RADICAL feminism comes from the same stable as Marxism: it is an ideology revealing the secret of the world. That secret is that our apparent freedom masks the fact that we are dominated by an oppressive system which invades every corner of our lives. The famous doctrine that the personal is the political is one formula expressing this secret. Once it has been revealed, there's only one thing to do: struggle against the evil system and liberate mankind.
Feminism tends to accept from Marxism an overarching understanding of capitalism as the basic form of oppression, but it has its own names for the evil system: "patriarchy" or "phallocentrism." Like Marxism feminism is prone to fragmenting into different understandings of the strategy by which the system is to be understood and destroyed. Feminists face, however, a serious problem from which Marxists are free. They are uncomfortably torn between the thesis that women are indistinguishable from men, and the very different thesis that women represent a sane and healthy value system, quite different from the brutalities of masculinity.
The spiritual dimension of feminism is something called "raising consciousness." This is the activity of learning the doctrine, meditating upon its implications, and applying it to every aspect of life. It also involves accumulating the materials of indignation, so that a constant and ruthless hatred may be directed against the system that feminists now realize is bent on seducing everybody into compliance. The fully raised consciousness discovers confirmations of the truth of the doctrine everywhere: such, of course, are the fruits of any spiritual enthusiasm. It also appeals to the vanity of believers, because the feminist finds herself living among sleelpwalkers who do not realize what their real situation is. The distinction between elite and mass--so foreign to the realities of Anglo-Saxon life--is thus central to ideological belief.
All feminists (like all Marxists) are intellectuals in the sense that they understand the world in terms of theory, but many of them are inevitably, as the old joke goes, intellectuals without an intellect. The basic materials of the theory were put together by Marx, whose work is essenftially a collection of devices for mobilizing proletariats and turning any set of circumstances into a theorized project. Ideologies basically mimic philosophy, and a few theorists are good enough to rise beyond the salvationist practicality of ideology and achieve the academic level from which the materials of belief had previously been derived. It is thus not quite a solecism to talk of "Marxist philosophy," and perhaps the same is true of some feminist thought.
Not of much, however, because ideologies are essentially practical. Even the most arcane realms of logic and metaphysics are judged in terms of what the believer imagines to be their bearing on the political struggle in the here and now. Nothing is more familiar in these circles than the pseudophilosophical cry that thefre is no neutrality anywhere. As the old American trade-union song had it, "You can either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair." Feminists have had no difficulty in consigning the whole history of science and philosophy to the exile of oppressive patriarchal doctrine whose point is to exclude women.
What became unmistakable in the 1960s, however, was that ideologies are remarkable sets of abstract propositions lacking both the competence of practice and the reflectiveness of theory. An ideological movement is a collection of people many of whom could hardly bake a cake, fix a car, sustain a friendship or a marriage, or even do a quadratic equation, yet they believe they know how to rule the world. The university, in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with comprehensive ineptitude, has become the natural habitat of the ideological enthusiast. A kind of adventure playground, carefully insulated from reality in order to prevent absent-minded professors from bumping into things as they explore transcendental realms, has become the institutional base for civilizational self-hatred.
Feminists have, however, been so far protected from one major disaster which bids fair to destroy to plausibility of Marxists: they have never attained the total revolutionary power they seek in order to engineer society closer to their ideas. Just such power was acquired by Marxists in many of the less sophisticated parts of the world, and their governmental bungling has left whole populations impoverished, demoralized, slaughtered, and genuinely oppressed. This tragic tale is fitting commentary on the arrogance of ideologists, and in fact the best commentary on it is in Marx himself: the remark in the Theses on Feuerbach that all theoretical mysteries find their solution in practice. The solution here in one of the few certainties in social science: If your rulers start taking Marx seriously, run for your lives. Millions have done so, but survival is only to the swift.
Parasites of Modernity
THE COMPARISON with Marxism reveals the essence of the feminist movement. For like Marxism, feminism is parasitic on the development of modernity. By the end of the eighteenth century, modern European society was sketching out the possibilities for all of a kind of freedom and abundance not previously enjoyed even by kings. Marxism orchestrated a hopeful enthusiasm among those who had so far seen few of the promised benefits. On this ground, it could claim to be progressive, though it encouraged the kind of snatching at benefits which destroyed those very benefits. But Marxism had another side: it appealed also to the many who were demoralized rather than challenged by the opportunities opened up by the modern world. It promised these people a secure and changeless place in a future world, a world without risk or failure. In this sense, it was an attempt to put the clock back. The result was that societies, like the Russian, which fell for the Marxist sales talk and tried the revolutionary shortcut to the future ended up in desperate straits pleading for help from the liberal democracies of the West.
Feminism is a similar exploitation of the impatience of less able women who want to make a fast leap into a future of free and easy equality. How else might one explain the astonishing indifference among feminists to the skill, ability, and resourcefulness on which the success of the Western mainstream has been based? How else to explain the lunatic demand that an amendment to the Constitution should immediately give women 50 per cent of all elective offices? All that matters to these simple people is that they want it, now, and all problems are theorized away as prejudice, stereotyping, and the resistance of the "malestream."
Yet, as with Marxism, there is a curious backward-looking element in feminism which bids fair to be as destructive of the opportunities of Western women as Marxism has been of the countries it dominated. A good example of this tendency is the campaign to turn women against men on the grounds that they are all rapists. No one doubts that some men are rapists, but this in no way establishes that all men are. A dim sense of unease with this logical point is part of the reason why the concepts of rape and of sexual harassment are constantly being stretched by feminists, so that it now appears possible for a women to have been raped without even realizing that it has happened.
A raised consciousness in this area plays with propositions of the form "X per cent of women have experienced sexual interference before the age of Y," where X is a very large number, and Y as low as you care to make it, and "sexual interference" defined so broadly that it can include hearing an older sibling discuss his/her adolescent sexual experimentation. Statistics of this kind are known in the trade as "advocacy numbers." The person in the street, with his notorious lack of delicacy, calls them "lies." The point is that the feminist, who in her hatred of patriarchy starts from this basic proposition, feels justified in choosing to entertain any fiction at all which will dramatize true consciousness.
It is along these lines that we discover an important but little-noticed convergence between radical feminism and Islamic fundamentalism. By campaigning against the thing called "date rape," the feminist creates immense hatred and suspicion between men and women, so that the feminist advice to any women going out on a date is to establish a virtual contract governing what will happen in the course of an evening. This is to destroy the free and easy relations between men and women which have long characterized the Western world--and only the Western world. It parallels the fundamentalist campaign to restore the old ways in the Islamic world. "It is a well known fact," as a Jordanian member of parliament recently remarked, "that putting men and women in the same room is like mixing benzine and fire."
Back to the Harem
FEMINISTS, in other words, are well on the way to reinventing the harem--special quartes in which women traditionally lived entirely separate lives untainted by the lusts of men. As with Marxism, the way forward turns out to be the way back. But anyone contemplating this remarkable situation is likely to have a further thought. Political doctrines always invite the question: Cui bono? Who is it, one might ask, that would benefit from dormitories filled with attractive young women who have been worked up into a state of hysterical mistrust of men? One of the most influential fragments of feminism has been its lesbian wing.
There are good reasons for thinking that late-twentieth-century feminism, now a generation old, has reached something like its apogee. One reason is that it has been able to ally itself with all the other ideological "minorities" which have succeeded in playing upon the guilts of the American mainstream and extracting a variety of collective privileges. American males of this generation seem to be polarized between a Rambo-like fantasy life and a remarkable wimpishness when charged with the supposed crimes of their ancestors or even themselves. Like everything else in American life, this disposition is unlikely to last. The minorities will themselves fall into conflict over scarce goods, and collectivist privilege (which clashes in any case with the basic individualism of American life) will begin to dissolve.
An even more important vulnerability of radical feminism is the fact that it is based upon an illusion. It imagines that everything it demands corresponds to the establishment of justice. But in a modern society, justice is simply the gloss that special interests paint over their demands. Justice, in this wildly extended sense, is a matter of fashion and taste. It is within living memory that many people (including women) waxed indignant over giving equal pay to spinster schoolteachers on the ground that they would spend it on cosmetics and foreign travel, while men were supporting a family. Such judgments change all the time. Many simple people, after all, used to believe devoutly that socialism was the unchallengeable wave of the future. Lost in a dream of absoluteness, feminists are ill equipped to face the inevitable somersaults of modern moral pluralism.
The most important vulnerability of the feminist project, however, lies in its evident bad faith in relation to its environment. Whatever complaints women may have in modern societies, they are as dust beneath the feet of women in all other societies. Yet every feminist success is greeted with a redoubling of complaint-mongering and tooth-gnashing at the horrors of patriarchy. This is a tiresome form of behavior which will in time wear out its welcome. Camille Paglia's charge that feminism is an "adolescent whine" is a salutary recalling to evident reality of believers lost to all sense of outside opinion.
Rewriting the Rules
NOT SO LOST, however, as to have rejected the benefits of what they most violently attack. The basic fact about feminism is that it is financed by the "malestream" and that its respectability results from exploiting the ranks and respectabilities of supposedly male-oriented universities. Feminists have got to be professors on the ground that they can do academic work just as well as men. But havifng been admitted to the game of academic life, many feminists have decided that it is "masculinist" and patriarchal, and that there is a superior feminist understanding of the world which ought to replace masculinist science and philosophy. They thus resemble those tiresome children who demand to play adult games but, on being admitted, find that they can't play, or won't play, and demand that everybody else accept a new set of rules more congenial to them.
False consciousness generates contradictions. Lving amid fantasies, feminists on the one hand demand that female Marines should be given a combat role just like the men, and on the other hand thrill to the alleged sufferings of Anita Hill distressed over some pornographic remarks. What do they want? To be clinging vines, or out there in the desert beside Rambo zapping America's foes? The men were understandably muttering: "If you can't take the heat, get back to the kitchen." Logically, American feminism is a mess--but who cares?--as long as the men knuckle under and the benefits keep rolling in.
The future of radical feminism in America is tied to the fate of all the soft, non-revolutionary ideological enthusiasms which are currently trying to march through the institutions. It seems likely that Americans will soon tire of the grievance-mongering which plays upon their guilts. It is difficult to think that a movement which replaces the fun and poetry of life with mediocre theorizing--which turns Romeo and Julet into a disquisition on the oppressive character of heterosexism--will long dominate even the academic world on which it has so successfully battened in recent times.
Mr. Minogue is a professor of political science at the London School of Economics.