Pseudofeminism - humor - Column

National Review, April 3, 1995 by Florence King

If YOU WANT to hear the ultimate feminist horror story, I've got it. This past Christmas season I had my annual telephone gabfest with my best girlfriend from college. These calls are always very informative because she keeps up with everybody and goes to alumnae events. It's never long before we turn very girlish, starting sentences with ``You'll never guess'' and exclaiming ``Oh, honestly!'' Last year was no different, except that one of her news items kicked off with: ``You'll never guess who's thinking of going to law school.''That's an easy one if you're talking about the general population; of 260 million Americans, only 17 are not thinking about going to law school, so you could name just about anybody and be right.

But we weren't talking about the general population. We were talking about girls who were in college from 1953 to 1957, now the target audience for bladder-control products advertised by June Allyson. Or to put it another way: tempus fidgets. My friend named a name that rang a faint bell. I thought back in what I used to call ``mounting dread'' when I wrote gothics, until I placed her. She was a junior when we were freshmen, so that meant she was sixty. S-i-x-t-y.Now that I had a new Ultimate Feminist Horror Story, I had to bump an earlier one back to Penultimate Feminist Horror Story. The previous one was about the uproar over the laxative commercial that featured a roll of unused toilet paper.You remember it. It was one of those new understated ads, like the luxury car sitting in the middle of nowhere, that are supposed to make everyone feel subtle. The camera zoomed in on a full roll of toilet paper in a bathroom dispenser, and a sign reading ``Day 1.'' The sign changed to ``Day 2 . . . Day 3 . . . Day 4 . . . '' and so on, but still the roll remained full, obviously untouched because unneeded. Then the laxative was shown and extolled, whereupon we saw the roll unrolling at top speed, proof that the laxative worked.Feminists were ``outraged.'' The ad was sexist, they said, because the scenario was obviously limited to constipated men. A constipated woman would still use a certain amount of toilet paper every day, they said, but by ignoring this fact, the ad implied that constipated women were not only unimportant, but invisible.``There's no woman living in that house!'' wailed one feminist, as if that in itself were sexist. ``Don't they even have women guests?'' demanded another, then compared the bathroom in the ad to the male huts of Polynesia. At no time in the brouhaha did they consider that for the ad to work, the toilet paper had to remain untouched. Several talk-show opponents reminded them of this, but the outraged feminists replied, ``That doesn't matter. Women use toilet paper every day.''``But it's not a toilet-paper ad, it's a laxative ad.''``That doesn't matter. Look at the pissoirs of Paris. There're no comparable conveniences for women because men think it's funny when a woman has to go and can't. Men don't want women to go, that's why they refuse to stop on long car trips. Look at Jean Harlow. She died of uremic poisoning because they wouldn't let her go.''That's when I lost it. Forgetting that I was sitting beside an open window, I yelled at the TV, ``Her mother was a Christian Scientist! The toilet paper has to keep still!'' The next day, a neighbor gave me an odd look and thereafter left the laundry room as soon as I walked in.The toilet-paper debate was such that it bumped back everything else that had ever sent me around the bend, making it impossible for me to identify my Antepenultimate Feminist Horror Story. It's just as well. My Latin is rusty; I don't know what, if anything, comes after -- or rather before -- antepenultimate, and I need a lot of categories to continue in this vein. Women are handling feminism so badly that I would have to spend all my time bumping things back to secure my Ultimate Feminist Horror Story before something else came along and dislodged it.I have no quarrel with feminism as long as it's real feminism, but what we have endured this past quarter-century is pseudofeminism.Pseudofeminists talk aggressiveness but practice timidity. Take sexual harassment. Every time I turn on the news some woman is describing, with murky insouciance, that terrible day ten years ago when her self-esteem was shattered because her male boss kept looking at her ``body parts'' instead of her face. A real feminist would say, ``I'm up here, Mr. Crabtree,'' and that would be the end of it. If you say it right, you only have to say it once.A real feminist understands that men cannot be expected to admire in the female sex the very qualities they despise in their own. They may sing the praises of ``femininity'' but in truth they have nothing but contempt for softness, restraint, and suffering in silence. The woman who makes it clear that she also is contemptuous of these traits reminds men so much of themselves that they will admire her even as they thank God they're not married to her.Pseudofeminists also have infused sexual harassment with their signature tunnel vision. In Muriel Spark's novel Loitering with Intent, the heroine, analyzing why she liked a foul-mouthed man that other women found offensive, thinks: ``Vulgarity I could take from him or, if he had been alive today, the sixteenth-century Benvenuto Cellini, because these were big sane men.''That some men can get away with anything while others make even ``damn'' sound dirty is a fine distinction beyond the analytical powers of pseudofeminists. Instead they think like Susan Faludi, who wrote in Backlash: ``If the American man can claim no ancestral coat of arms on which to elevate himself from the masses, perhaps he can fashion his sex into a sort of pedigree.'' There you have it. Equality is why women aren't equal; American men do bad things for heraldic reasons; the bar sinister creates the bastard instead of the other way around.