Just made me think of some similar discussions here...
'Many feminists were dismayed, especially by the judge's decision to make
the woman's name public; one activist fumed that "the judge needs
shooting."'
>Date: 7 Mar 2000 12:06:18 -0000
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>Subject: CENTER-RIGHT, Issue 101, March 7, 2000
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> - http://www.center-right.org/
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> Issue 101, March 7, 2000
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>
>"Brit's-eye view: The specter of American gender extremism is making
>ripples across the Atlantic,"
>
>by Cathy Young, from Salon Magazine,
>
>http://www.salon.com/health/sex/urge/2000/02/19/sex/index.html
>
>
>
>In England, the gender wars are often viewed as a peculiar form of
>"dementia Americana." There is a common, and not entirely groundless,
>belief among Europeans that Americans have a propensity to take even good
>ideas to absurd extremes: Convince the Yanks that working women should be
>protected from sexual extortion by the boss, and the next thing you know
>they're outlawing lascivious glances at the office.
>
>And yet two days before Valentine's Day, here we were at a conference in
>London titled "Sex Wars," discussing such familiar problems as the
>politicization of the personal, the demonization of men and paranoia about
>sex and relationships. The conference, held at the Institute of
>Contemporary Arts just a short walk from Buckingham Palace -- itself the
>site of some famous sex wars in recent memory -- was organized by a
>discussion/debate group called the Maverick Club and the
>libertarian-leaning, iconoclastic monthly LM.
>
>A crowd of nearly 300 people, less predominantly female than gatherings at
>gender-related events stateside, came to hear academics, journalists and
>others tackle subjects ranging from "Regulating Passion" ("What impact
>does an increased awareness of issues such as sexual harassment, domestic
>violence and date rape have on the way we enter into relationships?") to
>"Sex and the Single Girl" ("Has the demise of long-term relationships led
>to greater emotional fulfillment, or will it result in an epidemic of
>lonely singletons, too cautious to make a commitment?").
>
>The specter of American gender extremism, invoked as a cautionary tale,
>hovered at times over the proceedings -- particularly when University of
>Massachusetts (Amherst) professor Daphne Patai, author of the 1999 book
>"Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism," talked
>about the depredations of the "sexual harassment industry" in the United
>States. (Full disclosure: I was a speaker as well, unpaid but reimbursed
>for travel expenses.)
>
>But that's not to say everything was quiet on the sex-wars front on
>British soil. One story freshly ripped from the headlines was a hefty
>award of damages -- 400,000 pounds (about $700,000) -- to a man who had
>sued a female co-worker for libel after she falsely accused him of rape.
>Many feminists were dismayed, especially by the judge's decision to make
>the woman's name public; one activist fumed that "the judge needs
>shooting."
>
>On the first conference panel, "The War of the Sexes," University of Kent
>sociologist Frank Furedi cited the brouhaha as evidence of how polarized
>discourse about sex and gender had grown -- on one side, men's movement
>activists (yes, they have them in England) gleefully rubbing their hands
>that a woman had finally been punished for falsely accusing a man, and on
>the other, feminists basically conceding that she lied yet complaining
>that the punishment would deter real victims from coming forward. Furedi
>noted that no one was looking at the specifics of the case or at the
>individuals involved.
>
>Such divisiveness, he added, had become typical of popular and even
>academic discussions of gender: "Either feminism is accused of stoking up
>anti-man passions and of inventing problems that do not exist, or men are
>said to be waging a war against women and systematically using violent
>tactics like stalking, battering and rape to maintain their hegemony."
>
>A good part of the "War of the Sexes" panel focused on an issue that has
>enough resonance in England to make Susan Faludi a happy woman: the
>plight of men. Curiously, the strongest plea for the newly beleaguered
>gender was offered by Sunday Times columnist Melanie Phillips, author of a
>controversial new book, "The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the
>Neutered Male." She painted a bleak picture indeed: Men are demonized in
>feminist rhetoric, made increasingly redundant in family life, subjected
>to discrimination in divorce courts and virtually presumed to be violent
>and abusive toward women.
>
>"Women have to stand up and say, 'What has been done in our name is
>wrong,'" declared Phillips. "No one should reach emancipation on the
>backs of somebody else's enslavement." There was some discussion about
>whether men as a group should themselves stand up to feminist excesses,
>and why they had not done so. "We're all vulnerable to the suggestion
>that we've been prejudiced or beastly to someone," ventured Phillips,
>explaining that men are "very intimidated" by charges of being sexist.
>
>A few men did speak up during the question and answer period, though one
>of them actually voiced his dismay at the idea of a men's movement, saying
>that he had already seen "angry men on television complaining about
>feminist bitches." (Now there's a cultural difference: We don't hear
>such complaints on TV.)
>
>One panelist, writer Daniel Britten, said that men, held in check by the
>fear of being politically incorrect, nevertheless need to articulate their
>side of gender issues. Male resentment against feminism, he noted, is
>partly due to feeling "excluded from the public debate about gender" --
>illustrated by the fact that only six of the 26 speakers at "Sex Wars"
>were men. He added, though, that it should be a "controlled response,"
>lest a nasty "cycle of retribution" be unleashed by male reaction to
>feminist rhetoric.
>
>The main focus, however, was not men but governmental and therapeutic
>intervention in relationships, exemplified by the widening reach of sexual
>harassment policies and proposals that would subject nonviolent spousal
>conflict to official scrutiny under the guise of combating domestic
>violence.
>
>Jenny Bristow, a freelance writer in her 20s who focuses on issues
>affecting young women, stressed that it isn't always a matter of clear-cut
>injustices to men: "The man accused of harassment is rarely a totally
>nice guy. The real problem is that once you start regulating with things
>like looks, comments or jokes, you get into a gray area where it's very
>hard to tell who's right and who's wrong. I think the only possible
>answer is that these interactions should never be regulated." Sara
>Hinchcliffe, a professor at the University of Sussex, argued that
>harassment rules dealing with such ambiguities "encourage people to impute
>the worst possible interpretation to human behavior."
>
>Furedi deplored the tendency to portray male-female relations as dangerous
>and in need of policing -- for instance, Valentine's Day warnings that a
>man's suave charm could be part of a batterer's power game -- but he
>didn't blame this entirely or even primarily on feminism. Rather, he
>argued that the demand for formal rules and restraints stems from
>society's lack of "moral and cultural equipment" to deal with change or
>with interpersonal relationships. This sounded rather like the argument
>advanced by many American social conservatives -- except that Furedi was
>calling not for a return to traditional morality but for a revival of the
>'60s ideal of creative and liberated relationships.
>
>Indeed, I got the distinct impression that in England, criticism of
>"sexual correctness" is far more likely to come from the left than in the
>United States. Even Phillips, under fire for her defense of the
>traditional family, stubbornly identifies herself as a liberal and a
>progressive.
>
>During the question period in the second session, "Regulating Passion," a
>self-described abortion-rights campaigner angrily said that just as she
>opposed state intrusion into women's reproductive lives, she was appalled
>by proposed laws that would allow intervention to protect women from
>"psychological abuse" in intimate relationships. Another woman said that
>as a veteran of leftism and radical politics, she found it very
>disconcerting to find sexual harassment codes depicted as progressive:
>"What sort of empowerment is it to say, 'You are harassing me?' --
>especially since you usually end up saying to the employer, 'You must take
>my word over somebody else's.'"
>
>Not everyone joined the consensus. On the "Regulating Passion" panel,
>feminist psychologist and author Lynn Segal -- herself once a critic of
>authoritarian tendencies in feminism -- got quite vexed by what she saw as
>an anti-feminist agenda and a "defense of straight men."
>
>Her ire seemed directed in particular at co-panelist Daphne Patai, who had
>assailed the expansion of sexual harassment policies as an effort to root
>out sexuality at work and in school, stemming from the anti-male and
>anti-heterosexual bias of a small but inordinately influential group of
>feminists. All the hype about men running scared and sexuality being
>under attack, an animated Segal asserted, was just a reaction to a new
>situation, one in which there was "more recognition both of women's right
>to sexual pleasure and of the need to defend women from sexual violence."
>
>This corrective to the sexual libertarianism of "Sex Wars" may have been
>useful, but Segal's defense of feminism often seemed more vigorous than
>coherent. She was upset because a recent TV show about the clitoris used
>humorous graphics of "quivering walls" to illustrate the female orgasm,
>whereas a comparison program on the penis showed "rockets shooting off
>50-foot fireworks," which somehow added up to cultural barriers to
>"asserting an active female sexuality."
>
>Worse, Segal seemed to ally herself with the sex regulators. "We need to
>ask why pornography is still with us," she said, suggesting that however
>silly porn may seem, it sometimes leads to "attacks on women." Alarm
>bells also went off when she talked about creating an environment in which
>young women could have "safe, caring, responsible sex." This prompted
>someone in the audience to inquire how such a notion was compatible with
>spontaneous passion, a question Segal never got around to answering.
>
>In the afternoon, following a discussion about television that focused
>more on culture than on politics, writer Philippa Gregory reintroduced a
>political note on the "Sex and the Single Girl" panel. Books like
>"Bridget Jones' Diary," she warned, were part of a "backlash" warning
>women about the perils of the independent life, rather like the 18th
>century novels in which the heroine who ventured out the front door was
>doomed to rape and early death.
>
>"But now the warning is not don't go out the front door," interjected
>Jenny Bristow, "it's don't let somebody into your life, because you could
>get hurt." While Bristow did not put much stock in the backlash theory,
>neither did she buy the bleak picture of the single girl's life. "We have
>more freedom than ever, more choices, but instead of enjoying this
>situation it has been problematized with talk about miserable singletons
>and commitment-phobes," she said. "In fact, it's not nearly so bad or so
>difficult." To my delight, Bristow also challenged the cliché of male
>fear of commitment, suggesting that the alleged commitment-phobe may not
>be fleeing marriage in general but simply a particular woman.
>
>One of the older speakers, novelist Maggie Gee, cautioned that many women
>who had pursued the pleasures of singleness had ended up childless and
>hurting. Yet, in refreshing contrast to American neotraditionalists, who
>are forever portraying women as hapless maidens victimized by the sexual
>revolution, she emphasized that "we enjoyed our sexual freedom and
>adventure -- not just the men, we enjoyed it too -- we just failed to make
>plans for having children." Gee suggested that women need a more
>strategic approach to go with their freedom, which some audience members
>found unpleasantly calculating.
>
>On the way back to the States, I reflected on what the real differences
>are between English- and American-style gender politics. In Britain, the
>percentage of the population actively involved in any kind of gender
>politics is probably much smaller, but this is not to say that the
>politics are any less radical. It may even be that, as one female TV
>journalist suggested to me at dinner, the British tend to be much too
>complacent about political correctness and gender warfare because they
>dismiss these problems as American afflictions.
>
>I suddenly realized that there is one noticeable difference: Even on the
>all-female panels at "Sex Wars," there was none of the "just between us
>girlfriends" tone that pervaded a panel on women and intimacy I recently
>attended in New York. Chalk one up for Anglophilia.
>
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