Take psychology professor Phyllis Chesler. She has been a tireless and eloquent champion of the rights of women for more than four decades. Unlike her tongue-tied colleagues in the academy, she does not hesitate to speak out against Muslim mistreatment of women. In a recent book, The Death of Feminism, she attributes the feminist establishment’s unwillingness to take on Islamic sexism to its support of “an isolationist and America-blaming position.” She faults it for “embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic, heartless, mindless and suicidal.” The sisterhood has rewarded her with excommunication. A 2006 profile in the Village Voice reports that, among academic feminists, “Chesler arouses the vitriol reserved for traitors.” ~Christina Hoff Sommers, The Weekly Standard

I have already remarked on why it would be bizarre for conservatives to care about this “controversy” over American feminism’s alleged lack of concern for Muslim women (which, for what it’s worth, happens to be untrue), but I thought I would go back over the Sommers article to see if I had been too flippant in trying to find something wrong with a Weekly Standard piece.  Certainly, The Weekly Standard could not be confused with a robust defender of tradition or traditional gender roles or anything that might mislead their readers into thinking that they were reading a culturally conservative magazine.  So it might not be quite as bizarre for the Standard to run this piece as, say, a magazine that was actually socially and culturally conservative, but it was still a bit odd.  Even so, perhaps I had missed the real point of the article in having judged it a bizarre piece of commentary for an ostensibly conservative audience.  It should have occured to me that a significant part of the real point, as with most everything the Standard does, is to back up their bad foreign policy views.  

At first, this section of the article puzzled me, but it became clear soon enough why it had been included.  It might well be that Prof. Chesler speaks against Muslim mistreatment of women, and it is probably true that there are academic feminists who are “anti-American” (though in the last ten years or so I have seen that word used so indiscriminately that I scarcely know what it is supposed to mean anymore), but I had to confess that I didn’t understand how there was any conceivable connection between the two.  Then I focused on that line about the “isolationist and America-blaming position” that these feminists are supposedly taking.  As we understand all too well in the wake of the Giuliani-Paul contretemps, the accusation of being “isolationist” and someone who “blames” America is intended as an insult, an accusation of disloyalty and a way to demean your interlocutor because he (or in this case, she) has taken a foreign policy position contrary to the globalist, hegemonist consensus.  The problem that Chesler and Sommers have with these feminists seems to be, actually, that they do not get on board for interventionist wars, because of their “isolationist and blame-America position.”  I cannot think of any other reason why someone would choose to use the word “isolationist” in the context of this discussion.  My guess would be that these people now shun her because they dislike the suggestion that they are somehow turning against their own country, and not necessarily because of anything related to the Islamic world at all.  Their shunning of her might therefore prove nothing at all about their own attitude towards “the subjection of Islamic women.”  

Yes, there are citations in the article of women saying stupid things about terrorism–but not really more or less stupid than Obama and Huckabee have said about violence and terrorism in the past few months.  I await the article, “Terrorism and the Fecklessness of Obama and Huckabee,” but I imagine I will be waiting for a while.  There are other citations in the article where women say exaggerated, Marcottesque things about similarities or equivalences between the treatment of women under Islamic fundamentalist control and treatment of women in the West (patriarchy is patriarchy is patriarchy, I guess), where their error is not so much failing to take seriously the oppression of women in Islamic countries as it is in equating or linking the plight of women in, say, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan with that of women living in America.  This may have the rhetorical effect of diminishing the significance of the plight of Muslim women in the eyes of people who are already not terribly inclined to listen to what feminist activists have to say in the first place, but it is rather different from saying generally that “American feminists” are feckless or are not working on behalf of Muslim women.  In any case, these equivalences and linkages typically do not involve showing hatred for America–they involve hatred for religious people.  It would be very difficult to say that Amanda Marcotte hates America, for instance, but she plainly does hate religious people, at least if they are in the least traditional or serious about their religion’s dictates with respect to sexual morality.  It is that hang-up that partly drives these feminists to say absurd things about universally identical patriarchy, since it is taken as a given that traditional religion is simply a weapon of patriarchy against women, and so on and so forth.

If Sommers’ piece were an article called “Outlandishly Exaggerated Things That Some Radical Feminists Say About America,” I don’t suppose many feminists would like it, but at least the article would actually demonstrate what it claims to be showing.  The best part of the article comes about three-fourths of the way through:

Hard-line feminists such as Seager, Pollitt, Ensler, the university gender theorists, and the NOW activists represent the views of only a tiny fraction of American women. Even among women who identify themselves as feminists (about 25 percent), they are at the radical extreme.

In other words, they are so unrepresentative that anything that Sommers can demonstrate about this “radical extreme” has almost no bearing on the majority of American feminists.  All of which makes the title, “The Subjection of Islamic Women and the Fecklessness of American Feminism,” seem fairly overblown and misleading.