SEXISM IS THE CAUSE AND CONTEXT OF GREATER HUMAN PROBLEMS

SEXISM IS THE CAUSE AND CONTEXT OF GREATER HUMAN PROBLEMS

1. DOMINATION OF WOMEN LEADS TO OTHER FORMS OF VIOLENCE AND DOMINATION

Sonia Johnson, Feminist, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 241.

Feminism posits that men raped and exploited and enslaved women before they went across the river and invaded the neighboring tribe. It posits that men learned the power-over paradigm in their kitchens and bedrooms, their caves and huts, through their most intimate, most formative relationships, which were with mothers, lovers, and wives, and that they subsequently applied it in all areas of their lives, operating within that dominant/submissive, dichotomous mindset in all subsequent affairs. Thus did the sadomasochistic paradigm, which is patriarchy, slouch into the world.

Sonia Johnson, Feminist, GOING OUT OF OUR MINDS: THE METAPHYSICS OF LIBERATION, 1987, p. 243.

But women, not taken in any more, are saying, "No, you don't understand. The way you treat women is central to all these problems: central to making peace in the Middle East and Central America, central to decreasing tension between the Soviet Union and the U.S., central to eliminating terrorism, central to restructuring the world economy." Feminists insist in the face of monumental disbelief and boredom that sexism is the Original Sin, "the fundamental lie that marks all human ideas, customs, and institutions," and that all the seemingly insurmountable problems in the world are the fallout from this most radical corruption. It is clear, therefore, that the only hope for this planet is in a global transformation in the status of women.
3. AGGRESSION AND WAR STEM FROM THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN

Mary Daly, Associate Professor of Theology, Boston College, GYN/ECOLOGY: THE METAETHICS OF RADICAL FEMINISM, 1978, p. 357.

Clearly, the primary and essential object of aggression is not the "opposing" military force. The members of the opposing team share the same values and play the same war games. The secret bond that binds the warriors together, energizing them, is the violation of women, acted out physically and constantly re-played on the level of language and shared fantasies. In the absence of women, defeating the enemy is envisaged as making him into a woman. Yet the warriors always attempt to seal the ultimate victory by the actual rape, murder, and dismemberment of women.
4. WAR IS JUSTIFIED THROUGH PATRIARCHY'S SYMBOLIC PRACTICES

Mary Daly, Associate Professor of Theology, Boston College, GYN/ECOLOGY: THE METAETHICS OF RADICAL FEMINISM, 1978, p. 357.

In order to understand the misogynistic roots of androcratic aggression, we must comprehend that the perpetual War is waged primarily on a psychic and spiritual plane. This is not to minimize physical invasion/occupation/destruction, but to grasp the total horror. The most noxious forms of aggression are not reducible to the biological level alone, but involve also the fabrication of "symbolic universes in thought, language, and behavior." These universes are all present in each concrete violent act of aggression.

"FEMINIST VALUES" ARE WRONG

1. LIBERATION REQUIRES REJECTING DISTINCTIONS AMONG MASCULINE AND FEMININE

Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.

In that vision, let us remind ourselves, the struggle for equal dignity, equal possibility, and equal worth was supposed to change and to benefit men, too. Women's rights were thwarted by culture, not by nature; by cruel social arrangements, not by timeless male troglodytism. "We do not fight with man himself," the nineteenth-century feminist Ernestine Rose observed, "but only with bad principles." In the great feminist vision, neither men nor women were to be defined by, let alone reduced to, their anatomy. For liberal feminism, as Martha Nussbaum has argued, sex, like caste and rank, was a " morally irrelevant characteristic" that acquired its significance historically and not biologically--through law and custom, which are amenable to moral and historical agency. Otherwise politics are meaningless, and women have reason only for despair.

Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.

There is plenty of empirical evidence to complicate and to counter these generalizations, not least our own experiences of women and men who fit neither mold. There is a preponderance of studies that show that most psychological sex differences are small to moderate, and exceeded by variation within each sex. In few other aspects of life, certainly, would we regard animal behavior or the behavior of our anthropoid ancestors as inescapable blueprints for our own actions. (Indeed, as Angier puts it in her delightful new book, Woman: An Intimate Geography, "many nonhuman female primates gallivant about rather more than we might have predicted before primatologists began observing their behavior in the field--more, far more, than is necessary for the sake of reproduction.")
3. THE "NATURE" OF FEMININITY IS FALLACIOUS--THERE IS NO SUCH THING

Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.

Liberal feminists and egalitarians of both sexes have usually made it a premise of their thinking that none of us can know precisely the essence of womanhood in the absence of social conditions. "What is now called the nature of woman," John Stuart Mill observed, "is an eminently artificial thing--the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others." American women in 1999 are no longer such constricted houseplants, clipped to bend in one direction and unable to grow in another direction, but neither do they exist in a sexless utopian zone. Surely humility on the subject of what constitutes a whole, a real, an essential woman is in order.

FEMINIST VALUES ARE UNNECESSARY

1. CULTURAL NORMS CAN CHANGE WITHOUT IMPOSING FEMINIST VALUES

Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.

Most importantly, it is a fundamental lesson of human history that a change in cultural norms can effect a change in sexual behavior--so that, for instance, when women are given the social opportunity and the cultural sanction, many of them will not feel it necessary to hide their libidos (and their thongs). For the evo- psycho school of misogyny (and it is misogyny, whether it is delivered in liberal or conservative voices), it is enough that we have all known men and women who resemble the evolutionary stereotypes. But in truth it is not enough. The reality of biological differences is undeniable, but it is also not the only reality, or the most significant reality.

Margaret Talbot, Book Reviewer, THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 31, 1999, p. 34.

The difference feminists could have argued that there are jerks of both sexes, and that men in general are prodded by a variety of social clues to express their jerkiness in one way--by crushing beer cans on their heads, say, or by pummeling people--while women in general express their jerkiness in another way--by emotional manipulation or verbal abuse; and they could have argued that both these tendencies are subject to change as cultural expectations change, though they will in all probability never be interchangeable. But that is not what the difference feminists wish to argue. They are not especially struck by the infinite variety of human beings. Like the evolutionary psychologists, they prefer to believe that men are one way and women are another way, and so it has been and so it shall be. And what point is there in social and political reform, if the problem is biological? Genes are impervious to legislation.
3. CURRENT CONCEPTIONS OF GENDER EQUALITY ARE SUFFICIENT

Danielle Crittenden, Author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, THE WEEKLY STANDARD, July 9, 1999, p. 31

Perhaps the best solution for women would be to accept that they have achieved equality with men in every important way. Having had every legal, economic, political, and social impediment removed, we may have at last run up against the impediments -- if you wish to call them that -- of our sex. To achieve any more, to be able to live the same lives as men, we would actually have to be men -- and this, I suspect, is not an enticing goal to most women.