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

THE GENDER WARDENS 269family values. She there described a gender feminist Utopia in which bothwomen and men are able to bear children and to nurse. It is unfortunatethat Ms. Piercy's concern for liberating women from biological constraintsis not matched by a passionate regard for free expression.Established and successful writers have not found it too difficult toresist the gender feminist pressures. Younger writers are more vulnerable.In 1992, Pam Houston published a collection of critically esteemed shortstories entitled Cowboys Are My Weakness. Some of her female characters"have a susceptibility to a certain kind of emotionally unavailable man,"and Ms. Houston, who gives workshops to other young writers, oftenfinds herself in the line of fire from feminists who are convinced she isdoing great harm to the cause. 42During one of her opening sessions, shewas confronted by a woman who asked, "How can you take responsibilityfor putting stories like these out in the world?" Houston points out thather feminist critics "confuse fiction with self-help literature."Because she writes as she does, Ms. Houston receives hate mail, harassingphone calls, and threats. She tells of other writers like herself, youngand old, who feel compelled to "apologize for their female characters ifthey were anything short of amazonian ... if their character was 'only awaitress,' sorry if she stayed at home and took care of the kids . . . sorryif she failed at the bar, or lost her keys, or loved a man." Houston warnsthat with "Big Sister" watching, women seem not to be "grant[ing] oneanother the right to tell the story of their own experience." She believes"the pressure women are putting on each other" to be "more insidiousand far harder to resist than the pressure men have used to try to silencewomen for centuries." Indeed, she says, "in 1994, women are silencingeach other and we are doing it so effectively that we are even silencingourselves." 43In some ways, the art world offers even better prospects than literaturefor an ideologically correct censorious revisionism. A recent exhibit atNew York's Whitney Museum Sixty-Seventh Biennial presented examplesof art that is acceptably didactic in celebrating "women's rage." Onework by Sue Williams explains itself: "The art world can suck my proverbial. . . ," which the catalog says "wrenches painting away from itswhite male domain." Two works express the artist's fury over women'svulnerability to eating disorders: one consists of a large amount of plasticvomit on the floor; the other, called "Gnaw," consists of two six-hundredpoundcubes of chocolate and lard with the artist's teeth marks in them.Another installation contains three casts of a larynx and tongue, whichwe are meant to take as the remains of a mutilated woman, and is accompaniedby sounds of women's laughter and crying. The casts are made