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Where Scholars Fear to Tread
| Article
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12311 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1987 |
1,912 Words |
| Author
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Brigitte Berger
Brigitte Berger is a professor of sociology at Boston
University. Among the books she has authored or coauthored,
the following relate to issues of the family: Societies in
Change, The Homeless Mind: Modernization Consciousness, Child
Care and Mediating Structures, and The War over the Family:
Capturing the Middle Ground. Her most recent book, The Culture
of Entrepeneurship (a book in which the family figures
prominently), will be published in October 1991 by ICS Press
(Institute of Contemporary Studies), San Francisco. |
It may be accidental, but nonetheless appropriate, that George Gilder's Men and Marriage - the revised edition of his earlier, widely popular Sexual Suicide - appears at precisely that moment in history when NOW, the National Organization of Women, is about to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of its establishment. In the tumultuous history of the brief period under the sway of the feminist revolution, Gilder and NOW have become firmly linked in the public mind as representative expressions of the most antithetical visions of human nature, with Gilder arguing for "anatomy is destiny" and the swelling ranks of the women's movement railing against notions of biological necessity, irrevocable instincts, and inherent differences between the sexes.
In order to understand the extreme hostility between these polar views of the human condition, it is important to remember the women's movement's more outlandish, if not bizarre, claims. In the space of few years, earlier, perhaps quite reasonable, attempts to give women a greater share in the economy and polity became radicalized to a degree previously unknown to American society. No longer concerned with this or that "unjust" aspect of contemporary female existence, the reinterpretation and, eventually, restructuring of the biological basis of human life became the focus. Heterosexuality was declared rape; motherhood, slavery, and "sexism," one of the most repressive ideologies that ever existed anywhere. There came into existence one huge outcry against being female and with this a clamor for putting into placed the new feminist freedoms, which essentially translated into the freedom from the family, the freedom from husbands and children, and, ultimately, the freedom from nature.
Biology versus culture
Against this background of frenzied propositions, Gilder's Sexual Suicide of 1973 came as a relief. Grounding his arguments exclusively on the new science of ethology, which explains human behavior in terms of powerful instincts or patterns genetically programmed in the course of evolution, Gilder forcefully argued on the side of innate biological differences between men and women. A writer of great intelligence as well as imagination, Gilder set out to explore the implications of this perspective for contemporary psychology in the context of specific issues posed by feminism.
In conceptualizing the millennia of human history in a grandiose sweep, he advanced an intriguing, though empirically problematic, theory of the sexual "fragility of men" waiting to be tamed and transformed
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