THE CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF FEMINISM

...where Greer wildly and carelessly fires off statistics like a child playing with a gun, Young levels hers coolly and accurately...

...She writes dismis-sively that "deferring to children is hardly a traditional value" and that critics of what she extols as the "dual-career lifestyle" ignore evidence that "two careers need not spell the death of healthy family life...

...To achieve any more, to be able to live the same lives as men, we would actually have to be men—and this, I suspect, is not an enticing goal to most women...

...American women hold more positions of power outside the home than they did in previous generations, but they are also more likely to be divorced or never married, more likely to be single mothers, more likely to have an abortion or catch a sexually transmitted disease...

...eration had "gone too far" when it hadn't gone far enough: It would have been inexcusable to remain silent...

...She's even willing to defend female circumcision against such Western practices as the mammogram and the pap smear...

...where Greer speaks of women as helpless dupes of patriarchal civilization, Young speaks of them as equal participants in a free, democratic society...

...Indeed, they should reject marriage as slavery, and if they want to be mothers they should do it by themselves...

...On the other hand, if a woman shows up who can handle the job, Young would insist that she should be given it...

...The Cultural Contradictions of Feminism By Danielle Crittenden With the 1970s back in fashion—bellbottoms, platform shoes, even Donny and Marie!—it's not surprising that Ger-maine Greer and her in-your-face, death-to-the-male-power-structure feminism is back, too...

...Greer's not ready to eff off, and her book amounts to a 384-page rant against almost everybody and everything: men, large corporations, new girl-power feminists, old flower-power feminists, doctors, lipstick, supermarkets, washing machines, transsexuals, the missionary position, and tongue piercing...

...it is at the heart of the uproar over high school killings by middle-class children whose own "healthy family life" included parents so unaware that they did not notice their sons were building bombs in the garage...

...Indeed, in her final chapter, Greer insists that a truly humane government would support little separatist, female villages of single mothers living communally...

...And in a big way, with the first print run for her new book, The Whole Woman, a hundred thousand copies...

...In fact, to Young, a child's preference for his mother is exactly like his preference for a red cup: an irrational choice that he can be reasoned out of...

...Call it "A Hut of One's Own...

...And neither may spending long days with a sitter who regards him as a chore to be dealt with along with the vacuuming...

...Greer has similarly little patience for the sexual revolution, observing as bitterly as any conservative that "the sexuality that has been freed is male sexuality" and now "any kind of bizarre behavior is [considered] legitimate if the aim is orgasm...

...She'll take the third world over the third way...

...Young, again attractively, is no special pleader for women...

...Going from Greer's book to Young's is like leaving the chaos and stench of the New York fish market for a meeting with an earnest policy wonk uptown...

...It's fine so long as it's convenient...

...We receive more respect at the office but less as mothers...

...But in the end, Young proves no less utopian than Greer...

...Those interests are rooted in the roles the vast majority of us eventually assume as wives and mothers, whether we continue to work or not...

...Right at the start, Greer announces that she was forced to write her new book because she couldn't stand hearing that women today could "have it all" and that the feminism of her genDanielle Crittenden is the author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman, recently published by Simon & Schuster...

...indeed, they hardly loom at all...

...It is a chokingly bitter irony that feminism accomplishes most within the confines of the superpower that grinds the life out of the world's women, makes war on them, and starves their children...

...Never mind that if there is one thing modern women should be worshipping at the feet of, it is Western medical science and all those machines that go ping: There's something nice about living in an age where there is little chance of dying in childbirth and some chance of beating breast and uterine cancer...

...Most of The Whole Woman is a diatribe against the ways of the West: patriarchal, soul-destroying, materialistic, oppressive, yadda yadda...

...No, they need not, but it depends on what your meaning of the word "healthy" is and whose "choice" we're talking about...

...Greer doesn't want to engage her readers...

...We lead more emancipated sex lives but have sacrificed male commitment...

...Young imagines that she has carved out a third way between the madness of radical feminism and the strictness of social conservatism...

...Greer is no Phyllis Schlafly, however, and having made these points, she reverts back to her 1970s default setting...

...Young's notion that we can somehow keep all the perks of modern female life along with all the comforts and satisfactions of traditional family life is equally unsustainable...

...But Greer is at least true to her beliefs in the way her less radical sisters are not...

...Greer gleefully admits her readiness to do away with men...

...she wants to sear them...

...Yes, she may be crazy: She complains, among other things, that her inability to find the right kind of pimiento in a supermarket is the fault of oppression by male grocery clerks...

...The trouble is where the chips fall...

...screeds...

...The same goes for a mother's desire to be with her children...

...And if sex is casual and divorce easy, then we'll need a much larger welfare program to take care of the increasing numbers of abandoned women and their children...

...Can we hammer out a contract that respects physical differences but doesn't victimize men or women...

...To a great extent, Greer's generation succeeded, but at a steep price...

...But in Young's world, they are as cheerfully amenable to being left to the care of strangers as they are to being taken care of at home by mom...

...Mainstream feminists now challenge us to "get beyond" our differences...

...They must eschew any serious entanglements with men...

...She has no trouble with couples who take on more traditional roles in the house, if that's their choice, just as she has no trouble with couples who don't, if that's their choice...

...That this vision might not appeal to large numbers of women does not trouble Greer...

...Perhaps the best solution for women would be to accept that they have achieved equality with men in every important way...

...It seems a simple, reasonable request...

...That this dual-career lifestyle may be healthy for parents but not their kids is now the subject of countless television specials and magazine stories...

...If we want to be heart surgeons or presidents, we may have to accept that we cannot be the mothers we want to be, or our children want us to be, or maybe we shouldn't be mothers at all...

...or the day-care workers to whom they must now entrust their infants so they can earn a living...

...twenty-four-hour day care is the solution...

...They just shouldn't assume that vast numbers of women would also prefer a life by themselves to a life with husband and family...

...In fact, all she has done is given radical feminism a bath and wiped the flecks of foam from its lips...

...Young asks...

...This approach sets Young attractively apart from feminists whose vision of a gender-blind society requires heavily coercive measures from the state, whether in the form of affirmative-action programs or "gender-fair" school curriculums that attempt to force boys to be more like girls...

...But give Greer this credit: For all her raving, she recognizes something that her mainstream feminist sisters do not...

...Perhaps that's because she takes about as much interest in children as the late W.C...

...This is the sort of denial that has led a generation of women to anguish and disappointment...

...Society once recognized and protected such interests through legal and social institutions...

...It's time for women to get angry again," Greer declares, and so she does, scoffing at the young naysayers who insist feminism's work has been done and believe it's time for the women's movement to, in her words, "eff off...

...And since that is very expensive, it will inevitably have to be subsidized by the state for millions of women who won't be able to afford it...

...Simply trying to sweep our relations with men under the rug, as Greer would have us do, or our relations with children, as Young would, won't help us realize the lives we crave...

...The price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character," she writes...

...And Greer sees that this has had disastrous consequences...

...The identification of feminism with the United States has dishonored it around the world...

...Dishonored feminism, she means, not the United States...

...Women should embrace pacifism and socialism...

...If we wish to live for ourselves and think only about ourselves, then we may manage to retain our independence, but little else...

...She dislikes all the fuss made over them by conservatives and feminists alike...

...If some women want to stay home with their kids, that's okay, just as it's okay if other mothers don't want to...

...Yet it is a question that reveals Young's deep-down belief that marriage and motherhood do victimize women...

...Liberated sexuality also implies widespread abortion, a phenomenon that Greer, almost alone among feminists, does not celebrate as a sign of great independence but deplores as the tragedy it is...

...For her, children are only one of many lifestyle choices available to people, and they can easily be sent away for eight, ten, twelve hours a day, no harm done, while mom and dad pursue their fulfilling lives...

...We'll also probably need laws that compel employers to accommodate the everyday events of our children's lives, like parent-teacher conferences and trips to the dentist...

...It's just that children and motherhood don't loom very large in her book...

...For some reason, Greer thinks the third world is less patriarchal, soul-destroying, materialistic, and oppressive, and for much of the book she gushes over any society that dresses in festively colored cloth and goes about barefoot...

...But Greer's generation sought to dismantle them, striving to replace women's natural alliance with each other—as defenders of marriage by law and custom—with a new "sisterhood" that regarded women as a political class in opposition to men...

...But are her musings really any more crazy than the respectable feminist belief that we can live lives identical to men's without compromising ourselves as women or compromising the lives of our children...

...They should follow Greer's own example, eventually turning into angry, unencumbered, sixty-year-old women like herself...

...This is the reality of women's lives, and it's why Young's third way can't work except in a theoretical exposition between hard covers...

...Young, good libertarian that she is, believes all policies and laws should be gender-blind, applied equally to men and women, letting the chips fall where they may...

...they are just dependent on other things: whether it's the state to provide the income and shelter the fathers of their children won't...

...While women may be leading more varied lives than ever before, their fundamental interests are unchanged...

...Young, a libertarian, has great faith that men and women, if left unregulated by societal prejudice and government interference, can work out their own individual bargains and arrangements in ways pleasing to everyone...

...What she denies is that our sexual differences have—or should have—any bearing on our dreams, ambitions, roles, and desires as individuals...

...Fields did...

...The "gender-blind" approach to equality has only intensified male pressure on women to perform more like men, both sexually and in the workplace, while it's devalued feminine pursuits like motherhood and making a home...

...If most men and women are going to work fulltime, then we are going to need someone to watch our kids...

...The difference is that Greer would have women sacrifice their relations with men in order to realize themselves, while Young would have them sacrifice their relations with their children...

...Where Greer is hysterical, Young is rational...

...Having had every legal, economic, political, and social impediment removed, we may have at last run up against the impediments—if you wish to call them that—of our sex...

...She espouses, for instance, the unusually sensible position that if a woman can't lift a fire hose or throw a grenade far enough to avoid blowing herself up, then she shouldn't be employed lifting firehoses or throwing grenades...

...If the future is men and women dwelling as images of each other in a world unchanged, it is a nightmare...

...Opening the book is like opening a blast furnace...

...But for Young, it registers not a whit...

...These days, even to raise this question is to open oneself up to the charge of being either a radical "difference feminist" like Greer—who views the female sex as irreconcilably at odds with men—or a hopelessly nostalgic traditionalist who wishes to "send women back" to the 1950s...

...For thirty years, the women's movement has pursued a definition of equality that allows no differences between men and women and urges women to take the same roles as men, in and out of the home...

...Being put in institutional care from earliest infancy, catching ear infections, and napping and playing according to group schedule, may not be a small child's definition of "healthy" family life...

...Well, here Young retreats to the mantra of "choice...

...Or, as he grows older, being pawned off in an endless succession of before- and after-school programs that begin with a dawn bus ride and breakfast in a baggie and end after dark with a microwaved meal eaten directly out of the package...

...On every side speechless women endure endless hardship, grief, and pain, in a world system that creates billions of losers for every handful of winners...

...where Greer indulges in sweeping, negative generalizations about men, Young treats the opposite sex with the same respect she requests in return...

...She grudgingly concedes that there may be some traits inherent in each sex, but only superficial ones—men like to watch football while women prefer the Lifetime channel...

...Reading The Whole Woman, I had a sudden, dreadful premonition that we are going to see much more of this literary cane-shaking over the next few years, as unrepentant 1960s radicals pen their "I'm not dead yet...

...For these mainstream feminists, the main obstacles that women face today are the shortage of affordable day care and fathers who do their share of the housework and diaper-changing, and such obstacles could be easily overcome if everybody would just stop judging each other and try to get along...

...Greer at least understands that both our desire to be mothers and children's need for mothers are not easily "gotten beyond" and haven't been solved by the gender-blind pursuit of equality...

...This is the view put forth in numerous books on working motherhood, and most recently by Cathy Young in Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality...

...But Young doesn't see the problem, even as it puddles around her feet...

...But the moment her cleaned-up ideology begins to speak, we hear the same old delusions...

...Greer is to feminism what the Unabomber is to envi-ronmentalism: You get the impression her manuscript was bashed out on a manual typewriter, sent out in a bulky old recycled envelope, and dunked in a bucket of water when it arrived at the publisher's for fear of explosives...

...or the goodwill of the bosses at the lousy jobs they stick to only for the benefits...

...Women's desire for men, their desire for comfort, indeed their desire for flush toilets and convenience stores can be chalked up to the evil influence of Western civilization...

...So too the feminist ideologues at the National Organization for Women have figured out that if women are going to pursue lives in every way indistinguishable from men's, then it is going to require the kind of dramatic increase in the reach and ambition of govern-ment—the kind of thing that gives libertarians like Young cold sweats...

...And while we no longer have to look to men for economic support, we can no longer count on it either...

...Or, when he is older still, being left alone in an empty house to waste hours rotating between television, the Internet, and Nintendo...

...But unlike other feminists who celebrate the "naturalness" of tribal women, Greer is willing to acknowledge and accept tribal women's embrace of brutal tribal practices...

...We must accept, they claim, that we live in a changed world in which most women—including most mothers of even very small children—work fulltime, either out of necessity or by choice...

...I've never met a child who is not willing to go to the mat for his preference for, say, a red cup over a blue one...

...And if it isn't convenient...

...There will always be women like Greer who choose radically independent lives for themselves...

...She takes a similarly neutral view of sexual roles...

...As thousands and thousands of women have painfully had to recognize, they are no less dependent than they were a generation ago...

...I suspect that Young, if buttonholed, would refuse to accept that our children are in any way sacrificed in her view of the world...

...Young sees the differences between the sexes as being no more profound than the difference between a short person and a tall one...

...Of course, Young doesn't acknowledge the price of her vision with the same mad gusto as Greer...

...If there is one lesson from the past thirty years of social change that women can learn, it is that our choices carry consequences, and that we must understand the tradeoff of every action we take...