Chapter 1. Good Will Toward Men: Cathy Young

writer; the perils of the victim mentality

Cathy is one of the twenty-two women interviewed in the 1994 book Good Will Toward Men.

Cathy Young is a freelance writer specializing in women’s issues. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Reason and The New Republic.

She is the author of Growing Up in Moscow, a memoir of her life before she emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States. at the age of sixteen. In 1992 she became one of the cofounders of the Women’s Freedom Network, an organization of “dissident feminists.” Cathy was born in 1963.

(This info is from 1994, when the book was published. Cathy is on Medium at medium.com/@cathyyoung63.)

Jack: You consider yourself a feminist?

Cathy: Yes, I do.

Are there feminists who might quarrel with you?

I think there are feminists and nonfeminists who would quarrel with me. I was talking to a man about women’s issues and when I said I was a feminist, he said, “No, you’re not. You’re not biased against men. You’re not a male-basher.”

So, some people would not consider me a feminist because they associate feminism with something negative. On the other hand, some feminists would not consider me a feminist because they, too, associate feminism with male-bashing — only they think male-bashing is good. They would say that because I don’t automatically assume that women are always oppressed by men and are always victims of men, and don’t always take the woman’s side in any conflict between women and men, I am therefore not a feminist.

I believe very strongly that people are people regardless of gender. I don’t think what one is or what one does in life is primarily determined by whether you’re male or female, although I do think there are some tendencies which may be biological in men and women. I think there is a great deal of overlap in these tendencies and that we are individuals first. I believe that makes me a feminist.

On the subject of feminism, what would you say to American men?

I would say that the male-bashers do not speak for all women, though they like to pretend they do, that the vast majority of women are interested in loving partnership with men. I think a lot of women today unfortunately are being seduced by the propaganda of victimhood.

One very obvious example is the crusade against sexual harassment. It started out with good intentions, as an effort to point out that if a boss pressures a woman for sexual favors, she may feel that she is not really free to refuse. But now truly trivial experiences that some women find annoying, even if most women don’t, are being redefined as sexual harassment. The current radical feminist perspective on what constitutes sexual harassment is the perspective of the most vulnerable woman, which translates easily into the most hypersensitive woman.

In all fairness, one could cite cases in which valid complaints are not taken seriously, such as a recent case involving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, in which several women apparently were quite egregiously harassed. But that’s one of the dangers in the tendency to overblow trivial charges — it desensitizes people to the serious stuff. So on the one hand this is dangerous to men because it can make a paranoid woman the arbiter of a man’s fate. On the other hand, it is dangerous to women because it can lead to the dismissal of serious abuse charges.

What is all this doing to efforts to establish better relationships between women and men?

A male friend of mine who teaches at a college in New York told me that he has decided that he is never going to close the door if he has a female student in his office, because of his fear of being accused of harassment. Certainly that’s not very good for the woman, because instead of giving his attention to her education, his mind is going to be on protecting himself from accusations of harassment.

Also, I’ve heard women express concerns that they may not be invited to business conferences that include overnight trips because the men are afraid she’ll allege they made a pass at her in the hotel. Recently a male friend who works at a magazine told me very casually that he had stayed at the office with his boss working very late, until nine or ten o’clock. And then he paused and said, “I bet if I were a woman, the boss would have been afraid to do that, because he would have been worried about accusations of harassment.” If a woman editor doesn’t get late-night assignments, that means she’s not as valuable a worker and she doesn’t get promoted.

Old-fashioned notions of propriety also work against professional women on [Capitol] Hill. Several complained that many lawmakers do not travel on business with female staff, particularly if the woman is attractive…

Others said that many lawmakers are reluctant to take female employees to working dinners or to other after-hours events. “A lot of members, especially now, given the recent scandals, are aware of ‘appearances,’” [a legislative aide] said.

—Richard Morin, Washington Post, February 21, 1993 in a page one article alleging sexual harassment in Congress

You mentioned that if the professor has possible accusations of sexual harassment on his mind, it’s not good for the woman student.

Obviously, it’s also not good for the professor.

Could you explain that? How do you think it might damage the professor?

It just detracts from his working environment. I’ll tell you a story which I witnessed myself when I was still in college in ’87. I was taking a course on human sexuality and we had a young woman in the class who had appointed herself to be the feminist watchdog. She was constantly pouncing on the professor for the most idiotic things. For instance, I remember that when he was talking about something that clearly applied only to men, to some male sexual characteristics, he used the word “people.” So this young woman jumps up and says “Ah hah! So you’re implying that women are not people, only men are people!” Another time we were discussing sex crimes, rape in particular. Our professor said that experts believe there are several types of rapists who are motivated by different things. Some are motivated by anger toward women and the desire to humiliate and dominate them. Others are primarily motivated just by violent impulses, and also commit a lot of violence against men. Some simply are either unable or unwilling to control their sexual urges. This young woman raises her hand and says in a very, very belligerent manner, “You’re glamorizing rape. You are trying to make rape sexy.” She insisted that all rapists are motivated by hatred and the desire to humiliate and dominate women, and to say anything else is totally unacceptable. Later she bragged about filing a complaint against him and getting him into trouble. He had to write a lot of letters justifying his conduct and explaining why he believed it was not sexist.

As long as the radicals can get moderate women to believe that they are really fighting for women’s rights, they have a winning issue. I think we need to inform both women and men about what some of the ideologues are like. For instance, how many people know that Catharine MacKinnon, who has emerged as one of the leading spokeswomen about rape and sexual harassment, has pretty much said explicitly that heterosexual sex is rape? I’m sure that if people knew she held these views, they really wouldn’t be listening to what she has to say on these issues.

Yet Peter Jennings had her as one of the panelists on ABC’s special on Men, Sex and Rape in May of 1992, and Tom Brokaw had her as one of NBC’s lead commentators on the Thomas-Hill hearings.

That’s right. And that brings me to another element of what helps radical feminists take over the field. I think a big part of it is guilt-ridden men who walk around all day apologizing for being male.

What radical feminist allegation do you think might be most effective at inducing feelings of guilt in men?

I think there’s a generalized charge of men having power over women and abusing it. Another very similar but really more far-reaching and, in my opinion, more ominous thing is the proliferation of so-called rape-prevention workshops in which male college freshmen are sometimes essentially badgered into conceding that they may have raped some of their seemingly willing sexual partners if they didn’t ask for and obtain an explicit “yes.”

Why is the question of the explicit “yes” not asked of all the women who have had sex?

You make a very good point. Some campus date rape guidelines say that there has to be consent to the specific act of penetration.

The word penetration is blatantly one-sided. The only person who can penetrate is the male. Why is it that we don’t talk about envelopment?

The one-sided presentation of female forced sex incidence rates may have fostered a negative and unrealistic public perception of college students — that men are aggressive and exploitative and that women are passive and victimized. These findings suggest that reality is much more complicated: Both men and women engage in a continuum of sexually exploitative behaviors ranging from verbal pressure to use of physical restraint and force.

Cindy Struckman-Johnson, Ph.D., “Forced Sex on Dates: It Happens to Men, Too.” The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 24, p. 241, 1988

Good point. I recently read an article in a scholarly journal which specifically considered the question of definitions of rape. Some studies define rape as any sexual acts involving drugs or alcohol — if the woman was drunk or stoned. And again, if a woman has sex with a man who is drunk, no one is asking if she raped him.

One of the major points you write about is that feminism originally talked about the need for women to get more assertive.

Sure.

Now we have a brand of feminism urging upon women the assumption of victimhood.

Absolutely. It’s very gratifying to some people to turn every trivial annoyance into a cosmic drama of oppression and struggle for liberation in which they are the perfectly good, perfectly innocent, oppressed victims and the people annoying them are absolutely evil. It also exonerates them of responsibility for their actions. If a woman has had sex with a man and feels bad about it later and thinks, “Oh, I really shouldn’t have had sex with that jerk,” she can persuade herself that it really wasn’t voluntary. He forced her and therefore she doesn’t have to confront what it was about her behavior that got her into that situation. And I’m not saying, by the way, that provocative behavior on the part of the woman justifies rape. But I do think she has a responsibility to clearly make the point that she doesn’t want to have sex.

I’m looking for a theme here, a key as to what is motivating this brand of feminism.

A desire for power, I think.

Why would feminism want women to be able to do whatever they want? Is it because they perceive men as being able to do whatever they want?

That’s a good question. That could be the case. What is it that motivates people to seek power? I think there is such a thing as power lust. And for a certain type of personality there is great satisfaction in imposing your will on other people. I think also that some people are sincerely misguided. Some people perceive women as being victimized by men at every step in their lives. I think they are motivated by the desire to help women, but also I think some of the ideologues are seeking power not so much for women in general as for themselves and for their clique.

The new girls network?

I guess you could call it that. Yeah, that’s very much the case, especially with the women’s studies phenomenon in which women are trying to dictate the curriculum and write campus codes that would turn ninety percent of the men into rapists. In my view there’s good empowerment and there’s bad empowerment. Good empowerment is essentially giving people power over their own lives. Bad empowerment is giving them power over other people’s lives. I think that the radical feminists are interested very much in the second kind of empowerment.

Is that drive for power motivated by a belief that women should exercise power over men’s lives because women are just better, they are more moral?

I think for some feminists that is the case. It amazes me, for instance, that we have a major female newspaper columnist, Anna Quindlen, who has repeatedly expressed her view that women are morally superior to men. She gets a Pulitzer prize. She is a very hot item. Now just imagine that you have a male columnist who had explicitly written of his belief that men are superior to women and should therefore be in command. He certainly wouldn’t be writing a column for The New York Times, much less getting a Pulitzer.

In what ways does she say that women are superior to men?

During the 1992 election campaign she said, “If we really believe… that there’s not a male politician in America who hasn’t slept around, I’ve got a solution for the future. Look for a woman.” Then she said, “If we really believe… that our political leaders don’t have a clue about real life, look for a woman.” And she said, “I’ve rarely met a woman who didn’t know more about the supermarket, the bus stop and the prevailing winds than her male counterparts. Not to mention child care, human rights, abortion, the minimum wage and sexual harassment.” [The New York Times, February 2, 1992.]

What would you say is the best refutation of that line of thinking?

First of all, there is simply no evidence that women in office are more compassionate or more ethical than men. In fact, Carol Moseley Braun, who was elected to the Senate as part of this wave of new women, is reported to have some really big ethical problems. I’m not saying that she’s unique in this, because certainly a lot of male congressmen have ethical problems. All I’m saying is she’s certainly no better in that respect.

It’s amazing how this is really a return to the Victorian view of woman, that women don’t sleep around, even though a lot of surveys now suggest that female rates of adultery are almost as high as the rates for men. But Anna Quindlen tells us that women don’t sleep around. And I might add that in states where women are represented in large numbers in the legislatures, they have been every bit as likely as men to be involved in corruption scandals. There was a case in Arizona recently where a large number of legislators were caught in a sting operation involving bribery and organized crime. Several of the major culprits in that incident were women.

Was Carol Gilligan’s book the starting point, the seed of this new branch of sexist feminism?

Partially.

How would you describe the Gilligan book?

Carol Gilligan’s book, In A Different Voice, argues that there are distinctly male and female ways of making moral judgments. That women make moral judgment based on caring for other people, caring for their needs, caring for intimacy and relationships. And men’s moral judgments are based on abstract notions of people’s rights as opposed to their needs.

“Abstract” seems like a loaded word.

Well, certainly, it is a loaded word. Abstract rights versus real needs? Which one do you prefer? Men make moral judgments based on autonomy, considering every person in a context that is isolated from other people.

That’s just spin control, isn’t it? Couldn’t we put a negative spin on what Carol Gilligan says about the way women think and make moral judgments, and put a positive spin on what she says about the way men make moral judgments?

Certainly: men have principles and women are so eager to please others that it’s the only thing they care about. This is something that feminists used to complain about — that women were socialized to please other people rather than think of their own integrity and their own personal goals. The only problem, which is highly ironic, is that the feminine traits that Carol Gilligan puts a positive spin on were also viewed very positively by the Victorians. They were seen as feminine virtues. And it was early feminists who defined these things as flaws, not male chauvinists, as the new feminists — the followers of Carol Gilligan — are claiming.

One of her contentions is that men have a fear of intimacy. But there was really only a small gap between men and women. Most of these gender gaps tend to be in the area of seven, ten, maybe fifteen percent, tops. At the most we are talking merely about tendencies in one direction or the other.

You wrote in one of your pieces that the variations inside a gender group are often as great as the variations between the groups.

Absolutely. And this is a point the earlier feminists were trying to make, that gender roles should be more flexible because individual characteristics are distributed across gender lines. But now we seem to be going in a direction of greatly exaggerating these differences and turning them into absolutes. Another pitfall of the type of research that the people like Carol Gilligan do is that they only measure the extent to which people see themselves as empathetic. Women tend to consider themselves more empathetic than men. But some studies have found that how people rate themselves on empathy or other traits is often almost unrelated to how much of those traits they exhibit in real life.

Suspiciously, experiments performed by women researchers have been more likely than those conducted by men to find that female subjects are especially empathic. But what seems to matter most of all is the way empathy is measured. That was the conclusion of psychologist Nancy Eisenberg and a student of hers after they reviewed more than 100 studies in 1983. “There is a huge sex difference in self-report of empathy as measured with questionnaires… [but] little evidence of a sex difference in physiological response to another’s emotional distress,” they wrote. — Alfie Kohn, You Know What They Say…: The Truth About Popular Beliefs

Is it possible that what we’re seeing in the phenomenon of male-bashing is a backlash on the part of women who are trying to reverse the advances of men into their traditionally female domains — that women are threatened by men wanting to be more involved in nurturance, child rearing and intimacy, for instance?

Well, they claim that they want more flexible gender roles. I don’t know about MacKinnon, but Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf do.

But don’t you point out in one of your reviews of Faludi’s book that she is quite gleeful about the fact that men have virtually no say in the reproductive process?

Yes, and that’s where radical feminist hypocrisy comes in. On the one hand Faludi says it is a great injustice that women are the ones who do all the child care, but at the same time she is gleeful about the fact that men are increasingly left with no say whatsoever in the reproductive process. I don’t see how she can reconcile that contradiction. Basically, it’s the woman who sets the rules.

The Rules

1. The FEMALE always makes the rules.

2. Rules are subject to change at any time without prior notification.

3. No male can possibly know all the rules.

4. If the FEMALE suspects that the male knows all the rules, she must immediately change some or all of the rules.

5. The FEMALE is NEVER wrong.

6. The FEMALE can change her mind at any given time.

7. The male can never change his mind without express written consent of the FEMALE.

8. The FEMALE has every right to be angry or upset.

9. If the FEMALE is wrong, it is because of a flagrant misunderstanding which is a direct result of something the male did or said.

10. If number 9 applies to you, the male must apologize immediately for causing the misunderstanding.

11. The male must remain calm at all times unless the FEMALE wants him to be angry or upset.

12. The FEMALE must under no circumstances allow the male to know whether or not she wants him to be angry or upset.

— Flier on executive woman’s bulletin board, March 1990

Could you, as they say at college, compare and contrast radical feminism and arch-conservatism on the notion of female superiority?

On the issue of pornography we’ve seen an alliance between radical feminists of the Catharine MacKinnon type and people of the Fundamentalist Christian right. The impulse on the part of radical feminists in trying to censor pornography is based at least in part on their fear of and their desire to dehumanize male sexuality. Male sexuality is seen as evil.

And the men-are-beasts rhetoric is surprisingly common among some right-wingers who endorse traditional gender roles. They will sometimes say that men have uncontrollable sexual urges that will run wild unless they are domesticated by women.

I have a quote from Newt Gingrich that we’ll insert here. He illustrates your point exactly.

Okay. What did he say?

One of the things that we know historically and biologically is that males are designed to be relatively irresponsible…. When you read about a 16-, 17-, 18-year-old kid going to jail as a criminal boasting that he’s already had eleven children by ten different women, you know you have a society which is breaking down in its core values. — Congressman Newt Gingrich, Republican from Georgia, speaking on Morning Edition, National Public Radio, August 28, 1992

He’s talking about one man and ten women being irresponsible here. Yet there is no mention at all of female irresponsibility. Newt, wake up!

Right. And this men-are-beasts rhetoric is also used against women to control women’s sexuality. The idea is that women have to be the guardians of sexual morality because men’s sexual urges are uncontrollable. Because of the abortion issue, conservatives don’t want to be seen as antifemale, so it’s safer to bash men, I guess.

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I am serializing my 1994 book Good Will Toward Men for free. It’s a collection of interviews with twenty-two women about making gender equality a two-way street. Check out the chapter list.