Tag: Cathy Young

Ceasefire:
Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality
By Cathy Young
Amazon.Com price: $17.50 (click on link above to buy)

At the end of the 20^th century two versions of the same ages-old idea still dominate most public
discussion of the sexes — namely that men and women are radically different.
On the one side are conservative activists reacting against feminism’s
inroads who claim children are harmed if their mothers work outside the
home or that women are harmed by a lack of “modesty” in sexual
relations. On the other side are many feminists and their sympathizers
who have simply reversed antiquated sexual stereotypes about women and
applied them to men.

Whereas throughout much of
human history women were often viewed as less than human and relegated
to demeaning stereotypes, so much radical feminism and even mainstream
feminism has simply replaced those old stereotypes of women with new and
equally pernicious stereotypes about men. Some go so far as to reject
important advances such as the scientific method simply because men originally
created them and maintain that men and women even think differently. Whereas
once men used women’s alleged irrationality to pigeonhole and debase women,
today some feminists agree that women’s thinking is less rational than
men’s but instead view this as a positive thing.

Into this fray steps Cathy
Young whose book Ceasefire argues that men and women aren’t all
that different after all and that many of the problems often described
in the media as men’s or women’s problems are, in fact, problems common
to all humanity regardless of sex. As Young aptly puts it in the title
of her first chapter, “Men are from Earth, Women are from Earth.”
That in many circles this is still a fundamentally radical idea is testament
to how pervasive sexual stereotyping in all its varieties remains.

As Young points out, although
early feminism was committed to a more egalitarian view of the sexes,
radical feminism has come to “reject the principle of equal treatment,
either because legal standards are inherently ‘male’ or because one cannot
treat oppressor and oppressed as equals. All divide humanity along gender
lines.” Her book does an excellent job of illustrating just how widespread
this division along gender lines has become.

Violence, for example, is
an area where media and feminist treatment tends to differ radically depending
on the sex of the victim. Although data from the National Crime Victim
Study show men are the victims in about 15 percent of all assaults by
current or former partners (and men make up 25 percent of the victims
of aggravated assaults), rarely is violence by women against men described
in terms of domestic violence. Young points to the coverage of the murder
of actor and comedian Phil Hartman by his wife. Unlike the coverage of
OJ Simpson’s assaults and alleged murder of his wife, Nicole, nobody described
Hartman’s murder or evidence of earlier abusive incidents as “domestic
violence.” Much of the media coverage focused on how despondent and
depressed Hartman’s wife was and focused on her problems with drugs and
alcohol.

Of course to support this
sort of gender bias, both the media and feminists try to claim there are
fundamental differences between men and women, and in the process often
end up producing a series of bogus statistics. Ceasefire excels
at debunking more feminist fictoids that you can shake a stick at. Young’s
analysis of Susan Faludi’s Backlash is simply devastating. Young
shows Faludi’s book to rely almost from top to bottom on extremely poor
scholarly standards, egregious misquoting of primary sources and a whole
host of other questionable procedures. She even catches Faludi making
a claim in Backlash that Faludi herself had debunked in an earlier
newspaper profile! Ceasefire takes the process of demythologizing
feminist claims that Christina Hoff Sommers began in Who Stole Feminism? and carries it to the next level. The level of detail is enormous here
– I have no idea how Young keeps track the huge amount information that
she brings to bear to cut through so much nonsense. Ceasefire would
be worth reading if this was all it did.

But Young aims higher and
doesn’t pick solely on feminists for their many miscues – she also picks
apart many of the claims made by some in the Men’s Movement and outright
conservatives such as Wendy Shallitt and F. Carolyn Graglia whose rejection
of feminism leads them to adopt views every bit as noxious as the radical
feminists (in fact Graglia approvingly cites radical feminist Andrea Dworkin’s
critique of heterosexuality).

At the very end of her book,
Young offers 12 suggestions to get past the gender wars, but her first
suggestion should be the only guiding principle anyone needs – “when making
judgments that involve gender, try a mental exercise reversing the sexes.” The beauty of this standard is that it asks people to treat others not
as stereotypical representatives of their respective gender but as individual
human beings. It is a call for a world where, except for a few exceptions,
gender is treated as a neutral matter that has no place in influencing
moral or legal judgments.

It is strange that today this
simple idea (really just a restatement of the liberal idea of the rule
of law) is despised by many of the intellectual leaders of both conservative
and feminist camps. Ceasefire is a plea to rescue humanity from
the narrow box of gender that both camps want to force it into. Young’s
book an impassioned and illuminating appeal for a true equality of the
sexes.