Then and now 5/29

Less is heard about feminism these days. Women go out of their way to deny they're feminists. The reason, clearly, is that it's no longer necessary. Feminism has become part of the "received wisdom." It's "politically correct." It's so pervaded the culture, in fact, it's no longer visible. So it's easy for diehards to imagine it isn't so, to deny it's happened. Their personal dissatisfactions haven't gone away; so they must be just as "oppressed" as ever. Life is no bowl of cherries. Philosophers and others can argue about the ratio of good and bad in life, but the simple fact of being human entails a generous helping of miseries and dissatisfactions. Often it seems good and ill are unjustly apportioned. And it's true enough: Life just is unfair. But fortune and misfortune are apportioned on an individual basis more than by group, by race, sex, or whatnot, and more by sheer hap than by anybody's design. Feminism, I've been told, has "done much good." But one of the not-so-good things it's done is deny the above, and advance the idea that women are uniquely miserable and dissatisfied; that their travails aren't merely their portion of the human condition in general but the particular consequence of the female condition. And that it's somebody's fault: It's a social, not a cosmic problem, one that can and should be solved by social action, by passing laws. We men, they're fond of telling us, "just don't get it." Maybe not; but they don't "get it" either. They don't "get it" that "we're all in it together;" that men, too, lead lives marred by disappointment and unfulfillment; that, though the particulars of men's and women's problems differ, they're merely two forms of the same condition, the human condition, and that in sum one sex is neither happier nor unhappier, neither more nor less miserable, than the other. Worst of all, they don't "get it" that becoming a man (unlike becoming a woman) doesn't happen of itself, but requires positive effort, striving. That it's a difficult achievement in the best of times, and that, while most cultures have helped it along by rites of passage, increasingly ours does its damnedest to deny and discourage it, in the sacred name of "equality." A male friend can't pick up a paper without seeing all-new cases of, as he laments, "Feminism triumphant!" Women friends, who read the same papers, don't "get it" at all. It isn't just such horror-tales as Kathleen Parker's recent "Another Knockdown for Men," about a 17-year-old boy jailed for rape because, midway through, "Yes" had become "No." "La donna e mobile (woman is fickle), and now, lo, man goes to jail! He wasn't guilty of rape, Parker concluded; he was guilty of being male. The message of the times: "Women good, men bad." "If I were a guy, I'd find another country." It's also the steady spate of subtler news: boys, despite all, still too "mannish," obviously needing yet more Ritalin and "sensitivity training;" continuing campaigns to recruit more women college students, though they're already in the majority; boys' athletic programs dropped to make room for girls'; academic courses cancelled when girls don't sign up equally with boys; "cooperation" (appealing to girls) supplanting competition (appealing to boys); Department of Education grade-school "handouts" in which "girls are taught to feel generalized anger against males" while boys have it dinned into them that "masculinity is something bad;" boys required to wear dresses to class, "to get the feel of what it's like to be a girl." And on and on. Often it's women writers who deplore this trend toward The Feminized Male as Patricia Cayo Sexton put it. Yet they seem unable to faze the culture, or most other women. When I cite them, my women friends counter, with classic lady-logic, "Oh, pooh!" I socialized very little for decades after I retired from business. In recent years my female friends have rousted me out of my hermit peace. And I find myself appalled at how the business-cum-social climate has changed in so short a time. Often, anticipating meeting an unknown man, I form an image of him after the pattern of my father and his peers. What a letdown when I meet him! Often he's distinguishable from the ladies only by his size. I've tried imagining my father in one of today's civic doingses: those gatherings of ladies of both sexes. Granted it's unkind, finding fault with obviously well-intended folks whose main activity seems to be assuring each other how nice they are and urging each other to be even nicer. And why should I want to find fault? What's wrong with ladling out generous helpings of "niceness" in a world pretty thoroughly overrun with its exact opposite? Q.E.D. Outside such meetings, or other ivory towers, the world isn't nice. And one who spends too much time in such a climate of artificial niceness may fail to recognize its artificiality, may imagine the world outside is nice too, and emerge dangerously unprepared. For my part I come away from such orgies of sweetness-and-light, such ladies-aid-society meetings, thinking the subversive thoughts of William James after his visit to the original Chautauqua: "One feels oneself in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air." "A middle-class paradise, without a sin, with no suffering and no dark corners." "And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: 'Ouf! What a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this goodness too uninspiring. The human drama without a villain or a pang." James would have been the first to agree that what he was deploring was a world without manhood, with "no hardness any more." "Fie on such a cattleyard of a planet!" he concluded of a world already, even in his day, awash in, as he put it, "co-education and feminism." One doesn't have to go to Chautauqua Lake for it today. Indeed, one can't get away from it, as James still could. It's everywhere, that mutual-admiration of the nice, that ladylike getting-along. Never is heard a discouraging word, and everybody's a darling. Women, of both sexes, still will wonder what I'm grousing about, how anybody can possibly object to such a nice thing as niceness. Q.E.D., again. They don't "get it." Kathleen Parker "gets it." "The gelding of the American male," she concludes, "is nearly complete." Ah, but we know the answer to that, don't we? "Oh, pooh!"