Left and Right: There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is: “What does a woman want?”

--Sigmund Freud

A lull in the war on terrorism has left the chattering classes hanging. The slowing of the Afghanistan campaign has rendered countless pro- and antiwar screeds obsolete. And bombs over Baghdad haven’t started falling. How best to fill the void but with the question that confounded no less a thinker than Sigmund Freud?

Yes, the topic of the day for both right- and left-wing publications is women. And that means trouble, with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for ... Plumbing. Over at the conservative National Review Online, Jessica Gavora is worked up over a study claiming sex discrimination in high school vocational education. Conducted by the National Women’s Law Center, the study found girls ghettoized in cosmetology and child-care classes while boys filled the ranks of classes for would-be plumbers, pipe fitters and engineers. Gavora thinks the study is a front for creeping gender quotas. Gender quotas are Gavora’s specialty. Her book, “Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title X,” posits that men are being forced to hand over athletic teams and programs to women who participate less in sports, in the unholy name of gender parity.

Now the gender quota lobby is moving on to vocational education, Gavora says. “When they fail to convince high school girls ... to take more classes in welding and auto mechanics, activists will begin to agitate for boys’ representation in these classes to be curtailed,” Gavora writes in NRO. “Boys will lose. No girls will gain. But the law will be complied with.”

Gavora’s musings inspire NRO Editor Jonah Goldberg--not coincidentally, Gavora’s husband--to take on women in plumbing. Or, more precisely, his wife’s piece got him “to thinking about how silly and hopeless feminism has become,” Goldberg writes.

To Goldberg, the explanation for gender apartheid in vocational education is simple: Girls would no more forgo “pretty things” for clogged toilets than join the Taliban. Goldberg does not explain the male taste for stopped-up plumbing, but he’s sure it has nothing to do with gender bias.

Feminism is so over, and the girls have won, Goldberg says. After all, “chicks” have the vote, and equal pay for equal work is a reality “if you control for childbearing, time in the work force and other relevant factors.” As if that weren’t enough, “the executive editor of National Review Online is a dame ... for Pete’s sake,” Goldberg notes. Such things, he says, have eliminated the need for a feminist movement.

“What studies and polls do show is that most young women don’t want to be called ‘feminists.’ Why? Because the term has become synonymous with ‘unreasonable ideologue,’ ‘chronic complainer,’ ‘crypto-lesbian’ and, perhaps most of all, ‘humorless toothache of a human being,’ ” Goldberg wraps up.

“Humorless toothache” was one of the kinder things leftie Katha Pollitt of The Nation was called after her post- 9/11 piece about her aversion to flying the flag. This month, defending the United Nations’ 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women against U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft’s attacks, she takes a global view of the woman question. And her appraisal couldn’t be more different from Goldberg’s.

“What would the world look like if women had full human rights? If girls went to school and young women went to college in places where now they are used as household drudges and married off at 11 or 12? ... If they had recourse against traffickers, honor killers, wife-beaters?” she wonders, decrying gross inequities women suffer in the world.

The doggedly leftist In These Times magazine also has a look at women, this time in politics, and the publication’s assessment is, like Pollitt’s, gloomy. It took a woman (Oakland Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee) to vote against bombing Afghanistan, says Laura Washington. But why, she wonders, didn’t more women join her? “Of course, we must hold elected and appointed office and move into controlling roles in corporations, academia and other influential institutions,” she writes, acknowledging gains in these areas. But, she continues, “Women in traditional authority positions too often got there by playing by the old boys’ rules--rules that limit them to the values and rules of a male-defined and male-dominated world.”

How’s this for coincidence: Back at National Review Online, contributing editor Stanley Kurtz makes the same point! He, too, says women shouldn’t be trying to play by men’s rules. Of course he has a slightly different take. According to Kurtz, the national nurse shortage is the fault of feminism, for bringing about “the replacement of a traditional ethic of sacrifice by a post-’60s ethos of self-fulfillment.”

“Nursing was once built around a spirit of feminine compassion and sacrifice. In the new, feminist world, that is unacceptable,” Kurtz laments.

Conservative Commentary magazine scribe Lisa Schiffren takes aim at professional women. Discussing Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,” Schiffren takes issue with the book’s thesis that female professionals were duped into giving up having children without knowing it. Schiffren says women do make a choice--and they can’t have it both ways, making money and making babies. “To pretend that women can have everything and sacrifice nothing is a recipe for widespread misery,” Schiffren sniffs.

Across the right-left divide, pundits are taking shots at uppity women media figures, real and imagined. At front pagemagazine.com, David Yeagley fumes over “Xena: Warrior Princess,” the eponymous heroine of the now-canceled cult TV hit. Applauding a recent Pentagon decision to further limit the role of women in war zones, Yeagley says women like Xena can’t and shouldn’t exist. “A beautiful woman who does combat is a creature of our imagination only.... Is there room for a woman who admires men for their strength in war, and yet herself remains humble and noble enough not to interfere with national security in the name of political correctness?” Yeagley asks wistfully.

Also at frontpage (leftie-turned-rightie David Horowitz’s Internet journal), radio host Larry Elder, in a commentary also posted elsewhere, is up in arms over former White House press corps dean Helen Thomas retaining her front-row seat at presidential newscasts. Elder unmasks Thomas, who left the UPI news wire to become a columnist, as an American-Taliban-loving liberal, and challenges her privilege. “Sorry, despite Thomas’ entertaining and feisty questions, she no longer qualifies to continue sitting there!” Elder writes.

In a cover story in The Nation, Richard Goldstein assails what he calls “homocons,” gay pundits who hide their conservative colors behind a facade of “independent” views. Chief among them is Camille Paglia, who, he says, despite being a gay woman, is a not-so-secret “masculinist.”

“For Paglia, masculinity is the source of creative energy, while femininity is a ‘chthonian swamp’ from which real men (and the women who adore them) struggle to escape,” Goldstein writes.

What is Paglia herself thinking these days? Let’s just say, they also serve who only stand and gloat. While she acknowledges in a recent frontpage.com piece that “the small cells still stoking their fury in feminism,” remain, she dismisses them as “mostly fanatics--those who are still nursing childhood wounds and who cling to ‘the movement’ as a consoling foster family.” Meanwhile, and more important, she writes, “There have been seismic shifts in feminism

Women, hear them roar.