IDEAS: A Feminist on the Outs

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Throughout, Sommers lumps together as man-hating "gender feminists" individuals who in real life disagree furiously on censorship, pornography and the extent of women's "victimization." She attacks feminist pedagogy and, tellingly, she thinks N.O.W. stands for National Organization of Women when it is actually "for" women and open to male members.

In Sommers' view, the gender feminists virtually rule the academy, where they effectively squelch all dissent. Never mind that Sommers herself has managed to thrive in this supposedly hostile atmosphere -- getting tenure, being appointed to a high-level federal panel on higher education, and garnering six-figure support for her book. Sommers is right to emphasize women's gains, but the biggest ones have been for women like herself and her ideological enemies, who are well-educated, upper-middle-class professionals.

Two temptations present themselves to women in this lucky minority: One is to downplay their own good fortune by exaggerating the forms of oppression they potentially share with the less fortunate -- rape, for example, or eating disorders. This allows for much fatuous p.c. whining of the kind Sommers justifiably takes to task. But the other temptation is to imagine that just because you are a free and fortunate creature, so is the rest of your sex. This leads, in Sommers' case, to a tone of distinctly unsisterly smugness.

In a world where millions of women have been losing ground before our very eyes -- in newly fundamentalist cultures, in the postcommunist countries that have restricted abortion or ceased to fund child care, in the expanding global sex industry and in the increasingly miserly American welfare state -- there is no need to exaggerate women's oppression. And there is no excuse for downplaying it.