Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality - Review

Reason, July, 1999 by Norah Vincent

by Cathy Young, New York: The Free Press, 368 pages, $25.00

Reality is inconvenient. Especially for that much vaunted and much maligned whirligig, the Western mind, which, we all agree, tends to think too much. We, the plodding possessors of such minds, are determined to organize our world and make sense of it. Even the declared nonrationalists among us (though they'd rather die than admit it) are living by the rules of reason: still counting their chickens, still putting too many of their eggs in that one basket, and, like everybody else, still mulling over which came first. But to make sense of something complex is always to oversimplify it, curtail it, misrepresent it. Invariably, there are stubborn loose ends in experience that never quite fit the patterns we've devised for them. So, for the sake of clarity or logical consistency, we just snip them off or tuck them away somewhere.

Not surprisingly, intellectuals are always doing this; and of course they're the very people who should know better. But they don't. So we end up with shelves and shelves of briefs and dissertations, polemics and apologia, all of them designed to convince us that the answer to A, B, or C must be X, Y, or Z - and all of them wrong. Kant explained why a long time ago: Reason is just too crude, too curtly organized, to reflect the world as it really is. And yet how could it be otherwise? Like Churchill's democracy, rationality is the worst kind of thinking we have, except for all the others.

Which brings us to Cathy Young. Though it may seem so at first, her new book, Ceasefire!, is not ultimately about sexual equality. It's more about this messy thing called reality, and how in sexual politics - as in race politics, gay politics, and all manner of other special interest politics in America - we've lost sight of it. Young's explanation for this harks back to Kant: Our diagnoses of the race problem, the woman question, and the gay agenda are too simplistic. Our arguments on both sides, left and right, are mired in the same unhelpful mentality: Us vs. Them. As Young writes in the early pages of Ceasefire!, "Life confounds all dogmas, whether of sameness or difference."

Since the publication of Susan Faludi's Backlash in 1991, we've seen a rash of vehement books about the collective female in society, many of them written by young newcomers, or "third wave feminists," as they've since been dubbed. The rough (and by no means all-inclusive) chronology goes like this: The same year Faludi published Backlash, Naomi Wolf made her debut with The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. In 1993, a young graduate student named Katie Roiphe came on the scene with her indictment of hysterical attitudes about date rape, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus.

A more recent string of books about women included lesser follow-ups by Wolf (Promiscuities, 1997), Roiphe (Last Night in Paradise, 1997), and the bad girl of Prozac Nation (1994) fame, Elizabeth Wurtzel (Bitch, 1998). What seemed to link these books was a newfound sexual confidence and an irreverence toward the physical fears and constraints of girlhood. These were young women to be reckoned with, femmes who'd found their boots; and propriety be damned, they were going to walk all over us to prove it. You might say they (especially Wurtzel) were bookish versions of Veruka Salt, the pubescent brat in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory who, upon seeing the geese who laid the golden eggs, sang with petulant abandon the refrain, "I want it now."

Lately, just when we've all been getting bored with black bra feminism, the good girls have begun striking back with a third wave of their own. Wendy Shalit has come charging out of the gate with her prescription to let girls be girls and make boys be gentlemen: A Return to Modesty: Rediscovering the Lost Virtue (Free Press, 1999). Meanwhile, former Women's Quarterly Editor Danielle Crittenden offers a new-fangled take on customary sex roles in What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman (Simon & Schuster, 1999). Her prescription: Marry young, have kids, then go back to work in your 30s; otherwise, you'll turn into the Wicked Witch of the West and die woefully unhappy, with only a brood of monkeys to your name. Cathy Young's Ceasefire! completes the triad of this year's dissenting woman books, though to link her ideologically with Shalit and Crittenden or the mainstream right would be a mistake.

Even Shalit and Crittenden cannot be lumped together so haphazardly. They both make cogent use of women's magazines (Mademoiselle, Glamour, Vogue, Redbook, Cosmopolitan) as cultural indicators of widespread female unhappiness, and both are avowed traditionalists, but their prescriptions for how to redress women's woes are quite different. Shalit wants us to listen when women say they're unhappy, rather than dismissing them as whining feminists, while Crittenden wants feminism to wake up and see that it has dug its own grave, becoming a cause of female unhappiness.