Stirring Up a Feminist Hornet’s Nest

My recent excerpt from a Vista housewife’s joyful memoir of a trip to Paris with a woman friend has been misjudged by some readers as anti-feminist.

As Elizabeth Dobbs said, she considers herself a radical feminist, and has the credentials, but she and her friend were pleased by the attention paid them by Frenchmen in the street, and by the chic femininity and self-awareness of Parisian women.

Most of the response was from women who expressed, in impeccable prose, the well-known tenets of feminism, none of which I disagree with.

“Historically,” wrote Ann Appley of Pasadena, “feminism is about mutual respect, comparable choices and rights, addressing injustice, changing personal and social systems and claiming a sense of self . . . and a lot more. Its importance cannot be negated by victims of the patriarchy who continue to put it down out of fear.”

In a letter that deserves to be quoted in full, Karen Grigsby Bates writes: “As for my deux centimes : Ms. Dobbs is right--superficially--about French men cherishing their women. (Parisian) women are a national resource--their vaunted chic is listed right up there with haute couture , haute cuisine and the country’s 315 different cheeses. . . .”

Ms. Bates notes that French drug stores stock an arsenal of aids designed “to keep the male eye firmly on the French female bod,” and that “Parisian women who do go to work (and most still don’t) eschew the American dress-for-success look (which, thank God, American women seem to be doing too--finally) for frankly feminine clothes. . . .”

Frenchmen do open doors, hold chairs and carry packages for women, she says, “but the downside is, very often, they don’t hire them for good jobs or promote them. Women still are not considered ‘normal’ in French business or commerce. . . .” (She points out that few women are chefs or fashion designers.)

Susan Moore of Glendale, acknowledging her debt to an article in Z magazine by Karen Struening and Cynthia Peters, argues that “many women have ambivalent responses to being addressed as sexual objects. While some women experience gratification and pleasure, many others recount feelings of humiliation, anger, outrage, and diminished self-esteem.”

I wouldn’t say that Mrs. Dobbs’ amiable memoir about the fun she and her friend had in Paris deserves so stern a rebuttal, but I don’t want to leave any suggestion that either of us is anti-feminist.

In a second letter, Mrs. Dobbs says, “I hope some other women can identify with me, especially women who choose to, or have to, stay at home. It’s a lonely, hard job, running a home. . . .”

I am more severely chastised not for anything Mrs. Dobbs said but for my response to her innocent disclosure that her sister (who has a husband and children) is now a belly dancer in Chile and has “danced for Pinochet.” My comment: “That’s what I call a classic case of having it all.”

The irony in that remark seems to have gone unnoticed. Mimi Kennedy of Santa Monica observes that “dancing for the entertainment and edification of a dictator like Pinochet or a society that is causing as much suffering as the one he governs is hardly ‘having it all.’ ”

Jonathan Aurthur of Santa Monica prefaces his criticism with the assurance that my column is “perhaps the dullest in the entire history of at least English-speaking journalism,” and notes that he reads it only on sleepless nights when “I am in need of, in the words of Moliere’s translator, ‘a soporific known for its dormative qualities.’ ”

( Dormative is not in the dictionary. If Moliere’s translator meant dormitive , which means sleep-inducing, he was redundant. Or maybe the word is Franglish-speaking.)

Mr. Aurthur observes: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more remarkable example of American Babbitry than this celebratory equation of ‘independence’ and ‘self-esteem’ with dancing at the feet of torturers, particularly torturers installed in power by those equally American champions of the eternal feminine, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and the CIA.”

In a postscript, Mr. Aurthur expresses the hope that his letter “achieved the tone of complacent and self-congratulatory pseudo-erudition that seems de rigueur among the readers whose puerile missives you like to quote and comment on with equal fatuity in your column. I tried.”

Don’t worry, Mr. Aurthur. You done superb.