Hey Everybody,
I was lucky enough to have an interview with the great and heroic Christina Hoff Sommers, but I can only post the link here as it is the property of the American Spectator. As you probably know, they have a ton of quality writers with a set amount of space so two of the questions got edited out and I will post them here, and only here, because all of us LaSalleites are big fans of hers:
BC: One Nation Under Therapy is an amazing book and one which deserves the accolades it has received. Is your next project going to be along these same lines? Also, can you tell us a bit about it?
Christina Hoff Sommers: I am becoming involved in the struggle of Islamic women to secure their basic rights. The United States of America is not a patriarchy—but places like Yemen, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia certainly are. There are broadly two sorts of women’s rights movements in the Muslim world. One is led by observant religious women who are trying to find sources of liberation inside their own religion. The other, much smaller, is led by women who are non-religious and who want to bring the Enlightenment to their societies. I sympathize with both groups and I believe that American equity feminism has a lot to offer both.
But remember, the American feminist establishment is currently dominated by gender feminist radicals. They believe that America is, in its way, as oppressive as any Muslim country. So most of their effort is taken up with “liberating” American women (especially college women) from the ravages of patriarchy. That leaves them almost no time to help oppressed women in other countries.
Even if they want to help Islamic women—their antipathy to traditional religion makes them useless to religious Muslim women. Their animus towards men, feminine beauty, and romance will alienate vast numbers of liberated, Enlightenment feminists in the Muslim world. (Their rejection of the free market capitalism helps no one.) Conservative, moderate and libertarian American women are going to have to find an appropriate and sympathetic way to make common cause with Muslim women—but we will have to work around the feminist establishment to help them—not with it. Anyway, I am planning to write a long essay or a short book to sort this out.
BC: I still consult both of those books along with your articles on the subject quite regularly. Have times changed over the course of the last decade? Do you think that the radical feminist (or gender feminist) viewpoint is no longer as dominant among our elites and the media as it once was?
Christina Hoff Sommers: As I said, journalists are no longer under the spell of orthodox feminists. In fact, no one seems to find what they have to say all that relevant or appealing. But hapless college students can’t escape them. Ardent, fire-breathing true believers are ubiquitous on the modern campus. They describe American society as a “patriarchy,” and they inveigh against capitalism. They see President George W. Bush as more of a threat than Osama Bin Laden. That worldview is not dominant in the media –nor almost anywhere else that you can name. The one exception is the feminist classroom.
11 Responses
> Sommers represents the former.
Uhm, I think he meant “the latter”…
Posted on February 8th, 2007 at 5:04 am
Ah, finally a language mistake that wasn’t mine! You’re right though but i had neither former nor latter in the original,lol.
Posted on February 8th, 2007 at 6:52 am
Bernard-
I read your interview with Sommers. Nice job as usual. I have to take issue with the identity “Equity Feminism”, and other feminist identities such as Independent Feminism. Sommers states in the interview:
“One of the things I say in my lecture is that American women — as a group — are not oppressed. In fact, they are among the most favored, privileged and blessed group of human beings in the world.”
I agree completely.
In my opinion Sommers (and if I am correct you also call yourself an Equity Feminist?) ought to call herself what the rest of us who undertstand and believe in genuine fairness and equality call ourselves: Humanists. By attaching the feminist label she brings gender into the equation of genuine fairness and equality. Why?
Again:
“….American women — as a group — are not oppressed. In fact, they are among the most favored, privileged and blessed group of human beings in the world.”
I will use an analogy I’ve used here at MND before:
Say you lived in Germany in the 1930s and say you were caught up in all the excitement and hysteria about the promise of a New Germany post WWI-a vision being sold to the German people by Hitler. You were a member of the Nazi Party. But you were a good German Nazi-not the evil variety such as the SS members. Not a political operative but simply a party member. Now say that someone you trusted opened your eyes about the attrocities being committed by the policies of the Party. Euthanasia of the mentally ill, the weak, the old; extermination of the Jews, etc. In response you say: “I’m not one of THOSE Nazi’s. I don’t agree with that!”
Now I ask you, does this person still not provide legitimacy to Nazism simply by calling himself/herself a Nazi? And simply by being a Nazi Party member?
I believe that feminism ought to be distilled down to what it is: a hate movement. Why should there even be a gender-specific title to someone who is a Humanist in philosophy and who is a member of what is already “the most favored, privileged and blessed group of human beings in the world.”?
By having different “variations” of feminism the idea is created in people’s minds that there ARE STILL areas as yet where women need even more favoritism, and privileges. That is, although an Equity Feminist does not have the rabid hatred of men that a Gender Feminist has, he/she believes there are areas that women continue to need special attention, special favors, special privileges. The message is: “Women have come a long way but we are still not there yet” (e.g., true equality).
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Posted on February 8th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Denis: Well spoken.
Even in societies that Sommers would deem patriarchal — those in need of reform by “Equity feminists” and “Religious feminists” — I must ask whether it is women expected to fight in military conflicts to save the men and children, or is it men who must do this?
Until women are put on the front line — and men remain home, not deployed by their side — where will never be a need for feminism.
Posted on February 8th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Correction, for the last paragraph of my comment:
WROTE: “…where will never be…”
INTENDED: “…there will never be…”
Posted on February 8th, 2007 at 10:44 am
I really enjoy her books. The War on Boys (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/104-5594849-6980731?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=christian+hoff+sommers) is a great indictiment on todays feminized society and how we are discounting males and making them the redundant part of society.
Would highly recommend it.
Posted on February 8th, 2007 at 11:29 am
Thank Goddess we are back on track. Instead of defending “men” “A gee, we are not oppressors - rapists, child molesters - we are fathers, soldiers, workers, who give as much as we get” as we end up doing when people like SG waste our time expect us to do, to defend, rather than attack. We are back to “gender warriors” who are not afraid to speak up. (Go Sommers, go BC, smile)
We should do as Sommer’s bravely does, walk into places where we have a right to be, college campuses, gender studies classes, and we need to be clear, we need to demand that feminists stop trying to brainwash people into seeing men as the enemy. We need to get college instructors fired for failing to uphold high standards of education and ethics. From gender feminists (women good, men bad) To equity feminists (men really aren’t that bad) to individulists who ask that we treat men and women as we would others by race, as individuals, and not as stereotypes, is the only way to end this gender war that men didn’t start.
SD
PS I made copies of the article by BC and Sommers to send to my son and daughter who are in college and one for the women who run our local newspaper.
Posted on February 8th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Hello Bernard,
I read the interview (ok, skimmed it. Most of it I have read before from her). What stands out is when she says: “I am becoming involved in the struggle of Islamic women to secure their basic rights.
So there you have it. She rails, granted, against the excesses of feminism in the western world but her primary “struggle”, women’s rights, takes her halfway around the world even as men are victims of her hate filled ideology here at home. “Gee, I’d like to do something about that awful smell coming out of the death camps but there are some Nazis being denied pension benefits in Costa Rica. I’ll get back to you…”
Sadly, she’s still just a feminist apologist and humanists who think that women and men can be “equal” even as women will always require special protections are naive dupes.
Posted on February 8th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
“Sadly, she’s still just a feminist apologist and humanists who think that women and men can be “equal” even as women will always require special protections are naive dupes.”
You sir, confuse Humanist with a Feminist who dictate literal equality of outcome and likeness.
To quote Alexis de Tocqueville who understood 150 years ago what few men today understand:
“There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make man and woman into beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things - their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be conceived that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded, and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.”
Posted on February 9th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Hey man, thanx. At least people are talking. And, from some of the comments, NOT ranting at each other. That she is able and willing to define the American woman as free and the most protected, pampered, perfumed and perplexed group in the hx of the planet makes her, in my book anyway someone to keep an eye on. As an honest person whose opinions may be worth reading, not as a threat! Okay, okay, okay I added the perplexed part.
A recent face to face conversation with a gal I’d met on an on-line dating thing revealed she’d put her ad on w/o a picture, received 65 hits in one weekend and was going thru her list, presumably vetting to see who was naughty or nice. This ole gal treated me as indifferently as a job interview. As I was trashing her phone number it struck me that we seem to pursue, with wild abandon I might add these (tho not all obviously are) shrewish american women with abandon, it is us who allows them to have this child like tude. I have since stopped this foolish dating thing and have found life w/o the american gal and all the demands and whining much more fun.
This silly addiction to them felt almost like it was penence for a crime I’d never committed. Victims one and all. Just ask them. Thanx agin Bernie, made me believe there might be a few women who still want to think about and treat men like we’re not the enemy!!
Then again.
Posted on February 10th, 2007 at 3:48 am
“This ole gal treated me as indifferently as a job interview.”
looking for love in all the wrong places my friend. Try http://www.filipinaheart.com/ or better yet one of the Colombia online meeting sites.
The problem with many American men is that they don’t travel enough. Get outside the US and you’ll find some beautiful women, both physically and personally, that havent been ruined by the feminist ideaology.
Shakira is half Colombian half Lebanese. How’d ya like to go home to a mix like that every night and she be 18 or 20 years old? LOL Trust me, much much easier than yo think.
Sad thing is, our own white European background culture is diminishing because of just those issues Ed mentioned.
Posted on February 10th, 2007 at 4:53 am
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