On The Right - equal rights for women;New York Times Book Review's review of 'Full Exposure'r

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Gender-Bendering At Large

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 10

MR. CLINTON gave one of his stellar performances, facing the press on Wednesday and answering fluently any number of questions, a tour d'horizon of the kind that undoubtedly impressed the Rhodes Committee when they looked him over, age 21. He stalled only at the end, when he found himself face to face with one of those ugly obstacles to truth and light by the Clinton canon. He tried at first to get away from it by challenging the nomenclature. The question: How come, boss, your critical aides have always been white men?

Whaddayamean!--"I disagree with that. What are they?"

The questioner was well prepared: "Chief of staff, national-security, domestic-policy, economic advisers, White House counsel, press secretary, senior adviser/counselor."

Mr. Clinton lumbered about. He was "unaware" that those were the "seven most important jobs in my cabinet, I mean, in the White House." He then went on to cite the profligacy of his appointments of women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians to other posts in government. He said in some cases he had approached minorities who preferred the job they already had to more exalted jobs. And so on.

What was most striking about his response was his apparent repudiation of affirmative action. "I have never not tried to recruit minorities for any job in the White House [which is like asking what the meaning of "is" is] and I have never followed a quota system."

Why not? He expects others to do so.

The woman question comes up all the time. A week ago eight men convened at Ole Miss to do a television debate on the question of whether Internet commerce should be taxed. At a press conference before the debate a black woman reporter asked why there were no women on the panel. The host answered that he simply didn't know why there weren't any women on the panel. There were two black gentlemen, one of them the secretary of state of Ohio and chairman of the Steve Forbes campaign, the other, the gifted mayor of Dallas.

Michael Kinsley, the moderator, said after the conference had ended that the questioner might have been asked what was a distinctively feminine approach to the question, Should Internet commerce be taxed? Sound advice, though bitter-end gender-preference detectors can always come up with something, even if it is only that women's sensibilities are different from men's (correct), and that these prompt women to different conclusions (incorrect) and policy approaches (incorrect). One fears the questioner might have dwelt on the special burden of a sales tax on women who do more spot-shopping on the Internet than men do, but, of course, who does more Internet shopping has nothing to do with whether it should be taxed. There is no facile escape from such a question, and at the White House you would not have expected to hear from Mr. Gender Equality any such answer as that, out of bed, he finds the company of white males more congenial--it was best left to him to recite how many minorities his administration had hired in other jobs, though his answer did recall the Irish defendant who gave the names of 35 people who hadn't seen him kill the girl.

Some century-watchers have classified equal rights for women as the single greatest achievement of the age, and this is in some ways correct, especially when one reflects that it was less than a century ago that women were denied the vote. It may still be that some men would shrink from voting for a woman as president of the United States, but if so, that inhibition can't stay around much longer, in the age of Margaret Thatcher, the string of women who govern India and New Zealand, the women governors of states, and justices on the Supreme Court; indeed women outnumber men in the law schools. But in terms of the general arithmetic, it pays to remember that women will always be outnumbered in professions that tend to require undistracted attention, given the interruptions that motherhood importunately claims on women, and President Clinton might have made the point. But if he had, he'd have left a longer sizzle of cordite, resulting, down the line, in strategic detonations at gender- frenzied forums.

A true sense of the proper kind of equality (some perquisites remain feminine, and should do so) will be here when such questions as were asked of the president and of the host of the debate at Ole Miss are greeted by signs of dismissive impatience by other members of the press. Maybe this will be the case sometime in the next millennium. -UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

That's Life!

NEW YORK, December 14

THE philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that the key insight into any society in any age is had by inquiring into what people didn't write about; because that is what those people, in that age, simply took for granted. Elizabethan England didn't write about alternative forms of government because monarchy was the way they did things--end question. The New York Times Book Review for last week will certainly give future anthropologists a hint about the way sexual behavior is done/judged in end-of-century America. It is (commonly) done without any sense whatever of right/wrong, loyalty/disloyalty, fidelity/infidelity, consequence/inconsequence.