What Else Do Women Want?

Politics is largely a matter of what gets noticed. Its practitioners exert themselves to make us place certain considerations in the foreground and others in the background. That is what lobbyists and political-action committees are for. Representatives of the American Medical Association or the Conservative Caucus, for instance, are, doubtless, estimable people who would like everybody to be happy; but when all is said and done, what they most want is for their clients to get more attention than the rest of us.

All that is so obvious that it may hardly seem worth saying. But consider a further point: Sexual politics is, in the end, just politics. It, too, is largely a matter of what we are encouraged to notice and what we are discouraged from seeing. Its practitioners want us to place in the foreground the concerns of one sex and in the background those of the other. To be sure, like other lobbyists, they are likely to tell you that their ultimate concern is with the good of all humanity, with which the interests of their group happen to coincide. Many of them will genuinely believe it, just as former General Motors president Charles Wilson probably believed that what was good for G.M. was good for America. Indeed, many of them will be right--just as Wilson was right--to an extent. But only to an extent and only at those times when their interests do not compete with the interests of others. At all other times, they will remember the first principle of their calling: There is only so much attention to go around, and the point of the game is to get most of it for their team.

The fact that sexual politics is just politics brings us quickly to a dismal conclusion that has long been waiting for all of us to see: Whatever it once may have been in theory, the women's movement today is, nothing more or less than a lobby, single-mindedly promoting the interests of one group at the expense of another, without regard to logic, principle or justice. "By their fruits ye shall know them," and ideology has long ceased to be the question for feminists; the question is, rather, just this: Which side gets its interests attended to? That is as true of the movement's most conservative representatives as it is of the radicals: The two most powerful women in national Government, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler, are exemplary hard-ass Reaganites in relation to all minorities except their own, that of middle-class women, to which they are invariably as indulgent as any discredited bleeding-hearter.

Generally, when one interest group succeeds in getting such special attention, the result may be unfair, but it is not likely to be terribly injurious to those passed over. The simple mathematics of the lobbying business usually guarantee that no individual will have to suffer in anything like the proportion to which another individual is benefited. Singling out the soybean growers of America for special treatment is not, realistically, the equivalent of discriminating against each of the other workers of the country: There are just too many of them, and whatever relative disadvantage they may suffer will be diffused too widely to allow any of them legitimate cause for feeling personally aggrieved.

In this regard, however, sexual politics is different from other kinds--perhaps, in fact, unique. There are, after all, only two sexes, dividing the human race about equally. To discriminate in favor of one is, unavoidably, to discriminate in equal degree against the other. A person who likes the Irish better than other nationalities cannot really be said to be bigoted against all the other tribes of humanity, cannot seriously be called a racist. But a person who preaches the superiority of one sex necessarily preaches the inferiority of the other and does deserve to be called a sexist. A movement that tells us, by precept or example, that we all have to be especially attentive to the interests of one sex also tells us that we have to be especially oblivious to those of the other; even if it calls that instruction consciousness raising, such a movement deserves to be called sexist.

Despite its protestations of sexual egalitarianism, when the National Organization of Women argues against (as it does) efforts to redress the traditional antimale bias of child-custody settlements, it is not merely working for women, as it will tell you it is; it is also working against men. The same is true when feminists demand (with some success) that the traditional presumption of innocence be withheld from accused rapists and extended beyond previously accepted limits for confessed husband-murderers. Or when communities across the land are lobbied (also with some success) to consider real or represented violence against women as an especially urgent issue, essentially more worthy of attention than ordinary violence against, you know, men. It is true, too, when the same people who once drove Dr. Edgar Berman from his post on a Democratic Party policy committee for making an issue of menstrual-related tension now demand that it be an admissible defense in court; or when, in response to feminist pressure, Indianapolis and other cities attempt to ban cinematic depictions of heterosexual (not homosexual) copulation on the grounds that the woman (not the man) in the scene is being degraded and that the women (not the men) in the audience or outside it are being oppressed, When, after some 25 executions of male criminals, the prospect of putting to death a woman who murdered, among others, her own mother suddenly stirs controversy and national uneasiness--when all this and much more goes on--the time has come to realize that what we are dealing with is sexism, the programmatic exaltation of one half of us at the expense of the other half, as promoted by the most successful political-action committee' of our age. In self-defense, if nothing else, the time has come for men to start noticing some things that they are not generally encouraged to notice these days.

Readers of Playboy may consider such admonitions superfluous. If there is any audience that one would expect to be at least as alert to male as to female interests, it ought to be the readership of this magazine. Well, no offense, but I wonder. Take a look at the following news item, reprinted in its entirety, and see how you feel about it.

San Francisco (October 20, 1983)--Female inmates of San Quentin prison will have to endure strip searches and showers under the scrutiny of male guards, says a Federal judge who ruled that privacy is secondary to security.

U.S. District Judge Spencer Williams yesterday dismissed a class-action suit brought by three inmates who complained it was humiliating to be naked in front of male guards at the maximum-security facility. They also complained some of the male guards verbally harassed them.

Williams said use of male guards didn't violate the inmates' constitutional right to privacy and said security needs justified the physical observation and hands-on searches by correctional officers, including men.

The ruling protects men's employment rights in correctional facilities, said California Attorney General John Van de Kamp.

Unless I am terribly mistaken, the reaction of most readers of this or any other publication is probably one of incredulity, even shock. Uniformed men being licensed to grope ("hands-on searches," indeed!) and abuse naked women, against their will, in the name of "men's employment rights"? Can such things be? In a time when female workers who find that men have been peeking into their shower room can successfully sue the company for millions (as happened recently in Wheeling, West Virginia), when "sexual harassment" is the red flag of the hour? Where is Ms.? Where are 60 Minutes, Nightline and the various evening news shows? How is it that they all failed to notice, and tell you about, such an enormity?

They didn't tell you about it because the news item quoted, though reprinted in its entirety, was transcribed with one slight alteration: My word processor was instructed to run it through its find-and-replace function, replacing the word male with female and men with women, and vice versa. As an experiment, you might try reading the item again, restoring the original words. Notice how commonplace it suddenly sounds? It sounds commonplace because it is commonplace. In its original version, it is not a bloodcurdling atrocity but part of the normal furniture of contemporary American life, unnoticed or barely remarked. That is why it was only by chance--while leafing through the back pages of a local paper on a slow news day--that I happened across it, and why you never heard about it on the network news. It is just not the sort of thing the people who run those enterprises consider worth noticing, not the sort of thing enlightened people, in the present climate of sexual politics, are supposed to notice.

What are we supposed to notice? Snuff movies, for one thing, the ultimate expression of man's rapacious, etc., and so forth, toward woman--even though, as it happens, there are no authentic snuff films. Still, the snuff-movie story has, so far, emerged in the campaign against men as a kind of Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a lie that keeps coming back no matter how many times it's exposed.

It does, however, have competitors for the honor. There is, for example, the fabled crowd of cheering, applauding men in the famous New Bedford rape case of three years ago--a crowd that did not exist, as was eventually discovered by a press that did not go out of its way to deflate the myth it had helped create. And, of course, there is the formulaic utterance "Women earn 59 cents for every dollar a man earns"--a figure that is technically correct, to be sure; but, as George Gilder (on the right), Lester Thurow (on the left) and several others have pointed out, a disparity resulting from a variety of causes (contined on page 156) What Else? (continued from page 68) (many women take years off to raise children; they have, as a group, spent less time in the work force piling up seniority, etc.), of which systematic discrimination is emphatically not one. It matters not. The New York Times, I am convinced, has a special 59-cents-on-the-dollar line of type on constant stand-by, ready to be bunged into every third issue or so as proof of man's inhumanity to woman. The phrase is routinely flourished, like a flag, whenever some new assault on male interests requires justification.

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This is not the way things were supposed to work out, gang. It may sound quaint now, but there are those of us who can remember having had high hopes that women's liberation, as it was then called, would prove to be not just another piggy little special-interest group looking out for number one but an actual movement for, well, liberation, freeing male and female alike from a host of accumulated stupidities. There was, after all, much cause for such hope. We were repeatedly told--and it made sense--that men should support feminism because of the new freedoms they stood to gain, the old macho encumbrances they would be able to shed, the promise that both sexes would come out of the transformation freed of much that had formerly worked to make them enemies of one another and themselves.

So we hoped and so we expected, once upon a time. Even at the outset, however, there were intimations of trouble to come, apparent if you looked at what the members of the movement's vanguard were saying and writing among themselves. What you found was eerie and disturbing--a peculiar kind of double-tracking that was either deranged or flabbergastingly disingenuous. Somehow or other, with one exception, all the gains men might have envisioned from the new dispensation were finessed away. (The exception was the right to cry, which may have been retained on the humane ground that when the new order arrived, men would have a lot to cry about.) Could men, for example, expect something approaching equitable treatment from the divorce courts in alimony and child-custody cases, which had routinely ruled that they must (1) leave and (2) pay for their children? What, and break the sacred bond between mother and infant, undermining Mother Right? (Which sacred bond, incidentally, traces back to the industrial revolution, when fathers were driven away from their homes and children and into the factories, and not to the primordial forces that keep creeping into the literature.) To the contrary: Feminist pressure was (and is) directed toward further increasing the discrepancy--toward hounding down and jailing defaulters, for instance. (With the sofar sporadic jailing of fathers who cannot afford to pay, we have returned, for men only, to the debtors' prisons abolished in the name of common decency more than 100 years ago.) Well, then, if men were to be asked, under penalty of law, to continue paying for the children they had sired, could they have some say in the mother's decision about whether or not to get an abortion? What, and interfere with--turn up the volume here--a Woman's Right to Her Body? (The coexistence of Mother Right and Pro-Choice formulas within the same set of heads is one of the authentic curiosities of our age.) Could men expect women to share the burden of defending their country's borders? Could they expect that women be drafted, like them, and, if necessary, fight and die, like them? No, there just shouldn't be any draft at all, because there shouldn't be any wars, and there wouldn't be if women ran things, because men made wars. (The example of history's female leaders, a singularly sanguinary lot, was carefully overlooked.) If there were a war, it should be left to the men, because men loved it.

Well, then, since, in the nature-vs.-nurture controversy, feminism was necessarily committed to stressing environmental influences, did the movement look forward to a day when men would no longer hold their current 20-to-one predominance in the nation's prisons or when, for instance, a man arrested for a capital crime would no longer be about ten times as likely to be sentenced to death as is a woman (as is now the case)? A few spokespersons thought that it one day might be so, but they were drowned out by a chorus whose unmistakable message was this: Nurture be damned; men are just naturally inclined toward violence, especially rape, and the main thing wrong with our penal system is that it isn't tough enough on them as it stands. Ditto for hopes that men might lose some of their overwhelming lead in suicide, heart attack and other stress-related disorders, in the process cutting into some of the female edge in the life-expectancy sweeps.

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Wonders are many, and here is one: When I ask my college classes what they consider the single most flagrant example of sexual discrimination in America today, I receive all kinds of answers--women take their husband's names; 59 cents on the dollar; Jean Harris went to jail and Nixon didn't--but never what seems to me the obvious one: that the class's male students, and only its male students, are required by law to register for conscription in an organization that, if so empowered, will certainly brutalize them for two years and may well kill them, which in this century alone has been responsible for the selective extermination of hundreds of thousands of their fathers and grandfathers.

Wonders, I say, are many; but what is one to think of a young man who, with that hanging over his head, can look on his female classmate with the uneasy conviction that he is the one who is somehow oppressing her?

Just this: that like his father and the other older males of this country, he is an aborigine, a sucker, a dunce when it comes to the ways of sexual politics. That he has failed to notice what any behaviorist's pigeon would have noticed by now: that he and his kind are the ones getting screwed, man, and that this fact is surreally out of sync with the official version that has been passed on to him.

Once he realized this, he might, if he read around, come to a few other self-evident conclusions. He might see that, far from being a lunatic fringe of the zany past, the people who used to call themselves radical feminists have done a fabulous job of getting their values into the currency of conventional wisdom, which he was parroting. If he knew a little history, it might then occur to him that one big reason for their success is, almost certainly, the uncanny convergence of their conspicuously radical sentiments, which amount to the position that women are better than men, and the traditional codes of chivalry, which also amount to the position that women are better than men. He would certainly see that those values were full of manifest inconsistencies that evaporate once one recognizes the essential premise at work--a premise spelled out some years ago in the statement of principles of a group called New York Radical Women: "We take the woman's side in everything. We ask not if something is 'reformist,' 'radical,' 'revolutionary' or 'moral.' We ask, Is it good for women or bad for women?"

Which might, perhaps, bring him round, at last, to the dismal conclusion that sexual politics is just politics.

Finally, I hope it might occur to this young man that it is not in the interests of either truth or his own survival to reflexively support such a movement. It is past time for the last minority, men, to recognize that their own rights are under attack, to organize, formulate policy and start applying pressure the other way. If the young man is reluctant to think of himself, in his privileged collegiate niche (though his even more privileged female colleagues are not often so inhibited), let him consider those San Quentin inmates, most of them black and all of them male, suffering, in the name of "women's employment rights," indignities that no woman would be asked to suffer.

Or let him just open his eyes and ears from day to day and attend to what comes in. As someone who has written a book on the subject, I can't help noticing the evidence. Even if I could, the men's-rights organization to which I belong, Coalition of Free Men, keeps my consciousness up. But sometimes I get tired of pointing out what seems so obvious and at the same time so hidden from the common eye. Yet all occasions do inform against me.

A while ago, I turned on the television before going to sleep, and there was Johnny Carson listening to some actress, and she was going on about this wonderful women's group she worked for that was trying to wean women away from the rapaciousness that, "unfortunately," seemed to come from men. And there was old Johnny, a man rather famous at the moment for being taken to the cleaners by as rapacious a woman as ever glommed onto a gold mine, a woman who, it seems, annually spends enough money on underwear to feed Appalachia--there was Johnny, I say, nodding his head and saying, "Yes, I see, uh-huh."

I know that talk-show hosts are supposed to be that way, but, still, I wish he had said something.

"We were told that men should support feminism because of the new freedoms they stood to gain."