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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