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Women are under siege and oppressed, while men have it easy.
This is the unmistakable message of Margaret L. Andersen’s
“Thinking About Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and
Gender,” the principal textbook for over 150 students in
Women’s Studies 10, a class taught by Professor Sharon
Bays.
The mischaracterizations and distortions begin on page one,
where Andersen speaks briefly of the progress which women have
made, but soon cautions the reader that “there’s still
a long way to go” for women to achieve equality. To support
her point, she tells us:
1) “In the 1990s, women college graduates who worked full
time earned, on average, 70 percent of what men college graduates
earned working full time”;
2) “Each year, five million women experience some form of
violence, two-thirds of it committed by someone they
know”;
3) “Employed women” work 13 hours a week more than
“employed men” on “household tasks.”
All three of these statements are extremely misleading. Yes,
full-time employed women do earn less money, on average, than
full-time employed men do, but they also: work 400 plus hours a
year less than men do; work only a tenth as many overtime hours;
have 25 percent less overall work experience (according to the
Journal of Labor Economics); comprise only 5 percent of workplace
fatalities (because they do not do the hazardous jobs which
necessarily pay better); and are far less likely than men to work
nights, weekends, have long commutes or to travel for their jobs.
Surveys conducted by the Independent Women’s Forum and the
Cato Institute which take these factors into consideration have
shown that, for the same job, women earn within 2 percent of what
men do.
The “five million women experience some form of
violence” statistic is misleading because it is driven
sharply upward by domestic violence studies which lump trivial acts
which women do as often as men (such as swearing at or insulting
your partner, slamming doors or stomping out of rooms, etc.) with
serious violence. Whenever two-sex surveys of domestic violence are
taken, women are shown to be just as likely to initiate and engage
in spousal abuse as men, and roughly 75 percent of all crime
victims are male.
Women may do an extra 13 hours a week of “household
duties” but the average full-time employed man works eight
hours a week more than the average full-time employed woman.
Andersen’s survey allows for the inclusion of people who are
“employed” but who don’t work full time and since
most part-time workers are female, this pushes the disparity in
hours worked in the home between men and women in the survey even
higher. Together with the fact that men spend more time commuting
and work more physically strenuous jobs than women do, what the
survey really tells us is that the overall labor of a household is,
in fact, being divided fairly between men and women, a finding
consistent with most research on the subject.
The book also spins myths about “deadbeat dads”
(actually, over 80 percent of the men who have jobs and can see
their children pay their child support in full), women’s
supposedly ignored health care needs (the government at every level
spends more on women’s health than men’s even though it
is men who dominate in most diseases and it is women who live
longer), and numerous others.
Andersen urges readers to notice women’s role both in
society and in everyday life ““ good advice, except that she
instructs women to look only for female suffering and male
privilege. For example, she counsels readers to look at the
“bright lights shining in the night skyline” and see
that they “represent thousands of women … who clean the
corporate suites.”
Fair enough, but what about the thousands of men who risked
their safety and even their lives (including yours truly) to build
those same skyscrapers? What about the men who pick up the trash,
crawl through the sewers to make repairs, or who work on power
lines 50 feet up in the air? In Andersen’s book such men are
as invisible as she imagines women to be.
Like many women’s studies textbooks, materials and
lectures, Andersen’s text ignores the growing number of
strong, articulate female scholars, researchers, writers, activists
and leaders who call themselves “equity feminists” and
support feminism’s basic goals but oppose the rampant
distortions and out and out man-hating of the established feminist
movement. Instead, Andersen chooses to trot out the standard
collection of cranks and hate-mongers such as Catherine MacKinnon
(who wrote “all heterosexual sex is rape”) and Andrea
Dworkin (who wrote “I want to see a man beaten to a bloody
pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the
mouth of a pig”).
Andersen also cites numerous discredited feminist researchers
such as Diane Russell, who arrives at high numbers of female
victims in her surveys by classifying consensual sex as rape and
hugs and horseplay from male relatives as incest, and Carol
Gilligan, whose baseless and unscientific research led in part to
the myth that girls are silenced and oppressed in the
classroom.
To be fair, Andersen’s book is actually a substantial
improvement over last year’s Women’s Studies 10 book,
“Women: Images and Realities,” where one could find a
factual error, fraudulent statistic, or discredited survey on
practically every page. But UCLA women’s studies students are
still a long way away from getting what they need ““ a
balanced book which includes dissident feminist voices and which
looks honestly at the many challenges women face as well as the
many advantages they enjoy.