Feminism Gone Astray: The Good Fight of Christina Hoff Sommers
Christina Hoff Sommers, former Clark University philosophy professor, Chairman of the Board of Advisors of the Independent Women’s Forum, and author of such provocative and quite controversial books as The War on Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, and Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, will be presenting a lecture to Wabash on Thursday, April 17. Sommers comes to the College with a message echoed in the opinions of many Wabash men and engrained in Wabash’s mission. Her books and lectures focus the beliefs that we hold dear into an eloquent, academic argument. The Wabash Conservative Union is proud to present Sommers as a strengthening voice for Wabash College and as an educating voice for its critics.
Sommers’ arguments center around her claim that the modern feminist movement is waging all-out war against masculinity. Many mainstream feminists equate masculinity with violence, aggression, and general oppression of women. According to her, feminism has gotten out of hand. Something has gone terribly awry since the first Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 and the great feminist achievements of the early 1900s.
In her book Who Stole Feminism, Sommers maintains that pure feminism has been transformed into the terribly altered mainstream movement it is today. Stolen. She considers herself to be among the adherents to what she labels ‘equity feminism’, representing the new generation of Cady Stantons and Susan B. Anthonys as the voice of dissention against the mainstream movement. As an equity feminist she believes in the classical feminist goals of equal pay for equal work and of equal rights between men and women. Her philosophy includes equality of respect and honor with men, adding in the ghastly, unorthodox doctrine of women sharing an intimate connection with “the enemy”— men. She opposes the beliefs of what she calls “gender feminism,” a philosophy which states that men hold women under constant oppression and as a rule considers maleness synonymous with violence.
Sommers became involved with the feminist movement as a fairly mainstream and politically correct academic. As she became more involved and educated, things rather changed. She explains in an interview with journalist Scott London: “When I originally started questioning feminism, I did it mainly because no one else was doing it…It seemed to me so insensitive and intellectually sloppy to be teaching students radical feminism and not telling them the other side, the dark side, which is so obvious…That made me very unpopular.” The more she looked into the core values of popular feminism, the more she became aware of its true nature. She soon realized that the mainstream movement was based more on an estrogenetic power surge than actual intellectual truth.
The ‘gender feminists’ were redefining feminism upon the core belief that women are trapped in the perpetual oppression of a male culture. The feminist campaign changed from lobbying for fair treatment and no discrimination of women to angry and bitter bashing against men and masculinity. Says Sommers in that same interview, “The orthodox feminists are so carried away with victimology, with a rhetoric of male-bashing, that they’re full of female chauvinists, if you will.” Her dissent with mainstream feminism grew as she began discovering the intellectual hollowness of its “girl-crisis,” the idea that young women are preyed upon by ‘toxic masculinity’ in every aspect. For example, she discovered in schools problems of violence being exaggerated into problems of sexual harassment, and students sometimes being taught to identify rape themes in Beethoven symphonies. This is, of course, ridiculous, as many Wabash music majors might agree.
Eventually she split away entirely from the mainstream movement. In her view, teachers should not aim to turn students into angry, resentful people. She strives now to combat the female chauvinist philosophies by teaching her new perspective to young generations of women. However, she feels that she faces a great uphill battle.
Sommers has found that unfortunately many teachers have been swayed to accept as truth the absurd idea that masculinity is a natural cause of violence. Academic elite falling prey to empty philosophy? Impossible. Sommers discovered that modern feminism feeds on the dangerous combination of moral zeal and largely false propaganda. Young women are taught a doctrine of male oppression that is fueled by myths and gross exaggerations. Commonly accepted statistics, Sommers argues, are absolute hogwash. For instance, she throws right out the window studies claiming that one in four women have been victims of rape or attempted rape, or that 150,000 girls die every year from anorexia, or that on Super Bowl Sunday battery against women increases 40 percent. Again speaking with London, Sommers states: “This is preposterous. There’s no such research, and yet this is being taught to young women in the colleges. They’re basically learning that they live in a kind of violent—almost a Bosnian rape camp.” She ardently seeks to save girls from this teaching.
Her other key battleground is boys’ education. Here she also combats the supposed girl-crisis, standing up for boys’ learning in the school room. In her book The War Against Boys, Sommers argues how in the educational realm the “girl-crisis” is also simply non-existent. The girl-crisis dogma teaches that on top of their physical oppression under men, women are grossly under-privileged in education. In class girls are victims of the patriarchal system, silenced and shortchanged while boys are the privileged beneficiaries. Gender feminists claim that girls are ignored in areas like math and science simply because “those are boy subjects,” and therefore miss out on the high-paying math and science related careers. In 1993, feminist leaders lobbied to create the Gender Equity Act to push millions of dollars toward helping girls in their oppressed and under-privileged state. Sommers argues flatly au contraire. She claims based on data from the National Center for Education that in fact there exists no such girl-crisis, but instead a crisis against boys. Their grades are lower; they are more likely to be enrolled in special education programs and held back, while women are now the majority on college campuses. In her new, friendlier feminism, Sommers states that boys’ education should really be a women’s issue. In accordance with her philosophy, she sees an especial cause to help boys because many women, after all, do have close connections with the enemy—as mothers and sisters of the struggling schoolboys.
One of her main goals in writing The War Against Boys is to change educators’ minds, to make them realize the reality of the education situation. She stands up for boys, debunking the false claims of the girl-crisis with factually recorded data. She offers solutions for the growing epidemic. In an interview with Ben Wattenberg, host of the radio talk show Think Tank, Sommers strongly supports same-sex education. “I think that you should help young men become gentlemen. And you respect their masculinity; you respect the fact that boys and girls are different. What I argue is that in Great Britain they’re about 10 years ahead of us in addressing the social and academic needs of boys. They don’t have these women’s groups marching around threatening lawsuits when you try to do something for boys. So, yes, I think we should experiment with same sex classrooms.” Her solutions greatly contrast those posed by hard-line feminists. The accepted belief is that the animal spirits in young men need to be tamed and restructured socially. Leading feminists like Gloria Steinem firmly believe that boys should be taught to be more like girls. In recent years Steinem and others have made efforts to teach boys to be more nurturing by trying to get them interested in playing constructively with dolls, Barbies, playhouses, soft colors, etc.
This is exactly the war against boys that Sommers highlights in her book. She finds efforts like Steinem’s as attacks against masculinity. Again in her Think Tank interview she states, “We are medicating young boys; we are increasingly intolerant of male high spiritedness, and that’s what I mean by the war against boys.”
Of course, in her outspokenness she has taken extreme heat from the mainstream feminists. Some feminist book reviewers have tried to kill her books before they can be widely read, fearing the effects of such literature. In her research, Sommers reveals the great flaws of these groups, uncovering their every farce. For example, she exposes that mainstream feminist groups such as the American Association of University Women were failing to attract new generations of women, largely because of their stance of angry hostility towards men. These groups were drying up and dying out, desperately in need of a new issue. In an effort to bring about quick revitalization, they began publishing exaggerated findings from incomplete research and hastily thrown together studies that sometimes did not take place at all. The result was, of course, the aforementioned false statistics, but few people in the media seemed to notice or care. The campaign was a knockout success. Democrat and Republican congressmen alike rallied behind the research, raising millions of dollars in support for programs founded on faulty statistical evidence. But such is the way with politics.
In its usual display, the liberal media remains ignorant of these more conservative groups of American women. Major mass media publications have tried to quiet Sommers’ voice by sometimes refusing to publish or even recognize her conservative writing. The New York Times, in reviewing Sommers’ book Who Stole Feminism, chose a leader of the mainstream feminist movement to deliver a highly critical main review. When The Times ran the review, Sommers’ book was immediately discredited by a large potential audience. As her research did slowly get out, however, the true merit of her work was soon realized. Numerous national talk show hosts and book reviewers have since lauded her works.
Still, though she continues to speak out on her position all across the country with passionate vigor, Sommers stands frustrated and doubtful. She fears that the current feminist leaders will likely never provide the enlightened guidance she has tried to inspire. After attending a recent major feminism conference she reflected that “The women at [the conference] are the New Feminists: articulate, prone to self-dramatization, and chronically offended. All had fine and expensive educations. Yet, listening to them one would never guess that they live in a country whose women are legally as free as the men and whose institutions of higher learning now have more female than male students.”
Sommers will soon be coming to Wabash, slightly weighed down with this discouragement. Has she since begun to tire in her position? We should hope not. After all, she has already become a sort of Wabash ambassador by default, bringing the case for our college’s mission to the ears of an unsympathetic majority.
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