Womyns' |
inhumanity to |  Woman |
Posted on 08/12/2002 5:34:35 PM PDT by Utah Girl
A feminist author discovers that women aren't always nice. Betsy Hart says this isn't news to anyone who survived seventh grade.
My mother had a wonderful way of summing up small truths with bang-on accuracy. It was she, the mother of three boys and two girls, who noted simply that "boys are boys, and girls are manipulators."
That girls and women can be petty, mean, backstabbing, vindictive, and jealous is not news to any female who has survived the seventh grade. But it seems to be big news in the popular culture (really, don't baby boomers discover everything?) where the subject of "Mean Girls" has recently been the focus of lengthy articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the stuff of tabloid talk shows.
Into this climate enters Woman's Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis Chesler, author of the best-selling Women and Madness, along with Letters to a Young Feminist, and a leader of the so-called "second wave" of feminism.
It comes down to this, a disillusioned Chesler seems to lament: In spite of all the wonderful, generous goodness which "should" inherently be found in the Sisterhood-as opposed to the brutish "brotherhood of man"-the fact is women can be real bitches.
Chesler worked on the book for decades. It shows. The too-long tome is full of angst-ridden anecdotes, stories, and all kinds of case histories of the little-defined group that Chesler interviewed for the book, women generally bemoaning how other women have betrayed them.
Chesler herself says she's been the victim of such treachery many times. She describes students who have been ungrateful, feminist compatriots who've stolen her ideas, and most of all her mother. Talk about too much information. Ouch. (Chesler's view seems to be that all mother/daughter and biological sister relationships are doomed from the start.) One can't help feeling that the book may have been written to settle more than a few old scores.
Chesler looks at everything from ancient mythology to today's middle school, from the animal kingdom to the modern workplace, and finds that women tend to resemble Cinderella's stepsisters a lot more than they do Cinderella.
One woman named Elsa recounts, "My best friend was a divorced woman who could not have children. I refused to discriminate against her because she was a divorced woman. In retrospect, I should have shunned her the way the other married women did. My friend not only made off with my husband. What was worse was her systematic campaign to become my son's mother."
Another woman has a similar tale. "I became friendly with a woman in our new neighborhood . . . . I confided in her and considered her a best friend. Guess what? About a year into our friendship she had begun having an affair with my husband."
Fortunately for us, women's betrayal isn't always so complete. Still, Chesler writes that even young girls "learn that a safe way to attack someone else is behind her back, so that she will not know who is responsible. This tracks girls and women into lives of chronic gossip and rumor mongering. . . . girls may use social manipulation to dominate or express anger because they have learned to do this from their female role models: adult women."
And watch out for those adult women. If they aren't stealing husbands, they're stealing the top spots in the business world. Unless there is a lot of room for women in key positions, says Chesler, the knives will be out.
(For Chesler, the biggest outrage seems to be women who don't believe another woman's story of sexual harassment or discrimination on the job, though it should hardly be a news flash that such accusations shouldn't be believed unless and until they are proven.)
Throughout the book, Chesler maintains an air of sad incredulity that women can be, in their own duplicitous, manipulative way, really nasty-just like men. Remember Lord of the Flies?
Sigh. Weren't we supposed to be so much better than "them"?
But of course we aren't "better." Women are different from men, and different from each other. We're also fully human, which makes us just as capable of sin in all its amazing manifestations as our brutish brothers.
Chesler appears conflicted about this truth, to which she grudgingly pays lip service, while looking for other "reasons" for women's inhumanity to women. Maybe it's that we live under an oppressive male culture, so we've learned to oppress others. Maybe it's that there are only a few "top" spots for women, whether in the workplace or in a culture that values youth and beauty too much, so we're always looking to knock off or knock down the competition. But maybe it really is just that women are real people after all.
Where Chesler's work proves valuable is that first, this is a well-known feminist pointing out the very inconvenient truth that the Sisterhood can be pretty bloody. Further, interspersed between the scenes of tortured betrayal and anecdotes that seemed mined from group therapy sessions centered around singing, sharing, and emotionalism, Chesler includes some really interesting data about how women typically relate to each other.
And a lot of it isn't pretty. For instance, "According to University of California anthropologist Victoria Burbank," writes Chesler, "women mainly target other women for aggression. They did so in 91 percent of the 137 societies Burbank surveyed. . . ." In other words, the message to husband-stealers is this: It's generally the other woman, not the husband, who will bear the brunt of the scorned wife's wrath.
Along the way, Chesler notes that too many women, including perhaps herself, are wholly focused on how others have vivisected them, rarely on how they have been cruel to other women. Chesler offers her prescription for how women can overcome such backbiting, manipulative habits. Some of it makes great sense. "A woman must be encouraged to put what she wants into words, to ask for it directly, not to wait for someone to guess what she wants. If a woman cannot get what she wants, she does not have to pout, blame herself, give up, disconnect, or become enraged. She must learn that she can get what she wants another day or at another job or with another person. Women must be encouraged to move on as well as to stay the course."
And some of it is great nonsense. "Each woman must understand that women have probably been internalizing sexist values for thousands of years; this value structure cannot disappear immediately. This means that no individual woman is responsible for solving this immense problem by herself, or even in her lifetime. I would like women to understand that the practice of sisterhood is a psychological and ethical discipline." Huh?
How about the "ethical discipline" that says people should try to be better human beings, whatever their gender, and we should be working to inculcate good character into our children of both sexes? After all, doesn't being fully human, and capable of sin, mean being capable of goodness too? Which really is the inescapable, greatest weakness of Woman's Inhumanity to Woman. Having suddenly discovered what the rest of us have always known-that women can in fact be superbly nasty to each other-Chesler then seems determined to put virtually every woman into the fully evil, conniving stepsister category. Which in turn may say a lot more about her world than the world the rest of us inhabit.
Because so many women have stories like mine: more than a half-dozen friends from high school to whom I'm still close some twenty (cough) years later, who aren't afraid to say, "I totally disagree with you," and then put aside whatever the disagreement was, who speak about each other "behind their backs"-but only with the most positive things to say. Close friendships with several other delightful, intelligent, warm, and supportive women friends and mentors whom I trust and enjoy, and acquaintances with many more who fit the same description.
I even got along terrifically with my mom, for every one of the thirty-two years I was blessed to know her. (She may have thought, rightly, that many girls excelled at manipulation. But at the same time she adored her daughters whom, along with her sons, she wholly encouraged to become people of character. And, she prized her many quality women friends.)
Yes, I've seen the dark side of women. Though I'd prefer to think otherwise, I know I've been the dark side myself. It's no surprise to any of us who see women as human, no more and no less, that the dark side is or can be there. But I certainly don't populate my life with the kind of she-monsters that Chesler describes (assuming she's even describing them fairly). Why does she? Why would anybody?
This book is important because, as a leading feminist, Chesler is here something of a "whistle-blower" when it comes to truths about women that the feminists would much rather gloss over. Yet in almost universally savaging women, the very thing she accuses our sex of doing so exquisitely, she seems to be moving women as a gender from "hero" to "villain" status. Such broad group-based descriptions are not only equally absurd-they are equally dehumanizing.
~Betsy Hart is raising four young children--including three girls-to be, she hopes, human beings. In her spare time she writes a weekly, nationally syndicated column for the Scripps Howard News Service.
Ah yes, but as Billy Joel once sang: "She's Always A Woman to Me".
| Womyns' |
inhumanity to | Woman |
Asbsolute torture. I was new to the school in 7th and never EVER felt welcome. Ah, the 70's. Found comfort in alcohol and drugs and then I didn't give a damn what they said about me anymore.
It took some years but I finally learned to fight back...usually with sarcasm or a sharp retort. You musta been one of "the crowd" and don't you remember making fun of someone who didn't have the same clothes and make-up you did? Come on now.
One of the good 'uns.
I disagree.
It is also about shame. Most women do not feel shame the way most men do.
The National Organization for Women is a (small) pack of bitter, humorless cows. It is simply a political arm of the DNC and the billion-dollar abortion industry. They have absolutely no shame. If their Democrat President rapes a few women and uses his powerful position to turn the Oval Office into a sleazebag motel room for quickies with a naive young intern, that is no concern of theirs.
Because they have no shame.
Are you sure men feel shame? Name a few who do. Terry MacAuliffe? Tom Daschle? Bob Torricelli? Bill Clinton?
Not defending the NOW gang, I'm only pointing out that in politics it's all about partisanship. They have admitted they looked the other way to Clinton's transgressions because politically he was more to their liking. If he were a Republican with these charges, they would have been calling for his head. How are liberal men any different in these circumstances? Conservatives could be like this if they were willing to play the same kind of hardball.
The National Organization for Women is a (small) pack of bitter, humorless cows.
It's unlikely Hugh Heffner will be calling very many of these gals in the near future, but it doesn't change my opinion of the article, which is a little too nice on men. The biggest a@#&oles I've ever known were of the male persuasion.
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