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Women are under siege and oppressed, while men have it easy.
This is the unmistakable message of Margaret L. Andersen's
Thinking About Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and
Gender, one of America's most popular Women's Studies 101
textbooks.
The
mischaracterizations and distortions begin in Chapter One on
page one, where Andersen speaks briefly of the progress which
women have made, but soon cautions the reader that "there's
still a long way to go" for women to achieve equality. To
support her point, she tells us:
1)
"In the 1990s, women college graduates who worked full-time
earned, on average, 70 percent of what men college graduates
earned working full time";
2)
"Each year five million women experience some form of violence,
two-thirds of it committed by someone they know";
3)
"Employed women" work 13 hours a week more than "employed men"
on "household tasks."
All
three of these statements are extremely misleading. Yes,
full-time employed women do earn less money, on average, than
full-time employed men do, but they also: work 400+ hours a year
less than men do; work only a tenth as many overtime hours; have
25% less overall work experience; comprise only 5% of workplace
fatalities (because they do not do the hazardous jobs which
necessarily pay better); and are far less likely than men to
work nights, weekends, have long commutes, or to travel for
their jobs. Surveys which take these factors into consideration
have shown that, for the same job, women earn within 2% of what
men do.
The
"five million women experience some form of violence" statistic
is misleading because it is driven sharply upward by domestic
violence studies which lump trivial acts which women do as often
as men (such as swearing at or insulting your partner, slamming
doors or stomping out of rooms, etc.) with serious violence.
Whenever two-sex surveys of domestic violence are taken, women
are shown to be just as likely to initiate and engage in spousal
abuse as men, and roughly 75% of all violent crime victims are
male.
Women may do an extra 13 hours a week of "household duties" but
the average full-time employed man works eight hours a week more
than the average full-time employed woman. Andersen's survey
allows for the inclusion of people who are "employed" but who
don't work full-time, and since most part-time workers are
female, this pushes the disparity in hours worked between men
and women in the survey even higher. Together with the fact that
men spend more time commuting and work more physically strenuous
jobs than women do, what the survey really tells us is that the
overall labor of a household is, in fact, being divided evenly
between men and women, a finding consistent with most research
on the subject.
The
book also spins myths about "deadbeat dads" (actually, over 80%
of the men who have jobs and can see their children pay their
child support in full), women's supposedly ignored health care
needs (the government at every level spends more on women's
health than men's, even though it is men who dominate in most
diseases and it is women who live longer), and numerous others.
Andersen urges readers to notice women's role both in society
and in everyday life--good advice, except that she instructs
women to look only for female suffering and male privilege. For
example, she counsels readers to look at the "bright lights
shining in the night skyline" and see that they "represent
thousands of women...who clean the corporate suites."
Fair enough, but what about the thousands of men who risked
their safety and even their lives (including yours truly) to
build those same skyscrapers? What about the men who pick up the
trash, crawl through the sewers to make repairs, or who work on
power lines 50 feet up in the air? In Andersen's book such men
are as invisible as she imagines women to be.
Like most Women's Studies textbooks, materials, and lectures,
Andersen's text ignores the growing number of strong, articulate
female scholars, researchers, writers, activists, and leaders
who call themselves "equity feminists" and support feminism's
basic goals but oppose the rampant distortions and out and out
man-hating of the established feminist movement. These include:
Canadian Senator Anne Cools, a former shelter director and a
pioneer of the battered women's movement who is now a fathers'
rights advocate; author/activist Erin Pizzey, who set up the
first battered women's shelter ever in England in 1971 and now
advocates for abused men; Camille Paglia, the legendary author
and cultural observer; author and ‘60s feminist icon Doris
Lessing, who says that in modern culture men are "continually
demeaned and insulted by women without a whimper of protest";
Cathy Young, co-founder of the Women's Freedom Network and
author of Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to
Achieve Equality, author and columnist Wendy McElroy, founder of
Independent Feminists (ifeminists.com); Christina Hoff Sommers,
author of Who Stole Feminism?, former Women's Studies
professor Daphne Patai, author of Professing Feminism; crime
journalist Patricia Pearson, author of When She Was Bad:
Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence; and countless
others.
Instead, Andersen chooses to trot out the standard collection of
cranks and hate-mongers such as Catherine MacKinnon (who wrote
that under the conditions of our society, "all heterosexual sex
is rape"), and Andrea Dworkin (who wrote "marriage as an
institution developed from rape as a practice").
Andersen also cites numerous discredited feminist researchers
such as Diane Russell, who arrives at high numbers of female
victims in her surveys by classifying consensual sex as rape and
hugs and horseplay from male relatives as incest, and Carol
Gilligan, whose baseless and unscientific research led in part
to the myth that girls are silenced and oppressed in the
classroom. Ms. Gilligan's scholarly reputation was permanently
laid to rest by Christina Hoff Sommers, in her chapter
"Gilligan's Island" from her book The War Against Boys.
American college students (male and female) need a balanced
textbook which includes dissident feminist voices and which
looks honestly at the many challenges women face as well as the
many advantages they enjoy. Instead, they are saddled with
factually-challenged propaganda tracts, which are allowed to
exist because of PC intimidation mixed with an unspoken,
condescending university atmosphere which says, "don't argue
with the little ladies--you can't expect those gals who teach
Women's Studies to keep their facts straight."
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