Don't Take It So Personally
About 130 years ago in
England, an unlikely coalition of feminists, trade unionists, and clergymen
transformed the sexual mores of the day. The alliance began progressively
enough, as a campaign against a law authorizing the police to round up
prostitutes--and other women suspected of loose morals--and force them to
submit to pelvic exams. The law was repealed. Thrilled at their newfound clout,
feminists looked around for another issue.
They
found it in white slavery, or "traffic in women." The cry went out. Newspapers
took it up, running story after story about virgins sold to drooling
aristocrats. New laws were passed. The "social-purity" movement was born.
Things spun quickly out of the feminists' control. Whipped
into a frenzy, citizens formed the National Vigilance Association, but rather
than protecting impoverished virgins the vigilantes conducted a crusade against
prostitutes, homosexuals, music halls, theaters, paintings of nudes, and French
novels (which they burned). At first, feminists joined in the fun. But when the
misogyny and terror of the social-purity movement became impossible to ignore,
they withdrew into the background. Which is where they remained for the next 20
years, discredited and humiliated, until the next wave of feminist activism
came around.
Feminist
historian Judith Walkowitz published an essay about this incident back in 1983,
during the height of feminist anti-pornography fervor. She wanted to show what
can happen when feminism joins forces with the public-decency crowd. Now what
can happen has happened. The social-purity movement that is the Clinton sex
scandal has at least some of its roots in feminist thought, and the embarrassed
mumbles of Gloria Steinem, et al., on the Lewinsky question show that feminists
know it. For instance: Why were Paula Jones' lawyers able to depose Clinton on
every sordid detail of his sex life? Because of sexual harassment laws that say
a man's entire sexual past may be considered relevant in a lawsuit, even though
a woman's may not. This arrangement was one of the triumphs of feminism over
the past two decades.
Like its 19 th century counterpart,
the women's movement will be forced to retreat from the field, confused and in
disarray, if it doesn't come to terms with its mistakes. The biggest one (as
many have pointed out) was blindly following the lead of that most illiberal of
thinkers, Catherine MacKinnon. With her belief that unwanted sexual advances
and utterances (and even, in some cases, wanted ones) degrade women so
profoundly that it's worth limiting free speech to prevent them, MacKinnon laid
the intellectual groundwork for today's sexual harassment laws. Before today,
the most egregious outcome of MacKinnonism was the Clarence Thomas hearings.
Liberal feminists (myself included, I'm sorry to say) were so eager to "educate
the public" about sexual harassment, to say nothing of wanting to get rid of an
anti-abortion Supreme Court candidate, that they were willing to overlook the
frightening precedent being set. A man's political career was nearly ended and
his private life pawed through while an entire nation watched, even though the
charges against him were never subjected to the rigorous standards of evidence
that would have prevailed in a court of law.
Back in
the 1960s and 1970s, before feminism came to mean anti-pornography statutes and
laws against "hostile work environments" and other forms of censoriousness,
there were all kinds of feminists. There were the liberal kind, such as Betty
Friedan, who believed in the Equal Rights Amendment, day care, birth control,
and abortion. There were the libertarian kind, such as Walkowitz, who argued
for sexual freedom, no matter how troublesome the consequences. (There were
also feminists who just seem goofy in retrospect, such as women's-music types
and flannel-wearing lesbian separatists.)
The healthy diversity of feminist life was killed off by
two things: 1) In the late 1970s, after the Equal Rights Amendment failed to
pass, the women's movement deliberately switched from the political arena to
the courts. A legal strategy for change had worked for Thurgood Marshall of the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, so why not? The answer is as true for women's rights
as it has been for civil rights: A movement always suffers when it fails to
subject its ideas to wide public debate. 2) Influenced by MacKinnon and others,
what the women's movement decided to seek in the courts was equal protection
plus : the right to work plus special protection against nasty
people in the workplace; the right to make their own sexual decisions
plus special protection against older, savvier guys who take advantage.
But rights are not necessarily cost-free. A relentless expansion of my rights
usually ends up imposing burdens on your rights, or even on other rights of my
own. The fury that followed some of the more questionable expansions of women's
rights has made it difficult to talk about anything else.
During a
debate on feminism, the philosopher Hannah Arendt once passed a note to a
colleague that said, "What do we lose when we win?" It was the sort of dour
remark that made Arendt unpopular among her female peers. That's a shame,
because Arendt's thought offers a way out of feminism's current jam. She stood
for the clear separation of the public from the private sphere, a distinction
dismissed as patriarchal a long time ago by feminists who thought it denigrated
domestic life. But failing to see the importance of this distinction has got
feminism into the trouble it's in today.
To Arendt, the elimination of the
public-private distinction is what distinguishes 20 th century
totalitarianism from earlier and lesser forms of oppression. Even in the days
of absolute monarchs, a person's home was his (or, to a lesser degree, her)
castle. But totalitarian governments want to control your private life down to
your psyche and to mold you into a New Man or New Woman on whatever model
they're peddling.
Conversely, Arendt's public
realm is the exact opposite of the private realm: It's where you're not
protected and shouldn't be. A classicist, Arendt saw the public arena as a
version of the Athenian agora--a world of political theater, where the harsh
light of publicity shines upon fierce debate. Arendt's conception of the public
was phrased in quasimilitaristic language almost expressly designed to irritate
feminists (it didn't, but only because they had stopped listening). She
declared that, for the public realm to function effectively, participants must
display a love of glory. It is a hunger for glory and all that comes with it--a
willingness to sacrifice one's personal desires to the common good; a sense of
honor, dignity, and fair play--that allows politics to rise above a mere
squabbling among interests. This is a spirit feminism lacks, which is why it
has allowed women's interests as a class to trump the common interest in
privacy.
Rediscovering Arendt's
public-private split wouldn't necessarily entail abandoning the feminist notion
that the personal is political. We're all better off because feminists turned
hitherto private topics into subjects of public debate. Who'd want to go back
to the days when you couldn't even talk about condoms? The problem is that
we've reversed the phrase: We've made the political personal. It's one thing to
put sensitive subjects out there for discussion. It's another thing to welcome
jurists, reporters, and the rest of the American public into our bedrooms. As
it turns out, it may not be such a good idea to welcome them into our
workplaces and schools either, at least not as warmly as we have. So should we
do away with all forms of sexual harassment law? Or just parts of it--the
hostile work environment clause, say, or the gender-biased evidentiary rules?
It will take years to find the best place to draw the line, and we'll never get
it perfectly right. The important thing is to realize that it's way past time
to move it.
