Review

Chronicling Lilith

The End of Men and the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Riverhead Books (Penguin Group), 2013
(336 pages, $17.00, paperback)

reviewed by Harriet Murphy

As the Catholic Church debates the future of the family and Pope Francis talks about deepening a theology of women, it is useful to remember that it was Karl Marx who called for the abolition of the family in The Communist Manifesto. His exhortation famously asked the proletariat to reject the bourgeois definition of marriage, which required women to defer to men's monopolization of the public sphere whilst they had preeminence in the private. One of the simple truths about revolutions, whether silent or bloody, is that they are always making incremental advances. Karl Marx, for instance, nowhere suggests that heterosexuality should be phased out, only that it should be relieved of its sacramentality and that women should be shifted out of the home into the
workforce.

Advance of the Fourth Wave

By the same token, the radical feminism that was first brokered by Marx's partner, Friedrich Engels, in the later The Origin of the Family is not dead, but has successfully gone forth and multiplied. Fourth-wave feminism is now installed as the new orthodoxy in schools and universities. It makes no distinction between popular and academic feminism. It assumes that men and women are gender-neutral. Its theological voice assumes that Galatians 3:28 literally means that Christ is the patron saint of gender neutrality, "there is no male and female" no longer being a reference to sacramental baptism but a metaphor for induction into a notional feminist FutureChurch. Many of its celebrity apologists are what critic Roger Kimball calls "tenured radicals" and, as such, are immune to the demands of a critical revision.

The ex-Catholic atheist Germaine Greer, for instance, of the University of Warwick and then Cambridge, published a book in 1999 asking for a revised definition of wholeness. But her thesis in The Whole Woman has since been replaced with that of the "disappearing woman." In 2013 Greer began a national lecture tour in Great Britain on "disappearing women," her talks recycling the charge that we only have token women in public life and claiming that there is still resistance from men. Although most of us can see that competence is the prerequisite for success at landing a good job, and that companies often bend over backward to be "inclusive," Greer still wants to make men responsible for what she dogmatically believes is the de facto erasure of real women. Though fabulously counter-intuitive now that women are highly visible in the professions, her conspiracy theory remains attractive to those allergic to the statistics, and, as of this writing, her tour is still not over.

Is there method in her madness? According to her, the absence of absolutely equal numbers across the board is the only marker, and in arguing this point, she censors the real discussion point, which is why feminists are always reluctant to consider the possibility that many women are not "in the public sphere" because they are happy to be at home with the family. Lacking a feminist magisterium, the celebrities all disagree with one another, and they all pretend their critics do not really exist. No Pope Joan seems able to blow the whistle and call the players to account. In the light of the latest tracts alleging men are obsolete, a disputatio is long overdue.

Sommers to Rosin

Hanna Rosin's is a case in point. Married and a mother, she is a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, and sympathetic to the atheist feminist Christina Hoff Sommers in an alliance we need to understand. Sommers is the controversial ethicist and philosopher who now writes a weekly show called "The Factual Feminist" for the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism? (1994), which accuses women of betraying women, and she is now arguing for a new brand called Freedom Feminism (2013), which claims to want to break what she calls the "one-party system" represented by Greer.

The Factual Feminist has thousands of followers on YouTube and takes issue with feminist "facts." But undergraduates are not interested in her own facts, let alone her interpretations. Sommers is finding that at universities such as Georgetown, the authorities see her as a threat to health and safety for triggering high levels of anxiety in students who do not even want to enter into debate.

When Sommers first started to look at the casualties of feminist rhetoric and propaganda, she alleged there were five foundational feminist myths, among them inflated figures about sexual slavery, domestic violence, and college sexual assault. The Holy See disagrees with her claim, and is now leading a campaign to stop human trafficking (something then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio fought against like a lion in Buenos Aires). In 2014, the British Parliament voted on a new Modern Slavery Bill.

In The War Against Boys (2000) Sommers launched a new front in feminist warfare, on which Hanna Rosin clearly builds, with information on how "the culture" punishes little boys on the playground for not conforming to the new stereotypes of behavior, which anathematize old-fashioned male aggression.

Continue Reading

---