The Ms.Click!, the Decter Anguish,the War Vulgarity

...It’s a questionable sort of endeavor in the first place, and usually doomed to failure, particularly when the other person’s perspective is studiously avoided...

...Though she does it crudely, Vilar proves one thing: that without departing wildly from reality you can describe men as the victims of an elaborate female con as well as the other way around...

...It tends to come out: “I’ve sacrificed and you’re not giving back...

...The tendency is to turn resentment inward rather than to express it at all...

...Back to the Nursery Feminist thought recognizes this element of choice and responsibility Moving forward from this ex- when lauding the single woman who tremely acute observation, Decter, in decides to have a child because she conformity with her thesis, says the wants one, but decides not to bring a revolt which describes itself as against man in on the responsibility of bringcompulsory sex roles-against “anat- ing it up because she doesn’t want to omy is destiny”-is really a revolt be part of a couple...

...The magazine’s letters pages carry at least one example from a woman who has “clicked...

...She shouldn’t feel obliged to share the feels herself to be responsible not only everyday burdens of child-bearing for their care while they yet remain after all, but just that the more helpless, but to be responsible-she, autonomously a woman decides to not nature, not society, and not even, have a child-the more the burden of except for a minority of cases, her ultimate responsibility for the child husband-for the very fact of their falls on her shoulders-an idea at odds existence...

...The housework issue is not trivial-the force of the emotions which comes out in these articles is ample evidence that it is not...

...The whole complex when she says that the pressure is less [of] involuntary and unseen repro- now than ever before (though she ductive potential that she carries overlooks the fact that this is about as a secret within her has now due in significant part to feminist willy-nilly come to be experienced as efforts...

...When engaged in feminist activism, it’s of paramount importance for women to believe, without question, that they are right...

...For instance, it has been observed that men often resist housework not because they are lazy but because they feel it’s “woman’s work” and that doing it makes them less masculine...

...One can hear the dialogue between the two: “Flagellant ! ” “Chic ken...

...over the function which in the past has played the greatest role in con- like state of unaccountability...

...Suddenly, Sue recognizes the put-down...

...Gloria Steinem, editor and co-founder of Ms., considers this policy the major distinguishing factor between today’s feminism and the more limited, short-lived movements of the past, particularly in its application to private life...

...On a number of occasions Decter lashes out so vindictively, not just at feminists, but out of context at hippies, radicals in general, and homosexuals, that, given the terms of reason and persuasion in which the essays are cast, the sudden irrational force makes one gasp...

...Groan and Bear It But the anguish theory of life-the grim buckling-under, “taking it on,” being a woman (sigh) or a man (groan) -is no solution...

...Lady Macbeth challenges her husband whenever he has second thoughts about murdering Duncan...

...I think Suzannah Lessard is an assistant editor of The Washington Monthly...

...I part ways with her, however, when she so enthusiastically embraces this sense of responsibility...

...For this abstraction one can feel only contempt, hostility, and resentmentfeelings which annihilate the one basis on which problems can be sanely worked out: the perception of each other as people, no matter what either might do, and the desire to understand each other...

...Most of us have run into feminists who seem to have mistaken personal problems for political issues, or who attribute their lack of success to bias when actually their work is inferior, or who have developed such persecution complexes that they meet any disagreement, obstacle, or bit of bad luck with a chip on the shoulder and a feminist flag...

...Men do this not just because they want to hog all the power and the fun...

...This book was a smash hit in England last year, and promises to do well on this side of the ocean, too...

...Why don’t you criticize the system which oppresses women...

...Clark reinforces this definition, doesn’t she stand a much greater chance of changing the situation by noting the little ways in which she reinforces this definition by applying to him a careermasculinity standard she does not apply to herself...

...It’s true that a general sense rises out of feminist literature that no great effort is being made to distinguish between which “oppressions’’ are due to correctable injustices and which are due simply to the human condition...

...Esther Vilar...

...Clark for blocking the way to an appreciation of herself on her own merits...

...It’s also one of the commonest manifestations of the sex-role structure...

...Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $5.95...

...For one thing, trying to “correct” or “restructure” a person according to your own lights is not at all the same as challenging an institutional or public practice...

...Feminist literature is replete with rejections of the “cut the mustard” mentality but is very weak on the ways women play on it...

...The aggressive impulse to reduce another person takes form in the accusations hurled when a member challenges the structure...

...By saying children is something men are invited that they are being forced in a time to share, and not an obligation imwhen they clearly have the most plicit in fathering...

...the questioner is automatically branded as immature, fleeing from the demands of life into childhood...

...Looking for another way is an effort to lose oneself-you have to test yourself against the anguish in order to find yourself...

...There Decter finds herself where she has been all along, pointing Cassandralike, at the “apocalypse in the distance...

...If you get no reaction, repeat in higher and higher registers...

...For such differences...

...This is a mindset dominated by fear...

...Cultural conditioning no doubt is the villain here, too, but how much is it reinforced by women who push tfiis value system on men in other contexts, by the millions of innuendoes and subtle reactions which signal measurement on the mustard-cutting scale...

...Her book The Manipulated Man,” is a perfectly atrocious piece of work, simp le -mind e d , indiscriminately misogamist, and quite often ridiculous: “For social events men are permitted to wear black, a color that shows marks and stains, since on those occasions men are less likely to dirty themselves...

...Out for dinner with their friends, Bob tells wife Sue to help hostess Jane clear the table...

...The others are through the innumerable devices available to reduce a person according to sex-related standards...

...Not many of us measure up to Lady Macbeth for bluntness, but the variations on this theme are endless...

...But while the details are often ridiculously off target, as a whole, Vilar hits the side of the barn: men wear themselves out cutting the mustard, and housework notwithstanding, one of middle-class woman’s major problems is idleness, or disuse...

...Many women have strong fears of challenging traditional role divisions lest they appear bitchy or unfeminine...

...The essays, which on the whole are thoughtfully -if some what over-elaboratelywritten, deal with housework, sex, wifehood, and motherhood and are all directed by one thesis: that the new feminists are actually recoiling from the freedom and responsibility they claim to be seeking and that they are recoiling because they are afraid (like hippies, homosexuals, and radicals) of growing up, facing their own mortality, and experiencing something she calls “adult anguish...

...Solution: Stand in the doorway and say, “The bed is lumpy...

...The articles, it turns out, are primarily instructions in the technique of dealing with recalcitrant men...

...Female manipulation of man is, of course, older than history...

...these statements by saying that womShe points out that this control en don’t really have this choice beover childbearing adds a new, terri- cause the culture tells them that a fying dimension to procreation...

...do in themselves constitute the most fundamental principle of the continuation of life on earth...

...The man in the lumpy-bed episode is, most of all, humiliated, reduced...

...I think the conditioning arguments are pointless if they are used to abdicate from responsibility by personifying the Villainous Conditioner in other individuals while remaining blind to its representatives in...

...It says that you cannot look inside yourself without self-hatred...

...s t r i c ting them-childbearing and Feminist doctrine would dismiss motherhood...

...Are compulsion and injury legitimate bases, given the measure of control she has within her power...

...Decter as Hard-Hat There is a big gap between Decter’s finely worked points (surrounded by scattershot) and her apocalyptic whirlwindher beliefs are matters of faith rather than the work of logic...

...Tme, women often do this because they have so little sense of their own worth that they measure their self-esteem by the “success77 of their mate...

...Activism is a doctrinal policy of the new feminism...

...child probably lies with the wife, “her Decter weakens her case by ignorchildren are her responsibility as, to ing social pressures, but she does hit be sure, helpless children have ever on a dilemma which faces a woman been the responsibility of their moth- once she rejects those pressures...

...It’s institutionalized in a negative way in feminist literature by a general tendency not to make distinctions between life’s terms and correctable injustices, or even to raise this obvious question...

...Are you going to remake it while I cook the dinner or am I going to remake it while you cook the dinner...

...Changing yourself, she said, is only frustrating if you don’t also change the world...

...With equal vagueness, she warns that by pursuing the feminist course (a retreat into childlike will, all “men, women, and babes in arms, live to reap the whirlwind...

...One can only deduce from the Ms.-Steinem attitude, however, that this state is confidence, true self-assertion...

...She never defines “adult anguish,” except to suggest it’s something men undergo in the tough world of competition, and women undergo as wives and mothers...

...Worse, as a general policy, it insulates the movement from itself...

...Liberation, like oppression, is an overused word, blurred and toneless like a loose guitar string...

...There is no doubt that many having “a” baby, but of having this women have felt pressured to the baby now, a parent has a responsi- point of pregnancy by cultural indocbility for the child previously consi- trination, when “deciding” whether or dered a burden borne either by God not to have a child...

...The mind may reject these reflexes and crush them a second after they surface, but unfortunately they have high communicability...

...The analogy, ,however, ends here, somewhat abruptly, as do most analogies between feminism and conventional political movements...

...Over-concentration on one or two carefully planned-for children, and a tendency to take their performance in the world as a reflection on the parent-a failure to see children as autonomous spirits-are among the more invidious effects on children of the much-maligned nuclear family...

...Jonathan Clark, the physicist.’’ The implicit directive is for Mrs...

...Isolating and examining them goes a lot further towards loosening the knot than fixating on a male partner’s reflexesreflexes beyond your jurisdiction...

...As far as the clear-cut political (in the conventional sense) and social abuses are concerned (equal pay and opportunity for advancement, legal abortion, the female image in schoolbooks, etc...

...He is frozen in his fault-click-no way out, she has him...

...Having taken on this attitude for oneself, one imposes similar expectations on one’s partner...

...Rooting out the Lady Macbeth in oneself is no mean task: her stronghold is not in the mind but in reflexes which lag far behind the mind-the little things, like feeling personally let down when a man you are with fails, slightly contemptuous when he refuses to compete, or ashamed when he is beaten...

...What bothers me is the widely accepted theorem that the terms of struggle are the same on the private front as they are in public...

...If mentioned at all, female manipulation of men is usually dismissed with the questionable master-slave analogy...

...One can tell just by thk vibratos in Decter’s prose not only that she believes the traditional role is proper, but that it has been magnificently enriched by this new element of choice...

...In other words, self-examination and selfdoubt would be holes in the dikes of newly erected confidence that the woman’s cause is just, and the pressure of old habits and conditioning would be too much for them...

...Beating another with your sacrifice is one way...

...This is not an unusual situation for an upper-class couple...

...Life is tough, Midge Decter says, but that is the way it is supposed to be...

...My third reason for concern with this attitude is that the dominant accompanying emotion is a fierce, locked-in state of resentment...

...However, though many movement women would disagree with me, I think that the area of daily intimate interchange between the sexes presents a different set of problems and calls for a different approach...

...Gloria Steinem employs the same sort of closeout: questioning is the equivalent of masochism...

...Yet exploration of, or commentary on these feelings ends there, focused on the shirking husband and holding out the state of mind of the wife in the doorway of liberation...

...with commonly accepted tenets of feminism...

...I understand that resentment, I think it should be aired, and expressing it has a passing therapeutic value...

...Clark to be both angry at the world and resentful towards Mr...

...Refusing to be held accountable for your major life-decisions or for the character of the relationships you have had a hand in building-to blame whatever cannot be pinned on someone else on “conditioning”-is likewise an avoidance, more like abdication than taking control...

...In the current issue, for example, the husband makes the bed, but lumpily, even though he knows perfectly well how to make a bed...

...But whatever inspiring possibilities the word might have once suggested with regard to freeing ourselves from the categories which thwart the way people perceive one another, this is not one of them...

...Questioning yourself, or considering the perspective of the other person, is, on the other hand, extremely dangerous to intransigence, therefore to the sense of being right, and therefore to confidence...

...In the process of this vituperative effort to drive feminists into the ground, Decter makes some very acute observations which will probably go unexamined because of the unfortunate tone of the book...

...But when this sort of distortion is institutionalized, it should be challenged...

...Putting his manhoodmasterhoodon the line, chiding him by calling him woman-like is the most effective tool available to the Lady Macbeths of the world...

...To switch to a more modern context, the picture of the pampered, well-to-do wife, lying on the beach in Nantucket, children tended by hired help, while her husband braves the summer subway to Wall Street, is not what you could call the classic master-slave relationship...

...women have unprecedented control Coward, McCann & Geohegan, $5.95...

...Secondly, this is the one area in which women are most- deeply implicated in creating their own predicament and in which men, if they are better off, pay a heavy price for their advantage...

...If this is so, then the first act of breaking out of the conditioning would be to take control of one’s own responses-to hold oneself accountable rather than to react in automatic patterns...

...Mental Health Via Spleen There is a valid point to the Ms...

...Keeping your eyes riveted on the “wrongness” of others, in this sense, is a very effective technique, not especially for accomplishing anything, but for overcoming inhibitions...

...It counsels that the antidote to the sickness of the past-heaping all the blame on oneself -is an equally noxious syndromeheaping all the blame on the other party...

...Her observation that modern seriousness about child-rearing is a result of the “fear-inspiring dimension” of choice rings true...

...Intransigence is a psychological ploy to counteract feelings of inadequacy, and a good way to become intransigent is to work yourself into a fury over someone else’s transgression...

...What other word but hatred is there for this one-dimensional, nonnegotiable attitude towards another’s fault, blotting out his individuality, putting him behind glass in the general category of miscreantloppressor...

...The Ms.Click!, the Decter Anguish, the War Vulgarity by Suzannah Lessard Ms...

...The impulse to reduce another person is one of the ugliest human traits...

...A sense of compuland Other Arguments Against Worn- sion is the helpmate of the sense of en’s Liberation” is one of those books injury...

...that is true, and that the policy is good...

...But I cannot see it as anything more than a technique, a stop-gap substitute for “confidence, a kind of hypnosis which enables you to walk on the water of your shaky sense-of-self until you reach solid ground...

...It’s like saying, “You’re nothing but a Drunk,” “You’re nothing but a Coward...

...They often pursue these courses because they have been conditioned to believe that their masculinitytheir measure of worth-depends on success in these terms, and women have learned to play upon this I conditioning with instinctual expertise...

...The reasoning is mere embellishmentneatly paved roads which go just so far into the desert and stop...

...is drawn from an article in which a woman recognizes innuendos of discrimination and “clicks...

...If it leads anywhere, it takes one deeper and deeper into righteous obsession with the minutiae of another’s faults and into the grips of an insulated sense of injury inflicted by others-a kind of victim complex...

...But something she has seen has made her angry, and as with the drunk, one knows, as one pushes her away, that she has a point-that she has seen something...

...But is resentment really an appropriate, or even useful, response...

...Rather than by noting all the little ways in which Mr...

...Having frozen an individual into an abstraction, the rest follows naturally -vigilance at every turn, the contemptuous wrath a hair trigger away from the surface, seeking out breaches, the monitor registering clicks...

...Gloria Steinem defended the onesided view of relationships with men by saying that women have to focus on the cause of their oppression: that in the past they have looked inward for the blame, thus further immobilizing themselves...

...Once you perceive a person this way, all empathy, all flow of feeling, is cut off...

...Esther Vilar does nothing so constructive...

...A running motif in the pages of Ms...

...If anything, her belligerently mysogynistic attitude and outlandishly inaccurate description of female behavior will probably crush whatever glimmer of insight a genuinely interested reader might have...

...There is no longer a person sitting on the other side of the table, there is a Male Chauvinist Pig...

...As one moves down the income scale the wife does more-in the working class she is often forced to take on the double dutv of a *The Manipulated Man...

...Though her book could be seen as a defense of the status quo, in the end she is not saying that things are good the way they are, but that if you dare change them, an unnamed disaster will strike...

...Institutionalizing it, however, is some thing else...

...The ers, but this time with a new and insight here for me is not that men fear-inspiring dimension added...

...The subject is often husbands who have at least one foot in the barbaric past...

...Overcoming the tendency to feel inadequate, to shrink from assertion, is a primary problem for many women...

...Which is it...

...Decter’s excesses remind me of a hard-hat drunk, hitting the same point too harshly and too loudly and too many times, breaking into startling eloquence and then throwing it away with extravagance...

...The faith comes first, fully intact: sex-role distinction is order...

...When individuals behave this way, one looks at the problem as a personal matter-perhaps a necessary phase, or a defense, or a neurotic exaggerationbut in general as an avoidance of some sort, a way of staving off life, and one hopes the person will work it through...

...Therefore, presenting the feared image and feelings in print has an important purpose insofar as it brings them into the open as human and natural...

...Are you a man...

...From this one against choice and the responsibility would assume that responsibility for which comes with choice...

...The actual work of restructuring personal relationships is much less a matter of overthrow than it is of untying knots...

...Thus, not just individuals, but the whole movement, becomes insulated in the stuffy, ever-recycled air of its hypnotically repeated interpretations of the world outside, definitions formed in terms of injury to innocent victims...

...Lady Macbeth and Uncle Tom Esther Vilar stands polar to Steinem, seeing a world of enslaved and manipulated men who can be freed only by women (the injurers...

...Steinem, and feminism in general, aim to break down these structures in which people look at each other through abstract standards of measurement, in which they reduce and manipulate each other, and rather than trying to discover the person, attempt to impose on another what he or she should be...

...a straightforward policy of aggressive action aimed at correcting the abuses is healthy, appropriate, and effective...

...Extending her comments beyond the individual confrontation, Steinem said, “Why do you criticize the movement...

...There are solid reasons behind Steinem’s position...

...The emphasis on male misbehavior in the most intimate relationships, however, only seems to substitute one rule for another...

...Against the idea that women whose reputations run before them...

...hence by attacking motherhood are The question isn’t about allocation of really seeking to retreat into a child- duties which can be divided in innumerable ways but about the bases on which a woman negotiates changes in a given structure...

...In developing her thesis, she repeatedly attacks the Poor Midge notion of compulsion which imbues Midge Decter’s The New Chastity feminist rhetoric...

...When I asked Steinem whether this extension of the field to private life didn’t entail confronting issues beyond the strictly political, she said, “The point is that everything is political...

...She said that entertaining the male perspective and facing the ambiguities of the feminist position would only lead to masochism-the age-old female habit of looking for the cause of unhappiness in one’s own failings...

...Ms.’s readership includes many women to whom feminist ideas are new...

...She goes on *The New Chastity and Other Arguments to point out that, having married, Against Women’s Liberation...

...The click symbolizes to me all that is off-base in the Steinem philosophy...

...job as well as housework...

...Given the force, frenzies of spleen like that of the woman in the case of the lumpy bed are healthy...

...The offense, when a woman feels disgust for a man because he won’t compete, or a man for a woman when she does, is that in their eyes they stop seeing a person and see instead an abstract integer which doesn’t measure up to an abstract standard...

...Defensive avoidance comes out affirmatively in Gloria Steinem’s views: you should avoid self-questioning because looking inside will immobilize you-in other words, because you are scared of the answers...

...Decter observes that since “the circles, to which the most vocal femilast placing of the bet” in the parentd nists, the writers, editors, and public decision of whether or not to have a figures, belong...

...To describe the situation as a simple exploitation of innocent victims (women) by the free and powerful (men) is such a distortion of reality that it’s hard to imagine a resultant strategy which would have any kind of lasting constructive effect...

...Fanatical housekeeping, fanatical careerism, and fanatical child-rearing is a vicious circle of aggressive sacrificefor my husband, for my wife, for our children-in which you “suffer” and expect something back...

...Feminists have recognized it and rejected it as the recourse of the slave, analogizing it to an Uncle Tom’s deft ability to “handle” white folks...

...are railroaded into subservient roles, The standard response seems to be she posits that in an era in which “Poor Midge, she’s so repressed,” and women are more widely and thor“Maybe someday she’ll allow her oughly educated, have a greater anger to come to the surface.’’ While opportunity to pursue professions, dismissing people you disagree with and have the least pressure on them to on grounds of their mental health marry early, American women wed doesn’t do much for your credibility, younger than ever before...

...The woman who believes she can “save” her degenerate love comes to mind...

...But the elements which are full blown in the upper-class situations (fitting the master-slave analogy only if the roles are reversed) are imbedded in the family structure from top to bottom...

...you from yourself...

...The pressure is weakest of all a force preeminently subject to her in well-educated, sophisticated urban will...

...yourself...

...Midge Decter...

...Lady Macbeth contemplated becoming Queen, which may not be as good as King, but which hardly fits in the slave category...

...fertile woman who decides to have no Because having a child is a matter of children will die having lived half a specific choice, not just a question of life...

...But there is a choice-when for the first time anat- distinct sense of being hoist by one’s omy is not destiny-women, Decter own feminist petard when one juxtaconcludes, are really saying they can’t poses such a heroine of independence stand the heat-the “adult anguish” or with another heroine demanding that the accountability involved in being her husband take on his “rightful” responsible for their choices and share of child-care duties...

...But no matter what the cause, at that moment hers is a pretty degraded attitude toward another human being-inflexible, vindictive, righteous...

...these comments, and the opinion that the book is a blind, fearful attack are not entirely without cause...

...Men will also read it, perhaps more avidly, because it will gratify their sense of being wronged, much as the feminist housework literature fans the sense of injury and legitimizes resentment by drawing such a dehumanized, abstract picture of the oppressor as a robot geared to one purpose-getting its way-that the reader can conveniently forget that there are people underneath all these categories...

...These interpretations rarely question that dubious innocence, investigate the perspective of the injurer, or open the door to the kinds of internal questions which would rise to meet other perspectives...

...But she does not allow questions...

...Being emotionally riveted on another person’s faults is blinding and antipathetic to growth, and hardly aids the development of a new, more viable relationship...

...Righteous fixation on the faults of people around you insulates...

...But Decter is right or by Chance...

...we all know of plenty of men who suffer terribly from the demands of competition and careerism...

...If the feminist movement had the equivalent of the CIA’S Department of Dirty Tricks, it might well have subsidized this book, which takes the strongest argument against feminism and so debases it that the argument might never be heard from again...

...A commonly adopted feminist line is that women should not take the blame for their contributions to this behavior pattern because they have been conditioned to behave this way, therefore it’s not their fault-like a slave, this is the only way someone locked into an inferior caste can react...

...The analogy works well in that women use many of the old slave ploys: coy subterfuge, flattery, the immunity of inferiority, but most of all, a man’s own image of himself as a strong, responsible decisionmaker...

...The wife notices the little ways in which he treats her like a servant, or, if the couple is more advanced, in which he cleverly evades his half of‘ the chores...

...Esther Vilar writes about these elements, but in a grotesquely distorted way-she will be widely read by women who are afraid of feminism, but she will neither sting nor enlighten them because her portraits of female manipulators and their prey are too exaggerated for any woman to recognize them as a piece of her own life...

...The way women measure their worth by their husbands’ is also regularly discussed, though usually in terms of the world’s habit of doing so: “That’s Emma Clark-she’s married to Dr...

...Growing up means facing the music, not trying to change it...

...Both the mind and the emotions grab on to someone else’s fault...

...The grimness of this directive, backed up by the arbitrary threat of disaster, draws such a heavy, unyielding picture of life that one questions why she is so committed to perpetuating it...