http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_02_24_05hm.html


      Feminists Get Hysterical
      First it was Harvard vs. Summers-and now Estrich vs. Kinsley. | 24 
February 2005


      Gee thanks, Susan. Political pundit Susan Estrich has launched a 
venomous campaign (links here 
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/16//OPINION/OP-ED/01aaaafestrichoped.txt 
and here 
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/16/opinion/op-ed/01aaaagkinsleyoped.txt 
and here 
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/18/opinion/op-ed/01aaoped19estrich.txt ) 
against the Los Angeles Times's op-ed editor, Michael Kinsley, for alleged 
discrimination against female writers. As it happens, I have published in 
the Los Angeles Times op-ed pages over the years, without worrying too much 
about whether I was merely filling a gender quota. Now, however, if I appear 
in the Times again, I will assume that my sex characteristics, rather than 
my ideas, got me accepted.

      Estrich's insane ravings against the Times cap a month that left one 
wondering whether the entry of women into the intellectual and political 
arena has been an unqualified boon. In January, nearly the entire female 
professoriate at Harvard (and many of their feminized male colleagues) rose 
up in outrage at the mere suggestion of an open discussion about a 
scientific hypothesis. That hypothesis, of course, concerned the possibly 
unequal distribution of cognitive skills across the male and female 
populations. Harvard President Larry Summers had had the temerity to suggest 
that the continuing preponderance of men in scientific fields, despite 
decades of vigorous gender equity initiatives in schools and universities, 
may reflect something other than sexism. It might reflect the fact, Summers 
hypothesized, that the male population has a higher percentage of 
mathematical geniuses (and mathematical dolts) than the female population, 
in which mathematical reasoning skills may be more evenly distributed.

      A feminist gadfly in the audience, MIT biology professor Nancy 
Hopkins, infamously reported that she avoided fainting or vomiting at 
Summers's remarks only by running from the room. And with that remarkable 
expression of science-phobia, a great feminist vendetta was launched. It has 
reduced Summers to a toadying appeaser who has promised to atone for his 
sins with ever more unforgiving diversity initiatives (read: gender quotas) 
in the sciences. But the damage will not be limited to Harvard. Summers's 
scourging means that, from now on, no one in power will stray from official 
propaganda to explain why women are not proportionally represented in every 
profession.

      The Harvard rationality rout was a mere warm-up, however, to the 
spectacle unfolding in Los Angeles, brought to light by the upstart 
newspaper, the D.C. Examiner. USC law professor, Fox News commentator, and 
former Dukakis presidential campaign chairman Susan Estrich has come out as 
a snarling bitch [ 
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/18/opinion/op-ed/01aaoped19estrich.txt ] 
in response to L.A. Times's editor Michael Kinsley's unwillingness to be 
blackmailed [ 
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/16/opinion/op-ed/01aaaagkinsleyoped.txt ] 
.. Estrich had demanded [ 
http://www.dcexaminer.com/articles/2005/02/16//OPINION/OP-ED/01aaaafestrichoped.txt
] 
that Kinsley run a manifesto signed by several dozen women preposterously 
accusing him of refusing to publish females. When Kinsley declined, while 
offering Estrich the opportunity to write a critique of the Times in a few 
weeks, Estrich sunk to the lowest rung imaginable: playing Kinsley's 
struggle with Parkinson's disease against him. Said Estrich: Your refusal to 
bend to my demands "underscores the question I've been asked repeatedly in 
recent days, and that does worry me, and should worry you: people are 
beginning to think that your illness may have affected your brain, your 
judgment, and your ability to do this job."

      It is curious how feminists, when crossed, turn into shrill, 
hysterical harpies-or, in the case of MIT's Nancy Hopkins, delicate flowers 
who collapse at the slightest provocation-precisely the images of women that 
they claim patriarchal sexists have fabricated to keep them down. Actually, 
Estrich's hissy fit is more histrionic than anything the most bitter 
misogynist could come up with on his own. Witness her faux remorse at 
engaging in blackmail: "I really do hate to be doing this. I counted e-mail 
after e-mail that I sent and was totally ignored. I can't tell you how much 
I wanted to help quietly. If this is what it takes, so be it." Witness too 
her self-pitying amour propre: "You owe me an apology. NO one tried harder 
to educate you about Los Angeles, introduce you to key players in the city, 
bring to your attention, quietly, the issues of gender inequality than I 
did-and you have the arrogance and audacity to say that you couldn't be 
bothered reading my emails." Add to that her petty insults: "if you prefer 
me to conduct this discussion outside your pages . . . that makes you look 
even more afraid and more foolish." And finally, mix in shameless 
self-promotion: "I hope [this current crusade is] a lesson in how you can 
make change happen if you're willing to stand up to people who call you 
names, and reach out to other women, and not get scared and back down. If 
you recall, I wrote a book about that, called Sex and Power. It's what I 
have spent my whole life doing."

      Selective quotation cannot do justice to Estrich's rants. But their 
underlying substance is as irrational as their tone. Estrich lodges the 
standard charge in all fake discrimination charges: the absence of 
proportional representation in any field is conclusive proof of bias. 
Determining the supply of qualified candidates is wholly unnecessary.

      For the last three years, Estrich's female law students at USC have 
been counting the number of female writers on the Los Angeles Times op-ed 
pages (and she complains that there aren't more female policy writers? 
Suggestion to Estrich: how about having your students master a subject 
rather than count beans.). She provides only selective tallies of the 
results: "TWENTY FOUR MEN AND ONE WOMAN IN A THREE DAY PERIOD [caps in 
original]" (she does not explain how she chose that three-day period or 
whether it was representative); "THIRTEEN MEN AND NO WOMEN" as authors of 
pieces on Iraq.

      Several questions present themselves: how many pieces by women that 
met the Times's standards were offered during these periods? What is the 
ratio of men to women among experts on Iraq? Estrich never bothers to ask 
these questions, because for the radical feminist, being a woman is 
qualification enough for any topic. Any female is qualified to write on 
Iraq, for example, because in so doing, she is providing THE FEMALE 
PERSPECTIVE. (This belief in the essential difference between male and 
female "voices," of course, utterly contradicts the premise of the 
anti-Larry Summers crusade.) Thus, to buttress her claim that Kinsley 
"refuses" to publish women, Estrich merely provides a few
examples of women 
whose offerings have been rejected: "Carla Sanger . . . tells me she can't 
get a piece in; I have women writing to me who have submitted four piece 
[sic] and not gotten the courtesy of a call-and they teach gender studies at 
UCLA. . . ." It goes without saying, without further examination, that each 
of those writers deserved to be published-especially, for heaven's sakes, 
the gender studies professors!

      Self-centered? Thin-skinned? Takes things personally? Misogynist 
tropes that sum up Estrich to a T. It is the fate of probably 98 percent of 
all op-ed hopefuls to have their work silently rejected, without the 
"courtesy of a call." But when a woman experiences the silent
treatment, it's 
because of sexism. Similarly, it is the fate of most e-mail correspondence 
to editors to be ignored. But when Estrich's e-mails are ignored ("I sent 
e-mails to my old friends at the Times. Neither time did they even bother to 
respond."), it's because the editor is a chauvinist pig.

      The assumption that being female obviates the need for any further 
examination into one's qualifications allows Estrich to sidestep the most 
fundamental question raised by her crusade: Why should anyone care what the 
proportion of female writers is on an op-ed page? If an analysis is strong, 
it should make no difference what its author's sex is. But for Estrich, it 
is an article of faith that female representation matters: "What could be 
more important-or easier for that matter-than ensuring that women's voices 
are heard in public discourse in our community?" Her embedded question-"or 
easier for that matter?"- is quickly answered. She is right: Nothing is 
easier than ensuring that "women's voices" are heard; simply set
up a quota 
and publish whatever comes across your desk. But as for why it is of 
paramount importance to get the "women's" perspective on farm subsidies or 
OPEC price manipulations, Estrich does not say.

      She provides a clue to her thinking, however. For Estrich, apparently, 
having a "woman's voice" means being left-wing. She blasts the Times for 
publishing an article by Charlotte Allen on the decline of female public 
intellectuals such as Susan Sontag. Allen had argued that too many women 
writers today specialize in being female, rather than addressing the broader 
range of issues covered by their male counterparts. For Estrich, this 
argument performs a magical sex change on Allen, turning her into a male. 
After sneering at Allen's article and her affiliation with the "Independent 
Women's Forum which is a group of right-wing women who exist to get on TV," 
Estrich concludes: "the voices of women . . . are [not] found within a 
thousand miles" of the Los Angeles Times.

      In other words, Allen's is not a "voice of a woman" because she 
criticizes radical feminism. Estrich does not disclose if she conducted this 
sex change operation on all conservative women when compiling her phony 
statistics on the proportion of female writers on the op-ed page.

      "Women's liberation," for the radical feminists, means liberation to 
think like a robot, mindlessly following the dictates of the victimologists. 
But if all bona fide women think alike, then publishing one female writer 
every year or so should suffice, since we know in advance what she will say.

      Depressingly, Estrich's crusade, no matter how bogus, will undoubtedly 
bear fruit. Anyone in a position of power today, facing accusations of bias 
and the knowledge that people are using crude numerical measures to prove 
his bias, will inevitably start counting beans himself, whether consciously 
or not. Michael Kinsley could reassure every female writer out there that 
Estrich has not cowed him by publishing only men for the next six months. It 
would be an impressive rebuff to Estrich's blackmail. I'll happily forgo the 
opportunity to appear in the Times for a while in order to get my pride 
back.



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