This afternoon I’ve spent catching up with recent feminist theory, summarized in “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

I wrote one of the first articles on feminism to appear in a philosophical journal (“Feminism Without Contradictions” in The Monist), and introduced a regular course, “Philosophic Foundations of Feminism” in the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College. Though I declined to join in setting up Women’s Studies as a separate department at BC, and most of my subsequent work has been on other topics, I share the concern that most of us have about where current thinking about women – about the sexes and feminism – is taking us.

The Stanford article covers five exploratory decades, starting in the 1970’s. One question runs through it: 

How much of the male/female difference

is the product of social conditioning,

and how much is biological?

All the feminists distinguish the biological layer, which they call “sex,” from the societal layer, which they call “gender.” And they all labor to widen the realm of “gender” (which is subject to rearrangement) and narrow the domain of “sex” – which is less receptive to modification.

To stretch the gender realm, feminists have pushed for gender-free toys, for fathers’ (as well as mothers’) equal involvement in child care, also for not pushing boys toward rough sports while relegating girls to dolls and tamer games.

For one writer, whom I’ll call the Power Feminist, gender differences reflect society’s power hierarchy. One of her proposed cures was to ban pornography, whose theme she saw as dominance and subordination. 

As it happens, I had dealings with the Power Feminist at a time when I was trying in vain to get feminists to protest the brutal rape of a credible woman whose interview I had watched on NBC. Her alleged rapist had been a popular official at the top of the American power structure. The Power Feminist I’d contacted told me that she would lend her name to the protest I was trying to organize, provided I contacted the victim and secured her consent. When (perhaps to the PF’s surprise) I was able to locate the victim and get her grateful consent, the PF said she was sorry but she had to leave town in a terrible hurry.

So the PF had prompted me to awaken the hopes of a woman who’d been victimized in a ghastly way – and then showed no compunction whatever in dashing those hopes. It’s one of my worst memories.

To go back to the movement’s timeline, it was visited next by feminists who claimed that oppression, patriarchy, etc. were differently experienced depending on your race, class, sexual orientation and classificatory “fit” into the biological categories of male and female which were, it seemed, less rigidly fixed in nature than in social practice.

On the other hand, if most biological distinctions are social – pertain to gender – and all gender distinctions are oppressive, what exactly is the domain of feminism? Maybe there are no such things as women – and so, there is nothing to liberate! Or perhaps the goal of feminism is merely to make such entities as “women” disappear.

Coincidentally, a memory comes to mind. I am one of the guests at an expensive New York restaurant called “The Top of the Sixes,” where a wealthy New Yorker is hosting a dinner in honor of his wife. She’s a well-known feminist. I’ve known her since I was a teenager. She’s a lovable woman who’s done a fair bit of good in the world, for many women – me included.

At my dinner table, the adjoining seat has been reserved for a Founding Mother of the feminist movement. She arrives late – too late to get dinner. I go into the kitchen where I persuade the staff to put a last plate together, which I then bring to her. As we listen to the toasts and brief speeches, enjoying the celebratory spirit of the evening, I remark to the Founding Mother, “It really is ‘feminism without contradictions.’ I am thinking of the article I published in earlier years of the movement, though of course the Founding Mother has no reason to know about that.

“What are you talking about?” she snarls at me. “I bet you don’t even know what a contradiction is! You live your whole life in cliches!”

I get up to wander about the restaurant floor, in shock. Along my wandering way, I see an editor who’s a friend and tell her what the Founding Mother just said to me. “Oh,” she shakes her head sympathetically, “you’re the last person about whom anyone could say that she lives her whole life in cliches!”

Later that year, I learn from my feminist friend – the one who was feted by her husband at The Top of the Sixes – that her marriage is breaking up. What is more, the Founding Mother, who lives in the same New York apartment building a few floors down, has become a chum of the soon-to-be-ex-husband and together they’ve spent time exchanging nasty confidences about her, the soon-to-be-discarded wife.

When I meet the by-now ex-wife for lunch, she tells me of a new fashion that her feminist friends talk of adopting: 

safety pins

clipped all over one’s skirt

to ward off men.

“Do you still believe that you’ll find true love?” she asks me.

“Yes,” I nod.

“Well, if you find him, I’ll believe in God.”

I did find my true love, and you can believe what you want. But he was not a referral from the feminists.

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