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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

A Fisch by any other name
My last name is Fisch. My husband's last name is Flynn. Our son's last name is Flysch. No, it's not a spelling error.
By Audrey Fisch
[01/20/00]

Why should a baby get the father's last name?
Historians, scientists and legal scholars offer some explanation.
By Carol Lloyd
[01/20/00]

A new year and a new spouse
Forget losing weight. For 2000, a vast number of British couples resolved to lose something else.
By Shelley Emling
[01/21/00]

Southern governors declare war on divorce
But their methods ignore social science, solutions and their neediest constituents.
By Lisa Moricoli Latham
[01/24/00]

Talking trash
Talk magazine peddles hardcore porn from the mouths of babes.
By Amy Benfer
[01/25/00]

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Today's feminism tends to focus on bad things men do to women, including misdeeds that, long before the widespread acceptance of women's equality, were generally viewed in the West as reprehensible violations of moral and social norms: rape, battering, sexual coercion of employees. Yes, it is true that the outrage at such acts often did not translate into social sanctions, and often did not preclude sexist biases against victims; the women's movement certainly deserves credit for bringing these problems to center stage.

However, framing the issues in terms of a male "war against women" had some unfortunate consequences -- notably, a much-deplored tendency to depict women as perpetual victims and men as villains. Women's ill-treatment of men is either obliterated or excused, resulting in a quasi-Victorian sentimental insistence on female virtue and innocence.

Often, the same people who bristle at the notion that women may be less sexual or less aggressive than men insist that unwelcome sexuality in the workplace is always a male imposition on women and indignantly reject any suggestion that women may sometimes be the aggressors in domestic combat.

Causes such as those that protest violence against women are less an appeal for respect for women as human beings equal in stature to men (who are, after all, the primary victims of male violence) than demands that we feel sympathy for women as damsels-in-distress.

The preoccupation with women's injuries at the hands of men also politicizes less egregious, more complex offenses. The 1999 book "Rebels in White Gloves" by Miriam Horn, a portrait of the Wellesley College Class of '69, tells the story of how U.S. Attorney Kris Olson Rogers came to see her bad (but non-violent) marriage as abusive. Rogers had her epiphany when, soon after her divorce, she read materials from a battered women's shelter which defined abusive behavior as ranging from lies and infidelity to "not giving support, attention, and compliments."

As a consciousness-raising exercise, Rogers read the checklist at a seminar for women lawyers and asked how many had experienced such treatment from spouses or partners. About 80 percent raised their hands. Surely, if the same list were read to a group of men -- or lesbians -- a similar forest of hands would go up.

While Horn wonders if this politicization of the personal turns "the confused misdemeanors inevitable in a relationship into stark crimes," she concludes that it is ultimately a good thing, empowering women to resolve their private problems through "public solidarity."

But actually, this kind of "empowerment" often seems to reduce feminism to a vehicle for women to vent and validate their frustrations with men -- frustrations which have less to do with gender politics or Mars-Venus differences than with tensions inherent in intimate relationships -- and to blame their personal unhappiness on the patriarchy.

Meanwhile, conservative traditionalists have long tried to use feminist claims of female misery as evidence that the pursuit of equality was a tragic mistake. While the neo-traditionalists often claim that the path they are proposing combines the best of women's new roles with the best of age-old wisdom about men and women, their actual prescriptions are heavy on the age-old, while the new often seems to be a mere cosmetic dusting.

Thus, Crittenden's proposed solution to women's work-and-family woes is vintage 1950s: Yes, women should be able to fulfil their talents outside the home but it's up to them to build their working lives around the family -- which is their primary responsibility, as breadwinning is the man's. ("What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us" shrugs off child care by fathers as an unrealistic option for most women; in a March 1999 article in the Canadian daily National Post, Crittenden goes further and mocks the nurturing dad as a wimp no real woman would want in her bed.) Nastily censorious toward working mothers, Crittenden has even chided Elizabeth Dole for having the temerity to announce, during the 1996 campaign, that she would return to her post at the Red Cross if Bob Dole became president.

Shalit, meanwhile, yearns openly for paternalistic norms that curtailed women's freedom but protected them from bad men and their own bad judgment. It is no accident that she repeatedly blurs the lines between girl children (who do need the protection of adults -- as do boys) and grown young women. While Shalit has asserted that her vision of feminine modesty is in no way incompatible with careers, she makes it clear that in her view, encouraging women to be assertive and independent, just like encouraging them to be casual about sex, is a way of telling them to "stop being a woman."

In many strange ways, modern feminism and modern traditionalism overlap. Both oppose equal treatment regardless of gender: the neo-feminists want special protections on the grounds of women's oppressed and powerless state, the traditionalists on the grounds of women's innate vulnerabilities and differences from men.

Both camps are preoccupied with men's mistreatment of women. In the conservative version of the personal-as-political, the liberalization of social and sexual mores has lifted the constraints that held male misconduct in check: Single women, duped into making themselves sexually available, are used and dumped at every turn, and those lucky enough to get married are still in constant danger of being dumped because divorce has been made easy. Men, in this scheme of things, have virtually no interest in love, marriage or children unless women rope them into commitment by withholding sex and unless there is societal pressure on them to get and stay married. They'll act like pigs if given half a chance, and they've been given just such a chance by feminism and the sexual revolution.

In fact, when it comes to male-bashing and preoccupation with female victimhood, some of the new traditionalists can hold a candle to the most radical of feminists. Victim feminism and victim anti-feminism achieve perfect convergence in "A Return to Modesty." In Shalit's hands, Victorian pieties about womanhood mix freely with feminist hyperbole about a "misogynist culture" in which women and girls face constant abuse, violence and degradation (except that she blames this on the loss of patriarchal protections, rather than the patriarchy).

Indeed, echoing the feelings-over-facts attitude for which conservatives have rightly derided the cultural left, Shalit suggests that false charges of victimization and statistics which inflate female misery matter less than the greater truth: A lot of young women are "very unhappy."

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