Backlash Read online

  More subtle indicators in popular culture may receive momentary, and often bemused, media notice, then quickly slip from social awareness: A report, for instance, that the image of women on prime-time TV shows has suddenly degenerated. A survey of mystery fiction finding the numbers of female characters tortured and mutilated mysteriously multiplying. The puzzling news that, as one commentator put it, “So many hit songs have the B-word [bitch] to refer to women that some rap music seems to be veering toward rape music.” The ascendancy of virulently misogynist comics like Andrew Dice Clay—who called women “pigs” and “sluts” and strutted in films in which women were beaten, tortured, and blown up—or radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, whose broadsides against “femi-Nazi” feminists made his syndicated program the most popular radio talk show in the nation. Or word that in 1987, the American Women in Radio & Television couldn’t award its annual prize for ads that feature women positively: it could find no ad that qualified.

  These phenomena are all related, but that doesn’t mean they are somehow coordinated. The backlash is not a conspiracy, with a council dispatching agents from some central control room, nor are the people who serve its ends often aware of their role; some even consider themselves feminists. For the most part, its workings are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic. Not all of the manifestations of the backlash are of equal weight or significance either; some are mere ephemera, generated by a culture machine that is always scrounging for a “fresh” angle. Taken as a whole, however, these codes and cajolings, these whispers and threats and myths, move overwhelmingly in one direction: they try to push women back into their “acceptable” roles—whether as Daddy’s girl or fluttery romantic, active nester or passive love object.

  Although the backlash is not an organized movement, that doesn’t make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see—and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women’s rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges inside a woman’s mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too—on herself.

  In the last decade, the backlash has moved through the culture’s secret chambers, traveling through passageways of flattery and fear. Along the way, it has adopted disguises: a mask of mild derision or the painted face of deep “concern.” Its lips profess pity for any woman who won’t fit the mold, whole it tries to clamp the mold around her ears. It pursues a divide-and-conquer strategy: single versus married women, working women versus homemakers, middle-versus working-class. It manipulates a system of rewards and punishments, elevating women who follow its rules, isolating those who don’t. The backlash remarkets old myths about women as new facts and ignores all appeals to reason. Cornered, it denies its own existence, points an accusatory finger at feminism, and burrows deeper underground.

  Backlash happens to be the title of a 1947 Hollywood movie in which a man frames his wife for a murder he’s committed. The backlash against women’s rights works in much the same way: its rhetoric charges feminists with all the crimes it perpetrates. The backlash line blames the women’s movement for the “feminization of poverty”—while the backlash’s own instigators in Washington pushed through the budget cuts that helped impoverish millions of women, fought pay equity proposals, and undermined equal opportunity laws. The backlash line claims the women’s movement cares nothing for children’s rights—while its own representatives in the capital and state legislatures have blocked one bill after another to improve child care, slashed billions of dollars in federal aid for children, and relaxed state licensing standards for day care centers. The backlash line accuses the women’s movement of creating a generation of unhappy single and childless women—but its purveyors in the media are the ones guilty of making single and childless women feel like circus freaks.

  To blame feminism for women’s “lesser life” is to miss entirely the point of feminism, which is to win women a wider range of experience. Feminism remains a pretty simple concept, despite repeated—and enormously effective—efforts to dress it up in greasepaint and turn its proponents into gargoyles. As Rebecca West wrote sardonically in 1913, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

  The meaning of the word “feminist” has not really changed since it first appeared in a book review in the Atbenaeum of April 27, 1895, describing a woman who “has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence.” It is the basic proposition that, as Nora put it in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House a century ago, “Before everything else I’m a human being.” It is the simply worded sign hoisted by a little girl in the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality: I AM NOT A BARBIE DOLL. Feminism asks the world to recognize at long last that women aren’t decorative ornaments, worthy vessels, members of a “special-interest group.” They are half (in fact, now more than half) of the national population, and just as deserving of rights and opportunities, just as capable of participating in the world’s events, as the other half. Feminism’s agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to “choose” between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define them-selves—instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.

  The fact that these are still such incendiary notions should tell us that American women have a way to go before they enter the promised land of equality.

  PART ONE

  Myths and Flashbacks

  2

  Man Shortages and Barren Wombs:

  The Myths of the Backlash

  BY THE END of the ’80s, many women had become bitterly familiar with these “statistical” developments:

  • A “man shortage” endangering women’s opportunities for marriage

  Source: A famous 1986 marriage study by Harvard and Yale researchers

  Findings: A college-educated, unwed woman at thirty has a 20 percent likelihood of marriage, at thirty-five a 5 percent chance, and at forty no more than a 1.3 percent chance.

  •A “devastating” plunge in economic status afflicting women who divorce under the new no-fault laws

  Source: A 1985 study by a sociologist then at Stanford University

  Findings: The average woman suffers a 73 percent drop in her living standard a year after a divorce, while the average man enjoys a 42 percent rise.

  •An “infertility epidemic” striking professional women who postpone childbearing

  Source: A 1982 study by two French researchers

  Findings: Women between thirty-one and thirty-five stand a 39 percent chance of not being able to conceive, a big 13 percent jump from women in their late twenties.

  A “great emotional depression” and “burnout” attacking, respectively, single and career women

  Source: Various psychological studies

  Findings: No solid figures, just the contention that women’s mental health has never been worse, and is declining in direct proportion to women’s tendency to stay single or devote themselves to careers.

  These are the fundamental arguments that have supported the backlash against women’s quest for equality. They have one thing in common: they aren’t true.

  That no doubt sounds incredible. We’ve all heard these facts and figures so many times, as they’ve bounced back and forth through the backlash’s echo chamber, that it’s difficult to discount them. How is it possible that so much distorted, faulty, or plain inaccurate information can become so universally accepted? Before turning to these myths, a quick look at the way the media handled two particular statistical studies may help in part to answer that question.

  STATISTICS AND A TALE OF TWO SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

  In 1987, the media had the opport
unity to critique the work of two social scientists. One of them had exposed hostility to women’s independence; the other had endorsed it.

  “The picture that has emerged of Shere Hite in recent weeks is that of a pop-culture demagogue,” the November 23, 1987, issue of Newsweek informed its readers, under the headline MEN AREN’T HER ONLY PROBLEM. Shere Hite had just published the last installment of her national survey on sexuality and relationships, Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution in Progress, a 922-page compendium of the views of 4,500 women. The report’s main finding: Most women are distressed and despairing over the continued resistance from the men in their lives to treat them as equals. Four-fifths of them said they still had to fight for rights and respect at home, and only 20 percent felt they had achieved equal status in their men’s eyes. Their quest for more independence, they reported, had triggered mounting rancor from their mates.

  This was not, however, the aspect of the book that the press chose to highlight. The media were too busy attacking Hite personally. Most of the evidence they marshaled against her involved tales that, as Newsweek let slip, “only tangentially involve her work.” Hite was rumored to have punched a cabdriver for calling her “dear” and phoned reporters claiming to be Diana Gregory, Hite’s assistant. Curious behavior, if true, but one that suggests a personality more eccentric than demagogic. Nonetheless, the nation’s major publications pursued tips on the feminist researcher’s peculiarities with uncharacteristic ardor. The Washington Post even brought in a handwriting expert to compare the signatures of Hite and Gregory.

  Certainly Hite’s work deserved scrutiny; many valid questions could be raised about her statistical approach. But Hite’s findings were largely held up for ridicule, not inspection. “Characteristically grandiose in scope,” “highly improbable,” “dubious,” and “of limited value” was how Time dismissed Hite’s report in its October 12, 1987, article “Back Off, Buddy”—leading one to wonder why, if the editors felt this way, they devoted the magazine’s cover and six inside pages to the subject. The book is full of “extreme views” from “strident” women who are probably just “malcontents,” the magazine asserted. Whether their views were actually extreme, however, was impossible to determine from Time’s account: the lengthy story squeezed in only two two-sentence quotes from the thousands of women that Hite had polled and quoted extensively. The same article, however, gave plenty of space to Hite’s critics—far more than to Hite herself.

  When the media did actually criticize Hite’s statistical methods, their accusations were often wrong or hypocritical. Hite’s findings were “biased” because she distributed her questionnaires through women’s rights groups, some articles complained. But Hite sent her surveys through a wide range of women’s groups, including church societies, social clubs, and senior citizens’ centers. The press charged that she used a small and unrepresentative sample. Yet, as we shall see, the results of many psychological and social science studies that journalists uncritically report are based on much smaller and nonrandom samples. And Hite specifically states in the book that the numbers are not meant to be representative; her goal, she writes, is simply to give as many women as possible a public forum to voice their intimate, and generally silenced, thoughts. The book is actually more a collection of quotations than numbers.

  While the media widely characterized these women’s stories about their husbands and lovers as “man-bashing diatribes,” the voices in Hite’s book are far more forlorn than vengeful: “I have given heart and soul of everything I am and have . . . leaving me with nothing and lonely and hurt, and he is still requesting more of me. I am tired, so tired.” “He hides behind a silent wall.” “Most of the time I just feel left out—not his best friend.” “At this point, I doubt that he loves me or wants me. . . . I try to wear more feminine nightgowns and do things to please him.” “In daily life he criticizes me for trivial things, cupboards and doors left open I don’t like him angry. So I just close the cupboards, close the drawers, switch off the lights, pick up after him, etc., etc., and say nothing.”

  From these personal reports, Hite culls some data about women’s attitudes toward relationships, marriage, and monogamy. That the media find this data so threatening to men is a sign of how easily hysteria about female “aggression” ignites under an antifeminist backlash. For instance, should the press really have been infuriated—or even surprised—that the women’s number-one grievance about their men is that they “don’t listen”?

  If anything, the media seemed to be bearing out the women’s plaint by turning a deaf ear to their words. Maybe it was easier to flip through Hite’s numerical tables at the back of the book than to digest the hundreds of pages of rich and disturbing personal stories. Or perhaps some journalists just couldn’t stand to hear what these women had to say; the overheated denunciations of Hite’s book suggest an emotion closer to fear than fury—as do the illustrations accompanying Time’s story, which included a woman standing on the chest of a collapsed man, a woman dropping a shark in a man’s bathwater, and a woman wagging a viperish tongue in a frightened male face.

  At the same time the press was pillorying Hite for suggesting that male resistance might be partly responsible for women’s grief, it was applauding another social scientist whose theory—that women’s equality was to blame for contemporary women’s anguish—was more consonant with backlash thinking. Psychologist Dr. Srully Blotnick, a Forbes magazine columnist and much quoted media “expert” on women’s career travails, had directed what he called “the largest long-term study of working women ever done in the United States.” His conclusion: success at work “poisons both the professional and personal lives of women.” In his 1985 book, Otherwise Engaged: The Private Lives of Successful Women, Blotnick asserted that his twenty-five-year study of 3,466 women proved that achieving career women are likely to end up without love, and their spinsterly misery would eventually undermine their careers as well. “In fact,” he wrote, “we found that the anxiety, which steadily grows, is the single greatest underlying cause of firing for women in the age range of thirty-five to fifty-five.” He took some swipes at the women’s movement, too, which he called a “smoke screen behind which most of those who were afraid of being labeled egomaniacally grasping and ambitious hid.”

  The media received his findings warmly—he was a fixture everywhere from the New York Times to “Donahue”—and national magazines like Forbes and Savvy paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce still more studies about these anxiety-ridden careerists. None doubted his methodology—even though there were some fairly obvious grounds for skepticism.

  For starters, Blotnick claimed to have begun his data collection in 1958, a year in which he would have been only seventeen years old. On a shoestring budget, he had somehow personally collected a voluminous data base (“three tons of files, plus twenty-six gigabytes on disk memory,” he boasted in Otherwise Engaged)—more data than the largest federal longitudinal studies with multimillion-dollar funding. And the “Dr.” in his title was similarly bogus; it turned out to be the product of a mail-order degree from an unaccredited correspondence school. When tipped off, the editors at Forbes discreetly dropped the “Dr.” from Blotnick’s by-line—but not his column.

  In the mid-’80s, Dan Collins, a reporter at U.S. News & World Report, was assigned a story on that currently all-popular media subject: the misery of the unwed. His editor suggested he call the ever quotable Blotnick, who had just appeared in a similar story on the woes of singles in the Washington Post. After his interview, Collins recalls, he began to wonder why Blotnick had seemed so nervous when he asked for his academic credentials. The reporter looked further into Blotnick’s background and found what he thought was a better story: the career of this national authority was built on sand. Not only was Blotnick not a licensed psychologist, almost nothing on his resume checked out; even the professor that he cited as his current mentor had been dead for fifteen years.

  But Collins’s edito
rs at U.S. News had no interest in that story—a spokeswoman explained later that they didn’t have a news “peg” for it—and the article was never published. Finally, a year later, after Collins had moved to the New York Daily News in 1987, he persuaded his new employer to print the piece. Collins’s account prompted the state to launch a criminal fraud investigation against Blotnick, and Forbes discontinued Blotnick’s column the very next day. But the news of Blot-nick’s improprieties and implausibilities made few waves in the press; it inspired only a brief news item in Time, nothing in Newsweek. And Blotnick’s publisher, Viking Penguin, went ahead with plans to print a paperback edition of his latest book anyway. As Gerald Howard, then Viking’s executive editor, explained at the time, “Blotnick has some very good insights into the behavior of people in business that I continue to believe have an empirical basis.”

  • • •

  THE PRESS’S treatment of Hite’s and Blotnick’s findings suggests that the statistics the popular culture chooses to promote most heavily are the very statistics we should view with the most caution. They may well be in wide circulation not because they are true but because they support widely held media preconceptions.

  Under the backlash, statistics became prescriptions for expected female behavior, cultural marching orders to women describing only how they should act—and how they would be punished if they failed to heed the call. This “data” was said to reflect simply “the way things are” for women, a bedrock of demographic reality that was impossible to alter; the only choice for women was to accept the numbers and lower their sights to meet them.