Virginia Heffernan is into sex segregation. She chooses to pretend not to know that sex segregation has always accompanied the most opressively anti-women societies. She also likes to fake a complete ignorance of how gender wars serve the cause of female subjection. Instead, Heffernan celebrates female chauvinism and gender bullying:
It buoys spirits, of course, that there are big, bestselling new books that fly the flamboyant colors of female chauvinism. They have those ugly, slightly bullying titles. There’s “Vagina,” by Naomi Wolf. “The End of Men,” of course, by Hanna Rosin. And “The Richer Sex,” by Liza Mundy. These books have not exactly delighted reviewers, but they’ve made it possible to pretend that playground name-calling (“boys are dumb!”) is social science. Better still, Wolf, Rosin and Mundy do the name-calling for all womankind, so the rest of us can meet in silk dresses and not talk about gender madness at all.
Of course, everybody is entitled to their own ignorance and stupidity. Still, I feel offended that Heffernan considers it acceptable to assume that “all womankind” shares her diseased attitude towards men.
According to Heffernan’s strange logic, the war against women’s reproductive rights that is currently being waged by the US politicians is not a big deal because Myanmar, golf, and Jesus. Think I’m exaggerating in order to make her look bad? See for yourself:
The stylized “war on women” may rage on as a fiction of the election, but in the barracks women are living it up. Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader, now sits in parliament in Myanmar. Women play golf at the Augusta National Golf Club. And, this week, we come to find out Jesus may have had a wife.
Got it? Well, neither did I. Real women are being denied their rights but for Heffernan this is a greater fiction than Jesus’s wife.
Heffernan is a great example of a person who refuses to face her own neurosis and pretends that her psychological imbalance is some sort of a political or social issue. Take the following statement, for example:
Last week I hired a babysitter, put on a dress and took a taxi to a friend’s birthday party across town. . . In place of cake and candles was an exclusionary door policy. Women. Only women. The three men present were waiters. There was nothing defiant or political in this separatism. Separatism by sex is so standard at social events now that no one even commented on it. The crowd was cool and gracious. The women seemed universally like winners, expansively at home in this unmixed company. No men around to worry about, to protect, to impress, to slow down for.
What Heffernan doesn’t know is that she can look and feel like a winner who is at home wherever she goes without locking herself up in a gynaikonitis or a seraglio. All she needs to achieve this happy state is solve her psychological issues that make her switch on the worrying, protecting, impressing, slowing down mode whenever a man enters the room.
When I imagine the sad reality of a person who automatically begins “to worry about, to protect, to impress, to slow down for” whenever a man shows up on the horizon, I feel perplexed. It must be a weary task to walk through life dragging these decidedly unhealthy responses everywhere you go. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to find the reason why the possibility that a complete stranger might have a penis provokes such an intense response in you? Wouldn’t it be more productive to look for a way not to be in such a complete thrall to other people’s physiology?
Crowds of women live their lives without any desire or need “to worry about, to protect, to impress, to slow down for” whenever men appear in their vicinity. Heffernan could easily become one of those women if only she gave herself the trouble of realizing that this is not about “all womankind.” This is an issue of personal psychology that she is choosing not to address out of sheer laziness.
The feminist discourse has degenerated into a laundry list of psychological issues that their owners blame on society, men, the patriarchy, and the Loch Ness monster. Such pseudo-feminists have no interest in the very real encroachments on women’s rights. Instead, they prefer to smother feminism in trivialities. Inane complaints against the universe, vapid discussions of golf and Jesus’s wife, endless passive-voice statements that allow them to whine without ever charting a course of action that will make the whining redundant – this is what I encounter with a scary regularity in the feminist section of my blogroll.
“Why is feminism losing popularity?” such pseudo-feminists ask whenever a fresh bout of vacuous militancy against nothing specific subsides. “Why are the younger generations distancing themselves from feminism?”
Well, just take a look at Heffernan’s article again. Would you like to be associated with something this insipid, infantile and stupid?
Clarissa's Blog 
“Inane complaints against the universe, vapid discussions of golf and Jesus’s wife, endless passive-voice statements that allow them to whine without ever charting a course of action that will make the whining redundant – this is what I encounter with a scary regularity in the feminist section of my blogroll.”
Is it just me, or is this just like Daisy in The Great Gatsby? That’s kind of scary.
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At least, Daisy never claimed to be liberated.
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“Feminist?” On what planet is that ridiculous piece feminist?
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I’m expecting Feministe website to gush over this article any moment now.
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Now on the list of things I never expected to see but did:
Having an adult’s actions described approvingly as “playground name-calling”.
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I know. Hugely bizarre.
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She sounds so immature that I can’t believe the article!
I have thought a bit about sex-segregation in teaching because this is a suggestion that is sometimes brought up in the context of teaching math and sciences. As you know, the participation of women in these topics (except perhaps for biology) is abysmally low. One theory is that girls are subtly discouraged from pursuing math and science in high school; now only if they were taught in sex-segregated classes, they would be free to speak up in class without their voices being drowned by those aggressive boys, they could gain so much confidence and learn so much more!!
Personally I think this is a load of crap. I am yet to see a good implementation of a sex-segregated class. The many examples I have seen in my home country and the very few examples I have seen here always end up with the boys’ class focusing on hardcore math and science, and the girls’ class focusing on “softer skills” (for example, working in groups on a project on how chemistry is central to cosmetics, crap like that). It may help some mediocre girls, who otherwise would not get into science, get superficially interested, but all sex-segregated education does is isolate the really bright women students even more, and keep them from getting more exposure.
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“The many examples I have seen in my home country and the very few examples I have seen here always end up with the boys’ class focusing on hardcore math and science, and the girls’ class focusing on “softer skills” (for example, working in groups on a project on how chemistry is central to cosmetics, crap like that). It may help some mediocre girls, who otherwise would not get into science, get superficially interested, but all sex-segregated education does is isolate the really bright women students even more, and keep them from getting more exposure.”
– Oh, I agree completely. Sex-segregated learning never works. Do people even ask themselves why the fascist Franco dictatorship was so dead-set on having exclusively sex-segregated education?
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I had sex segregated education in high school. We did all the normal subjects for O levels, including physics and chemistry, mathematics, geography and what have you.
It left me with a very strong impression of authoritative women. It’s not difficult for me to respect women in power, unlike some of my peers in normal society.
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I agree that the article is silly. I will be surprised if feminists gush over it though. Her complete refusal to acknowledge that women’s rights are under attack puts her at odds with most mainstream feminists. I also found it strange that she considered the title _Vagina_ to be “bullying.” I haven’t read the book so I’m not commenting on its contents but the word “vagina” on its own is hardly a “bullying” word—especially if you are a women. To me this suggests that she’s uncomfortable with her own anatomy.
Picking up on the point about sex segregated education….I’m somewhat divided about this. I don’t think sex segregated education should be “de rigueur” or required but I have taught a few classes that were comprised solely of women (and this was by accident not design—no men signed up for the classes. Very few men at my institution are English majors.) At any rate, the differences between my co-ed classes and my “women only” classes are always striking. In the “women-only” classes, _all_ the students speak—even the shiest ones. In the female-only classes, the students inevitably seem more engaged; the students ask more questions etc etc. In short, female only classes seem to provide a “safe space” to combat years of American cultural conditioning. I also have a couple of friends who graduated from Smith College and they are accomplished women who have wonderful memories from their undergraduate days. For the record, I went to a large public co-education institution and I wouldn’t have changed that experience for anything. Still, I’m considerably more outspoken than the average American woman and so female only institutions/classrooms weren’t necessary for me personally. Still, I think that places like Smith College provide an important alternative for some women.
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” I also found it strange that she considered the title _Vagina_ to be “bullying.” I haven’t read the book so I’m not commenting on its contents but the word “vagina” on its own is hardly a “bullying” word—especially if you are a women.”
– Remember this recent incident when a female state representative was removed from the floor for traumatizing male representatives by using the word “vagina”? I thought this was an echo of that episode. Of course, I don’t know how anybody can simultaneously refer to that occasion and deny the war on women.
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“At any rate, the differences between my co-ed classes and my “women only” classes are always striking. In the “women-only” classes, _all_ the students speak—even the shiest ones. In the female-only classes, the students inevitably seem more engaged; the students ask more questions etc etc.”
– I know, I see this, too. My female students at Cornell confessed to me that they find it hard to speak when boys are around. But the solution to this is not segregation. The very first generation of women who ventured into law, university teaching, medicine, etc. suffered from intense sexism and persecution. Yet the response to that has not been to build a ghetto around these women.
Somebody needs to stop hiding and start facing these realities. If we do this in this generation, then the next generation will not have to face this issue at all.
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I’m strongly against enforced sex-segregated education.
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“Still, I think that places like Smith College provide an important alternative for some women.”
Yes, AS AN ALTERNATIVE, not enforced…for both men and women.
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This fucktard sees sex-segregation as tool to fight against ass-fucked frats…founded by staunch male segregationnists faggots.
The solution is not female segregationism, it’s simply “stop supporting the ass-fucked frats”.
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This is a really good critique of the craziness that much of feminism has fallen into. If the writer had been a postmodernist, she could have managed an even more subtle take-down of feminist values by pronouncing that there are numerous patriarchies, indeed as many as there are individual women to perceive them, and that everybody’s experience of oppression was necessarily hidden from the view of anybody else, by virtue there being nobody free from neurosis, and that therefore it would be ethically wrong even try to find someone who had become free.
This is how postmodernists like to burrow down into their neurotic postures, whilst cutting off the means to freedom for everybody else.
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This is a really good critique of the craziness that much of feminism has fallen into.(Muster)
Priceless. 😉
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I have no idea about US/Canadian culture, honestly. I think in general, politically and socially speaking, you are all nuts. You all seem so invested in emotion and metaphysics. Not much reason, empirical orientation or rationality. Just the good old terminology of linguistically based opposites: good versus evil, emotion versus reason, man versus woman, cat versus dog, tree versus wood house.
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