Bad Will Toward Men

Cathy Young from the February 1999 issue

Sexual Harassment on Campus: A Guide for Administrators, Faculty, and Students, by Bernice Sandler and Robert Shoop (1997). Women are seen as powerless in interactions with men; distinctions between trivial and severe offenses are erased; an accusation, for all intents and purposes, equals guilt. Lack of evidence is treated as a pesky inconvenience, to be circumvented by such Kafkaesque means as depositing unproven allegations into sealed files that can be opened in the event of future complaints against the same person.

Sometimes women--such as flamboyant feminist professor Jane Gallop, whom Patai aptly dubs an "intellectual flasher"--get ensnared in the trap. In an insightful and amusing chapter, Patai dissects Gallop's account, in her book Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, of being on the receiving end of a sexual harassment charge by a female graduate student. To Gallop, sexual harassment is about male power, and it is a distortion of the cause to invoke such charges against women and feminists. In other words, "she wants sexual harassment law and regulations to exist only within a framework that provides her and other feminists with license, while restraining the behavior of men. And this she presents in all seriousness as a right and just demand."

Such blatant advocacy of double standards is rare. But Gallop is right about one thing: The sexual harassment crusade was intended to be a war against men. "Somewhere along the line," writes Patai, "the feminist criticism of patriarchal institutions derailed into a real, visceral, and frightening antagonism toward men and a consequent intolerance toward women who insist on associating with them."

This is hardly a new charge, of course, and it's one that most feminists indignantly deny. But Patai, who provides the most comprehensive analysis of the topic to date, makes a persuasive argument that the image of orthodox feminism as anti-male and anti-heterosexual is not just "the product of `backlash' or bad public relations." She notes that "prominent heterosexual feminists routinely approach the potential conflict between their feminism and their heterosexuality in an apologetic mode," rather than questioning the existence of such a conflict. Patai's discussion of self-hating male feminists, including a tragicomic young man who strives to become asexual because he finds that any sort of sexual act, even homosexual or solitary, is "contaminated by patriarchal values," is alone worth the price of the book.

Patai relies not only on texts but on her own and others' real-life experiences in women's studies--a world in which a teacher refers to her husband as her "partner" without pronouns, leading students to assume that she is a lesbian, and a faculty member's announcement of her upcoming marriage causes an awkward silence among her colleagues. Some will surely accuse Patai of exaggerating the importance of a lunatic fringe. But while she concedes that hard-core heterophobia is "an admittedly minority position within feminism," she makes a convincing case that its ideas and its rhetoric have infected the crusade against sexual harassment, with its presumption that male sexual interest demeans and endangers women.

In an interesting twist, Patai places her analysis of modern sexual politics in the context of dystopian fiction--futuristic visions of a completely regulated life (such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World). She sees codes of speech and conduct meant to protect women from possible "discomfort" as stemming from the sort of mind-set described in such stories. "To conflate much of what today is labeled `sexual harassment' with serious forms of sexual assault and abuse," she writes, "is to invite authoritarianism into our lives--the hand of the state everywhere in the private sphere, until there is virtually no private sphere left."

Like many other critics of feminist extremism, Patai notes that it is bad for feminism itself, insofar as feminism is about equality and dignity for women. Refreshingly, however, she adds that one should be able "to attack feminism for the harm it is doing to men and to nonfeminist women," not just to its own cause. Patai doesn't just denounce male bashing; she has genuine sympathy for men and a strong sense of the common humanity of men and women. She proposes a fascinating mental exercise: Imagine that men start to clamor for protections against "emotional harassment" by women (all those demands to express their feelings!) similar to current protections for women from sexual harassment by men.

This thoughtful and fair-minded book might have been helped by a look at the question of whether serious sexual misconduct sometimes goes unpunished--when, for example, the wrongdoer is influential or has the support of campus feminists. One also wishes Patai had included more material from the world outside of university campuses; as it is, she leaves room for the argument that the excesses of the sexual harassment industry which she chronicles are limited to the academy (they are not). Then, too, a few of her case histories might have benefited from more detail. But these are quibbles.

Heterophobia is a powerful brief for personal freedom and against efforts to politicize human relations and strip them of their complexity. Patai leaves no doubt that sexual harassment laws and policies as they exist today do far more harm than good. Perhaps, as President Clinton's tribulations continue to fuel a backlash against "sexual McCarthyism," this timely book can provide an additional push for a rethinking of the ideological and legal orthodoxies that have gotten us where we are now.