Salon keeps up the Hunt witch-hunt

As I wrote in my last Newsday column, while Sir Tim Hunt’s “girls in the lab” jokes at a women in science luncheon at a conference in Seoul were tacky and dumb, the savaging to which the British Nobel laureate has been subjected — which includes being forced to resign from the University College of London and from several prestigious science committees, including one he co-founded — is not only absurd but utterly disgraceful. Even The Guardian, which faithfully toes the feminist party line these days and which initially ran a gloating response to Hunt’s resignation, followed up with two sympathetic articles by the paper’s science editor Robin McKie.

But now, along comes Salon, where Scott Eric Kaufman slams evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins for defending Hunt in a letter to the Times in which Dawkins criticizes Hunt’s joke but quite rihtly deplores “the baying witch-hunt that it unleashed among our academic thought police: nothing less than a feeding frenzy of mob-rule self-righteousness.” The headline on Kaufman’s piece refers to Hunt as “misogynistic.” While Kaufman doesn’t use that word in the text, he implies that Hunt actually is in favor of gender-segregated labs and insists on treating Hunt’s clumsy initial attempt to explain his remarks in a comment to BBC Radio 4 as an admission that they reflected his actual views (i.e. that “girls in the lab” are trouble because you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and they cry when you criticize them). Yes, Hunt “admitted” that love in the lab had happened to him and had been disruptive; it sounds like he was more self-deprecating than anything else. (He later told The Guardian that his comment to the BBC was a recorded message after midnight, when he had just found out that his remarks had caused outrage.)

What Kaufman does not to mention is that Dawkins is far from the only scientist to speak up on Hunt’s behalf. His other defenders include prominent female scientists such as Cambridge physicist Dame Athene Donald, who has described him as “immensely supportive” of initiatives to promote gender equality in science; biologist Ottoline Leyser, also of Cambridge, who has said she was quite certain that Hunt was “not a sexist in any way”; and physiologist Dame Nancy Rothwell, who has pointed out that he had “trained and mentored some outstanding female scientists.” Nor does Kaufman see fit to acknowledge that Hunt’s wife and colleague Mary Collins, an immunologist who describes herself as a feminist, has said she is “extremely angry” about the backlash, which has “badly tarnished” her own relationship with University College.

What a dishonest hit piece.

Anita Sarkeesian, book (& film) critic

So, I can’t really properly judge newly famous media critic Anita Sarkeesian’s videogame criticism because I’m not a gamer.

I can, however, judge her reviews of books and movies, and if her 2012 video about The Hunger Games is any indication, her commentary runs the gamut from the banal to the laughably wrong.

Oh, and before you go on, there be spoilers here for The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay. Proceed at your own risk.

Here, I should add that I think The Hunger Games is not only an excellent series, but one of the best works of fiction in recent years in its approach to gender. (Yeah, Suzanne Collins’s writing style is a bit flat, but I actually think it works well for this kind of novel.) In Katniss Everdeen, it gives us a three-dimensional, active female protagonist whose struggles don’t have anything to do with gender. I love that Katniss is trying to protect Peeta as much (or more, actually!) as he is trying to protect her. (I could have done without the love triangle and frankly I think Gale is one of the books’ least interesting characters, but hey, nothing is perfect.) I love that while Katniss is a fighter, she’s not somehow magically stronger than all the guys. I love that it’s never at any point suggested that there is something uniquely horrible about forcing girls as well as boys to fight to the death; the Hunger Games are horrible, but female victims are never treated as more worthy of sympathy or horror than male ones.  I love that there’s no bullshit about the Panem power structure being oppressive because it’s “male.” I love that the rebels are led by a woman, Anna Coin, and that she turns out to be just as bad as the people she’s fighting. (Which, gender aside, is also a commentary on many revolutions.)

And now, here’s Anita Sarkeesian.

Okay, first of all, unrelated to gender: at about 55 seconds in, Sarkeesian makes a passing comment about how the premise of the book is unrealistic because there’s no way people would give up randomly selected kids to participate in a fight-to-the-death spectacle without a fight.

Has she actually read the damn books? Because I think it makes perfect sense in the context of the Hunger Games universe. The people from the districts are too cowed to rebel. Plus, the Hunger Games system is actually a combination of carrot and stick — well, lots of stick and a little carrot. If you win, you become a celebrity and a hero, and not only your family but your town reaps major economic benefits.

Then, there’s a discussion of Katniss that consists of a lot of statements of the obvious. She’s not reduced to her gender, she’s not sexualized or objectified, she shows sympathy and compassion for her family and friends. One of Sarkeesian’s pet ideas is that a truly feminist heroine has to challenge the “patriarchal value system” not only with regard to gender roles but also by prioritizing compassion, cooperation, and non-violent conflict resolution over competition, dominance, vengeance, and so on. So, for instance, she refuses to consider Mattie Ross in True Grit a feminist heroine, because among other things she doesn’t show enough emotion and doesn’t question the idea that death is appropriate retribution for her dad’s murderer.  I have to say that I find this idea deeply offensive. If a conservative wrote that a female character was a bad model of womanhood because she’s insufficiently emotional and too vengeful, he (or she) would rightly be excoriated as a sexist. So why is it okay for Sarkeesian to declare a female character to be a bad model of feminism because she’s too much “like a man”? I have no words for how obnoxious that is. Well, I do, but they’re the kind of words that would violate my own rules about civility in public discourse.

Katniss mostly meets Sarkeesian’s True Feminist test (whew!). Except that Sarkeesian manages to give her a passing grade by seriously misrepresenting the books. For instance, she asserts (at 3:56) that Katniss remains “troubled and disturbed at the idea of personally murdering another human being, even within the context of the death match.” Reeeally? Re-read the start of Chapter 18 of The Hunger Games, where Katniss kills the boy who has just mortally wounded her friend and ally, Rue.

The boy from District 1 dies before he can pull out the spear. My arrow drives deeply into the center of his neck. He falls to his knees and halves the brief remainder of his life by yanking out the arrow and drowning in his own blood. I’m reloaded, shifting my aim from side to side, while I shout at Rue, “Are there more? Are there more?”

Earlier, at the end of Chapter 11, Katniss is rather cold-bloodedly contemplating the murder of the girl who is camping out near her hiding place at night and is stupid enough to light a fire, which is likely to be spotted by the “career” tributes:

I lie smoldering in my bag for the next couple of hours, really thinking that if I can get out of this tree, I won’t have the least problem taking out my new neighbor. My instinct has been to flee, not fight. But obviously this person’s a hazard. Stupid people are dangerous.

(The careers get there first and kill the girl without spotting Katniss.)

In fact, at 5:55, Sarkeesian contradicts herself by noting (when discussing the ways in which Katniss is shown as traumatized by violence) that near the end, she aims an arrow at Peeta’s heart when she thinks he’s about to kill her.

And then there’s this:

SAY WHAT?

This is the same Katniss who counts the dead tributes at the end of each day, with no thought other than “The more of them die the more chance I have of staying alive”?  The only death (other than Rue’s) at which she feels sorrow is that of Thresh, because he cared about Rue and because he saved her (Kat’s) own life earlier, and then spared her:

Thresh dead. I should be happy, right? One less tribute to face. And a powerful one, too. But I’m not happy. All I can think about is Thresh letting me go, letting me run because of Rue, who died with that spear in her stomach…

And that’s just in the first book. By the third, Katniss actually demands, as a condition of cooperating with the rebels, the right to personally kill President Snow. And I know Sarkeesian had read all three books by the time she made her video, because one of her criticisms was that the love triangle took up too much room in the later books. (One of the few points on which I agree with her, but that’s hardly an insight of stunning originality; almost everyone I know thinks the love triangle was pointless and boring.)

The inconsistency is, apparently, that Katniss is very distraught by Rue’s death, but “doesn’t even bat an eye” at that of “Foxface,” the girl who dies after stealing berries from Katniss and Peeta’s food supply that turn out to be poisonous:

SERIOUSLY?

Are you kidding me?

First of all, while Foxface has cleverly stayed out of the action, she was hurting or trying to hurt Katniss and Peeta by stealing their food supplies.

Secondly, Katniss also remains unfazed by the deaths of several other tributes who haven’t hurt anyone. At first, I was going to say that Sarkeesian’s objection to Katniss’s lack of grief at Foxface’s death betrays her sexism, since Katniss also shows no grief at the murder of several harmless males (like the boy in Chapter 11 with whom she struggles for a backpack at the Cornucopia and who is killed right in front of her — she’s only repulsed by being splattered with his blood), but after re-reading the scene where the girl who lights the fire is killed, I had to conclude that Sarkeesian is not being sexist; she’s just being stupid.

The rest of the seven-and-a-half-minute video is taken up by a discussion of how male heroes are typically portrayed as suffering no emotional repercussions from violence and how refreshing it is that Katniss struggles with such repercussions. But ironically, in trying to squeeze Katniss into her politically correct little box of Compassionate Feminist Hero, Sarkeesian totally dilutes one of the strongest themes of the trilogy: that being forced into a world of brutal violence does have a dehumanizing effect.

Is there a place for intelligent media criticism that focuses on gender issues? Sure thing. But the fact that Sarkeesian has emerged as the leading voice in such criticism right now ensures that it’s going to be propaganda, not analysis.

(P.S. I’m leaving the comments open, but any comments containing personal abuse of any kind will not be approved.)

THIS IS RAPE CULTURE! … not?

Hold on, folks.

Maybe it’s time for me to take back everything I’ve ever said about “the rape culture.”

Like, how it’s slightly deranged to suggest that any modern liberal society has one.

Because, really, what else do you call it when a man can post reams of pornographic fantasies online about a female celebrity, and not only get away with it but get a six-figure book deal to turn those fantasies into a novel?

Oh, wait. My bad.

Correction: When a woman can post reams of pornographic fantasies about a male celebrity and get a six-figure book deal.

Can you imagine the howling in the feminist blogosphere and on Twitter if the genders were reversed?

Anyway. Still no rape culture, sorry. But considering that this is One Direction fanfic we’re talking about, it does make me weep for the future of culture, period.

More on “affirmative consent” laws and why they are a really dumb idea

So I have a new Reason.com piece up about the pending California bill that would require colleges to use an “affirmative consent” standard in adjudicating sexual assault complaints and I have my critics on Twitter (see here and here).

One of the arguments is that “affirmative consent” would be a useful standard in cases where someone is coerced into unwanted sex and doesn’t say no because s/he is paralyzed by fear.

Here’s why I think “affirmative consent” is entirely useless in such cases.

(1) If a man has sex with a woman who is paralyzed by fear (I’ll just use the “conventional” male perpetrator/female victim scenario here, since this is what the laws are clearly targeting), he knows perfectly well that she’s not a consenting partner. He’s a sexual predator, not a clueless guy making an innocent mistake. If he’s brought up on charges of sexual assault, there is nothing whatsoever to stop him from lying and saying that she said yes. It’s going to be a completely unprovable he said/she said case.

(2) If a woman is too intimidated to say no to unwanted sex, she can also be easily intimidated into saying yes under “ask first” rules. Some years ago, I got a large stack of documents from a guy who wanted me to write about his case claiming to be a man wrongfully jailed for rape. One of the points he stressed in his letter was that he actually asked the woman if she wanted to have sex and she said yes. However, when I reviewed the documents, it became pretty clear that this verbal exchange took place in a situation where the woman had very good cause to feel threatened (I forget the details–this was some 15 years ago). So the emphasis on expressed consent can actually be bad for victims if takes the focus off questions of force and threat.

One of my Twitter critics says that affirmative consent laws won’t compel anyone to accuse anyone else of rape. No, they won’t. But they can coerce a lot of people into unwanted and awkward “communication” about sex. And yes, in some cases they can encourage a person who has had an unsatisfying or emotionally traumatic sexual experience (e.g. sex followed by rejection) to reframe it as sexual assault in their own mind afterward.

The bottom line? As long as there is no force, threat, or incapacitation, the government has no business dictating to adults how to have sex. Period.

 

Giving feminism a bad name, Chapter [insert astronomical number here]

So this morning, this showed up in my Twitter feed:

Out of morbid curiosity, I followed the link and found this article in the Jewish online magazine, The Tablet, which skewers “male critics” for giving lukewarm reviews to the new Disney feature, Frozen, and missing its feminist message.

To start with: I haven’t seen Frozen yet.  I’m really disappointed that Disney made a film very loosely based on Andersen’s wonderful story The Snow Queen, rather than an actual adaptation of the story (which has a courageous, active female protagonist, an awesome and terrifying female villain, and other great characters including a lady bandit chief and her bratty but good-hearted daughter).  One friend of mine thought it was great.  Another, a feminist who has a strong interest in female-driven stories, thought it was so-so.

If Frozen is getting mediocre press, that’s news to me: the film has a very impressive 89% “fresh” rating on RottenTomatoes.com (though some of the reviews counted as “good” are not quite as enthusiastic as Tablet author Marjorie Ingall, the magazine’s Life and Religion columnist, would prefer).  Plenty of male critics loved it: Time‘s Richard Corliss, for instance, or The Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern (who concludes his review by calling one of the sisters, Elsa, “a heroine for our times”). And some female critics, such as Christy Lemire of RogerEbert.com, were every bit as lukewarm as the male critics Ingall castigates.  The Village Voice‘s Sherrilyn Connelly thought that in terms of its portrayal of female characters, Frozen is a step back from Brave; Ingall emphatically disagrees, which is fine.

What’s not fine is that (1) under the guise of feminism, Ingall has penned a disgustingly sexist and crass attack on male critics, a respectable online magazine published it, and some people are apparently loving it; and (2) Ingall seriously misrepresents both the overall tenor of the reviews and some of the actual critics she slams.

After cherry-picking a few “meh” reviews, Ingall writes:

All these critics are boys. This movie is an extraordinary, subversive story about sisterhood, and it is funny and surprising and weird, and they do not get it because they are writing with their penises.

Really, Ingall?  Really, Tablet?  “Boys”? “Writing with their penises”?  Good grief.  Imagine the reaction if a male writer derided “girl” critics who were insufficiently enthusiastic about some male-oriented movie and opined that “they do not get it because they are writing with their ovaries.”  (Yeah, okay, Rush Limbaugh says this kind of crap, which he rightly gets slammed for.  But I can’t imagine, say, Commentary or National Review Online publishing anything of the sort.)

Speaking of “not getting it,” I think Ingall actually misunderstood the meaning of a line that particularly incensed her in Stephen Holden’s New York Times review.  Holden wrote:

“Frozen,” for all its innovations, is not fundamentally revolutionary. Its animated characters are the same familiar, blank-faced, big-eyed storybook figures. But they are a little more psychologically complex than their Disney forerunners. Its princesses may gaze at a glass ceiling, but most are not ready to shatter it.

Ingall fumes:

Wait, what? It’s true, animated movies fall down spectacularly when it comes to body-image diversity. This is no exception. (My daughter Josie observed that the princesses’ eyes are wider than their arms, and I know of someone who dismissed the film as “Battle of the Snow Barbies.”) But how are they not shattering a glass ceiling? It’s a cartoon in which both of the leads are female, the love story is secondary to the tale of the sisters’ relationship, and oh yeah, audiences are flocking to see it in record numbers despite the tepid reviews.

Actually, I believe Holden is contrasting the film’s princesses, Elsa and Anna, to “their Disney forerunners.”  The last line in the paragraph Ingall quotes is rather clunkily written and confusing, but it sure looks to me like “Its princesses” refers to “Disney’s princesses,” not Elsa and Anna (“most” of two makes no sense).  I think Holden is saying that Frozen‘s princesses do shatter the “glass ceiling,” an interpretation supported by the fact that his next paragraph notes that this is the first Disney animated feature with a female director.

But back to Ingall for this snarky aside:

(I did laugh at the conservative New York Post’s response: “[Disney] too often panics at feminist pressure and orders up formulaically ‘strong, capable, smart’ girls.” Heaven forfend! Love those quote marks. Who’s really panicking here, monkeyboy?)

What Ingall doesn’t say is that the New York Post review by Kyle Smith is actually highly positive (he gives the movie 3.5 stars out of 4, compared to 3 out of 5 from gender traitor Elizabeth Weitzmann in the rival, and liberal, tabloid The Daily News).  Also, Smith is — in this case, unmistakably — contrasting Frozen‘s Elsa, whom he calls “intriguingly nuanced” and “cool,” to the “formulaically ‘strong, capable, smart'” girls from other Disney films.

Oh, and just to remind you: Frozen did not get “tepid reviews.”

To recap:

This is a year in which female-driven movies (Catching Fire, Frozen, Gravity) have done amazingly well with audiences and with critics.

And out of this, a feminist writer manages to get a male-bashing whinefest about slights to women and girls (or to feminism) at the hands of beastly men.

Imaginary slights, I should add.

And then feminists complain that feminism gets a bad press.

Was I unfair to Gloria Steinem?

Dusting off my blogging hat, at least for now.

The occasion:

Last weekend, RealClearPolitics.com ran my column on Gloria Steinem, her Presidential Medal of Freedom, and her role in twentieth and twenty-first century  feminism.  It is, shall we say, not complimentary.  Barry Deutsch of Alas, a Blog, with whom I’ve crossed reasonably friendly swords before, comments and raises some points that require a response.  Sorry it’s taken me a week to put this up; it’s been a bit crazy lately, time-wise.  (And will continue to be, so I warn in advance that I probably won’t have time for a lot of back-and-forth.)

Barry thinks my column on Steinem is an unfair, one-sided hit piece (though I’m glad to see he agrees with some of my criticisms, particularly on Steinem’s deplorable role in the child sex abuse mania of the 1980s and early 1990s and its particularly grotesque offshoot, the satanic ritual abuse panic).  You know what? I’ll concede that this is not the most, ahem, fair and balanced article I’ve ever written.  It was not a complete overview of Steinem’s career; it was a critique, based on my belief that Steinem bears a lot of responsibility for the woeful misdirection of feminism—from a philosophy of gender equity, individual rights, and gender-role flexibility to what Betty Friedan called “sex/class warfare” and, in particular, a focus on various male horrors visited upon women.  Obviously, Steinem did not single-handedly steer the women’s moment in that direction, but her influence was huge.

And now, I’m going to address what Barry believes are unfair or petty criticisms.

1.  I wrote that, as evidenced by her appearance on John Stossel’s 1997 ABC News special, “Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women, and the Sex Difference,” Steinem verges on what Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge termed “biodenial” in her insistence that innate psychological/intellectual differences between the sexes are nonexistent and physical ones are almost entirely irrelevant.  Barry suggests that Steinem’s line which I quoted, referring to scientific research on brain differences between men and women as “anti-American crazy thinking,” may have been taken out of context. The full Steinem quote, on this page linked by Barry from Stossel’s book (where it’s misattributed, presumably due to a typo, to Heritage Foundation analyst Kate O’Beirne, Steinem’s conservative adversary on his program) is, “It’s really the remnant of anti-American, crazy thinking to do this kind of research. It’s what’s keeping us down, not what’s helping us.”

Is it possible, as Barry suggests, that Steinem was referring to some specific research project that was genuinely outrageous (for instance, one that set out to prove that women shouldn’t be able to vote or attend college because of differences in the “wiring” of their brains), and not to any of the studies reported in the special?  Perhaps, but it is worth noting that Steinem was surely aware of the program and has never claimed to have been quoted out of context.

Barry also chides me for ridiculing Steinem’s assertion that strength tests requiring prospective firefighters to carry a dummy—challenged and discarded in many urban fire departments as discriminatory toward women—are unnecessary and that, when rescuing someone from a burning building, it makes more sense to drag them along the floor than to carry them, since “there’s less smoke down there.”

Here, I have to give a point to Barry and concede that Steinem’s statement, which has earned her a lot of conservative derision, is not quite as risible as it first appears.  Barry cites evidence that dragging rather than carrying has actually been the preferred rescue method in firefighting for a while, in part because there are fewer noxious/toxic fumes at the lower level.  I did not know this, and I will readily admit that I should have done better research rather than rely on a recycled criticism.  So, to quote a famous Dead White Male: A hit, a very palpable hit!

I will add that even without this information, when I first saw Stossel’s program, I was put off by O’Beirne’s gibe about being “dragged by my ankles as my head hits every single stair going down three stories.” It sounded like she was deliberately reducing the opposing view to caricature; there was no reason the rescuer couldn’t grab the person under the arms, which is indeed the standard technique (this article on fire engineering, which describes the drag as the preferred method, specifically states that dragging by the feet is a no-no).

But here’s why I still think Steinem is not only wrong but dangerously wrong.  As the article linked above points out, dragging is not always possible; for instance, if the stairs are inaccessible and you must get an unconscious person down a fire ladder, there is no option other than to carry them.

While doing my own actual research, I came across this very interesting 1984 article from The Pittsburgh Press, discussing objections to a revised physical test for firefighters that eliminated the requirement of lifting a 125-pound sandbag and carrying it on one’s shoulders while going up and down a staircase. (It was replaced with dragging a 145-pound dummy around an obstacle course.)  Interestingly, one person objecting to the change—made with the express purpose of allowing more women to qualify—was the city’s lone female firefighter, Toni McIntosh, who was concerned that lowering the standards could endanger everyone.

One of McIntosh’s male co-workers pointed out that there were many situations in which dragging was highly inadvisable: “There may be broken glass or other debris on the ground … or your partner may have fallen through a week floorboard and you’ll need to lift him out.”  Fire Chief Charles Lewis, who supported the new exam as a way to meet federal non-discrimination guidelines, was quoted as saying that “a drag would not work in all rescues, but neither would a lift” and that both techniques were included in the training. But why not in the test? Because, said Lewis, “Women’s groups are likely to challenge an exam when there are things in it they can’t do.”

As far as I know, no fire department has ever dropped the lift-and-carry test for any other reason than concerns about sex discrimination—either to comply with a court order or to avoid lawsuits.  And that, I think, is a problem as far as giving feminism a bad name.  The perception is that feminists like Steinem are willing to dilute the standards for physically demanding jobs to accommodate women even if it endangers public safety.  Is this perception is based on right-wing misinformation, as I’m sure Barry would say?  I think it would have been fair for Stossel to acknowledge that the drag method of rescue is a widely accepted firefighting practice, not some weird figment of feminist fantasy.  But, for the reasons explained above, I think the point still stands.  For Steinem to suggest that the lift-and-carry test is based on nothing more than some silly idea of “macho” is glib and unfair, and a cheap shot at male firefighters.

2.  Barry defends Steinem’s advocacy of the American Association of University Women study on the “crisis” in girls’ self-esteem as well as the study itself, and specifically notes that the article I linked for reference, by Amy Saltzman in U.S. News & World Report, does not describe the AAUW study as “shoddy” (as I do). Yes, I am aware of that, and I actually hesitated for that very reason about using that reference. I ended up using it because (1) the article is a pretty thorough overview of the debate and (2) it does state that the bulk of research does not support the claim that adolescent girls suffer a drop in self-esteem compared to boys (except for body dissatisfaction).

For the record, I did review the AAUW dataset back in 1994 when Christina Hoff Sommers challenged the study in Who Stole Feminism?, and I think her critique is entirely on target.  I also think Saltzman is flat-out wrong in her assertion that using only “always true” responses to “I’m happy the way I am” as a measure of self-esteem (as the AAUW did) was “standard practice” and that including “sort of true” and “sometimes true/sometimes false” responses would have been “bad science.”  The Pew Research Center, for instance, routinely combines the “extreme” responses—“very,” “always,” “completely” etc.—with “somewhat” and “mostly” ones as an overall measure of agreement; see here, for example. (Also for the record, I would not be inclined to think well of anyone over the age of twelve who was always happy with him- or herself.)

3.  Barry takes issue with my assertion that Steinem has a tendency to vilify men. Specifically, he says that the quotation I use from her 1992 book, Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem—“The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home”—is taken out of context and refers only to the statistical probability that a woman is more likely to be murdered by an intimate partner than a stranger.   He also accuses Sommers of using the same quotation in a downright “dishonest” manner.

Sommers writes:

Gloria Steinem’s portrait of male-female intimacy under patriarchy is typical: “Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself…. The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their own home.”

According to Barry, “Sommers took a partial sentence from page 259 of Steinem’s book, put it next to a sentence about crime statistics from page 261, and then pretended the two separate passages formed a single thought,” supposedly altering the meaning of the passage.

As Barry says, it is true that American women are more likely to be murdered by a current or former male partner than by a stranger—partly because stranger homicide for women is an extremely rare event. (I also suspect that the 2009 Bureau of Justice Statistics report Barry cites, Female Victims of Violence, inflates the percentage of female homicide victims killed by partners and ex-partners, which it places at about 45%.  A footnote in that paper notes that about one in three homicides reported by local law enforcement to the FBI are missing information about the offender—often because the offender is not identified.  The analysis assumes that the distribution of homicides with missing offenders is roughly the same as for ones with known offenders.  But surely stranger homicides would be far more likely to remain unsolved?)

But that quibble aside: is it “dishonest” to accuse Steinem of using homicide statistics to support her view that male brutality toward women is close to a norm “under patriarchy” (which includes modern Western societies)?  Well, let’s look at the actual context of the first part of the quotation used by Sommers:

And, of course, [domestic] violence also has the larger political purpose of turning half the population into a support system for the other half.  It polices and perpetuates gender politics by keeping the female half fearful of the moods and approval of the male half.  In fact, patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself.  Furthermore, the seeming naturalness of gender roles makes male/female violence seem excusable, even inevitable.  As G.H. Hatherill, Police Commander of London, put it: “There are only about twenty murders a year in London and not all are serious—some are just husbands killing wives.”

Oy vey.

So, in the Steinem worldview, American (and, generally, Western) society in the late 20^th Century is one in which male batterers act as enforcers for the patriarchy; the female half of the population (I’m hoping that Steinem doesn’t mean the entire female half and is resorting to hyperbole) is cowed and terrorized by the male half; and murders of wives by husbands are dismissed as trivial.  (Steinem’s quote from George Hatherill, Detective Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard in the 1940s and ’50s, is sourced to something called The Lovers’ Quotation Book by Helen Handley, published in 1986; I have not found it anywhere else and have no idea if it’s genuine.)

Is this really the kind of feminism we want to be promoting?

I will concede (having re-read parts of Revolution from Within the other day, for the first time in twenty-plus years) that I was oversimplifying when I said that Steinem’s writings usually depict men “under patriarchy” as dangerous brutes; it’s certainly not true, for instance, of her discussion of Rochester in Jane Eyre.  Except … except that Steinem has made comments that do paint men, collectively, in just such a light.  Here’s one particularly outrageous example. While stumping for Hillary Clinton in Austin, Texas in 2008, Steinem told an interviewer that many Americans want to vote for Obama because they “want redemption for racism, for our terrible destructive racist past”—but not as many “want redemption for the gynocide.”  For instance, she noted, while Americans generally “acknowledge racism—not enough, but somewhat,” they are not as ready to acknowledge that “the most likely way a pregnant woman is to die is murder from her male partner.”

Leaving aside the obscene suggestion that America is guilty of “gynocide,” Steinem’s claim about murderous men as the biggest danger to pregnant women is a blatant falsehood.  According to a 2005 report in The American Journal of Public Health, of some 7,300 deaths of American women during pregnancy or in the postpartum period in 1991-1999, 57 percent were for medical reasons while 27 percent were due to various injuries.  Among the injury deaths, 44 percent were car accidents while 31 percent were homicides—not always by male partners, of course.  (While some researchers believe these statistics undercount homicide of pregnant women, their analysis indicates that all pregnancy-related mortality may be undercounted, since death certificates don’t always mention pregnancy.) To suggest that men are routinely slaughtering their pregnant wives and girlfriends is a pretty grotesque slander.

(Oh, and on that same trip to Austin, while speaking to a Hillary Clinton campaign rally, Steinem made comments ridiculing John McCain’s military service and captivity in Vietnam—and slamming military service in general—that the Clinton campaign was forced to publicly disown.  If Hillary runs in the next election, as I hope she does, could Steinem do her a big favor and stay off the trail?)

My objection to Steinem’s the Medal of Freedom is not that she has used some shoddy statistics and made dubious claims. It’s that she often promotes a toxic brand of gender-war feminism that unfortunately tends to cancel out her achievements.  And that’s even aside from her support for the child sex abuse witch-hunts, the recovered memory movement and the Satanism craze—all of which left untold numbers of wrecked lives in their wake. (Like this woman, who was brainwashed into believing that she grew up in a family of baby-murdering, child-raping Satanists; the “therapist” responsible for this atrocity and others like it, Dr. Bennett Braun, is named by Steinem is the acknowledgments for Revolution from Within.)  For that, Steinem has never apologized.

I think I’ll stop before this blogpost balloons to a magazine-length essay.  I’m glad Barry’s article prodded me to do some more research (and, just maybe, to get back to blogging a bit!). I stand by my basic points, but I also agree that I should have done my homework better.  If nothing else, I could have used better quotes.