You're Not as Crazy as I Thought by Phil Neisser & Jacob Hess

Author:Phil Neisser & Jacob Hess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2012-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

How can anyone be against “equal gender rights”?

Jacob: Whenever I start talking about different or unique roles, no matter my insistence on complementariness, the first image that comes to mind for many of my progressive friends is Jim Crow. Since “separate and equal” was indeed used to justify the oppression of African Americans, it is easy to conclude that any distinction between groups that does not preserve identical rights is automatically harmful or unfair. My question here has simply been: is it theoretically possible to have real differences in roles between two persons who love each other and for those differences to complement and bolster each other? As rudimentary as that sounds, I honestly don’t sense that many people even believe that, Phil. They seem instead to assume that all observable differences are actually 1950s-style “hidden oppression” in action.

Phil: Who have you been hanging out with? None of my liberal or left-wing friends decry difference. On the contrary, they usually celebrate difference (a few of them in excess, in fact). More to the point, no one I know, or whose writing I have read, says that two parents who live together should each do 50 percent of a given family duty. And virtually no one on the left now assumes that someone is “oppressed” because they’re a housewife, stay-at-home mom, or breadwinner man. Those assumptions are way out of date, having long ago been ripped apart by difference feminists, ecofeminists, and many others. There might be a few half-fossilized professors here and there around the nation who, along with a few ex-1960s activists, believe “all difference is oppression.” Also, I’m not surprised to learn that a handful of wonderfully zealous graduate students have, thanks to courses taught by those out-of-date professors, cut their intellectual teeth on left-wing books that are over forty years old. Nonetheless, I stand firm: the idea of the “feminazi” who denounces all difference between men and women is a myth created by a well-funded right-wing political machine.

Jacob: If no liberal decries difference, Phil, with all due respect, what have you been doing through the first half of this chapter? You seem flatly uncomfortable with my suggestion there are complementary roles that befit men and women. In doing so, however, you’ve been helpful to point out exaggerated images that still have a life of their own. I hope you’ll show the same willingness to puncture distortions about wealthy right-wingers.

Phil: Before I go there, Jacob, I first need to say that I don’t understand how the issue of equal rights fits into your argument. “Rights” are claims about what treatment (and what zone of freedom) the law owes to individuals, not claims about what individuals should do with their legal freedom, or how much people will differ from one another if and when they enjoy those rights. And therefore, I can, without contradiction, champion equal rights for men and women and champion the appearance of differences when it comes to what the members of each gender actually do with their lives.

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