Strange Rulings: Boys in Skirts?
Judge Susan Webber Wright pulled the plug on Paula Jones and really, was anyone surprised? Most significant is the confusion left in the wake of her ruling. A sampling of comments and related news suggests just how widespread this confusion is and how deep into our culture it reaches.
Forerunning the judgment, Gloria Steinem and Anita Hill already had exonerated the President. Steinem said that what Mr. Clinton did was not harassment because he took ‘no’ for an answer. (So did former Senator Packwood with very different results – departure from the Senate – for a far more minor offense). Professor Hill also denied that the President’s behavior was harassment, an assessment contrasting oddly with her own situation and views some years ago. As usual, feminists bend over backwards to be broad-minded about Bill.
Professor Camille Paglia offered her unique blend of civil libertarianism, feminism and common sense perspectives. Writing in Time, Paglia held that the Jones suit was tendentious and for the same reason excoriated those who took the opposite stance on Hill. “Lawsuits filed on nebulous grounds of psychological ‘distress’ are grotesquely totalitarian,” she wrote. “The ‘hostile environment’ concept is predicated on a reactionary feminist archetype. That Judge Thomas was grilled about trivial lunchtime conversations that may have occurred ten years before was an outrage worthy of Stalinist Russia.”
Paglia made another point long vanished from society’s radar. “While men must behave honorably,” she wrote, “women also should watch how they dress and behave. For every gross male harasser there are ten female sycophants who shamelessly use their sexual attractions to get ahead.” And she indicted the acutely mixed messages culture has been sending about gender. “Feminist excesses have paralyzed and neutered white, middle class young men as should be obvious to any visitor to the campuses of elite schools.”
A story from Middletown CT high school illustrated her point. A young man came to class in a dress and blouse stuffed with tissue paper. When the principal sent him home there was an outcry from lawyers and some students who have absorbed the new rules. Eight other boys wore dresses in protest and twelve girls came to class in business suits, ties, and heavy shoes. The Executive Director of the state’s Civil Liberties Union termed the school’s attempt at decency “an over-reaction.” The real problem, he said, was “the administrators’ own discomfort about men wearing skirts.” Imagine being bothered about that, what bigotry!
Amid the shuffle of these confluences of law and Eros came Jodie Foster’s decision to go the single mom route. It has become “a rite of passage for liberated women” wrote columnist Kathleen Parker who declined to cheer. “Having a baby without a father is a very bad thing. A supremely stupid thing, an American tragedy,” she explained while decrying it as “a trendy notch in feminist self-realization.” Citing the nation’s “crisis of fatherlessness,” Parker observed, “even perfect mothers are only half the equation and never are a substitute for even an imperfect dad.’
Common sense like this might save America but trendsetters in Washington, Hollywood and Manhattan don’t care to make sense. No one believes Wright’s judgment applies to anyone but big shot liberals like Kennedy or Clinton. Beside, “sexual harassment” is meant to be nebulous, arbitrary, and selectively applied. It is not meant for civility, there was plenty of that before feminism and its big Foundation supporters, but to create occasion for lawyers and to instill fear, as Stalinist rules always do. The surface of culture is prostitute chic: the substrate is punitive gloom.
So sexual confusion grows; as Paglia states, the mixed messages beamed to youth are crippling (see Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers’ the War on Boys). As non-feminist (that is, non-sexist) women have written of the subtext of ‘Take Our Daughters to Work Day,’ men are to be scared, depressed and/or ‘gay’ as the students at Middletown intuitively grasp. “My algebra teacher treated me like a celebrity,” said the skirt-wearing seventeen year old. Another who cross-dressed in support was uncomfortably surprised by the enthusiastic response of the girls. “They all said I looked really good in a skirt,” he worried.
The confusion writ large in the Paula Jones decision reflects more than hypocrisy, power politics and injustice. It is part of the disintegration of basic standards whose result is cynicism and anxiety. As Paglia notes, this is the seedbed of tyranny.
Middlesex News, Thursday, April 16, 1998