02/06/04

The Feminist Con

Carol Iannone

New York Press

Chandra Levy’s debasing involvement with Democratic Congressman Gary Condit has set people to wondering how such a relationship could develop in an age of women’s liberation. Her agreement to carry on the affair in secret, her humiliating readiness to conduct her life to suit her lover’s convenience, her touching hope that she would eventually marry this husband and father almost 30 years her senior–all seem like something out of Fannie Hurst’s Back Street, redolent of a time in which single women supposedly cared about nothing except men and matrimony. But now–we all believe–women aspire to full careers, demand complete independence and would sooner remain alone than tolerate such treatment as Chandra accepted from Condit.

In one of her columns, the estimable Mona Charen puzzles over the willingness of an accomplished young woman to put herself at the beck and call of a man twice her age who was so obviously using her. Charen wonders if a "new feminism" is needed, not to advance such aims as the integration of combat units, but to instill "a sense of dignity, honor and self-respect in young women."

While Charen is certainly on the right track, the truth is that feminism in any form is unable to provide such a solution because feminism is part of the problem. Feminism was good at teaching women how to pump their fists, guzzle water bottles on street corners, ridicule men a la The View, shriek about self-esteem and blame others for their own shortcomings and difficulties. But it did not teach them to "know thyself," which is the primary requisite for happiness.

For example, feminists claim that the desire to please men has been artificially cultivated in women by a male-dominated society. Women should strive instead to attain independence, take control of their own bodies and satisfy no one but themselves. A woman without a man suffers no more than a fish without a bicycle, proclaimed the feminist sages. The little flaw in this model of behavior is that most women actually–and naturally–do want to please men, and realize their own highest human pleasure in giving themselves to one of them. A woman’s goal should not be to deny her need for a man but rather to find a man worth giving herself to. Conned into a false afflatus of total freedom, however, women are left with nothing higher to live by than their own shifting desires and undirected proclivities, and these can lead them into the wrong kinds of relationships.

Feminism and the individualistic liberalism out of which it arose also denied the primary importance of the larger social whole that gives human existence its full meaning. There is no such thing as one sex being independent of the other; even monks and nuns have to deal with the existence of the opposite sex. Men and women are locked into a complementariness that they cannot escape in this world, and that normally leads to an even wider web of connection to family and community. In place of this deep-rooted interrelatedness, our hyper-individualistic culture substitutes romantic or sexual exploration devoid of moral and social supports. While feminists may insist that women can have sex as men (purportedly) do, with no strings attached, women’s longing for attachment persists. Without good ground in which to thrive, however, this longing can take stunted and perverted forms.

Ironically, the attraction of young women to older and often married men may actually be a misguided attempt to capture some degree of this male-female complementariness. Women have always had a tendency to be drawn to men significantly older than themselves, of course, as attested to by certain famous literary couples such as Emma and Mr. Knightley, Kitty and Levin, Scarlett and Rhett. But now the age gap seems to be widening dramatically, and women consort with men old enough to be their fathers and even their grandfathers. What was once a joke in medieval literature is apparently becoming more common in the late modern era.

If so, this is really not surprising. Under several decades of the feminist dispensation, boys have been tutored not to grow into good men but to become more like women. As a result of this unnatural education, younger men today can appear altogether unformed–crass, callow, unappealingly androgynous, afraid of responsibility and prone to wearing baseball caps backwards. Popular entertainment and advertising show women acting aggressively, seizing control and possessing superior wisdom to men, yet in reality many women want men to be dominant, to take charge and to direct their mutual life. Though women nowadays scarcely dare admit such desires to themselves, they nevertheless may seek to satisfy them by joining themselves to older men who possess a more seasoned masculinity.

We have overestimated women’s ability to be "free," and to engage in unimpeded self-definition. For that matter, we’ve overestimated everybody’s ability to be free and to engage in unimpeded self-definition, but for now we’re talking about the female sex. Ironically, a movement that was all about entitlement deprived women of their most basic entitlement, a true sense of worth based on the fulfillment of their own nature.