*Criterion Winter 02-4.16 - Divinity School - University of Chicago

. . . when each woman fights her way out of that male-imposed dichotomy, some of them
will find that they do not in fact want to be one thing, but many things . . .
I particularly like the several aspects of the issue of multiplicity
that she has raised. On the methodological level, the
ten different approaches do, as she notes, raise different
questions; but together they also implicitly argue for what
her colleague Chris Gamwell keeps trying to persuade me
to regard as a single method: the eclectic method. This argument
finds a nice parallel in Professor Elshtain’s suggestion
that many women’s desire to be viewed as one thing is in
part a reaction against their perception of being split (by
men) into many things, such as virgin/whore, against their
will. And I wonder if, when each woman fights her way out
of that male-imposed dichotomy, some of them will find
that they do not in fact want to be one thing, but many
things, as many women now do—or, in Gamwellian terms,
to be the one thing that is many things, eclecticism again.
Professor Elshtain’s closing remarks about the ethics of the
bedtrick, her insight that some of the tricks are cruel but
others are life-saving—a vindication of Clinton’s lies, perhaps?
Not life-saving but presidency-saving, even nation-saving?
—inspired me to think more than I had about the ethical
arguments embedded in the book, of which the four most
directly relevant are that a great deal of human suffering is
caused when people do one of the following:
1. tell self-serving lies
2. legislate different social privileges for men and
for women
3. disenfranchise homosexuals
4. attempt to enforce monogamy universally
And there are permutations. (2) and (4) combine in the
judgment that it is unfair to insist that women be monogamous,
men polygamous. In fact some people of both genders are,
and some are not, monogamous by nature, and type A should
not marry type B; indeed, type B should not marry at all. (1)
and (4) combine in the judgment that monogamy makes
sexual liars. (1) and (2) combine in the judgment that sexism
forces women to lie (what James Scott calls “the weapons of
the weak”) and torments men who fear that their women
32 WINTER 2002
are lying about the paternity of their children. (1) and (3)
combine to force homosexuals in many situations to lie (or
at least to remain in the closet). And so forth. The stories in
The Bedtrick document both the human suffering that has
resulted from some of these lies and the human ingenuity
that, through creative lying, has righted the wrongs inflicted
by some cultures upon some individuals. I really did not see
that until Professor Elshtain pointed it out, but it is there in
the book if you look for it. ❑
University of Chicago Press, 2000