Excerpt, Chapter One:
Fellating Patriarchy: Men’s Magazine Feminism
Women hate both themselves and other women. They try to escape by identifying with the oppressor, living through him, gaining status and identity from his ego, his power, his accomplishments. And by not identifying with other “empty vessels” like themselves. Women resist relating on all levels to other women who will reflect their own oppression, their own secondary status, their self-hate.
From “Woman-Identified-Woman” by Radicalesbians
To many Americans, the word feminism conjures up the image of angry women picketing strip clubs….
From “Outlaw Feminists” in Penthouse Magazine
As the Clinton administration failed to take up the hypermasculine political rhetoric and agenda of the Reagan/Bush days, conservative discourse began blaming feminism for the actual and perceived failures of American (masculine) culture. Since the Reagan Revolution, anti-feminist sentiment has become a kind of editorial growth industry, and within this industry the prevailing voice is female. This trend takes off in the early days of the Clinton administration, but the roots are plainly in the events of the Reagan/Bush era.[1] The anti-feminist argument of this period both alleviates and articulates the fear that as patriarchy is forced to accommodate more feminist demands, men themselves—those who occupy the privileged class, race and gender positions within patriarchal culture—risk irrelevance, or, the undifferentiated status of equality.[2]
“We need sluts for the revolution.” Naomi Wolf, Esquire interview
For example, Naomi Wolf offers the following gloss on patriarchal culture: “If I were a man, and I were expected to feed her, shelter her, and give her an orgasm, I would cling to every masculine prerogative I have” (Esquire 48). And masculine prerogative emerges as precisely the point within anti-feminism.
Ask Camille Paglia, who, in a May 1995 Playboy interview, (in)famously rationalizes the wage gap as follows:
The reason women earn less than men is that women don’t want the dirty jobs. They aren’t picking up the garbage, taking the janitorial jobs and so on. […] Most women like clean, safe offices, which is why they are still secretaries. […] Also, women want offices to be nice, happy places. What bullshit. (53)
Paglia has made a career of slinging this kind of misogynous rhetoric, and of waging fallacious arguments propelled by the sheer momentum of her speaking style and the outrageousness of her convictions. Famous for rhetorical assaults like the one above, Paglia bulldozes not only women laborers and blue collar men, but also feminism and logical thinking. In suggesting that garbage men and janitors are making all the money and that most women are secretaries, Paglia embraces the sepia-toned fairy tale told by the privileged about the laboring class: men happily take out the trash and cash checks; women, well supported by these men, opt for the less demanding jobs and keep things clean.[3]
If the mid-90’s was the right time for anti-feminism, men’s magazines provided the right place. Grounded in the belief that feminism has always been equivalent to man hating, men’s magazine anti-feminism declares the old feminism dead and offers itself as a progressive alternative. Arguments contained in these publications move well beyond softening relations between feminism and patriarchy, their nominal goal; they showcase political accommodation on the glossy pages of magazines that routinely devalue women. Further, while claiming to promote a new woman-centered ideology, anti-feminism simply carves out a new publishing niche, and offers another product for men’s magazines to sell: the reprogrammed “feminist.” An ideological symbiosis begins to emerge; in featuring ostensibly feminist pieces, magazines for men appear to take a progressive step forward, while, in fact, the work of the “feminists” they choose to feature merely validate (and promote) the misogynous ethos of men’s glossies. This “rogue feminist” (Penthouse’s term) promises to resuscitate women’s politics by embracing and promoting regressive images of women —images characterized in large part by female surrender to masculine erotic and political desire.
Consider the work of Naomi Wolf. Just three years after the publication of The Beauty Myth (1991), Wolf categorically backs away from not only identifiably feminist assertions, but also too pointed a tone. The book makes hard line claims like this one: “We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women’s advancement” (10). But by 1994 she tells Esquire: “Here is my secret, that should be a feminist secret no longer. The male body is home to me, my rocket, my whirlpool” (49). Such ideological backpedaling at this time underlines the phallic anxiety exposed so clearly by the overdetermined Reagan/Bush domestic and foreign policies: bellicose militarism, Family Values intolerance, and White House public relations. Susan Jeffords describes Reagan’s constructed persona:
It cannot be an accident that one of Ronald Reagan’s most powerful and effective activities in the White House was to convey certain distinctive images of himself as a president and as a man—chopping wood, breaking horses, toughing out an assassination attempt, bullying Congress, and staging showdowns with the Soviet Union…. (12)
Such activities imply an invisible, passive female presence acting as a foil for a terrifically active male persona, a female presence that waits quietly for the hero-cowboy’s return, takes strength from his efforts, and nurtures his identity at the expense of her own. The cowboy president, Ronald Reagan portrayed himself and his administration as “distinctively masculine,” that is, “not merely as men but as decisive, tough, aggressive, strong, and domineering men” (Jeffords 11). Add to this manly mix a healthy dollop of “spiritual strength” and you have the recipe for the Reagan Revolution. The Reagan White House promoted a set of conservative Christian values that authorized and fueled the administration’s embrace of the New Right and Family Values. The harmful effects of this ideological strategy, which is specifically responsible for the birth of the politics of personal responsibility (who can forget the invention of the “welfare queen,” or Reagan’s racist coding of the “truly needy?”)[4] have already been widely documented and interpreted. What is important for my purposes is that the movement from the Reagan/Bush days to the Clinton administration produces what Susan Cheever calls “gender-based road rage” among women[5] —a full scale media assault, featuring women attacking women and feminism (in Jong). In flavor and tenor, these attacks reflect the Reagan/Bush Family Values machine employing, as they do, the rhetoric of personal responsibility, identity politics and ad hominem attacks.
For example, Camille Paglia channels Pat Robertson on the pages of Playboy, saying that “the price of women’s liberation is being paid by the children,” and “AIDS is a price paid for sins committed in the Sixties, and by gay men who took free love to extremes…” (53, 58). An obvious paradox exists in how welcome a Family Values agenda finds itself inside the covers of publications like Playboy and Hustler. This Family Values “feminist” champions male sexual authority, patriarchal marriage and family, and she struts this ideological stuff next to air-brushed, surgically enhanced, soft-core fantasies of femininity. This editorial coupling is rendered less surprising when we consider that celebrations of highly eroticized, impossibly constructed female bodies constitute no more of a fiction than the anti-feminist/Family Values notion of gender roles. With this in mind, the timing of a Clinton-era (or post-Reagan) anti-feminism makes sense, for no two presidents in recent memory have so thoroughly saturated politics/policy with issues of gender identity. More than commanders-in-chief or makers of policy, these men, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, were masculine personalities, what we might call embodiments of identity politics. Halfway through his first term, Clinton represented a softening of the great American tumescence erected by the Reagan White House.[6] Clinton’s comfort with women in general and feminist politics in particular demanded a response from the firmly entrenched New Right and others whose ideological desires and policy demands were previously satisfied by “the quintessential macho president” and his successor George Bush (Orman in Jeffords 12). This response largely took the form of editorial invective aimed at both the president himself and the category of women with whom he was perceived to sympathize, feminists. In the case of the president, his personal behavior was relentlessly scrutinized, from his marriage to his life as governor of Arkansas, from what he ate to whether he jogged regularly. In the case of the women, feminists were blamed for everything from divorce rates to Monica Lewinsky’s dress size, from female infertility to the decline of liberal education.
For example, citing feminism’s pernicious influence upon American culture, Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the 1994 blockbuster anti-feminist work, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994), claimed that liberal feminists “are quietly engaged” in literally “hundreds of well-funded projects” designed to radically transform college curricula and “[drive] out the scholars on many campuses” (33). A muscular over statement typifies the particular strand of anti-feminist rhetoric that concerns me here. For example, Hoff Sommers’ book was published at a time when, according to the American Association of University Professors, only about 10 percent of tenured university positions were occupied by women, and there were no more than a dozen full-blown Women’s Studies Programs in place nationwide. Further, a few years later, the AAUP’s “Faculty Salary and Faculty Distribution Fact Sheet” (for 2000-2001) puts the percentage of female full professors at just 7%.
Post-Reagan anti-feminism claims to be rethinking feminism, realigning the movement to meet the demands of a changed/ing society. This description of the project is accurate; however, not in the way its proponents might claim. Rather than urging a reorganization of feminist political goals to accommodate the gains women have made and to suit the new political landscape (which they claim now favors women), the female anti-feminist, in fact, recommends that women abandon women-centered political thought and behavior altogether. What better way to align the movement with the demands of patriarchal society? Claiming the untenable position that feminism has become simultaneously irrelevant and corrosive to American culture, these authors avow an oxymoronic political point of view, calling an emphatically anti-woman ideology “feminist.” Indeed, I find myself disinclined to refer to these authors as “feminists” at all. However, they have in the main successfully appropriated the term and are generally referred to in this way, often with a qualifying prefix like “anti-” or “post-.” While the term does not entirely satisfy, I will use anti-feminism to describe women who claim the feminist label while endorsing a regressive politic designed to undermine the women’s movement.
[1] As Susan Faludi so meticulously demonstrates in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1992).
[2] In this context, I am using “men” as a marker of cultural privilege, a position that speaks to race and class as well as gender. As politics have become increasingly identity politics, any attempt to signify an identity position becomes problematical. That is, how to generalize—an unavoidable requirement in any discussion of cultural trends—without excluding, misrepresenting or otherwise offending specific identity positions? Take for example, the difficulty in describing what we mean when we talk about female oppression at the hands of men. “Men” in this case refers both to literal, biological individuals and an abstract notion of cultural identity. For the purposes of feminist discussions, one must acknowledge the presumption that a measure of privilege inheres to all members of the cultural identity position we call “men;” this privilege varies widely in accordance with class, race and sexual preference. Still, I am uncomfortable that my own assertion is too categorical. It ignores, for example, the analogous oppression suffered by men who occupy subjugated identity positions, like men of color or gay men. Still, I want to argue that feminism is a social movement committed to transforming structures within patriarchy that plainly undermine women’s access to power and favor an identifiable, privileged category often described as “men.”
[3] For an informed discussion of labor, class and gender, see Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (Henry Holt and Company, 2001).
[4] See Reagan’s 1982 State of the Union Address.
[5] In a 1992 piece in the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, Erin Steuter observes, “While supported by religious and political organizations of the New Right, the rank and file membership as well as the leadership of the contemporary anti-feminist movement in the
[6]
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