Time capsule - the feminization of American society - Column

National Review, Dec 13, 1993 by Florence King

THEY SAY a drowning person sees his whole life flash before him as he goes down for the third time. The feminization of America is having the same effect on me.

The chain of reasoning in date-rape cases brings back my grandmother's lecture on the proper way for a lady to walk past a barbershop.

"Always look straight ahead. If you look in, the men will think you're looking in."

"But if I looked in, I would be looking in."

"Yes, but not really."

Whenever I watch debates about women in combat, I begin hurtling through time the moment a worried general utters the words "male bonding" and "unit cohesion." The brass had better worry; anyone who has ever been in a girls' gym class has heard a snippy little voice say, "I'm not going to throw the ball to her."

Dee Dee Myers's disjointed press briefings? I am back once more in a Fifties dorm, listening to a panicky coed as she tries to figure out when her last period started.

"It's my middle, but it isn't really my middle because it's February, and that messes everything up because it's so short. I think it was the day you traded that green sack dress you hated for Flo's blue shrug--no, no, wait a minute, it was before that, because Flo wore the shrug to the movies the night I had cramps. What movie did we see? If I knew that, I could call the theater and find out when it played. Oh, I know! It was the one where Deborah Kerr saved the boy from being a sissy--no, no, wait! I take that back. It was the one where Charlton Heston was Andrew Jackson, and Yul Brynner did ... um, something, I forget what, and there was this big battle."

Just about everything brings back memories of how I got started in writing. The 2,476th feature on mammograms, the 4,728th segment on unwed mothers, the eternal "special" hosted by Connie Chung, Meryl Streep's face as she discusses her "films"--expose me to any one of these and I will start reciting verbatim from the 1958 Writer's Market:

True-confessions stories must be about subjects of interest to women: marital discord, adultery, problem children, alcoholism, insecurity, anxiety, depression, nervous breakdowns, accidents, illness, surgery, and sudden death. Upbeat ending essential. No humor; our readers take life seriously. Length 3,000 to 5,000; payment 5 cents per word. Enclose SASE.

The first story I sold was called, "I Committed Adultery in a Diabetic Coma." I think of it every time a Women's Health Special Supplement falls out of the newspaper.

The feminization of America has progressed so far that sometimes I have a hard time telling whether I'm watching the news on CNN or a three-hankie weeper on American Movie Classics. Barry Goldwater's sudden espousal of gay rights, or Barbara Stanwyck yearning for social approval? George Bush sabotaging himself to preserve his "place in history," or Lana Turner agonizing over What People Will Think? The scandaltainted politician who decides to retire "to spend more time with my family," or Joan Crawford growling, "I'll do anything for those kids, you hear me, anything"?

It's especially confusing to watch old movies in the era of apologies. A nation so nice-nellied that it sees nothing odd about apologizing for homeless gypsies has only one apology left, and we just used it. In October, the Senate passed a resolution apologizing to Hawaii for overthrowing Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. It finally happened: we apologized to ourselves. Is that Joan Fontaine cringing through Rebecca or not?

I FOUND myself aboard another time capsule when the Houston Oilers fined football star David Williams for skipping out on a game in order to attend the birth of his child. The Sensitivity Patrol led by Anna Quindlen flew into the usual hysterical rage, but I flew back to the 1940s and sat on the floor beside our huge Philco console with my ear pressed against the brocaded vent so as not to miss a word of Abbott & Costello.

This particular show was as wonderfully wacky as the others. Not once did Lou Costello give any indication that anything was wrong. Not until the next day did we learn that he had gone on the air only hours after receiving word that his son had drowned. No one called him "insensitive" for leaving his wife alone while he made the whole country laugh; in the flood of admiring editorials that followed, one word stood out: "trouper."

The feminization of America has made emotions sacrosanct while condemning as cold and unfeeling rigorous concepts such as duty and honor. Propelled by incessant hosannas to woman's "finer" this and "softer" that, we make emotional decisions instead of ethical ones and congratulate ourselves for having "heart."

We need to get a grip on ourselves while there's still time. A bracing antidote to feminization is Mary Wollstonecraft, the Ur-feminist of the rational eighteenth century, who knew that political correctness is nothing more than female touchiness writ large. Said she: "I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness."