CHSommers

I consider myself an equity feminist. An equity feminist wants for women what she wants for everyone: fairness, dignity, liberty, opportunity. But today, too many in the women's movement are carried away with victim feminism and male-bashing. The victim feminists hijacked the movement a few decades ago, and they don't welcome dissidents of any kind. They call me an "anti-feminist", "backlasher", a "traitor to my gender", "anti-woman"-- even a "non-woman." But what I am is a former philosophy professor with a respect for logic, rules of evidence, and basic fairness. I think these qualities put me at odds with today's feminist establishment.

I respect the men's rights movement. However, it is badly in need of scholars. A movement has to be built on an intellectual base, and that base has not yet been built. Gender scholarship has been in the hands of hard-line, male-averse leftists for several decades. It will take scholars to bring down the faux scholarship of these hardliners.

In the spring of 1988, I was a professor on a ship that went around the world in a program called Semester at Sea. I walked onto that ship a liberal feminist and came off- let me just say- confused. Not many, but a vocal few of the professors were Marxists or hard-line feminists. They tried to persuade the privileged young women on the ship that they were oppressed. I was appalled by the conspiracy theories about the patriarchy and an obsession with victimization-- on a world cruise, no less! Long story short, I wrote an article about it when I returned, and the Atlantic monthly commissioned me to write a longer piece on academic feminism. That's how it all got started.

That violence against women increases 40 percent on Superbowl Sunday. This canard was everywhere in the mid-90s, but last year it came back in Great Britain during the World Cup. There's no truth to it, but like many false victim statistics, it will never die. http://chronicle.com/article/Persistent-Myths-in-Feminis/46965/

Unfortunately, the crime of domestic violence is poorly understood and the issue has been used by gender zealots to depict the average man as a predator. Women (and men) plagued by violence will be helped by solid research and good statistics. Right now we have little of either.

Yes, misogyny certainly exists, but it was a far more serious problem a few decades ago. Today, misandry-- hostility to men-- is rampant in our society. A "women are from Venus; men are from hell" mentality dominates today's organized feminist movement.