Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

THE BACKLASH MYTH 231The woman who checks her make-up half a dozen times a day tosee if her foundation has caked or her mascara run, who worriesthat the wind or rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently tosee if her stockings have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat,monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as theinmate [under constant surveillance], a self-policing subject, a selfcommitted to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is aform of obedience to patriarchy [my emphasis]. 15Catharine MacKinnon presents her own, sexier version of how contemporarywomen have "interiorized" a self-destructive, self-sustaining, despairing,craven identity that serves men very well and continues tohumiliate women:Sexual desire in women, at least in this culture, is socially constructedas that by which we come to want our own self-annihilation;that is, our subordination is eroticized; ... we get off on it, toa degree. This is our stake in this system that is not in our interest,our stake in this system that is killing us. I'm saying that femininityas we know it is how we come to want male dominance, whichmost emphatically is not in our interest. 16MacKinnon rejects "femininity as we know it" because it has come tomean accepting and even desiring male domination. Her militant, gynocentricfeminism would teach women to see how deeply, craftily, anddeceptively the male culture has socialized them to compliance: "Maledominance is perhaps the most pervasive and tenacious system of powerin history. ... Its force is exercised as consent, its authority as participation."17It would be a mistake to think that the idea of a tenacious internalizedpower that is keeping women subjugated is on the fringe of the NewFeminism and not at its center. To most feminist leaders, the backlash isvery real. It was the theme of a 1992 conference I attended at RadcliffeCollege called "In the Eye of the Storm: Feminist Research and Action inthe 90s." One of the purposes of the conference was to "explore thebacklash—against the women's movement, against women's research,women's studies . . . and against public policy equity agendas." The conferencewas sponsored by the prestigious National Council for Researchon Women—an umbrella organization that represents more than seventywomen's groups, including the Wellesley College Center for Research onWomen and the American Association of University Women. Expenses