There are female intellectuals with stellar credentials and bestselling books: Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi, Deborah Tannen, Natalie Angier. But there's a big difference between these women and their forebears. They are all professional feminists. They don't simply espouse feminism; they write about little else. Feminist ideology forms the basis of their writings, whether it's Greer on the infantilization of women by a patriarchal society, Tannen on how the sexes are socialized to communicate differently, Faludi on how white men have reacted to women's progress, Ehrenreich on how the male medical establishment intimidates female patients, or Angier on how humans ought to be more like bonobos, the female-dominated, sexually liberated cousins of chimpanzees.
Feminist Fatale
Where are the great women thinkers? Thinking so much about women has shrunk their minds.
GENDER STUDIES
Greer of "Female Eunuch" fame has lately taken up memoir-writing and a fascination with adolescent boys, and Ehrenreich similarly has branched out into socioeconomic topics ("Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America"). Even then, Ehrenreich looks mainly at the plight of female workers -- but the other women have stayed even closer to home, exploring subjects of interest mostly to like-minded women: gynecology, the backlash against feminism, dysfunctional families, marriage versus career, eating disorders, the beauty industry, pornography (does it victimize women or empower them?), guys who can't share their feelings, the professor who put his hand on your knee back when you were in college. That kind of parochialism disqualifies them as public intellectuals.
A typical example is Laura Kipnis, rising literary star and professor of media studies at Northwestern University. In a recent article for the online magazine Slate, she wrote: "For some reason, the majority of women simply would not give up the pursuit of beautification, even those armed with feminist theory." The topic of Kipnis' article was playwright Eve Ensler's new one-woman show, "The Good Body," whose subject matter is the author's potbelly. Is this what female intellectuals have come to -- women writing about women writing about getting fat? If you think it's unfair to target a single essay by Kipnis, be reminded that her oeuvre consists of books about sex and gender ("Ecstasy Unlimited"), pornography ("Bound and Gagged") and the miseries of marriage ("Against Love: A Polemic").
