Warning: feminism is hazardous to your health

Progressive, The, April, 1997 by Ruth Conniff

Here's some startling news. The latest threat to women's health isn't any of the medical scandals you've been reading about -- not unnecessary hysterectomies, not defective birth-control devices, not breast implants, not those medical-research projects that fail to study women. No, the big health risk facing American women today is feminism. So say researchers working with rightwing think tanks, who have Isolated a particular strain of radical, deconstructionist feminism now spreading from cultural-studies departments into the general population, distorting medical research, infecting our justice system, and causing mass hysteria.

This frightening trend was the theme of a February conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., called "Women's Health, Law, and the Junking of Science."

The conference, put on by the conservative Independent Women,s Forum, presented a series of expert panels to show how a nefarious network of feminist ideologues, public-interest research groups, and trial lawyers are politicizing science and jeopardizing women's health.

"Radical feminist academics and `fellow travelers, are leading the flight from science and reason," said Noretta Koertge, a professor of the history and philosophy of science from Indiana University. Koertge gave a presentation using overheads that diagramed something she called "menstrual mathematics." This school of thought claims that women are put off by scientific experiments involving hard collisions, and are more attracted to fluids, she explained. She showed us an e-mail message from a teaching assistant in physics, asking whether there were any textbooks that covered wave theory before quantum mechanics, since that might appeal to women more.

Paul Gross, a professor emeritus of life sciences at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at Harvard, followed Koertge. Gross had overheads, too. He flashed a quote from an ecofeminist named Val Plumwood, saying that "rationalism is the key to the linked oppressions of women and nature in the West." He had another one from Jacques Derrida, saying something spurious about reality and the whole Western tradition. He had also downloaded a silly message posted by a graduate student on the Internet, and he had some pictures of New Age magazines touting miracle cures for AIDS and cancer.

All in all, pretty goofy stuff. "There are questionable and indeed dubious arguments that underlie the study of science," Gross concluded gravely. "Women's studies is particularly fertile ground for the growth of these ideas. The teaching of patent nonsense can't fail to have an impact on the next generation of thinkers and leaders."

But deconstructionist theory, e-mail messages from addled graduate students, and a bunch of loopy New Age magazines hardly add up to an all-out assault on medical science.

Don't be fooled, warned Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of Who Stole Feminism and a member of the Independent Women's Forum. Some of you may think, OK, women's studies departments are anti-rational, but women have other sources of information," she said. But unfortunately, she explained, the liberal media. influenced by feminists, are "far too eager to portray women as victims of gender bias," and often report distorted "advocacy research" on women's health issues. "Faced with the growing strength of the anti-science-and-reason movement, we can't afford to be passive," Hoff Sommers declared.

During a break in the conference, I chatted with a white-haired man in a tweed jacket sitting next to me -- Fredrick Goodwin, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University. Goodwin said he thought the conference was "excellent" and "long overdue."

"I'm interested in victimology," he said. "I treat depression, and I've seen a lot of patients who are products of these women's studies programs. The radical feminist movement is fostering depression in women -- fears of the environment, somatization [excessive preoccupation with the body], paranoid thinking.... If you took feminism as described here today and applied it to an individual, you'd say that's a person who needs help."

The most riveting presentation of the day was on breast implants. Marcia Ormbsy, a very young-looking, blond plastic surgeon from Annapolis, Maryland, showed slides of some of her patients.

"I received hundreds of calls from women across the nation who were ready to consign themselves literally to insane asylums," they were so upset when they heard that breast implants might be linked to serious health problems, she said. "There is a lot of guilt and fear in these patients. Society already is telling them they shouldn't change their bodies," and then the news about implants hit.

Ormsby showed a slide with the words Communications EFFECTIVENESS, MEDIA, and, underneath, in big capital letters, SENSATIONALISM.

The implant crisis started with Connie Chung," she said, "and it quickly became headline news." She showed an overhead with the words Headline News.