Among the Intellectualoids/Analyzing a Feminist Whine
Iannone, Carol
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS ANALYZING A FEMINIST WHINE A regular feature of the extensive non-news pages of the New York Times is the Thursday "Hers" column. Initiated in 1977 by Times editor A. M....
...Sometimes they explain the gaps between theory and practice by insisting that feminism hasn't gone far enough...
...and even the rabbi concedes that she's less than satisfied with her revenge on Judaism...
...asked one columnist—seems bound to foster something resembling narcissism in one way or another...
...Thus both pro-porn and anti-porn feminists remain stranded far from the heart of the moral issues...
...Whatever the contradiction—the Catholic unable to condemn abortion, the feminist contemplating a face lift, the devout liberal unwilling to accept lesbianism—it is never too great to ponder irresolutely in print...
...Feminism hoped to arrive at some pure, unadulterated female identity by peeling off the layers of cultural accretion...
...younger women may be sensing the disorder in the lives of many feminists (perhaps by reading the Hers column...
...lives, that attack the Superwoman syndrome, that wonder about the feasibility of managing both career and family, that look nostalgically on the old rules of courtship, that find too much freedom to be paradoxically confining...
...According to one baffled columnist, even Aphra Behn, a seventeenth-century English playwright and the first English woman to write professionally, can lose her status as a quintessential feminist heroine when her life is examined too closely...
...Thus it can be a source of some amusement to read the columns that demand to know why certain women, successful women or younger women, for example, repudiate feminism...
...Moreover, once all of life's challenges have been translated into the social/political spheres, it's not easy to reclaim them...
...In a similar case, a columnist questions why feminism has become "puritanical," as evidenced, for example, in its campaign against pornography...
...With all its woeful shortcomings and inadequacies, then, amply if inadvertently documented in the columns themselves, feminism seems to stand as the reigning ideology of femininity in our time, comparable to the Victorian cult of true womanhood, and the backdrop against which the intellectual and/or professional woman must measure her life...
...Surveyed as a whole, the column can offer fascinating insight into the effects of feminism on the thought of contemporary women...
...For, not surprisingly, the underlying point of view in many if not most of the columns is some sort of acknowledged or unacknowledged feminism...
...A moment's reflection outside the feminist paradigm might have suggested that despite feminism's attempt to discourage women from being "sex objects," the habits of intensive self-absorption that are at the root of feminism`Flow can I shape my life so that every minute of my day fits me, suits me, pleases me...
...Neither is feminist thought very disciplined...
...a Moslem writer enjoys wearing the chador...
...ideology has at least partly re30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 placed the fully felt reality (as the use of too many expletives can drain a vocabulary of real color and energy...
...Women try to solve through feminism the problems that feminism itself causes, try to reclaim personal feeling, private vision, genuine integrity against an ideology of manufactured, public, collective identity...
...When he asks her why she has told him at all of her pregnancy since she intends to manage it completely alone, again an unspoken answer hovers in the air...
...When all of life's contingencies are screened through a political lens, some essential privacy is lost or seriously damaged: all aspects of life, even, or perhaps especially, those that are poorly understood by the writer, become fodder for public reflection, explanation, and consumption...
...Furthermore, feminism politicizes the traby Carol Iannone ditional understanding of vanity, making it society's fault and thus preventing women from seeing their part in its perpetuation...
...Some women long for a baby, others admit they'd like a man, while still others have had it with the new sensitive male and the new hands-on daddy...
...Clung to with tenacity, feminism nevertheless proves to be an impoverished guide to the human condition, bordering the truth with a barbed wire of ideology, as on the question of feminine appearance...
...Faced with a contradiction that might break into truth, the writer retreats into a socio-political explanation, but the real answer almost seems to hover on the page...
...But so far out of touch with her real feelings in the matter is she that she is soon wielding a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 31...
...One would like to think that some atavistic, preconscious glimpse that sex is serious, that it is more than recreation, has managed to flicker even into feminist awareness...
...Some writers cold-heartedly insist on diminishing the emotional implications of biology'physical pregnancy . . . means occupation by a foreign body...
...On the other hand, one is almost touched to read the writer who wonders why so many women are still in psychotherapy after years of liberation...
...One wonders if this failure of feminism to answer the deeper cries of the heart may at least partly account for the surprising number of Hers columns on spiritualism, fortunetelling, and psychic phenomena.knife in rage at his rejection of her...
...This is the trap of publicity, of ideology...
...Because if she can't flaunt her "independence" at him, use it somehow to manipulate and later belittle him, it isn't really worth it...
...but of course neither then is it real independence...
...Thus there are the columns that bewail the loss of intimacy in women's Carol Iannone teaches in New York University's Gallatin Division and is managing editor of Academic Questions...
...For example, jargon words like "nurturance," "intimacy," "caring," and "sharing," now substitute for what has faded of women's traditional access to the emotional life...
...Even a contented at-home mother must examine her conscience for the tendency to live through her family, and happy marriages must be scrutinized for what makes them happy...
...a TV news reporter admits she prefers doing soft news to hard...
...Those who don't have it all wish they did, but those who do have it all seem to be missing something still...
...And don't look to feminism for consistency...
...Writers are willing to quibble, qualify, modify, tinker, and retouch, but none will elevate their complaints into a full-scale challenge to feminism...
...The reason they are still in psychotherapy is that feminism clearly does not suffice—it cannot confront the conflicts of a woman's soul...
...When the main character in this film, a single career woman, tells the married man whose baby she is carrying that she will have the child and raise it alone, she is clearly leaning on the feminist ideology that has led many women to think this is a viable, even desirable option...
...We may well be seeing the disorganizing effects of feminism indirectly reflected in TV series like "Moonlighting" and movies like Broadcast News as well, in which the conflicted desires of a woman character shape the plot...
...Admittedly, such pieces tend to stand out in their peculiar singlemindedness...
...From letter to letter," the writer reports sadly, "she swerves from fury at her lover's domineering treatment of her to a pleading reassurance that she would do what he wanted her to...
...But because of the jargon in which feminism is mired—woman as victim of sexual exploitation, for example—the movement is unable to make the full case against free sex and pornography (which are harmful to men as well as women) even to other feminists, especially those caught between feminism and the larger liberal left...
...Pioneer feminists watch in puzzlement as their daughters get their ears pierced...
...Time and again, women who thought they were remaking the world must instead learn the basic truths their mothers might have taught them had the daughters not been busy trying to raise maternal consciousness along with their own, as some columns disclose...
...as a forum in which women, chiefly writers, examine their post-liberation lives...
...The number of columns concerned with looks, aging, and so on almost seemed to prompt one writer to wonder aloud why there is more narcissism among women now than ever before...
...Conflict is of course what drama and literature are all about, but chronically unresolved conflict is a relatively new and extremely dubious contribution...
...D espite all the revisionism coursing through the Hers column, however, there is never any serious questioning of the tenability of the feminist view in general or of its viability as a guide to feminine existence...
...Initiated in 1977 by Times editor A. M. Rosenthal at the suggestion of writer Lois Gould, honored in 1985 by the publication of a collection of its entries entitled Hers: Through Women's Eyes, the column has been running weekly in the Home section (where else...
...some emphasize them—"We are women...
...Writers decry the practice of women supporting their husbands' careers, revile the sentimentalization of maternity, condemn marriage as an arrangement for one and a half persons, complain that public space is a male preserve...
...Part of the confusion is surely due to the displacements that occur when the personal becomes political...
...The typical Hers column is liable to be more circumspect, rather chastened, even a bit tongue-tied, as the insistent, sobering realities of the morning after begin to crystallize...
...and a particularly controversial columnist confided that she may have become a rabbi to avenge herself on what she saw as a misogynistic tradition...
...We bleed...
...But if feminism has not yet reached .1..3 a crisis of self-awareness, the culture at large has clearly begun to see through the rhetorical surface, as evidenced in even a crude mass market vehicle of popular entertainment like Fatal Attraction...
...or, on the other hand, they rebuke feminism for having gone too far too soon (the rebuke couched in a respectful, hopefully corrective spirit...
...Maybe the successful women want to relish their own achievements without having to glorify the sisterhood...
...We learn that, sisterhood notwithstanding, women can be selfish, envious, and competitive toward each other...
...But when you systematically diminish and dissolve the forms by which people structure their lives, you don't get the real essence, you get confusion (or worse...
...the monkey paints the bars of his/ her cage...
...In large part, the absolute convictions of heyday feminism, the righteous acclamations, the rhetorical urgencies, the sweeping abstractions about gender behavior have decidedly diminished...
...or sometimes a writer blames herself for missing the mark...
...and, if you're a modern feminist, you write about it, maybe in the Hers column...
...A few columns actually protest this stampede to publicity, again without seeing its New Age/feminist roots...
...In some pieces, the ideology is straightforward, for example, an expose of the power base of male/female relationships (although in 1984 this could hardly have come as a shock to anyone...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
