Two Cheers for Feminism!

I disagree with academic feminism a lot — with those vague oppressor stories about the patriarchy, with the strange unwillingness to admit inherited-gender differences and with the tone of faculty lounge militancy. But academic feminism is right about the big thing.

The big thing is that for thousands of years social thinking has been dominated by men — usually alpha men — who saw life as a place where warriors and traders went out and competed for wealth and power. These male writers were largely blind to the systems of care that undergirded everything else.

These male-dominated narratives created a tunnel. Everything that extolled competition, self-interest and independence was celebrated, and everything that celebrated relation and intimacy was diminished. As Niobe Way, Alisha Ali, Carol Gilligan and Pedro Noguera argue in the introduction of “The Crisis of Connection,” a new anthology they edited, the stereotypical masculine culture values “self over relationships, individual success over the common good, the mind over the body, and thinking over feeling.”