Nobody's dummy

I love this story! It captures the indomitable, muscular energy of women of the agrarian phase of culture, which I too witnessed in my childhood. (My mother and all four of my grandparents were born in the Italian countryside.) There can be no doubt that this is the primary reason for my dissident protest against the bourgeois proprieties and whiny male-bashing of Anglo-American feminism. Take-charge feminism doesn't try to game the system or run to authority figures for protection. It's hands-on in the moment, forcing respect for female power by earning it.

In a television interview, Germaine Greer was asked about Bill Clinton. She rejected the conclusion that he is a feminist just because he supports a woman's right to choose abortion (notice how the word "abortion" in that repeated phrase is coyly dropped by the ambivalent and squeamish). Greer: "Of course he supports abortion rights. I never met a libertine who wasn't pro-abortion."

Best,
Maggie Balistreri

Whoa -- what a rapier thrust! And richly deserved. The feminist coddling of Bill Clinton has been appalling. I admire Germaine Greer enormously. She is bold, independent, learned and devastatingly witty. It was an absolute scandal that for several decades the poststructuralist maunderings of a second-rate crew of French women intellectuals (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigirary, etc.) were imposed on smart women undergraduates at elite universities, while Greer's work was not assigned. Lo, the professor clones and how they do dither!

It's pretty gutsy for you to admit that abortion is murder, "the extermination of the powerless by the powerful." It's also pretty gutsy for you to admit that hardened criminals need to be zapped (I agree).

I'm a follower of Jesus Christ who is friends with quite a few "liberals" who are not as honest as you. So, following the teachings of Jesus causes me to think about life as a mission to "speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves." This doesn't only include the unborn (thanks for calling them individuals --also refreshing), but many times the women who are forced into having an abortion by boyfriends, embarrassed parents or other outside pressures.

I've volunteered in a well-run pregnancy center for nearly 13 years and have come face to face with women who face all kinds of pressures. In my nine years of doing peer counseling there, I believe I've only met one woman who thought abortion was her right and wanted one right away. Most of the women I've encountered don't want an abortion. Even the ones who end up having one and then have come back to me to debrief about it end up saying how hard it was, how they wish this had never happened.

I've come to believe that abortion is a nasty symptom of a much deeper problem -- a society that eats, lives and breathes sex. So, while we're eating, living and breathing it, why isn't anyone really talking about sex as an emotional and spiritual act as well as a physical one? (Actually, Lauren Winner in “Real Sex” talks about this, but she's writing to Christians --not a mainstream audience.) Wow -- nothing can screw up intimacy for women more than having a lineup of beaux they've slept with -- even if they were using birth control. Many women that I've talked with at the center are trying to find that intimate connection by having sex with men they think they could possibly love one day, but they are fooled. They awake empty and, for lack of thought, continue to "look for love in all the wrong places."

So I believe abortion is the fallout of some pretty messed-up views about sex. And our attempt as a society to let women do whatever they want with their bodies (as if the things we do have absolutely no effect on anyone else) has a huge price tag. It costs a lot of women a loss of intimacy for life. Pretty ironic, I think.

Warm thoughts,
Paula Cook
Dayton, Virginia

Thank you so much for this letter, which I am sure many other Salon readers will also find very unsettling. You raise crucial issues about the psychological turbulence that has been an unanticipated consequence of the sexual revolution. My generation of baby-boom women tried to destroy the traditional double standard, which we viewed as an oppressive constraint on women's liberty. But over time, it became apparent that younger women, raised in a more permissive environment, were under much more severe sexual demands and pressures than we had been in the cloistered 1950s. I began raising the alarm about this in my controversial writings about date rape in the early 1990s. There needs to be much more honest public discussion of these issues, without the usual breakdown into partisan animosity. Whether we like it or not, nature has ordained that the female reproductive system, which shelters every fetus, is far more complex and fragile than male sexuality.

I am stunned by your sensitivity to what a conservative pro-life traditional woman feels about old-school feminism and our rude exclusion from it -- until now. Sarah Palin does indeed give women like me a voice at last.

I am a 51-year-old, devout Latter-day Saint. I have been married 32 years and have five children and one grandson with a granddaughter on the way. My two sons are both Eagle Scouts. I am a published fine artist. My work with the Arizona State Game and Fish Department has been distributed to universities, schools and libraries throughout the state for many years. I have been a working mom as well as a stay-at-home mom.

I, like millions of women, have volunteered countless hours to church, school and community service. In addition to that, I have donated my time to many world-relief efforts through the humanitarian service arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On a more local level, I have taken meals to the invalid, packed relief boxes, sewed humanitarian kits, tied quilts for Kosovo, and organized collections for local charities, and I babysit for neighbors in a pinch. As an avid animal lover, I am known to rescue dogs and stray birds.

Women who deem themselves "liberated" have always grossly minimized women like me who feel great, genuine joy in being a wife and mother. In the workplace, I was brutally criticized by other women who felt my large family reflected poor planning and a drain on national resources. It didn't matter that my children could cook, sew, excel scholastically at school, perform community service, teach younger siblings music lessons and complete long chore lists while I was at work.

The work ethic of my very functional and social children then prompted my female co-workers to criticize me for being too harsh on them when I brought the Nintendo controllers with me to work (so the boys at home would read a book instead). They said I should let my children "have fun." If I mentioned a fun Sunday school lesson craft we did, I was criticized for being "religious." But later, the office manager asked me to draw visual aides for her church nursery class. She also asked me to teach her how to sew after I gave the office girls homemade Christmas gifts. The liberal women I worked with seemed uncomfortable with someone like me who cheerfully ignored their personal attacks and shared my talents with them when asked. I was never fully accepted. I didn't see them as obstacles to me being me; yet that is how they regarded me.

It seems many feminists talk large about the world family and our accountability to it, yet do little to personally follow through on that ideal. As a conservative woman, and especially as a conservative LDS woman, I invest quite a bit of myself in the world as a lifestyle choice. My family is no different. My oldest daughter spent a semester abroad as a literacy employee of the Mexican government, living at the base of an active volcano in a one dirt-road village. She voluntarily served an 18-month mission to Brazil. Later, she used her Portuguese language skills again in Mozambique, working with families directly affected by TB, malaria and AIDS. My husband and two sons all were volunteer missionaries for two years, serving the people of Japan, Ukraine and Mexico. The missionaries pay their own way and love the people and cultures that they serve for the rest of their lives.

Ours is hardly a myopic, sheltered or uninvolved view of our neighbors, our countrymen, and our world family. Our contribution to the larger society is unsung but quite alive and well. Thank you very much for your remarkable articulation of a force that should have been invited into a more flexible "sisterhood" a long time ago.

Respectfully yours,
Cindi Tanner

Your letter brought tears to my eyes. I am profoundly impressed by the active involvement of your family in ministering to the world's needs. How few of the liberal Democrats of the Northeastern professional world come near this level of self-sacrifice and commitment. Letters like yours are truly an inspiration.

My parents are lifelong Democrats, I have always voted Democrat (I am 26), and I have always considered myself a feminist, right down to my major at Union College in Women's Studies. However, more and more, all I see from fellow feminists is outrage when I express a view that is even remotely different from theirs. I am pro-choice, pro-death penalty for serious crimes (I would take your view a bit farther to include pedophiles with more than two offenses), pro-gay rights, etc.

I am all for feminists of all walks of life, all views, all choices. I mean, that's what I understand feminism to be about -- women having the ability to make their own choices. While I may agree with some choices more then others, and firmly believe some are better than others, we are truly cutting out a huge portion of the population by attaching "absolutes" to feminist ideology. Instead of being the party of independent choice and thought, Dems are becoming as strident and intolerant as how I always saw the Republicans.

Additionally, I really see feminists of the Gloria Steinem group (i.e., most of the ones I know) not wanting women to take responsibility for their own actions. It's always a blame game. I am unsure as to how taking agency and responsibility away from women is advancing feminism. If anything, it does the opposite and gives men and women who haven't bought into the idea of equal rights ammunition as to why they shouldn't.

I agree that it's the pioneer women (or women like Sarah Palin), who took action, who did what the men did, who were strong and resilient and refused to complain who really prove that women are equal, as opposed to constantly complaining about what is keeping us down, and why we are objectified, etc. I guess basically what I am saying is that I agree with you wholeheartedly and that it saddens me to see how mainstream feminists have treated your views, because you deal in reality and responsibility, while all they do is subscribe to the victim complex. I realize now that this is basically how most of them will and do view me, but I just won't keep my mouth shut (that has actually never been easy for me!).

If Sarah Palin has done anything, it is to truly expose mainstream feminists (and Democrats for that matter) as hypocritical elitists who really aren't as tolerant as people think they are and who only support women who agree with them on every single issue.

Best,
Katie Cunningham

The reform of feminism must come from idealistic young women such as yourself. Independent thought and speech should be a Democratic as well as a feminist principle. I still cannot grasp how quickly the resurgent women's movement, a product of the rebellious 1960s, turned so repressively ideological. Despite the apparent multiple strands in feminism, there remains a grotesquely punitive streak in too many feminists, who have latched onto their belief system with fundamentalist religiosity. The only cure is the dialectic of debate: liberal feminists must start listening to strong-minded conservative women, and vice versa.

NOTE: I will be giving the keynote address for the Theodore Roethke centenary celebration at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Oct. 17. My lecture is scheduled for 10 a.m. in Rackham Amphitheatre. I will also be part of a panel discussion starting at 1 p.m. All events, including a performance at 3 p.m. by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom, are free and open to the public.

Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.