Antifeminism

Feminist Victory

First, there is in American culture an assumption of feminist victory. The goals of the second wave feminist movement, from the late 1960s through the 1970s, [Page 72]have largely been achieved. The claim of this argument is that there has been sufficient progress toward equality, for instance in women's paid employment, the recognition of sexual harassment in the workplace, and Title IX for girls’ education. Christina Hoff Sommers is one of the main purveyors of this point of view. She valorizes first wave feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony but regards present-day feminists as chronic complainers. She argues that there is no need for modern feminism because discrimination against women is largely in the past. In fact, according to this view, the real victims of gender discrimination today are boys and men. One of Sommers’ targets is the supposed “war against boys.” The war-against-boys rhetoric says that feminism brought attention to girls’ and women's needs in education but in doing so feminists subordinated boys’ needs to the point that girls and women got ahead of boys and men. These authors’ argument is essentially (1) that girls have no need for any special attention because resources have already been spent on them and feminism has done what it has set out to do; and (2) the real victims are not girls and women but boys and men who are victims of feminist critique.

Because the goals of feminism have been met, this argument goes, those women who continue to call themselves feminists or insist on a feminist movement, are judged either as innocuously passé, or, more harshly, as trying to get ahead of men-and thus as anti-male. It is in this element of antifeminism where one finds allegations of feminist “man-hating.” Because there is nothing left for women to complain about, feminists must have it out for men. Only isolated cases of overt gender discrimination against women are recognized. Today's feminists who talk about gender inequality as a system face allegations of man-hating. To find a pattern of discrimination, as a systemic analysis of inequality would do, is to express hatred of men.

Some scholars distinguish the backlash against second wave feminism from the current backlash of the early 21st century. In the old backlash, feminism was vilified as a false ideology to which women sacrificed their personal happiness (in marriage and motherhood) for the sake of abstract ideals of independence. In the new backlash, women's equality is treated as a fact that no sensible person would deny, but feminism is made to seem ridiculous and passé in its insistence on still talking about gender discrimination. The new backlash compromises feminism's ability to critique economic and other gender divisions that still disadvantage women, and it reduces political consciousness and gender questions to personal stories, refusing to acknowledge structural problems.

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