Tuesday, June 16, 2015
"Feminist Enemy Number One"
At WeeklyStandard.com, Mark Hemingway discuss Christina Hoff Sommers:
"For years now, Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys, has been promoting what she calls, in the title of her latest book, Freedom Feminism. This view, she writes, 'stands for the moral, social, and legal equality of the sexes,' but also for women’s freedom—including the freedom to embrace traditional femininity. 'Efforts to obliterate gender roles can be just as intolerant as the efforts to maintain them,' she writes, and 'theories of universal patriarchal oppression or the inherent evils of capitalism are not in [freedom feminism’s] founding tablets.' Above all, Sommers’s approach is moored in reality, not utopian notions of social justice.
Sommers’s efforts to spread her gospel have annoyed many academic feminists for years, but recently the response to her has gone from confrontational to hostile. 'I have never stopped going to campuses, and I’ve been going to law schools. But I have rarely faced protests,' she tells The Weekly Standard. 'I used to face vigorous debate, and the young women would come ready to argue—and that was fine, that’s what I was there for. But this is different, and it only started happening this year.' "
