From: Jonathan Davis (jonathan@limbicnutrition.com)
Date: Sun May 05 2002 - 06:19:15 MDT
Excerpts from http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2002/03/29/girls/print.html
"Woman's Inhumanity to Woman" [is ] based on 20 years of research, arguing
that other women can often be a girl's worst enemies. The supporting
evidence ...comprises primate and anthropological research, workplace
studies, sociological data, original interviews, memoir, even literary
criticism and fairy tale analysis -- all documenting the usually underhanded
and often devastating ways that women attack each other.
[The author] Phyllis Chesler is: a veteran and luminary of the Second Wave
feminism of the late 1960s and early '70s. She has always been one of the
more doctrinaire and unreconstructed members of that generation, a user of
the kind of hoary lingo that makes everyone but old-guard true believers
wince."
Like most of her cohorts, she subscribed to the idea of sisterhood, the
belief that women enlightened by feminism would live and work together in
perfect, nonhierarchical, mutually supportive solidarity. Later, theories
about women's superior skills in communication and forging relationships
(spearheaded by Harvard professor Carol Gilligan) burnished that notion, and
this idealized vision of how beautifully women get along seeped into all
sorts of corners of American society, many of which would hesitate to call
themselves feminist...From the very beginning there have been dissenting
voices to this cheery chorus, but they could usually expect to be attacked
as anti-woman, often by feminists like Chesler. And in [the book] Chesler
not only details the varieties of "indirect aggression" conventional women
inflict on each other -- she comes clean about some pretty ugly battles
within the ranks of feminism's elite as well.
"'I think you should be writing about how men oppress women, not about what
oppressed people do in order to survive.' She said this smugly, sternly, and
sanctimoniously ... I am surprised, a bit frightened for my work. Here was a
feminist writer who had pre-judged an intellectual work, who was reluctant
to even read a book if it did not seem to espouse the party line."
That Chesler should be astonished by this is in itself astonishing, as
anyone who has ever dared to question this party line can testify..."Woman's
Inhumanity to Woman" demonstrates again and again, most women can vividly
remember being on the receiving end of this kind of damning, potentially
ostracizing disapproval; what we "forget" are the times we've dished it out.
Groups of women tend to espouse an "illusion of equality" (and uniformity)
in which variations from the norm are seen as dangerous betrayals. "Any
expression of anger or the introduction of a tabooed subject may result in
the group's scapegoating of one or two of its members," she observes.
Because one of the biggest taboos is against any overt display of female
aggression, these attacks are invariably covert, indirect and maddeningly
unexplained -- which makes them especially devastating. "Most women have a
repertoire of techniques with which to weaken, disorient, humiliate or
banish other female group members," Chesler writes. Because women tend to
place tremendous value on belonging, they can experience exclusion from the
group as a kind of death.
The horrific, inflammatory anecdote is a time-honored tool of feminist
rhetoric... but Chesler provides ample quantities of harder data
(particularly about the social lives of girls, a popular new area of study)
as well. The anecdotes, of course, make for much more compelling reading --
these are sagas of intrigue, deception and puppet-mastery that put the
doings of Cardinal Richelieu to shame.
She devotes several pages to a complex dispute with a woman she calls Inge
(not her real name). Chesler had been working as a consultant for the United
Nations and organized an international feminist conference in 1980, with the
plan of publishing the proceedings along with her own introduction. She
invited Inge to the meeting. Sometime before the conference, the man who
hired Chesler, a foreign diplomat, began to sexually harass Chesler and then
raped her in her home.
When Chesler attempted to get the attendees of the conference to join her in
confronting the culprit, who was black, Inge managed to convince the women
that this would be perceived as racist....Inge somehow collaborated with
this man to publish the proceedings of Chesler's conference herself, with
her own introduction, effectively taking credit for Chesler's work. "Why did
she need to usurp my place?" Chesler laments. "Inge simply viewed herself as
my competitor for a highly limited, much prized resource and did what
millions of women do to each other in similar circumstances." In other
words, instead of competing openly -- another taboo -- many women, "even
ideologues," engage in surreptitious and "unethical" skullduggery in order
to get what they want without seeming to fight for it.
Inge had deployed another classic technique of covert feminine hostility by
bad-mouthing Chesler behind her back to their feminist friends. Chesler sees
Inge as embodying one of the most noxious of traditional female
propensities -- the desire to sabotage and undermine exceptional women.
"She is the kind of woman who feels cheated ... She experiences excellence
in others as a form of persecution." In groups, this can take the form of
punishing talented and effective members for making the rest of the members
feel inadequate. Of course, this is not a great idea if your group actually
wants to accomplish something in the world, as early feminists initially
did...the movement descend into poisonous infighting and "navel-gazing."
[ Chesler is now ] "a lapsed Utopian" who no longer shares "as an article of
faith the belief in the power of political-social programming to improve
human nature."
Primate research that suggests that aggression among females can be as
ferocious and even as murderous as the aggression shown by males, if less
spectacularly so...dominance, exile, infanticide and sometimes even
cannibalism, all part of a relentless battle for survival....[That] rivalry
and cruelty among women may have a biological basis is yet another startling
development; traditional feminists usually subscribe to a strict "social
construction" view that blames most bad behavior on culture.
As long as feminists and other social constructionists continue to
fruitlessly bicker with the evolutionary psychology crowd about what causes
people to act the way they do, any talk of how to change things for the
better is forestalled.
[How might] women might unlearn some of their worst habits?...Men can teach
[them] a thing or two... Chesler urges women to acknowledge that aggression
and competition, even among women, is an inevitable part of social life and
that the healthiest way of dealing with it is directly and decisively -- no
backstabbing and grudge-nursing."
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also at: http://www.ukpoliticsmisc.org.uk/weblog/
Regards
Jonathan
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