions, *a new personality* has been created, and the uncoerced acts of this new personality are fully free. Even metaphorically calling the average woman brainwashed, therefore, attributes to her an underlying personality far richer than the one that she displays under patriarchy, and assumes that she, along with the average man, could have developed a range of preferences far wider than those she actually exhibits. Both attributions assume, in turn, that the human personalities currently on view are not significantly determined by biological factors, an assumption inconsistent with Mintz's dismissal of biological factors as irrelevant. (It should anyway be apparent that Mintz is making strong environmentalist assumptions when she speaks of society as infinitely flexible and capable of minimizing sex differences to any extent.)

The idea that voluntary sex-typed behavior is inauthentic explains the readiness to call for state action that is prominent in the feminist political agenda.  The inauthentic preferences now enslaving people will change when, but only when, people stop acting in ways which perpetuate them. Reform therefore requires that people temporarily act against their own preferences and those of others until everybody's new behavior generates more authentic preferences. The problem is starting the process, since no one will wish to adopt the meritorious but unorthodox practices before they are adopted by everyone else.  In the language of economice, feminist reform presents a coordination problem: how to get people to adopt a practice that benefits all when all follow it, but disadvantages anyone who follows it when others do not. The first children raised nonsexistly will be subject to environmental countercues like their playmates' ridicule; as few pioneers will subject their children to ridicule in the name of an ideal, nonsexist childrearing will not work unless everyone does it. Worse, freeloaders can take advantage of local antisexist behavior. An employer who continues to hire on merit and pay market wages will outcompete any business rival who hires female role models without regard to merit and pays them their "comparable worth", without demanding increased productivity. An employer who establishes in-house day-care to accomodate female employees may suffer if his competitors choose to attract the cheapest labor force without regard to the convenience of females.

The accepted  solution for coordination problems is to have the state make everyone act in the individually adverse but collectively beneficial way. Everyone wants a lighthouse, but private parties cannot finance one by renting its light to seafarers, since freeloaders need only sail near a lessor to catch the free spillover light. Everyone is waiting for everyone else to subscribe to the lighthouse fund, and to everyone's regret, the lighthouse is not built. At this point the government, able to exact payment from everyone, steps in to build with taxes or user's fees. There is no longer room to outmaneuver suckers, and all the would-be maneuverers are better off.

The various antisexism scenarios we will examine suggest a paralell resolution: avert the adverse consequences of antisexism by denying people the liberty to refuse to go along with antisexist reforms. Feminists are prone to look to the government not because they like to see other people pushed around, but because their plans require a coordinating mechanism. As this is being written, for instance, Congress has before it a proposal to require all employers to grant four months maternity leave to pregnant employees, on the grounds that many employers now replace women who leave their jobs to have children. Such a law is needed, if it is, precisely because employers who do not automatically grant maternity leave enjoy a competitive advantage over those who do, and will act to gain that advantage if not forbidden by law.

There is, of course, no *logical* link between feminism and advocacy of state intervention. Just as a libertarian can consistently regret the failure of private action to secure the advantages of a lighthouse, all the while insisting that the construction of a lighthouse exceeds the bounds of permissible state action, so a libertarian feminist can consistently hold sex roles to be unjust artifacts while insisting that the co-ordinatin mechanisms needed to eliminate sex roles -- such as mandatory maternity leave -- exceed the bounds of permissible state action. Still, the libertarian feminist remains committed to the same empirical theory about society that actuates her more statist sisters, and the ranks of libertarian feminism are bound in any event to remain thin, since it is psychologically difficult to regard a situation as extremely unjust without wishing to deploy the power of the state against it. In point of logic, feminist aims cannot be achieved without state coercion, and in point of fact those who subscribe to feminist theory will tend to endorse state action.

The need to start anew with a clean slate also explains the readiness to misrepresent reality. Like a concern with every facet of life and the conviction that expressed preferences are inauthentic, the impulse to suppress discordant empirical facts is a trait common to all totalitarian ideologies. This impulse is rooted in two fears. One is that persisting memories of the old ways may prove attractive to those embarked on the initially difficult new ways. The second is the fear that reality itself amounts to a validation of sorts; the old ways cannot be all that bad if people are demonstrably getting along while following them. Legitimation by reality is best opposed not by an outright denial of the facts--which only calls them to people's attention--but by the pretense that they never existed. A major goal of totalitarian education thus becomes the creation of a new order by making it seem already in place. In 1964, Alice Rossi advocated ending "class excursions into the community. . .  to introduce American children to building, construction, airports or zoos," because "going out into the community this way, youngsters would observe men and women in their present occupational roles. " She recommended instead "having children see and hear a woman scientist or doctor; a man artist or dancer; both men and women who are business executives, writers and architects." While Rossi has developed second thoughts about the feasibility of these ideas, they remain central to the thinking of other feminists.


                              ~Innate Sex Differences Again~

The average person familiar with the public debate would unquestionably include complete environmentalism in any definition of feminism, and feminists themselves have repeatedly proclaimed this tenet. This inclusion is correct on logical as well as textual grounds. So far as feminist plans go, it is pointless to aspire toward an ideal of sexual equality that biology renders impossible.

The goal of releasing personalities far richer than those people now possess is likewise pointless if people have their present personalities courtesy of biology and lack any underlying personalities to be released. But it is in its evaluative role that feminism depends most crucially on environmentalism. If the broad features of human society flow from innately programmed preferences of men and women, these features are not products of oppression, and the feminist indictment of them as such is in error.

Whether the assignment of sex roles is a device to keep women in thrall depends on how this assignment came about and how it is sustained. It is not an oppressive device if it came about because men and women for the most part innately prefer things the way they are, or as an unintended consequence of preferences.

Compare: The bridge of the nose is not a device *for* keeping eyeglasses in place unless the bridge of the nose came into existence because it supports eyeglasses and continues to exist because it supports eyeglasses. Like any finding of wrong, the feminist critique of society rests on a prior theory of fact, in this case a factual theory about the causes of the relations between the sexes.

Legal verdicts are based on factual findings; after instructing the jury as to what sort of act counts as a crime, the judge asks them to decide whether an act of that sort was committed. A charge of theft is rebuttable by the factual showing that the accused robber recieved the wallet as a gift. By the same token, a charge of discrimination is rebuttable by showing (for instance) that the numerical preponderance of men in positions of power came about through individual choices.

It is precisely because the legitimacy of the position of men depends on the way in which men got their position that feminists argue that men have gotten where they are because women *would have gotten* those positions but for being interdicted. It is not a desire for rhetorical effect but the logic of the argument that leads Janet Richards to say that "all social arrangements . . . *were designed to ensure that women should be in the power and service of men,"* and Kate Millett to describe sex as "an arrangement whereby one group of persons is controlled by another."

The case against patriarchy cannot allow that men run things  because men are more interested than women in running things. The case hinges on a question of fact, and we must heed the injunction of Mao Zedong: "No investigation, no right to speak."

However, since it is possible to *say* that one recognizes innate sex differences without really doing so, this investigation must await a survey of common evasions--a survey also intended to verify that environmentalism is indeed the nervus probandi of feminism in all of its forms.

--Perfunctory Acknowledgment Followed by Silence

For instance, while the HEW documents cited above seem to admit the possibility of non-social causes of sex segregation ("part of the answer is 'socialization'"), this possibility is not mentioned thereafter in the document, or in any of the dozens of references that it cites. At other times, the concession that there are *some* innate nonanatomical sex differences is followed, inconsistently, by denial of the innateness of any specific sex difference that is brought up in context.

A variant form  of pseudoconcession is covered by tenet (1a) and illustrated by the citation from Marian Lowe: Sex differences exist but are irrelevant to any actual or possible society. It is sometimes difficult to see that this is what an author is up to, since one way to treat a factor as irrelevant is simply to fail to treat it as relevant. Thus Jessie Bernard begins Women, Wives, Mothers with the statement: "Men and women are different. A highly sophisticated corpus of research documents biological, psychological, social and cultural differences between them." However, after a review of the evidence documenting the "inferior status of women" (in which the corpus of research cited at the outset is heavily criticized),Bernard concludes that a "new society" based on an "information net" will soon coalesce around "the values characterizing women up to now." Since Bernard neglects to consider that the sex differences considered initially might bear on the possibility of this new order, she has in effect withdrawn her concession. Once again, a difference assumed to make no difference is assumed to be no difference.

--Describing Innate Sex Differences as Small

This tactic figures prominently in discussions of the difference between male and female mean scores on mathematics aptitude tests, whch Ruth Bleier (along with a great many others) dismisses and "small" and "almost trivial." Calling this or any other sex difference small carries the implication that it is *too* small to explain any socially observed sex difference, and perhaps that the same innate difference is too small to *deserve* to play a significant causal role.

The trouble with this idea is the absence of any standard for the size of a sex difference apart from the extent of its influence on the structure of society. One cannot first decide that a sex difference is small and conclude therefrom that it cannot be responsible for some given social phenomenon; one must first determine what phenomenon can be explained by the difference in question and from that determination decide whether the difference is large or small. It is easy to see in the physical sciences that the importance of a factor cannot be stressed a priori. Even though the difference between the two natural isotopes of uranium is "only" three neutrons (about 1 percent of the atomic weight of uranium), these three neutrons determine whether an explosive chain reaction can be sustained--a large difference indeed. The same holds in the biosocial world. A small mean difference in mathematical aptitude also means small discrepencies at the extremes of the bell curve--it means, for instance, that 99.9 percent of the population above a certain percentile will be male. If mathematical creativity should turn out to require an aptitude drawn from that percentile, then virtually all important mathematical discoveries will be made by males, the general population will perceive mathematics as a male activity, relatively able girls will not aspire to success in mathematics--and the "small" difference will have had a major social effect.

It might seem doubtful to someone unfamiliar with automobiles that the twenty gallons of gasoline an automobile carries in its fuel tank is a big enough part of the automobile to be what makes it go. And no doubt the gasoline could not make the car go without the intervening mechanisms of combustion chamber, drive shaft, and axles. Still, it is the combustion of gasoline that makes cars go; no further causal variable is required. There is no way to estimate the importance of gasoline a priori; you have to determine its role in the system to which it belongs. Nor can you decide in advance that a sex difference is small. To do so is to assume that it is causally irrelevant to the system to which it belongs, and hence, in effect, nonexistent.

-- Appeal to the Fact/Value Gap

This is probably the most frequently cited reason for waving aside the question of sex differences. It begins from the truism that the way people *are* does not dictate how they *should* be. In particular, it is argued, the approprate attitude to take toward sex differences, whatever they may be, is that they are raw material to be shaped in accordance with out values. It is the values that should be the object of primary concern. Macoby and Jacklin conclude their survey of sex differences on this note:

"We suggest that societies have the option of minimizing rather than maximizing sex differences through their socialization practices. A society could, for example, devote its energies more toward moderating male aggression than toward preparing women to submit to male aggression. . . . It is up to human beings to select those [institutions] that foster the life styles they most value."

Christine Pierce holds that nothing follows if men are instinctively more aggressive than women: "Perhaps women are needed to rescue men from being caught up in their own anatomical destiny." Janet Richards compares male dominance to rape:

"Even if men are naturally inclined to dominance it does not follow that they ought to be allowed to run everything. Their being naturally dominant might be an excellent reason for imposing special restrictions to keep their nature under control. We do not think that men whose nature inclines them to rape ought to be given free rein to go around raping, so why should the naturally dominant be allowed to go around dominating?. . . If women are weak and need protection, it should have been the men who were controlled."

This argument is often supplemented by a dilemma constructed by Mill: If sex roles are biologically unalterable, feminist reforms will not change them; and if sex roles *are* alterable, feminist reforms must be judged on their merits. Either way, there is no way to worry about what is biologically inevitable.

But the question of innate sex differences is not so easily evaded. Once again, since it is irrational to try to do what is known to be impossible, it is irrational not to try to determine whether biology precludes some envisioned reform. What is more, "impossibility" has a somewhat different meaning when applied to physical systems that when applied to homeostatic social systems. The internal state variables of homestatic systems tend to converge to a relatively small number of values which can persist stably over time. There are states through which a society can temporarily pass which are nonetheless impossible in the sense of being unstable; they are states that no society can occupy permanently. By contrast, a mechanical system like a galaxy cannot even temporarily occupy a mechanically impossible state. It must not be assumed, therefore, that a social innovation possible in the sense that it can be instituted in the short run is also possible in the sense of corresponding to a condition that a society could stably occupy. Indeed, homestatic systems like societies can occupy physically possible states beyond their elastic limits. These are not unstable states from which the system must rebound, but states from which the system cannot evolve back into stability, and which lead to the system's disintegration. It is obviously possible for all fertile women in a society to refuse to bear children, so that a childless society is possible for one generation, but after that the society will cease to exist.

To put the latter point in different but equivalent terms, "necessary" is meant conditionally in assertions like "sex roles are biologically necessary." To say that sex roles are biologically necessary is to say that there will be sex roles in any existing society. However, no law says there must be sex roles no matter what--as there is a law which says that any two bodies will attract each other no matter what--since no law says that there must be any societies. It hardly follows, as Mill assumes, that feminist reforms will change nothing if sex roles are biologically necessary. Feminist reforms could not, by hypothesis, bring about a society with no sex roles, but the effort to destroy sex roles could destroy society. (It is impossible to drive a car through a brick wall; does this mean that it is all the same whether one tries to drive through a brick wall or not?) I am not here sounding the alarm about any damage that feminism might or might not do; I am simply observing that Mill's argument does not presuppose that sex roles are not biologically necessary features of a stable society.

Once it is granted that the mechanism that propels society toward and maintains it in stable states is individual preference, the question naturally arises as to the *point* of manipulating sex differences in accordance with values. Let it be agreed for a moment that there might be arrangements consistent with biological laws that produce more sexually equal outcomes. Why are those arrangements preferable to the present one, if the present one arose under conditions of equal opportunity? While there is a tradition in social theory which finds equality valuable in itself, most egalitarians value equality because of a presumed causal connection between equality and other valued factors. Thus, when the question is pressed as to what is wrong with the present inequality of results, the reply almost inevitably is that *this inequality could not have come about under conditions of equal opportunity for men and women.* In other words, the wish to see sex differences manipulated toward more equal outcomes is virtually always (if not always clearly) premised on the denial that the present order really is the product of innate preferences. This denial amounts to an empirical theory about the origins of the present order. We may thus expect the ostensibly prospective citation of the fact/value gap to yield sooner or later to the theory that present reality involves the subjugation of women. Richards so yields when she talks of men being "allowed to dominate" under things as they are. Appeal to the fact/value gapas an argument for radical change assumes environmentalism after all.

The final lacuna in feminist appeal to the fact/value gap is obliviousness to the question of who is to select and control the institutions to be fostered if it is decided that male impulses need more controlling than they currently recieve. If males really are naturally more dominant, it will always be males who are in charge. The only agency that can prevent males in a human group from dominating is a more powerful human group. However, one group's intervention in the affairs of another to strip its males of power does does not transfer power to the females of the subject group; the real power goes to the dominant members of the dominant group--who will be males if males are more interested in dominance that females. (In forcing a private firm to hire more female managers, the government does not transfer more power to the women in the firm; it transfers power to the males running the government.) Talk of controlling male aggression and imposing values on facts is incoherent without the assumption that women are innately as prone to seek power as men.

It is possible to miss this point if individual and collective choice are conflated. Human beings are undoubtedly capable of making reflective decisions, but this capacity is almost always exercised by individuals in individual circumstances. Institutions are not chosen by anybody; they emerge unintended from those individual decisions. No child is socialized by society. Every child is individually socialized by his parents, and from these private practices evolve shared norms which are logically and causally derivative.

Collective decisions can be made by governments--"collective decision-making" is no more than a grandiose name for state action--but governments generally concern themselves with sharply defined goals rather than overall social structure. Totalitarian governments have not been able to change social structure appreciably, and democratically enacted social reforms generally codify antecedent unwilled changes in mores.

That societies may differ in their emphasis on "masculine" or "feminine" traits , the status accorded women, and similar variables does not suggest that the character of a society is up to its members. The Swiss did not decide to acquire a reputation for precision. Nor does the variance that has existed in the assignment of sex roles show that significantly greater variation awaits only the will to create it. The variation that is possible is, once again, an empirical question that must be answered before one even begins to ask which variables are desirable.

Appeal to the fact/value gap is more often confusing than clarifying. Once the question of innate sex differences is recast as the best collective response to innate sex differences, the option of letting private individuals do as they please tends to sink from sight.  Maccoby and Jacklin take up the significance of sex differences in visual-spatial ability by asking: "If girls are, on the average, less skilled in visual-spatial tasks, does this mean that fewer of them should be admitted to graduate schools in engineering, architecture and art?" Maccoby and Jacklin cite no advocate of such a proposal, and I have been unable to find any; they frame the issue in this needlessly contentious way because they have fused the question of what sex differences mean for society with the quite different question of what people should do about them. Maccoby and Jacklin fail to consider the possibility that people "should" beyond letting students choose subjects on the basis of their own interests and aptitudes, recognizing that in all likelihood fewer girls that boys will choose architecture if indeed a difference in visual-spatial ability does exist.

The tendency to see every fact as grist for evaluation alos fosters misunderstanding about the implications of evolution. It is very frequently argued that, because drives once adaptive may no longer be so, these drives should no longer count. Thus Nancy Chodorow concedes that a hunter-gatherer past selected for aggressiveness in human males and nurturance in human females, but replied that "the [evolutionary] is allowed to stand for industrial societies like ours, which do not need the  division of labor for physical reproduction."  Chodorow does not see that the point of the evolutionary argument is not to *justify* sexual dimorphism, but to *establish its existence.* This dimorphism may prompt behavior that is maladaptive in our present environment, but it is silly to treat evolution as if it were a purposive agent that had slipped. If the question is whether children feel responsible for child care because of conditioning or because of drives that were selected as mankind evolved,  (and this is the question Chodorow is concerned to answer), it does not matter whether those drives have since become maladaptive if they, not socialization, explain the institution of motherhood.

-- The Treatment of Innate Drives as Obstacles

Thus Betty Friedan:

"Even if it were true that all societies so far have been patriarchal and dominated by men, and even if that dominance is based upon biological differences, it is irrelevant to the situation forcing women to demand equal opportunity in America and Britain today. Even if they are sorely handicapped by lack of testosterone it is inescapably necessary for women at this stage in human evolution to move to equality in society."

This is less a denial of innate sex differences that sheer muddle. Since a handicap is anything that prevents someone from getting what he wants, it is logically impossible for not wanting something to be a handicap to its pursuit. A would-be competitor in a race may be handicapped by external factors like like a muddy track or weak hamstrings, but he cannot be handicapped by his own indifference to winning. To treat a person's lack of desire as something that gets in his way is to draw an unreal distinction between *him* and his preferences and personality. If a woman's preferences and personality interfere with her, who is the *she* they interfere with? This abstract self must be conceived as a characterless monad, devoid of desires but nevertheless capable of autonomy. Such a view makes no literal sense, but it makes a kind of emotional sense for those who see so much value in male pursuits and so little value in female pursuits that they cannot believe that women do not want what men do.

-- "Women are Better Than Men"

A familiar theme in feminist writing, particularly in the second stage said to have emerged aftert 1980, is that the world would be a better place if women were leaders becaused women are less belligerent that men. Whatever its other merits, this idea would seem to involve a strong commitment to innate sex differences.

That commitment, however, is most equivocal because the critical point is left unclear: Is the greater cooperativeness of females innate, or is it the product of female socialization? The overall idea faces difficulty on either interpretation. If female cooperativeness is innate, how are women to reach positions of leadership whose attainment requires competitiveness? If female cooperativeness is learned, how did oppression produce moral superiority? And if oppression does produce morally superior beings, using female cooperativeness to ensure peace requires the oppressive apparatus that produces it--a requirement at odds with the goal of liberation. The more popular second-stage writers, like Ehrenreich and Dowling, never explicitly contest environmentalism and so far as I can tell would be loath to attribute the female's superior moral nature to an innate program. But the ambivalence of the second stage surfaces very clearly in Carol Gilligan's work on sex differences in moral thinking. Gilligan received much attention for arguing that female moral judgment is distinguished by "an overriding concern with relationships and responsibilities . . . a world composed of relations rather than of people standing alone, a world that coheres through human connection rather than through systems of rules."

This finding would seem to amount to no more than the common sense of the matter, which would have been derided as sexist stereotyping had it not been published by a woman. It certainly would not  have surprised Freud, who held that the male superego must impose stricter, more impersonal rules to contrl the male's greater aggressiveness. The only interesting question raised by the cognitive-affective sex differences Gilligan identifies is their origin, and Gilligan firmly distances herself from any nativist interpretation: "No claims are being made about the origins of the differences described. . . . Clearly, these differences arise in a social context in which factors of socialization and power combine with reproductive biology." Gilligan stresses the cooperative character of the games girls play as a contributor to the female moral style--without asking why girls choose cooperative games in the first place--and she leaves the overall impression that the female moral style is inculcated through early training. Separated from a nativist interpretation, Gilligan's conclusion come to little more than the triviality that groups raised in different environments, as boys and girls are said to be, develop different norms. It is not, after all, surprising that nomadic Arabs living on a harsh desert should value death in combat more that do contemporary Chicagoans. There is no distinctive female moral voice if men would have spoken in the same tones had they been raised as women are.

As it emerges, Gilligan's ultimate aim is less to explain the female voice than to chide society for ignoring it: "Sex differences in aggression are usually interpreted by taking the male response as the norm, so that the absence of aggression in women is identified as the problem to be explained." She cites no-one who regards female lack of aggression as a problem  (Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer come to mind), but Gilligan's use of sex differences is perhaps the distinguishing trait of  "second-stage" feminism. To the very uncertain extent that innate sex differences are recognized, they become vehicles for expressing dissatisfaction at society's failure to accomodate the female nature--now described as complementary or superior to men's. The diabolization of men continues, with men now being blamed for the mistakes of first-stage feminism. If first-stage feminists imposed an impossible "superwoman" ideal on women, the tensions experienced by women trying to "have it all" are laid to their copying male standards. Men are blamed for a high divorce rate. Taking a position indistinguishable from the first stage, Barbara Ehrenreich explains that a marriage in which the woman depends on a man to earn a living is inherently unstable. The existence of female nurturance, regarded as a new discovery, is seen as opening new possibilities for rapprochement betweeen men and women, the tapping of long-ignored nonmasculine thoughts and feelings, a new appreciation for the female world view, a new emphasis on the feminine in men, and dismay at what has been lost through the universal dominance by men of extrafamilial pursuits and female domination of child-rearing.

Dissatisfaction with the present social order, moreover, leads second-stage feminists to the same practical recommendations as were advocated by first-stage feminists on environmentalist grounds. In The Second Stage, Betty Friedan develops the view of testosterone as a handicap into a call for the total reorganization of society around women's "beta consciousness." Friedan remains adamant about quotas, an expanding female presence in the military, public funding for abortion, comparable worth, and along Benjamin Barber, the "unfinished business" of the Equal Rights Amendment. Other second-stage feminists continue to call for special preferences for women and for a statistical equality of outcome which, one would have thought, made sense only on environmentalist grounds. Elizabeth Wolgast begins "Equality and the Rights of Women" by stating: "We need an alternative to egalitarian reasoning" because "society does not create all the differences" between men and women. It is better, she says, to "allow for various differences between the sexes," but the provisions she suggests are oddly atavistic:

"Such a bivalent view provides a justification for affirmative action policies because it rejects a neutral perspective from which the concerns of both sexes can be seen "objectively". [Society] should not adopt linear scales for distinguishing all individuals regardless of sex. It suggests that men and women of talent, for example, will not generally match on the same set of parameters, and therefore, if a single standard is assumed and if that should be drawn from a sample of males, the comparison with a sample of women may be invidious. Without awareness of the possible range of differences between the sexes, this linear approach to merit must be treated with suspicion."

Does the use of innate sex differences as a stick for continuing to beat society and demand special treatment at least imply recognition of innate sex differences? Not at all, for, so far as I can tell, second-stage feminists agree with first-stage feminists that the organization of sex roles is to no significant extent the result of innate sex differences. To say that marriage must be changed to accomodate female needs is precisely to assume that female needs have nothing to do with the shape of marriage as it presently exists. It is this refusal to see social institutions as connected to the innate sex differences they say they recognize that accounts for the felt propriety of the term *feminist* to describe the authors I have cited.

It will not do to pretend that second-stage feminism is entirely coherent. While many one-time feminists are no longer able to deny altogether the evidence of biologically based sex differences, they are at the same time unwilling to admit that women *lack* any of the traits that men have. Naturally, no social institution can accomodate creatures who are amalgams of men and women, so much social reconstruction needs to be done:

"Justice in social relations preserves (or creates) political and economic equality in the face of different roles, distinctive gender needs. . . . [T]he challenge of third-stage feminism is how to make "different but equal" a reality, not because differences are ineluctable, but because equality is valuable only when it encourages rather than destroys them."


                                      ~Moderate Feminism~

That some feminists, lesbian separatists among them, are more radical and strident than others should not be taken to imply that there is a moderate feminist *position*. Society is either the residue of arbitrary conditioning--a *radical* position--or it is not. The radical analogy between blacks and women is to be taken seriously, or it is not. There is no intermediate view about the basic structure of society.

This may be less obvious than it should be, in part, for purely verbal reasons. People convinced a priori that feminism is good, will often shop around for something inoffensive for "feminism" to denote. This is no doubt how "feminism" remains attached to platitudes and positions granted decades ago, like "equal pay for equal work." Willful misuse of words is bad manners, but harmless so long as its practitioners do not confuse what they call "feminism" with what other people call "feminism".

A more serious obstacle to seeing the impossibility of moderate feminism is the tendency to see feminism as an application of the liberal precept that people should be judged as individuals. When applied to relations between the sexes, this precept has no meaning that is both moderate and fixed. As advice about institutions like the law, this precept is radical, requiring for example the legal recognition of homosexual marriage--a welcome reform, perhaps, but still a radical one. As advice about private conduct, the precept is either empty, or based on adventurous factual assumptions. The precept "Don't make assumptions about a woman on the basis of her sex" is not a belief system about the origin of society or a canon for evaluating it. It contains no implicit critique of extant sex roles or the victimization of women. It attaches no program of action involving quotas, censorship, unisex actuarial tables, comparable worth, abortion, or homosexual rights--many of which liberals would deplore. It finds nothing objectionable in a woman seeking paid labor if she wishes it, but it sees nothing especially desirable about careers for women. It says nothing whatever about personal relations or emotions. Moderate feminism as liberal tolerance is at best a caution for dealing with career women.

The liberal precept that everyone deserves a fair go is so nearly vacuous because it is not specifically about women at all. It involves nothing about such obstacles as may exist to treating women as individuals, and nothing about the reliability of stereotypes. If liberalism is given content by being conjoined to the empirical contention that sex stereotypes are false (and that is why one must keep an open mind) and that men and women are really alike, the resolve to be scrupulously fair suddenly becomes radical. What makes liberalism far less applicable to relations between the sexes than it is to, say, relations between races, is that it assumes away any innate differences that might control people's responses to members of their own and opposite sex. If for instance men cannot help feeling more protective than competitive toward women and more competitive than protective toward other men, the question of how men *should* act in new encounters is taken out of their hands. They will feel and act as they cannot help feeling and acting.

It is impossible to say at this point how many responses to new situations are learned projections from the lessons of old situations, but no doubt much of our behavior toward men and women *is* learned. This does not mean, however, that those acquired responses can be unlearned. People are bound to base their behavior and expectations on past experience, and if someone has always observed men and women to act differently, his subsequent attitudes are bound to reflect the belief that these regularities will continue. Probability assessments coalesce too unconsciously and impressionistically to be altered by formula--by just how much should one reduce one's estimate of the chances that the next woman he meets will want children--and anyway, belief is not subject to the will. The reader might try as an exercise to will himself to believe that Jews make terrible lawyers. Conversely, there is little point in urging people to change their stereotypes because stereotypes change unprompted when the world does. After 1948, people stopped believing that Jews could not fight. If women cease being more interested in children than men, that stereotype too will vanish.

Many thoughtful persons continue to apply the liberal ideal to women out of concern that the persistence of stereotypes unfairly penalizes unusual women. To the extent that this concern denies the influence of biology and experience on attitudes, it is nto a *moral* qualm, but it might be mentioned in passing the the right of unusual people to be treated as such is almost certainly imaginary. On what could such a right be based? Kantian considerations of reciprocity impose an omnilateral obligation to refrain from inflicting harm, but not an obligation to appreciate. Moreover, while a woman with atypical abilities may, thanks to stereotyping, face difficulties that a man with those same but more typically male abilities will escape, those benefits must be balanced against the benefits conferred by stereotyping on the majority of typical men and women, who are told via stereotypes that their preferences are normal and desireable. While the one woman in fifty who does not want children may be made uncomfortable by the message that there is something wrong with her, the same message is reinforcing the other forty-nine women.

Whether the discomfort of the atypical few is too high a price for the comfort of the many is not a question that concerns me here, and any attempt to interfere with it requires interference with processes whose variations between persons are important marks of individuality. Liberal open-mindedness risks running athwart individual liberty just as surely as does "radical" egalitarianism.

It is not hard to see why there *seems* to be a middle ground between feminism and the platitude of open-mindedness. One may begin with the platitude, edge toward the social oppression theory under pressure to be specific, and hasten back to the platitude as the oppression theory becomes implausible. Shuttle back and forth quickly enough, and the resultant blur can be taken for a position. That some such self-deception is at work is suggested by the difficulty experienced by self-described moderate feminists in detailing what they are *for*. Benjamin Barber writes:

"Once feminism is liberated from the narrow perspectives that put it at odds with the femininity its name ennobles, it can begin its true struggle to rescue the polity in which our humanity resides from its myriad enemies, and thereby to rescue women from the precarious perch somewhere between animality and divinity where their search for liberation has left them."

Who, then, are the "real foes of liberation" that enlightened feminism will oppose? They are the "the materialists and bureaucrats and interest-mongers and technocrats and behaviorists and ideologues and hedonists and bigots who together conspire to annihilate our human identity." This miscellany cannot be called a helpful guide to what positive views moderate feminism might advocate.

Against the pious hope that one keep an open mind about women there stands a coherent theory about the nature of women issuing in an extensive program of action. I will *give* the word *feminism* to anyone who wishes to use it out of pious hope, and return to examining the coherent theory under any name anyone prefers for it.


                              ~Feminism and Public Policy~

At some risk  of repetition, it is important to verify that feminism as defined here is a working assumption of public policy. Satisfaction on this point will presumably motivate the examination of that theory, whatever it is called.

Environmentalism implies that any significant statistical disparity in outcomes for men and women is due to outright discrimination or more subtly inequitable social forces. This interpretation of statistical data has been accepted by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Commission on Civil Rights, the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education, and Congress. It is also, very nearly, the opinion of the Supreme Court. The EEOC states: "Absent discrimination, it is to be expected that work forces will be more or less representative of the population of the community from which employees are hired." The federal Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection procedures presumes a ranking system for a job to be illegal if it statistically "underrepresents" women. In 1980 the CCR argued that "a steady flow of data" shows "ongoing discriminatory attitudes and processes [on the part of] white males [toward] the rest of the population." The data in question are abstracted from the commission's 1978 statistical report, Social Indicators of Equality for Minorities and Women, and is given as follows:

"Women and minorities are more likely to be umemployed, to have less prestigious occupations than white males. . . . [W]omen are less likely to have completed as many years of high school than white males. . . . Majority female college graduates have average earnings less than majority males with a high school education. This indicator reflects a bleak picture for black young men and women and for majority women."

The Commission sometimes explicitly endorses  the assumption that equal outcomes are to be expected absent discrimination, as when it considers the lower overqualification rate of white males relative to Blacks and females: "in a labor market where the match between people's qualifications and their jobs is not influenced by minority or gender status, it would be expected that the different groups would have equal degrees of overqualification." At other times the inference from statistical inequality to inequality of opportunity is tacit:

". . .women . . . have not achieved equal status with majority males on a series of 21 measures of equality in the areas of education, income, employment, occupations, poverty, and housing. Despite some absolute improvements in many of the areas . . . majority males have continued to enjoy broader opportunities and to reap disproportionate benefits while women . . .  have in many instances fallen even further behind."

There is a call for government action, but action not based on knowledge of the causes of the statistical inequalities in question:

"While the indicators alone will not decipher the causes of social trends, their clear delineation of trends should be sufficient to sitmulate more intensive scrutiny of programs or to suggest adjustments to them. Through these indicators, attention is focussed on the limited effect of recent Federal efforts to enhance the condition of women and minority men relative to majority males, indicating the need for more effective policy and program formation."

The commission recommends the collection of further data, but again, none addressed to determining causes.

Many commentators have detected a shift in recent decades from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome as the governing criterion of equality. These passages suggest that no such shift has occurred. Rather, the empirical assumption that the sexes are equal in all relevant respects has forced the conclusion that opportunities equal in the traditional sense would result in equal outcomes. Equality is not being identified with equal outcomes; instead, unequal outcomes are being used as unrebuttable evidence that opportunities were unequal.

The Supreme Court has also concerned itself with undoing the supposed artificialities of sex stereotyping. It has not at this writing subjected sex-based legal classifications  to "strict scrutiny", the standard it applies to racial classifications, but it did hold in *Craig v. Boren* that a sex-based classification must be "substantially related" to "an important government objective," and it added in *Mississippi v. Hogan* that an "extremely persuasive justification"  is needed to meet the *Craig* test. *Frontiero* raised the question of extending strict scrutiny to sex-based classifications, and four justices did vote to affirm this extension.

The Supreme Court, then, is quasi-feminist: It takes the conditions of Blacks and women to be substantially analogous, but has so far refused to treat them as legally equivalent. It would certainly be wrong to view the court as biased toward women; the court has been interested primarily in making the sexes come out alike. In some cases, this has meant permitting preferential treatment for women, and in other cases overthrowing privileges previously accorded women. Attributing such an intent to the court renders consistent such an otherwise incongruous pair of rulings as *Schlesinger* and *Orr*. In *Schlesinger* the court upheld the navy's policy of making promotion easier for women than for men, in *Orr* the court struck down an Alabama law stipulating that only husbands could pay alimony. *Orr* is consistent with the doctrine of rigid sex blindess, but *Schlesinger* is not; *Schlesinger* is consistent with favoritism for women, but *Orr* is not. However, both decisions are consistent with the doctrine that gender differences should not be allowed to have consequences. *Schlesinger* has the clear intent of helping to "integrate" the armed forces, and indeed *Orr* had a similar intent: in the words of Justice Brennan, the Alabama statute impermissibly risked "reinforcing stereotypes about the 'proper place' of women and their need for special protection."

This same tendency on the part of the courts is at work in the recent series of decisions affecting insurance. In addition to *Manhart*, the 1982 *Norris* decision held that a sex-based actuarial table "discriminates against women because it looks at them as a class instead of individuals" --rather curious reasoning from a judiciary which regularly holds women to have been damaged as a class and to deserve compensation as a class, regardless of the histories of the specific women who benefit from court-orderd remedies. *Norris* was supplemented by a consent decree before a Pennsylvania under which women will no longer have to pay higher disability rates despite their greater proneness to injury. In 1984 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the state's Equal Rights Amendment barred automobile insurance companies from basing insurance premiums on differences between male and female accident rates. Paralell rulings have been made about pensions. In the past, retired men have normally recieved more per month than retired women who have paid identical amounts in to the same pension fund, since the male's shorter life expectancy means that he must get his net return in a shorter time. In many jurisdictions women must now be given monthly payments equal to those given to men. It is doubtful that such judicial actions can be made fully rational by any interpretation (their net effect has been to require careful female drivers to subsidize reckless male drivers, and to require short-lived men to subsidize longer-lived women), but their overall intent would seem to be to prevent action based on information about sex differences.

The analogy between women and Blacks informs the passages cited from EEOC and CCR documents, and it is ubiquitous in civil rights legislation. Race and sex are jointly forbidden as bases for treatment of individuals in the 1964 Civil Rights Act (barring discrimination in housing), Executive Order 11063 (barring discrimination in federally assisted housing) , EO 11375 (mandating affirmitive action for government contractors), EO 11478 (mandating affirmative action in the federal civil service), and twenty-two more specific federal civil rights laws covering matters from discrimination in disaster relief to affirmative action on the Alaska Pipeline. Several laws protect women but not racial minorities; only the Food Stamp Act and the Public Works Employment Act of 1977 contain language which protects Blacks only. The history of this legislation involves little extended deliberation on the Black/female analogy; indeed, Blacks and women have marched so firmly in lockstep in the law that it is difficult to extract from it any distinctive views whatever about women. The advice given on these matters by government advisory bodies is often couched in language which suggests that its authors believe women  to *be* a racial minority.  The 1980 report of the President's Advisory Committee describes "the problem of sexism" as one of

". . . a multitude of other conditions which inhibit [women's] capacity to fully develop as productive human beings. Continued advancement will require a vigorous enforcement of laws prohibiting inequitable treatment of women, and  a national committment to the elimination of sex discrimination, sex bias, sex stereotyping, racial stereotyping, and any form of differential treatment that abridges the rights of women."

The proposed Equal Rights Amendment deserves mention as the chief legislative goal of contemporary feminism. The preamble to Senate Judicary Resolution 10, its present legislative embodiment, asserts that "being born female still constitutes a clear and present danger to the full attainment and the full development of the individual's character." The operative wording of the ERA is:

"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. The Congress shall have the power to enforce by appropriate legislation the provisions of this article."

ERA supporters divide into those who cannot say what these words mean, and those who see the ERA as ending the recognition of gender in society. Its proponents clearly intend it to make sex a suspect (and in practice impermissible) legal classification.

"Although opponents of the ERA maintain that the 14th Amendment provides adequate protection against sex discrimination, the Supreme Court of the United States has stopped short of applying the same 14th Amendment standards to sex discrimination that it does to race discrimination."

The full implications of the ERA go considerably further. The legal claim of homosexuals to marriage licenses "would almost certainly be vindicated under the proposed ERA,"  as would broad state powers to impose "benign discrimination"  favoring women. Before they came to be regarded as liabilities, the conscription of women and public funding for abortion were cited by proponents of the ERA as two of its desirable consequences. I know of no legal scholar who disputes the inference that all-male conscription denies to men the right not to join the armed services on the basis of sex, and would be legal under the ERA. As for the second hypothetical consequence, several state supreme courts have ruled that denial of public funds for abortion is discriminatory, since pregnancy is a condition unique to women, and it is not clear how a federal ERA could fail to support a similar interpretation.

A demand supposedly distinctive of  "radical" feminism is numerical equality of outcome in all activities--and feminists haved urged that the Supreme Court's "disparate impact" test for discrimination, which since *Griggs v. Duke* and *Dothard v. Rawlinson" has forbidden facially sex-neutral laws that effect men and women differently, be applied to ERA. Judith Wegner argued before the Senate Judiciary Committee that

". . . interpretation  of the Equal Rights Amendment to include a disparate impact rather than discriminatory intent statement standard would provide  additional protection against gender-based discrimination without unduly compromising competing government interests. Based on this analysis, I strongly recommed that the Committee go on record as supporting such an interpretation."

Whatever may be the intrinsic meaning of the words of the ERA, its advocates clearly wish to see it applied with numerical literalness whenever there is a government presence.

The most open-ended feature of the ERA is the difference in language between "rights under the law" and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of  "equal protection of the law." The equal protection clause speaks only  of state treatment of individuals; it requires the same enforcement of all laws for all citizens, without reference to any further, nonlegal rights. But a right "under" the law can be understood to cover not only rights created by statute, but, in addition, any prerogative in any private activity merely permitted by the law. Deployed with the disparate impact test, any activity whatever which affects the sexes differently would be construed as an abridgment of  "equality of rights under the law". And while it is impossible to predict judicial construction, pressure to interpret "right under the law" as pretermitted action would be placed on the courts by the axiom that legislatures do nothing in vain. The courts can hardly be unaware that ERA was proposed while the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, which bars private discrimination, were in effect. Thus, the ERA redundantly reiterates these two statutes--an interpretation which would put the courts at sword's point with the axiom--or it goes beyond them, and there is little way for the ERA to go beyond them other than by reconstruing private action as action pretermitted by the law. There is a precedent for this wide understanding of "right under the law" in *Pennsylvania v. Board of Trustees,* in which the Supreme Court held that a school established with a private endowment for "poor White male orphans" could not exclude Blacks because of the role of the courts in administering trustees.

Lawyers representing NOW were not being hyperbolic when they claimed that ERA would remove the "legacy of the past, which leaves the athletic prowess of males and females at different levels right now." Athletic prowess like everything else falls within its ambit. In the rueful words of an ERA supporter reflecting on its loss of public support, "under ERA, everything will become ERA's business."

Later chapters will look more deeply into the impact of feminism on public policy. This overview is merely meant to suggest the extent of this impact. Not that such exercises still the objection that I am talking about a fringe phenomenon. Quoting people who call themselves feminists is commonly regarded as bad form, while critical examination of feminism is equated with misogyny, the wish to disenfranchise women, and incipient Nazism. These misunderstandings resist the most dogged efforts at rectification. I do not know why otherwise  reasonable people find it necessary to mishear any criticism of feminism as somethng idiotic (and therefore not needing consideration). Here is a research project for some curious psychologist.


==========================
==========================



This has been chapter 2 of 'Feminism and Freedom' by Michael Levin, published by Transaction Books, 1986.  I would encourage anybody to study this material exhaustively, and learn the basic lines of argument. I would also recommend reading the entire book.

Antifeminist Praxis

My official blog is now

http://www.antifeministpraxis.com

It is hosted on Wordpress, and is a joint venture between me, Nick Reading, and a few other people.

Check it out, spread the word, and set your bookmarks accordingly.

Introducing Antifeminist Praxis

Video by Nick Reading:

 




Introducing Antifeministpraxis.com

by Fidelbogen:



Nick Reading and I have launched a new website, antifeministpraxis.com -- or "Praxis" for short. We felt the time was overdue to build a robust post-manospheric platform for the activated non-feminist sector. This project has been in preparation for several months, the product of much working and reworking, and many talks that stretched far into the night. Now we unveil it to the light of day.

At Praxis, we address the feminist problem in a style that eschews male identity politics and moves beyond the legacy discourse. We bring counter-feminist analysis to bear upon this task, and we give a green light to outside-the-box thinking. Our practice flows from a political ethos called "Strict Anti-feminism" -- or SAF for short. (The SAF Manifesto will bring you up to speed.)

It is axiomatic that feminism is irredeemable. Few things could interest us less than "bickering" with feminists in the hope that they will eventually see the light. If we want to engage them we will, but for the most part we won't. We take the post-argumental approach, which means that we simply "tell it like it is" in the full power of non-feminist authority.

We are concerned with three key questions, each of which opens the door to a realm of secondary questions. You might say that SAF discourse is a continual meditation upon these questions, since nearly all of our talk embraces one or more of them:


1.) What is feminism?

2.) Where do non-feminist people stand?

3.) What is to be done?


Under the legacy discourse, nearly all anti-feminist politics has been branded by an androcentric (male-identitarian) voice -- the "men speaking as men" voice. For better or worse, this voice has represented the non-feminist revolution in the public mind.

Under the SAF mandate, anti-feminist politics assumes the ecumenical voice of non-feminist people in general, and this establishes that the non-feminist revolution has more than one voice. That is a paradigm-shift whose implications will become clear as time goes on. 

The meaning of "strict" anti-feminism is that opposing feminism should be differentiated from promoting male interest in a subjectively male way. Furthermore, this differentiation should be understood clearly by the general public and not merely by the practitioners.

Take note of that last point: we are talking about a political division of labor reflected in both popular and private language.

This is not to suggest that politics "in a male voice" will disappear. Such politics will perk along as always, and most of it will have the customary anti-feminist flavor. Our point is that anti-feminism must also be harnessed solo, as a task force under specialized discipline free of male-identitarian baggage.

After all, this is is 2017 -- the current year no less! We are growing a different tree in a more complicated political landscape shaped by Toronto, Gamergate, WomenAgainstFeminism, developments in England, and yes ... Donald Trump.

SAF operates on the conceptual model of "feminism's wrongs" rather than the longstanding "men's rights". In this new model, the statement "look what feminism has done to the world" has a top-category position. Further down the chart will be found feminism's specific wrongs against men -- which are numerous and grave. However, "men's rights" remains a secondary narrative under the overarching construct of feminism's wrongs.

It is rich and satisfying, no doubt, to speak "de profundis" from an existential place of maleness. There is nothing wrong with this. However, that does not make it politically efficient to center your message upon male pathos. The masses don't respond well to such a tone.

We focus narrowly upon the feminist problem because this simplifies and streamlines our work. We don't want anybody (feminists especially) to change the subject. We want to concentrate our energy, we want to situate the conversation in a useful way, and we don't want mission drift to creep in.  

Quite understandably, there is nothing the feminists dread more than anti-feminism. They will do whatever it takes to prevent that force from advancing in society, and for them prevention starts in the microcosm of everyday conversation.

Accordingly, since feminism per se is a gateway topic to the feminist problem at large, they will steer clear of this topic. Such talk, after all, might pull feminism itself within range of critical awareness.

You might think that feminists do nothing but talk about feminism, but you would be mistaken. Feminist talk is informed by feminism, suffused by feminism, dripping with feminism -- but not about feminism. What they actually talk about is feminist theories, feminist issues, feminist talking points, feminist narratives, feminist histories, feminist conceits, and so on -- everything but feminism itself.

So you could say that all of their talk is a deflection from feminism's problematic core truth: they don't talk about feminism because they talk around it. 

In the end, only a non-feminist mind is fit to explain feminism. That is where activated non-feminist people, as a task force, step into the picture. We are fit to explain feminism because we exist outside of feminism, so that even if the view is not lovely, we are able to see feminism for what it is. Furthermore (which ought to be obvious) we have no vested interest in feminism's preservation.

Above all, we are willing to ask hardball philosophical questions, over and over again, even at the risk of looking geeky. We will not let those questions get overshadowed or shoved aside.

Antifeministpraxis.com furnishes a platform, and a cyberspace focal point, for those who wish to address the feminist problem in this new way. At Praxis, we take the non-feminist revolution to the next level.

More than that, we take it to the streets. We furnish a growing library of counter-feminist pamphlets which can be printed and distributed in the offline world, and a selection of other literature too.

Finally, we provide a Craigslist-style contact resource for anti-feminists who want to arrange meetups in real life.

At Praxis, we welcome non-feminist men and women from everywhere on Earth -- as commenters, as contributing writers, as community members. We wish to activate the great fund of raw intellectual talent that lies dormant within the non-feminist sector.

http://www.antifeministpraxis.com