The Ebbtide - May 23, 2003 - June 13, 2003

WEB EXCLUSIVE!!!
The author had written a much more extensive story than there was room to print in the May 23, 2003 edition of The Ebbtide. This is the original version of the story found at http://elmo.shore.ctc.edu/webbtide/v38.15/opin01.htm
Return to the article

 Campaign of Ms/information comes to SCC
 Chris Austin
 Ebbtide Reporter

 "... I can see it in the men who try to deny that patriarchy still exists. I can see it in the women who refuse to call themselves feminists even though they believe in feminist principles..."

These were the first words I heard as I walked into the auditorium to hear Allan Johnson speak on "Privilege, Power and Differences" April 23 in the Campus Theater.

Hell yes. I was back in academia proper.

What was being referred to here? Another formulaic "backlash" theory? Another polemic exposing the patriarchal plot to "broadcast images of thin women in order to make women feel that they have to starve themselves so that they'll be weak and that much easier for men to dominate"?

It didn't matter. In academic "feminist"-land, all roads lead to Mecca. Men -- all men -- are involved, wittingly or unwittingly, in a conspiracy to keep women trapped in a state of cowering submission.

It had been a while. Graduating with a degree in the humanities almost 10 years ago, I decided to put graduate school on hold for a while in order to pursue music. Returning to school to prepare for a master's program in a different field, I found that attending a community college spared me a return to the land of perpetually ill-intentioned men always on the lookout for new methods of subjugating women.

The more elite the college, the wealthier the students, the more the women studies majors are oppressed. This I had found to be the case while attending the predominantly upper-class student body of Emory University, a private school in Atlanta where I had done most of my upper division course work. I also found it to be the case among the affluent, out-of-state segment of the student bodies both at Evergreen and The University of Montana, public schools which, due to their alternative reputations, attract students from all over the country.

The wealth/oppression correlation didn't sit well with me. I am a socialist-variety leftist and the math didn't add up.

And like most leftists, particularly agnostic religious studies majors, I had no special love for fundamentalist Christianity. Involved in the environmental movement, I noticed that there were always a few among its more ardent supporters who carried themselves in a manner a little too prim, self-important and easily offended for my comfort. I began to notice this among certain self-avowed feminists as well. These types also seemed more likely to have rather one-dimensional and simplistic views of the world, and seemed to thrive on pontificating to the unsaved. In another environment they might have been Evangelicals.

Early on in my experiences with both the left and academia, I learned to make a distinction between what I considered to be real, actual feminism, on the one hand, and so-called academic or radical feminism, on the other. The former was a progressive movement. Concerned with inequality where it actually existed, its mission was to fight sexism. The latter seemed fixated on promoting sexism. Adhered to and promoted mainly by upper-middle and upper-class women, it was regressive and sometimes bordered on reactionary.

This was an element I had not missed during my sabbatical. And returning to school via a year of classes at a community college, I neither expected nor found this ideology to be much in evidence.

Speaker offers 'Cookie cutter PC'

I'm something of a glutton for punishment. When I learned the Ebbtide was looking for someone to cover a presentation entitled, "Privilege, Power and Difference," I jumped at the chance. Though I assumed such a topic would inevitably focus on class and race, I was sure they would drag out a least a perfunctory dose of bourgeois pseudo-feminism. The title "...and Difference" was cookie-cutter PC, a phenomenon which, like academic "feminism," was held by popular misconception to be a petty tyranny of the left, but which, in my experience, was most predominant on conservative, Eastern college campuses with affluent student populations.

As I settled into my seat, the speaker continued on a predictable trajectory. America needs to wake up realize what a bunch of sick fucks men are. Publishing op-ed pieces on the Columbine massacre, the Central Park jogger, and 9/11, the media considered the gender of the participants irrelevant. He did not.

He then laid down what he called the basics: 55 percent of women working out side the home are trapped in the low wage pink ghetto. Women are still responsible for most child care. The wage gap between men and women is stagnant. Men dominate all major institutions in society. In media portrayals, "Women's bodies are viewed as worthless except for what men might do to them." There is an epidemic of violence against women.

Johnson really doesn't have anything new to say; his act is largely a regurgitation of 30 years of academic feminist saws. His sophistry mostly consists of putting it all together in a late-night TV infomercial format, packaging his fallacies into bite-sized mortar shells. Dressed in a suit and tie and punctuating his bromides with humorous quips, he comes off like an affable talk show host, focus-group tested to disarm a potentially skeptical mainstream audience.

His spiel is so rigged, and so predictable, on so many counts that it's hard to know where to begin.

On the issue of 9/11, gender seemed to be the only thing relevant to AJ. Nothing about America's support of corrupt, repressive regimes throughout the mid-east since 1945, all for the benefit a handful of wealthy men and women. That's right Allan, women. In case you haven't heard, half of the ruling classes, on whose behalf most dictatorships are run, are women, both among the local elite of colonized populations and the major share holding families of North American and European corporations. And that means half of the beneficiaries.

Please, save the shit about, "that money goes into the pockets of rich, white men." The gender of the figurehead is completely irrelevant. What matters is the ultimate beneficiaries at the top of the food chain. Half of these are women.

But then -- the usual argument goes -- if women were running the show, things would be different. We would live in an equitable, cooperative world where unicorns fly over rainbows.

Well, let's look at this. Even if we were looking only at non-Western societies - and, here, patriarchy does still exist -- there is no credible evidence that women would behave any differently than their male counterparts. (We'll have to save the hippie pseudo-scholarship of Carol Gilligan and her ilk for a later article.) Women of the ruling classes of any society have traditionally been as supportive as men of whatever repressive measures keep their families in power.

But we can do better than this. In Western societies, trust funds and inheritances are divided equally among all children, regardless of gender. And it's the large shareholders of corporations that determine policy, regardless of gender. (You knew this.)

So what percentage of the female half of the upper classes, so above all the greed and need for control by virtue of their gender, have returned their wholly unearned share of their inherited wealth to the working men and women who produced that wealth with their labor, from whom it was stolen? What a surprise. Zero. The same ratio as with men. So much for the sisterhood and "patriarchal" oppression.

Tales from the 'pink ghetto'

Fifty-five percent of women working outside the home are trapped in the "pink" ghetto (a little higher than the percentage of men trapped in that good ol' "blue" ghetto). The wage gap is stagnant.

This has largely to do with upper-class women (and men, of course) having pushed more and more women of the working and middle-classes into the labor market, as it becomes increasingly difficult for the latter two groups to subsist on one paycheck.

Women have often functioned as a reserve labor force, most famously during wartime in response to labor shortage. During the last twenty years, as more and more wealth has been transferred from working people to the owning class, women have again stepped in, this time in response to an income shortage among working people.

That women are still responsible for most child care ties in to the wage gap and the pink ghetto. Being able to quit the commercial labor force to focus on raising children is increasingly a privilege of affluent women. Women forced to abandon their domestic work in order to help pay rent are generally more lacking in commercial skills than their husbands who have been struggling to find a living wage in the commercial workplace from day one.

As to men still dominating all major institutions in society, religion, which dominated medieval life, no longer plays a major role in shaping economic distribution (or our understanding of the world, for that matter). Government, the guiding light of the 18th century, mostly advocates the interest of wealthy men and women. And corporations, the dominate institutions of contemporary life, exist solely to maximize the advantages of wealthy men and women at the expense of all other men and women. Again, there is nothing particularly patriarchal about this situation, 30 years of radical "feminist" dogma notwithstanding.

Betraying the similarities between bourgeois Protestantism and bourgeois feminism, Johnson begins to sound like a televangelist when he repeats the line that the media "portray women's bodies as having no value beyond what men might do to them." Now there's an interesting way of phrasing it: "what men might 'do to them'." Barely concealing a Victorian hysteria towards (male) sexuality, Johnson resurrects the old assumptions of devious cads plotting the debasement of innocents. It's hard to decide if this is more insulting to men or women. This outlook also suggests that men are only capable of, and interested in, manipulation and anti-emotional conquest.

The centuries-old stereotype of men as inherently aggressive and women as inherently passive, is further perpetuated by the "epidemic of violence against women" hoax. You can't wade ankle-deep into academic feminism without being hit from all sides by the rigged statistics and sexist ideology that declare unequivocally: Men are out to get women. I cannot even begin to cover here the flawed interpretation of data, often dubious to begin with, which is commonly employed to this end.

Though academic studies have shown females as likely as men to engage in violent behavior inside the home, most physical violence outside of the home is perpetrated by men. And it's not hard to figure out why. Violence, whether physical or economic, is usually carried out by those strong enough to feel confident of prevailing. Upper class men and women increase their already obscene concentrations of wealth by "downsizing" (destroying) the lives of working men and women because they can. And because men tend to be larger than women, it's obvious that, among men and women with violent tendencies, it's going to be the men who are more likely to feel confident resorting to this means.

But it's mostly men who are the victims of (physical) violence as well. Johnson, while pointing out that most violent crimes are committed by men, didn't bother to mention this. Instead, he trots out the old "epidemic of violence against women."

In reality, it is men who are by far the most likely to be victims of physical violence in every category except rape among the non-incarcerated population. If there is indeed an "epidemic of violence," it's men who bear the brunt of it by far.

And only men are subject to being systematically rounded up and sent to their slaughter by the state. If men are really possess such a blood-lust, whether by nature or nurture, why is it that they have to be conscripted? Whenever the foreign business interests of wealthy men and women are at stake, it's working class men (but not women) who are made to go and fight another social classes' battles. Where is Johnson's outrage over this?

The short answer is that they're not the right gender, so who gives a fuck? The implicit (mis)understanding here is that it's just men being their usual aggressive and control-obsessed selves.

Power of privilege

After laying down the basics, Johnson got down to the matter of privilege, the title of his lecture. "Every time men and women interact, men control the conversation. It's been proven." (I'm not even going to get started on this one.) "Where do all these patterns come from? They all benefit men at the expense of women. And since it is unearned, it is privilege!"

And here we go with the identity politics privilege scam, pretending that power and privilege are determined along racial and gender lines, rather than by class. This is mostly true, of course, with regard to race. Most minorities are overrepresented in the working class and underrepresented in the middle. And it's obviously not true with regard to gender, as the upper-classes are half-male, half female; the same is true for the middle and working classes.

Unless you're a gender feminist, particularly a sheltered one.

The Rev. Johnson continued his identity politics sermon. "Privilege is something that comes to people by birth, unearned, and is therefore attached to social categories (e.g. men). And for many people, 'man' means heterosexual; if you're gay, you don't have access to male privilege."

And here is the crux of opportunistic, pseudo-leftist identity politics. Now (almost) anyone can belong to an oppressed minority. Salon-tanned Emory freshmen (er- freshwomen. Wait. Is that sexist and exploitative?) being served eggs with hollandaise sauce by black men their same age, decked out in their finest kitchen whites, standing behind stainless steel counters asking, "Will that be all, ma'am'?" in a southern accent (this wasn't part of a work study program).They're all part of one big club. All able to understand the "voice" of "the other," all being part of that distinguished bloodline themselves.

Johnson pointed out that it is possible to have access to privilege and not know it. As an example, he used Molly Ivins' quip that George W. was born on third, but thinks he hit a triple.

I agree, but would add an additional example: Upon entering elite universities, or elite populations of public universities, women in particular are indoctrinated to believe that they were born having already struck out when, in fact, they were born on home plate. But, even if your claims to oppression are tenuous - pagan beliefs are not given equal air-time on the 700 Club; no vegan meals at Jack-in-the-Box - you learn that they can be run through enough pseudo-intellectual smoke and mirrors to make you a victim - a survivor - of the white, male, heterosexist, non-pagan, non-vegan hegemony.

After his predictable misdiagnosing of the parameters of privilege to exclude half of the privileged, Johnson spoke of the scourge of individualism, the philosophy that says it is individuals who cause good and bad things to happen. He lamented that this model allows "good" men off the hook, it makes privilege invisible, saying nothing about the social category one is born into.

Basically, he uses this as another smoke-screen to hide the real source of privilege. By declaring the social category, not the individual within it, to be the ultimate measure of unearned power, and then presenting false dichotomies as his categories, he is the one ignoring the privilege that many are born into. By fixating on gender, a mostly arbitrary and irrelevant measure of privilege in contemporary Western society, he lets privileged women off the hook.

Characteristics of patriarchy

He closed his presentation by defining "the characteristics of patriarchy." The first, he said, is that it is male dominated. This doesn't mean that all men have power, just that most people with power are male. Apparently, Johnson is unaware that half of the people born into wealth are female.

The second characteristic: An obsession with control. Women's bodies are thought to be "out of control" and are therefore considered less valuable. And it's understood that men are always right.

Really? What living Westerner believes either of these things to be the case? Again, Johnson commits the ever-popular academic feminist fallacy of presenting antiquated prejudices as if they were current.

A favorite tactic of academic feminists employed by Johnson to show women's alleged marginal status is to bring up historical ideologies - he cited the argument that women should not go to college because blood from the uterus would be drawn into the brain, leaving them infertile --as if this had anything to do with the situation of contemporary women.

This serves dual rhetorical purposes. One is to portray men as devious, conniving, yet comically inept, buffoons (and, hey, why should we suppose they're any different now?). Another is to suggest a historical continuity in which contemporary women must be suffering the same fate now (we've established that men are conniving and devious).

As to the first purpose, it's easy to look back on historical periods and feel superior, as everything seems so obvious now. And since it's so obvious now, it looks as if they were shamelessly full of shit, like George W. declaring we need tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of men & women, first, because we're in a stock market boom, and then, because we're in a recession. We forget that we have the advantage of 20/20 hindsight. Pre-industrial men didn't know shit about physiology and neither did women.

So this means they weren't being opportunistic? No. Humans have a tendency to interpret and theorize opportunistically. Reading the contradictions, wishful thinking and fantastic leaps of logic in almost any academic or radical feminist screed makes this abundantly clear. But the point is that goofy assumptions of previous centuries were, in their own day, not always as completely absurd and disingenuous as they appear today. When Johnson insinuates that men will say anything to manipulate an advantage, he is doing so out of context.

The third and fourth characteristics of patriarchy, he said, were that it is male identified and male centered. Male experience is taken to be the standard. He warned that people trying to be in control are dangerous. An obsession with control and fear chase each other.

Curiously, the only contemporary Western institution I'm aware of which could be defined by these hallmarks is academic feminism. Dominated by (a tiny clique of sexist) females, it is not just indifferent, but openly hostile to anything a male might do or say. Men are believed to be out of control and therefore must be kept under wraps by the few people who know best ( and guess who this is ).

Because academia is one of the few places that anyone listens to academic feminists, it is instructive to look here for tangible manifestations of their ideology. "An obsession with control and fear" are evident in the Victorian sexual codes of conduct instituted at a handful of schools under pressure from academic feminists, written in gender neutral language, but understood to be directed at those always-on-the-verge-of rape-and-murder males.

Even uglier are the Kafkaesque star chambers on some, usually elite, campuses, before which male faculty are brought anytime a McCarthyist cries "harassment." This can mean just about anything, as it's understood that anything any male ever does that involves a female is a conscious ploy to keep women down. He is effectively denied the chance to defend himself as it is also understood that, in any dispute involving male and a female, the female is always right. If you try to suggest otherwise, it only serves to make it obvious that you are in cahoots with the patriarchy, trying to gain some unearned advantage at the expense of women.

Diversity of feminism

Afterwards I asked Johnson about his ignoring class and race in his promotion of a self-serving, faux-progressive bourgeois institution. He replied that, in this lecture, he didn't really address privilege based on race or class. (He's damn right he didn't.) As to self-serving, bourgeois opportunism, he stated that he thought the advocates of academic feminism are far too diverse a group to be summed up by this one thesis.

I agree. Although, as a leftist, I think that socioeconomic issues explain a lot, I don't think they explain everything. There are other features of this movement which I think attract certain types of people.

A movement which tells women that they're so much more special than the other sex simply by virtue of having been born female is bound to attract more than its share of people who have nothing else going for them. This is not so different from white supremacy groups attracting underprivileged, troubled youths by telling them they're more special than others by virtue of their skin.

A movement which breeds hatred and contempt for half the world's population is bound to attract a number of hateful people.

A movement which makes one gender the measure of all things is bound to attract some self-centered people.

A movement which is largely dedicated to the self-praise of its own members is bound to be a big draw for narcissists.

But I think the most troubling situation is when people are drawn to events and organizations on campus which claim to be "feminist," only to be repulsed by the sexist bullshit that they find there. I learned to make a distinction between real feminism and bogus pseudo-feminism. Not everyone is inclined to give it a second chance.

 © 2003 Shoreline Community College™