Support in Unexpected Places: Gloria Steinem in The Colbert Report

I must confess that I am huge fan of Comedy Central, the cable channel dedicated exclusively to comedy shows. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, with my neighbor from Montclair Stephen Colbert, are my “must see TV.”

Last June 22nd, Stephen interviewed Gloria Steinem (March 25, 1934), the icon of American feminism. Steinem, journalist, social and political activist, was a leader and spokeswoman for the Women's Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, and still is a prominent figure and an important referent of the movement.

During the brief although interesting interview, Stephen asked her to comment on her statement that it was unfair to women to ask them to have careers and to raise children too. In her comments, and to my pleasant surprise, Steinem argued in favor of shared parenting responsibilities, pointed out as a social advancement the fact that the men’s rights movement is fighting so that men have a more active role in the raising of children, and complained that the US laws make difficult to men participate as equal parents as women.

I have said before that regarding family law, some forms of feminism are not real feminism, but feminine supremacism, kind of an “inverted machismo” where women want to have over men the same control that men used to have over them. These false feminist want equality in everything but in family matters, and when they divorce, they want to deny men their right to be parents of their children. If these so-called feminist were so, they would have understood that putting on women all the responsibilities of raising children is just a way of preserving gender inequality, and they would be fighting for equal parenting rights for both genders. And if someone asks who said this, you can reply: Gloria Steinem did.

Cathy Young and the Gender War

Cathy Young (Moscow 1963), an author, a public speaker, and a regular columnist for The Boston Globe and Reason, her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, The American Spectator, Salon.Com, National Review, and The New Republic. She published in 1999 the book Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality.

In her book, Young states that there is no war against women, and rebuts a series of controversial issues, from the incidence of domestic violence (it is not as frequent as the feminist media wants us to believe), the nature of domestic violence (she states that domestic violence is a two-way street: University of New Hampshire researchers consistently report women as often as men initiate physical violence. Furthermore, recent studies reveal that lesbians have also high rates of violence toward their own partners) Mainstream media hides or misreports these facts, fomenting this way legislation constructed on false assumptions), that male violence is directed primarily against women, or that girls are ignored in classrooms.

She offers evidence that these and other basic feminist credos are mistaken, mainly due to a feminist propensity for exaggeration, stereotyping, and over-generalization based on little or no evidence.

Young argues that the battle for equal rights is not an excuse for portraying men as fundamentally malevolent. She explains that in the '80s, a radical sector of feminism became mainstream, and equality for women began to mean inequities for men; is at this moment when she and many others became part of a new brand of feminism that looks for true equality.

One good example of this attitude towards an unequal equality, and the one that for our cause matters the most, is these feminists’ attitude toward joint custody. While they condemn men for not contributing enough in raising the kids, at the same time they demand that women should automatically have child custody following a divorce, because they have an inherent capacity to nurture children, while men do not. Young make an interesting point here: as Victorian morality believed, these feminists believe that women are the fragile guardians of good who must be placed on pedestals and protected. Young cleverly points out this "strange convergence of radical feminism and patriarchal conservatism - and the alienation of both ideologies from real life." Weirdly enough, the arguments of the Christian fundamentalist Promise Keepers and the National Organization of Women are based on the same premises.

Young believes that women and men need to learn to get along. Women have sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers. Because we have families, we cannot battle each other, we have to work together, and we have to look for each other’s wellbeing. In the final chapter of Ceasefire, Young proposes a twelve steps program for de-escalating the gender wars. These steps include:

-Do not assume sexism is the root cause of all women's problems.

-Rewrite sexual harassment law.

-Demand that husbands and wives serve as equal parents.

-Take gender politics out of the war on domestic violence.

-Stop acting as if women’s claims were more legitimate than men’s were.

In summary, the book is well written, well argued, and carefully reasoned, a book that should be read by anyone interested in real gender equality.

The Lucifer Effect

Social Psychologist Philip Zimbardo directed in 1971 the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which volunteer college students randomly assigned to be guards or inmates in a simulated prison. Those students playing guards found themselves enacting sadistic, cruel, authoritarian, and abusive behavior.

In his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2008), Zimbardo connects to historical examples of injustice and atrocity, especially the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He found that almost anyone, given the right "situational" influences, could be made to abandon moral scruples and cooperate in violence and oppression. He insists that in cases like Abu Ghraib ,we should blame the situation and the system that constructed it.

Any group that has power without supervision or accountability for their actions, will do the same thing that the student of the Stanford Prison Experiment did, becoming sadistic, cruel, authoritarian, and abusive. Remember when Arian Germans were allowed to do whatever they wanted to German Jews without any legal consequences. Remember the horrors of Rwanda, when Hutus where allowed and encouraged to murder Tutsis. We, human being, are a dangerous animal.

I have said this before: the problem with family courts is not women, is attaching almost absolute power to a specific gender in family courts, establishing a hierarchy that in this case is based on gender, but it could be based (and it has been before) on race, ethnic group, religion, etc. The problems that fathers now confront in the Western World, are confronted in an even more terrible way by mothers in the Eastern World and in Africa. The problem is not women, is the social, legal and political structures that sustain gender inequality.

For women’s rights

I say that men’s rights are not only their rights: they are also the rights of women.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because if it is true that at family courts the weighing scale is still leaning towards women, in a very near future, when laws Project both parents rights no matter gender, we should make sure that laws are formulated in such a way the weighing scale does not leans in the opposite direction, like it has happened infinite times before in history when it comes the time of adjustments and corrections (Remember the French Revolution? And the urban violence unleashed in the post-apartheid South Africa?). Only through clear laws and fair court we would be able to achieve this task.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because the present state of family laws is ideological fossil that states that men belong to streets and women belong to their house wit the children, limiting this way the spectrum of divorced women with children. And this goes from the extraordinary to the ordinary, from the woman who since divorced has been forced to relegate his professional career to a second plane because she does not have time for it, to the one who, as one woman confessed to a pro-joint custody militant in Puerto Rico, she had not been able to go to the movies in years because the situation after her divorce had killed her social life. We fight for fair laws that assign equal responsibilities to men an women, laws that insert men in the family life that they are entitled to by right, and liberate women from having the full load of raising children.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because in the present state of things, those women who live with divorced men with children live with the continuous stress of sharing the emotional, social, and economical pressure to which present laws submit them. There is no worst enemy for a new family than a former wife devoted to sabotage it.

I say that our struggle for men’s rights is also the struggle for women’s rights, because many aunts, grandmother, godmothers and other women relatives of children of divorced men find themselves without contact with the children they love, because when courts block contact between fathers and their children, they’re not only blocking them, but their whole families.

It is for all of the above that leaders of pro-joint custody groups, like Ana Isabel Gorduño of Amor de Papá in Mexico, and Anneliese Garrison of Parents Without Custody of Southern New Jersey are women. They have understood what is at stake in this struggle.

It is time that men and women to be equal for the law. Let us fight to achieve this equality. Our children are waiting.