From: hillyard@msc.cornell.edu
Newsgroups: alt.feminism
Subject: Victimhood's Strange Bedfellows
Date: 3 Sep 92 22:18:35 GMT
Reply-To: hillyard@msc.cornell.edu
Organization: Cornell-Materials-Science-Center
Originator: hillyard@tiger.msc.cornell.edu

A couple of exerpts from an editorial in todays Wall Street Journal.

________________
  Victimhood's Strange Bedfellows
    by Cathy Young

A woman wants to sue a moving company for damaging her furniture.
Unfortunately, she has signed a paper waiving any liability for such
damage.  Case closed?  Maybe not.  The argument, by the late New England
School of Law professor Mary Joe Frug, goes thus:  Since the movers
were tired and in a hurry to leave, and since woman are socialized to be
concerned about the feelings of others, the woman--by signing without
reading--was acting reasonably from the female point of view.

More old-fashioned voices might put it another way, and say our subject
was "acting like a woman."  But this peculiar logic is typical of the new
school of feminist legal scholarship.  Its focus on victimhood reflects
an increasingly prominent tendency in more "mainstream" feminism as well.
The chapters in this story--Thelma and Louise, Anita Hill, the Palm Beach
trial, Naomis Wolf's "The Beauty Myth," Susan Faludi's best-selling
"Backlash"--have something in common, besides being about women, sex and
gender.

At their center is the image of women as victims--victims of men, or victims
of a (male) societal conspiracy.  And the important news here is that
even anti-feminist conservatives are guilty--they have created their own
victimology.

Let's take a look at the themes on which feminists and anti-feminists 
present mirrir images of victimization.[..]

[some examples deleted]

Abortion is another issue where conservatives have used the rhetoric of 
victimology.  The image of the woman who terminates a pregnancy as a
promiscuous, selfish murderess has given way to the soothingly familiar
image of woman as victim.  A full-page ad in the New York Times signed
by Pennsylvania Gov. Robert Casey, Havard University law professor Mary
Ann Glendon and a number of pro-life feminists asserts that the right
to abortion "has ushered in a new era of irresponsibility toward women."
Abortion becomes "surgical rape," as if pregnant women were grabbed on
the streets and dragged kicking and screaming inside the clinics.  The
conservatives have even found their very own victim group:  women who regret
their abortions and argue they were coerced into the deed.

On this issue many pro-choice feminists have a problem too--they are being 
hoist by their own petard.  If anti-porn activists can claim that a woman
who, in the words of legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, "spreads here
legs before the camera" can't be exercising free choice, what's so different
about a woman spreading her legs before a suction machine?

[...]

For men to define themselves as victims of oppression may not be either a
traditionally masculine or a politically correct thing to do.  But there's
always hope.  The men's movement, its bibles also riding the best-seller
lists, seems to be mostly about one great truth:  Men are victims, too.  
They are victimized by an industrial civilization, by their fathers, by
their mothers, by feminists.  It seems we're just a few steps away from
a brave new world in which everone is everyone's victim and no one is to
blame.

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Newsgroups: alt.feminism