Power Play
[In the following review of Fire with Fire, Rollins finds shortcomings in Wolf's preoccupation with an outmoded notion of patriarchal oppression and a tendency to resort to unsubstantiated generalizations and truisms.]
Women's fight for equality did not end when women won the vote seventy-three years ago. Equal in theory but often not in practice, many women turned to feminism to help them fight the remainders of inequality. While these remainders were real, the feminist movement of the 1960s and beyond frequently degenerated into extremism and radical excess.
In Fire with Fire, Naomi Wolf attempts to extract the good from the bad. While she applauds the feminist movement in general, she notes a development she believes harmful to women: the notion of women as helpless victims, unable to stand up to the “patriarchy.” Women are anything but, she argues, and it is time they recognize it. Wolf announces a new feminism: power feminism, the feminism that will change the twenty-first century.
Wolf's mission is to show women that they are the real victors in the gender war. Women not only have the power to stand up to the patriarchy, Wolf argues, they have the power to eliminate it. So why does the patriarchy still exist? Too many women are not aware of their own power, a power that stems from identifying “with one another primarily through the shared pleasures and strengths of femaleness, rather than primarily through our shared vulnerability and pain.”
Fire with Fire is not a man-bashing book. Wolf believes that women are no better than men, and that women, like men, have a dark side. “[I]mpulses toward aggression, retaliation, dominance, and cruelty,” she writes, “are as innate to women as they are to men.” Nor is Wolf always hostile to capitalism—she supports the right to make money and to become wealthy; in fact, she believes it crucial for women to do so: “every woman's work ha[s] a market value and one purpose of feminism [is] to raise every woman's market value so she [can] use her own money to determine her own life.”
But is Wolf's feminism really that different? She champions individualism as the means to women's “empowerment,” yet urges women to put forth a “concerted, unified effort” to “harness the power of their [2 percent] majority” so that “the side that best represent[s] the spectrum of women's wishes [will] win.” She praises individual merit and achievement, yet defines “fair” representation of women in terms of sheer numbers (e.g., her goal that Congress be 51 percent female by the year 2000).
Wolf's view of women's oppression is not complimentary to anyone (male or female) who disagrees with her. Instead of pitting men against women (as does victim feminism), her power feminism pits her “egalitarians” against others' “patriarchalists”:
The civil war of gender does not involve “men against women” on two distinct sides. The patriarchalists' worldview, shared by women as well as men, is battling the emerging egalitarian worldview, which is also shared by people of both sexes. … [I]t is just as foolish to assume that all men are opposed to women's equality as it is to assume that all women favor it.
Wolf is contemptuous of the millions of American women who do not believe that there is a systematic campaign by the “opposition” to keep them down. Wolf describes this opposition as “those men and male-dominated institutions that are actively resisting women's advancement.” As for women who do not believe in the opposition—they must either not recognize their oppression or enjoy it.
Wolf goes on to provide evidence of women's oppression. For instance, there is her account of how the mainstream media discriminate against women. Wolf spends several pages listing magazines that have published more men than women, talk shows that have had more male guests than female guests, and various sectors of the media that have more men than women in high positions. Her interpretation of these numbers is often bizarre. Some of the women who appear on talk shows, she says, do not count. Morgan Fairchild does not count because she is a soap star; Iman does not count because she is a model. Wolf dismisses Phyllis Schlafly's presence as “perennial,” Jeane Kirkpatrick as “trusty,” and notes with disdain that Margaret Thatcher was the only woman to provide a “female perspective”—presumably unwittingly—on a show on Bosnia. Of the forty-five articles by women that Harper's published in 1992, nine do not qualify as independent women's journalism, Wolf explains, because they “were part of forums that conscientiously included men.”
Wolf complained about “the closed infosystem of the White Boy Rolodex” in an article last year in the New Republic. She wrote that women “are forced … to speak ‘for women’ rather than simply hashing out the issues in a solitary way,” yet her disdain for a woman who does just that belies her sincerity.
An extreme of the female public voice is perhaps represented by a Jeane Kirkpatrick: a voice so Olympian, so neck-up and uninflected by the experience of the female body, that the subtle message received by young female writers is: to enter public voice, one must abide by the no-uterus rule.
Interestingly, the author of The Beauty Myth is attacking another woman for lacking femininity. Wolf's assault discredits her central claim that she believes women should be diverse, that a woman should “claim her individual voice rather than merging her voice in a collective identity.” Since Kirkpatrick does not say the correct things about the correct topics, Wolf deems her a non-woman who must have learned that women “have a much better chance of being published in a big boys' magazine if they present a viewpoint disdainful of feminist reasoning.”
Many of Wolf's statements will find few challengers; some of what she says is so simple and obviously true (“women matter as much as men do”) that one gets the impression she is trying to validate her ideology by stating already accepted truths as tenets of power feminism.
There are also a few issues that Wolf discusses cogently. For example, she presents a nuanced view of pornography, neither advocating censorship nor denying pornography's potential harm, and criticizes various forms of political correctness. Wolf distances herself from the negative extremes of the feminist movement and rightly points out that much of feminism is made to suffer for the excesses of the radicals. But the majority of her arguments are a whirlwind of assertions about the “patriarchy,” the “opposition,” the “backlash,” “oppression,” “gender apartheid,” and “men's tools,” as well as unsupported statements such as “most women have been sexually harassed at work.”
Wolf's power feminism is not new. Her methods may be different, but her goal is the same as that of the victim feminists she criticizes: to free women from the oppression of the ruling white male patriarchy. The paranoia of her premise overwhelms the rationality of her discourse.
Inequality exists. So do discrimination and sexism. A true power feminism would urge women to stand their ground and fight against the individuals who commit these offenses. A truly new feminism would recognize an old truth: the man who does not take his female co-worker seriously because of her sex is a jerk, not a part of the systematic oppression of women by the “opposition.” Any feminism obsessed with something called patriarchal oppression is not new, nor is it likely to be powerful.
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