To some degree I'm on your side here because my parents have been married for over 40 years. But having seen some genuinely unhappy families, I don't think I'd want my children to stay in a relationship where they are truly unfulfilled --
Well, these things are complicated, Rebecca. But you can be happy when you do your duty as you see it. I have a 26-year-old who's married and I'm thinking, "What would my advice be to him?" I might [tell him] that you're happy when you do your duty. If he had a wife and three kids? Oh yeah.
If he came to you and said, "I am really unhappy, Mom"?
I'd say "Gee, honey, that's a real shame. Go on home and try to be happy with those beautiful children you have."
And five years later if he came back and said, "Mom, I'm still unhappy"?
"Go do your duty, honey. You're going to live to be 80 years old; at the moment you're needed someplace." That would be my impulse and he's my child. But I don't really put me, me, me, happy, happy, happy, first.
You quote Karl Zinsmeister as describing how men need to be "lured" and "corralled" into being nurturers, using that quote in a passage about the centrality of men in the family. If fathers are so naturally central to the family, why do they need to be lured or corralled? Isn't that a darker view of men's impulses than you argue feminists have?
No, no. Impregnating women? Really natural! Hangin' around? Not necessarily natural! That was [the woman's] job. Her job was to hang around.
So then why do we need them? Why is it so bad -- in your view -- to have fatherless households?
Because there's tons kids learn from their fathers! Look what happens to boys who don't have fathers! They become hyper-male; they don't have male role models, they're joining gangs. They bristle against the matriarchy they're in. The data is incredible about fatherless boys.
I saw all the time as a mother of sons why boys need fathers. It would ruin my day if they didn't get an invitation to a first grade party! [My husband] would be like, "Kate, lighten up, they'll be fine." They really need fathers. And fathers have to feel needed.
In the chapter about VAWA [Violence Against Women Act] you describe some of the signs of abuse -- like having a partner who monitors what you're doing, humiliates you in public, and controls your money -- as trivial. Do you really think those things are trivial?
I think they are potentially trivial. Could any one of those things rise to the level of a real abusive situation? I suppose so. But it strikes me as a sort of alarmist [attempt to define] domestic violence down in order to find some epidemic of it. [If those were true] every dating relationship in high school would be abuse. I mean constant, constant humiliation in front of people? It's all so subjective: like every time I go out he asks me where I've been?
What I see there is an attempt to define it down because it has to be an epidemic -- because there's a lot of money in it being an epidemic.
Right. You complain about all the jobs VAWA created. But you also write about how the domestic crime statistics fell between 1993 and 2002, calling that bad news for all the people who need the stats to be high to keep their VAWA jobs. But given that the numbers fell with all those people in those VAWA jobs, isn't it conceivable that those jobs helped lower the domestic violence rates?
The overall crime rate's also down; you just don't ever know, frankly. But I do know that they have an incentive to hype an epidemic. We don't know. Because it's so unclear what they're doing [in VAWA jobs] except advocating and hyping the epidemic
And thereby making more women aware of what to call it, and how to report it ... and even if it's a guy controlling their money, learning to look for unhealthy relationships, and --
Seriously, though, what business is it of yours or mine if guys are controlling their money or asking them where they've been? At what point is it not a matter of public policy or government if somebody's living with a loser who's controlling her money?
But if it helps women to understand the power dynamics of bad relationships --
Right, they are expanding the definition. You got a black eye? We want to hear about it. But don't you think that controlling money begins to flirt with a private matter?
You quote Suzanne Venker as saying that loving a child more than herself elevates a woman. Are women who choose not to become mothers lesser women?
No, if you don't want to become a mother, you shouldn't be a mother! They're missing out on something but I wouldn't say they're lesser women.
You write about your dismay when your son was read a story about a princess killing the dragons while the boys did nothing. Why shouldn't the girls defend the castle?
Men protect women from the physical threat. You're going into a movie theater with your husband or your boyfriend and you see two guys tussling in the parking lot: You walk a little faster. You see a guy shoving a girl around: You want to be with a guy who wouldn't go over to the parking lot and see what was happening? I wouldn't want to be with a guy who didn't. Good men rise to defend women in the face of a physical threat.
The most inflammatory passage in the book is when you suggest that if women are going to be in the military, mothers are going to have to start teaching their sons to hit girls.
It's a sort of flip way to do it. It is very difficult for men raised with what we should still regard as the right traditional values -- this doesn't mean that a woman doesn't dance circles around him in every other area of American life, get used to it -- but he defends her from the face of physical threat.
But the notion that it would be OK to hit girls -- this would carry over into civilian life?
Well, aren't we going to have to? These are real-world choices. We're going to have to have the kind of guy who continues right into the movie theater whether it's a girl pushed around or two guys in fisticuffs. It's like my Jessica Lynch thing. The stories about her being beaten up and sexually assaulted dropped out of all the yellow ribbon stories because we wanted a sweet, thank-god-she's-safe, 19-year-old blond. We didn't want to read about the fact that she was physically and sexually abused by foreign soldiers. We don't want to know.
Let me finally ask about the titular notion of the book, that feminists actually made the world worse?
[Silently points at the publishing publicist again.] They've weakened our institutions: weakened attachment to marriage, sending out signals that children don't need fathers -- fathers are listening too. When you used to ask, "Do you think people should wait to get married before having children?" it used to be overwhelmingly yes. Now it's, eh, no. It all has such consequences. Look at the state of our families. The military is gender-normed, which is a weakness, the workplace ... I think, yes, there has been big net harm. Our culture is feminized, but coarser.
Feminized is bad?
Oh, yeah. I've had it both ways, and I think we were better protected by traditional mores and chivalry than we are by lawsuits and laws. Men behaved better. And bring back the date! These juvenile men into their 30s who are unmanageable, and frustrated women who can't find anyone? It's been really bad for women -- it's been really bad for men -- but it's been really bad for women.
Even as women have more financial and professional and political opportunities?
I back all of that! Equal pay! Great! They wouldn't lose me on opening up law schools and med schools [to women]. What I'm saying is I wouldn't have brought you all the other stuff. I'm not a caricature. I would have been the first at the head of the parade.
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
About the writer
Rebecca Traister is a staff writer for Salon Life.
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