It isn’t easy being the personification of the feminist movement.
Anti-feminist Camille Paglia thinks Gloria Steinem has overstayed her societal welcome: In her book “Sex, Art, and American Culture” (Vintage Original, $13), Paglia approvingly quoted a friend who said, “Once we needed her, and now we’re stuck with her.”
American University professor and sociologist Rita Simon thinks 60-year-old Steinem and other feminists of her generation are out of touch with today’s female youth.
“A lot of young women are saying, `We’re not sure we like that image of (women as) victims,”‘ said Simon, 62, who founded the Women’s Freedom Network last fall as a voice for like-minded women.
And Christina Hoff Sommers, author of “Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women” (Simon & Schuster, $23), can’t understand why Steinem is still protesting instead of celebrating the impressive gains made by the women’s moveme
“I saw her at a conference last year, and she said she’s so angry,” Sommers said. “Why is she so angry, when things are better for women than ever?”
So it goes in the trenches of feminism, where a succession of women have come forward to take aim at the feminist establishment in general and Gloria Steinem, as its most visible representative, in particular.
Steinem, touring the nation to promote her latest book, “Moving Beyond Words” (Simon & Schuster, $23), regards the critics with equanimity.
“You always get rewarded for selling out.” She shrugged. “A Camille Paglia or a Clarence Thomas is always going to be able to get the attention of the conservative male establishment.”
The neo-feminists in turn regard such responses as evidence that mainstream feminists are so ideologically rigid that dissenters are dismissed as traitors.
“Certain very prominent feminists are only paying lip service-and only now-to tolerating dissent,” said Katie Roiphe, whose 1993 book, “The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus” (Little, Brown & Co., $19.95), inspired a storm of fury with its claim that feminists have expanded the definition of “rape” to include sex a woman later regrets, resulting in a rape hysteria among college women.
“What dissent actually means to them is that it’s OK to say women can wear lipstick,” she said. “But when they’re actually faced with some sort of authentic disagreement-from Paglia, Sommers or me-all of a sudden we become the enemy, the backlash, the neoconservatives, and all the guns are taken out.”
But to Kim Gandy, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, the pillar of the feminist establishment, the critics are ingrates who have done nothing to earn the feminist identification they claim.
“It’s because of the work all of us have done that these women are able to say, `Look at me, I’m where I want to be, I’ve arrived,’ ” she said.
Moreover, she said, the critics offer no substantive arguments.
“What are they disagreeing with?” she said. “Have they proposed an alternative to the Violence Against Women Act? To the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act?
“All they’re doing is name-calling. I haven’t seen them lift one little manicured pinkie to help any of those issues to go anywhere.
“God knows there are disagreements among feminists on all kinds of issues,” she said. “But this is vacant. The whole theory is empty.”
The critics believe mainstream feminism has applied the terms sexual harassment and rape to mere boorish behavior and errors of judgment, and that it portrays women as fragile potential victims of rape, harassment or battery.
Naomi Wolf, in her latest book, “Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century” (Random House, $21), wrote that women should concentrate less on what men can do to them than on what women can do for themselves.
Mainstream feminism contains an inherent contradiction, Roiphe says.
“What we’re saying to men is, `We want power, we want to be your equals, we want to be at the top of our field-yet we also want special status, and if you look at us the wrong way or compliment us on our dress, we’re going to burst into tears,’ ” she said. “We can’t have it both ways.”
Roiphe and some other women-Esquire magazine dubbed them “do-me feminists”-also say the movement has a prudish, anti-man cast. Date rape activists on college campuses, Roiphe says, propagate a hoary stereotype of men as sexual pursuers and women as sex avoiders who engage in sex only because they are afraid to refuse.
“I think what we’re dealing with is a time warp,” Sommers said. Older activists are “accustomed to being aggrieved, being offended. It’s a new world, and they have to adapt. They’re still using the language of oppression, domination and subjugation.”
The women’s movement also still uses the language of sisterhood, of the belief that women can accomplish more by banding together than by standing alone.
That is a notion that is foreign to the more individualistic bent of, for example, the Women’s Freedom Network.
The Women’s Freedom Network promotes personal responsibility rather than group activism.
Its statement of principles holds that special protections for women concerning child care, employment and personal relations “minimize our accomplishments and undermine our equal status.”
“For years I had become more and more upset at the distortions, the stories I had been reading in the media,” said founder Simon.
“The country, and the media, is becoming hysterical on the subject of sexual harassment, and a lot of people are getting hurt,” she said.
“I thought, `There must be other young women, aside from my daughter, who agree with me.’ “
And so she founded her own organization, which she describes as lying somewhere between Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Schlafly, and whose board members include Sommers and conservative Jeane Kirkpatrick.
“We don’t believe there is a war out there between men and women,” Simon said. “Men and woman agree on almost all the issues-abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment. The notion that . . . men are just trying to subjugate women is not supported by any systematic data.”
But Gandy says that women who reject organized feminism are a privileged and selfish few who figure that since they have enjoyed success, courtesy partly of the organized feminism, all women can have good jobs and nice lives if they only apply themselves.
“My husband doesn’t beat me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t speak out against domestic violence,” she said.
“In fact, if I’m fortunate enough to be in a situation where I’m not beaten, where I’m not sexually harassed, then I have an obligation to speak out,” she said.
“Where is their obligation? Why aren’t they speaking out for the women who need help, instead of saying, `We’ve arrived, we have ours, the heck with the rest of you’?”
The critics say they vehemently oppose rape and sexual harassment but believe the extent of the problem has been exaggerated.
Sommers says feminists deliberately ignore statistics that do not bolster their contention that men are fundamentally oppressive.
The truth, she said, is “not jazzy; it’s not good propaganda.”
Suggestions that women are making unreasonable demands enrage feminist activists.
“What they’re doing is exploiting the same stereotypes that kept women down for so long, that if you ask for fair treatment and equal justice, you’re just whining,” Gandy said.
“It’s the same treatment we got 20 years ago, when we were told, `Oh, you whiners, you bra burners, you just hate men.’ “
If women feel estranged from NOW, she said, they aren’t showing it. NOW’s membership is down from its peak of 280,000 members in 1992, but it still stands at 250,000.
The Women’s Freedom Network has a mailing list of 1,000, of whom 300 are contributors.
But Paula Kamen, who interviewed more than 200 women in their 20s for her 1991 book, “Feminist Fatale” (Donald I. Fine, $21.95), found that young women associated the word “feminist” with every ugly stereotype imaginable: bra-burning, hairy-legged, amazon, castrating, uptight and man-haters, for starters.
“There does seem to be a generation gap,” Kamen said. “Organized feminists have not got the message out about what feminism is, and about sexism that still exists.
“Younger women are turned off by any party line,” she said. “Instead of telling young women what to think, (feminists) should encourage critical thought.”
Steinem thinks opposition is simply par for the course for any movement that causes discomfort.
“Society doesn’t want to change,” she said. “So even after it accepts some reform, it will reject and ridicule the people who effected it and ignore the process that brought it about.”
As for young women, Steinem suggested in her book that they may think feminism is irrelevant because they have not yet married, gotten into the paid work force, had children or gotten old.
“If young women have a problem, it’s only that they think there’s no problem,” she wrote.
The ferment in feminism is not a bad thing, Kamen suggested.
“In the long run, Katie Roiphe is probably doing a lot of good for the feminist movement,” she said. “She is encouraging people to do a lot of introspection about how they feel about these issues.”
For Steinem’s part, she said she welcomes new organizations into the fray.
