Saturday, May 23, 2015

Feminist Enemy Number One



By Mark Hemingway
Saturday, May 23, 2015

Lately, there’s a lot of talk among feminists about the need to keep women safe. The rape culture is allegedly inescapable, and trigger warnings are appended to college syllabi to protect sensitive souls from reminders of any past cause of pain, from “neuro-atypical shaming” to mention of “how much a person weighs.” But it turns out that if you dare to debunk feminist myths, you’re the one that really needs protection.

For years now, Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys, has been promoting what she calls, in the title of her latest book, Freedom Feminism. This view, she writes, “stands for the moral, social, and legal equality of the sexes,” but also for women’s freedom—including the freedom to embrace traditional femininity. “Efforts to obliterate gender roles can be just as intolerant as the efforts to maintain them,” she writes, and “theories of universal patriarchal oppression or the inherent evils of capitalism are not in [freedom feminism’s] founding tablets.” Above all, Sommers’s approach is moored in reality, not utopian notions of social justice.

Sommers’s efforts to spread her gospel have annoyed many academic feminists for years, but recently the response to her has gone from confrontational to hostile. “I have never stopped going to campuses, and I’ve been going to law schools. But I have rarely faced protests,” she tells The Weekly Standard. “I used to face vigorous debate, and the young women would come ready to argue—and that was fine, that’s what I was there for. But this is different, and it only started happening this year.”

At Sommers’s speech in April at Georgetown University, multiple undercover policemen were placed in the audience. At Oberlin, also in April, uniformed police officers never let her out of their sight and after her speech escorted her in a police car from the campus to a dinner. In May, she was the guest of honor at a Washington, D.C., meetup of “Gamergate” supporters—video gamers concerned about radical feminism’s influence in the video game industry (more on that later). In response, Salon and Daily Beast columnist Arthur Chu started a social media campaign to pressure the bar where the gamers were meeting to drop the event and sent emails to the venue accusing them of hosting a “right-wing hate group.” Despite the pressure, the owner of the bar, Local 16, emailed Sommers to tell her they “would never keep any group out. This is America.” A bomb threat soon followed, necessitating a heavy police presence and a tour of Local 16 by bomb-sniffing dogs.

Through all this, Sommers says, “I didn’t feel threatened. I’d never known feminists to be violent.” Her calm in the face of feminist extremism is in marked contrast to the fury of her critics. “I am a threat to their health, to their mental well-being. That attitude is new,” she says. “Before, they might have thought, ‘Oh, her views on feminism are reactionary.’ But now it’s that her views are a threat.”

Indeed, an inability to distinguish between threats and disagreements seems to be a hallmark of this contemporary feminism. Sommers is scary precisely because she doesn’t shy away from heightening the contradictions. Where op-ed writers have patiently picked apart the discredited “wage gap” statistics feminists insist on recycling, Sommers shows up in the proverbial lion’s den, calmly points her finger at the scolds-in-training, and challenges them to prove their commitment to female equality by changing their major to the lucrative and male-dominated field of petroleum engineering.

These days, campus feminists make no attempt to debate Sommers on substance. Instead, she routinely faces attempts to shun her, silence her, or distort her message. After her Georgetown speech, there were demands that the student group that had hosted her remove the protesters from video of the event. A university administrator warned that if the upset students weren’t edited out, “Georgetown [would] need to step in.”

Got that? Protesters showed up at a public event to draw attention to their message—but then realized that footage showing ostensible adults holding signs saying “Trigger Warning: Antifeminist” was an embarrassment to the students and bad PR for the school, so they wanted it censored. Another embarrassment is young feminists’ ignorance. When Sommers joked at Oberlin that the Junior Anti-Sex League had occupied campus feminism, a voice from her audience yelled, “What the hell is that?”

Before Sommers’s speech at Oberlin, 150 feminists signed a letter to the campus newspaper claiming that, among other libelous assertions, Sommers was a “rape denialist” for daring to poke holes in the improbable campus rape statistics bandied about. (According to an article in Slate last year, the commonly spouted figure that one-quarter of college women are victims of rape or attempted rape “would mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.”) The Oberlin letter was titled “In Response to Sommers’ Talk: A Love Letter to Ourselves” and urged students to boycott the speech and attend another event hosted in a “safe space.” While Sommers went on to address a full lecture hall, the Oberlin Review reported that “the alternative event, ‘We’re Still Here,’ was attended by approximately 35 students and one dog.” Disappointingly, the Review did not elaborate on how exactly Sommers’s presence on campus had managed to traumatize the dog.

The intensity of the opposition Sommers is facing may be new, but its seeds were planted a few years ago. Sommers says some of the opposition to her is a logical consequence of government policy. In 2011 the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice told campuses they were obligated under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to protect women from harassment—even exposure to sexual language and innuendo—and that they had to lower their standards for determining guilt. “The colleges panicked, but it empowered that contingent. .  .  . The ‘drama feminists’ suddenly could hold the school hostage because they could threaten lawsuits under Title IX,” she says.

Sommers has forged an entire career by brushing up against drama feminists. As a professor of ethics in the 1980s, she recalls being surprised by the reaction to a paper she presented at the American Philosophical Association. “I argued against the increasing radicalism of feminist theory and its fixation on doomed projects—like overthrowing ‘male science’ with ‘women’s ways of knowing.’ My plea for moderation was not appreciated. Gender theorists in the audience hissed and stomped their feet. I was excommunicated from the church of feminism on the spot.”

But despite rubbing some of her peers the wrong way, Sommers thrived, in part because she wasn’t completely alone. There were a number of prominent “second-wave” feminists—Wendy Kaminer, Katie Roiphe, Mary Lefkowitz, Cathy Young, and others—who were also questioning whether the political program of the feminist left was good for women. For a while, their thinking was in vogue, and they earned plaudits not usually given to heretics. In 2000, The War Against Boys was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Those days are gone.

For more than a decade, Sommers has been happily ensconced in the think tank world at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She’s still a Democrat and says she’s “pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-trans—I mean, I’m just in favor of personal liberty.” She’s quick to add, “This does not save me from being called a right-wing crank [by the feminist establishment], because you have to go along with their increasingly paranoid version.”

Sommers may not be scoring any points for feminist orthodoxy, but don’t discount envy as a reason she’s increasingly targeted. Unlike a lot of feminists, Sommers has escaped the academic ghetto. In feminism, cultural relevance has always been the coin of the realm, and Sommers is awash in it right now, thanks to her involvement in the controversy over sexism in the culture of video games. And for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, video games are bigger business than Hollywood. 

Gamergate’s origins are murky—it started with the online revelation that a well-known feminist video game developer was cheating on her boyfriend with, among others, her married boss. Somehow the surrounding revelations unspooled so as to confirm the suspicions of many gamers that a cabal of influential industry players and journalists was trying to impose a politically correct agenda on video games. Now hordes of video game fans call Gamergate their movement to enforce ethics and reject political correctness in the video game industry.

As for Sommers, she says she hasn’t played a video game since “Pac-Man in a bar in Cambridge, Mass., in 1980.” But when an Entertainment Software Association study last year claimed that most video game players were adult women, the anti-Gamergate crowd seized on the news as proof that the video game industry needed to stop focusing on shoot-’em-ups in favor of female-friendly games.

The topic was ripe for Sommers’s “Factual Feminist” YouTube series. Once again, the feminist “facts” were incorrect. “There are casual game players—and there are hard-core gamers for whom highly complex, competitive video games are a primary life passion,” she explained. “Adult women are not a key demographic here. Researchers at UCLA have been studying the pastimes of college freshmen for more than 40 years. For incoming freshmen, 65 percent of girls but fewer than 19 percent of boys said they played no video games at all in a typical week.”

Gamergate supporters began passing Sommers’s Factual Feminist video around, and in the first three weeks it garnered over 440,000 views and 7,700 comments—pretty impressive for a think tank scholar talking into a camera. Sommers is now referred to by Gamergaters as “Based Mom,” with “based” being video game slang for cool.

To some extent, Sommers is walking a fine line by defending Gamergate. She has repeatedly condemned Internet harassment and threats against women; there are indeed unsavory and misogynist elements among hard-core video gamers. But her personal example of reasoned debate has had a positive influence on the controversy, which otherwise might have embodied everything that’s wrong with arguing online. Her allegedly enlightened critics in the video game community have mainly indulged in glorified name calling. Video game website Polygon called Sommers a “reactionary” and said her supposed indifference to video game sexism was an “irresponsible abrogation of our shared humanity.”

There’s a certain novelty to feminist agitation invading video games, but what’s at issue is still the notion there’s only one valid way to think about women’s lives, and it assumes they’re victimized by every aspect of the culture.

By being poised, persuasive, good-humored, and scrupulous with facts, Sommers is exploding unhelpful feminist stereotypes. It says a lot about contemporary feminism that precious few who claim the feminist label also embrace liberty and reject victimhood—and for that, they’re the ones who are getting bomb threats. 

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