It goes without saying that I am a feminist. Women are, of course, superior to men. That goes without saying.
Yet some very public feminists who would speak for all women often make Me uncomfortable. Because underneath much of their “feminist” rhetoric is the unspoken notion that women are somehow weaker than men, and that they need special legal and social “protections” from both words and deeds.
The recent controversy surrounding Herman Cain have brought this irony into sharp focus.
Your and Mine… political feelings about Cain aside, the allegations against him raise some troubling issues as to just how weak many feminists consider women to actually be.
Here are some noteworthy observations on the whole affair by author and academic Katie Roiphe, as taken from the op-ed page of a recent edition of The New York Times.
First, she takes on the very troubling definition of “sexual harassment” itself.
. . . sexual harassment includes both demanding sex in exchange for a job or a comment about someone’s dress. The words used in workshops — “uncomfortable,” “inappropriate,” “hostile” — are vague, subjective, slippery. Feminists and liberal pundits say, with some indignation, that they are not talking about dirty jokes or misguided compliments when they talk about sexual harassment, but, in fact, they are: sexual harassment, as they’ve defined it, encompasses a wide and colorful spectrum of behaviors.
Roiphe adds a personal note pointing out the absurdity of want amounts to a gender “thought police.”
. . .when I was at Princeton in the ’90s, the guidelines distributed to students about sexual harassment stated, “sexual harassment may result from a conscious or unconscious action, and can be subtle or blatant.” It is, of course, notoriously hard to control one’s unconscious, and one can behave quite hideously in one’s dreams, but that did not deter the determined scolds.
She notes this issue has been explored earlier—much earlier.
In her brilliant and enduring critique of the women’s movement in 1972, Joan Didion wrote that certain strains of feminism were based on the idea of women as “creatures too ‘tender’ for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets… too ‘sensitive’ for the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life.”
That women are much tougher than some feminists would allow, Roiphe has no doubts.
And, in fact, the majority of women in the workplace are not tender creatures and are largely adept at dealing with all varieties of uncomfortable or hostile situations. Show me a smart, competent young professional woman who is utterly derailed by a verbal unwanted sexual advance or an inappropriate comment about her appearance, and I will show you a rare spotted owl.
And finally, she says,
Codes of sexual harassment imagine an entirely symmetrical universe, where people are never outrageous, rude, awkward, excessive or confused, where sexual interest is always absent or reciprocated, in other words a universe that does not entirely resemble our own. We don’t legislate against meanness, or power struggles, or political maneuvering, or manipulation in offices, and how could we? So should we be legislating against rogue flirtations, the floating out of invitations?
Obviously there is a line, which if the allegations against Mr. Cain are true, he has crossed, but there are many behaviors loosely included under the creative, capacious rubric of sexual harassment that do not cross that line.
I think it is a fine line indeed and I agree with Roiphe. There are “some” modern feminists who—in the interests of an impossible to achieve degree of political correctness—would take much of the spice from life.
How about you? Agree or disagree?
Katie Roiphe is a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
