HEATHER WILHELM ON THE SEXES AFTER WEINSTEIN:
Twenty seventeen has exposed many monsters, and that is a positive thing. Breathless reports of a looming monster epidemic, however, seem greatly exaggerated. In a recent op-ed in the New York Daily News, Christina Hoff Sommers pointed out some seemingly incongruous data from the General Social Survey: In 2014, 3.6 percent of women reported being sexually harassed at work in the previous twelve months. That’s not fantastic, but it’s certainly not “burn it all down” bad, either.
Supposedly, we’re all in this together — or, at least, we should be. Perhaps a step towards sanity would involve some introspection on all fronts. Not all women are fragile, hapless victims. Not all men are predators or predators-in-waiting. Both men and women can contribute to a healthier sexual ethic. We can expect more from both.
Or not. “There are three ways you could approach the problem of sexual harassment,” Anita Hill told The New York Times Magazine. “You can fix the women. You can fix the guys. Or you can change the culture. And I think that really, at this point, what we should be talking about is fixing the guys and fixing the culture.”
“Do we have to choose?” asked Laura Kipnis. “Can’t it be all three?”
“Well,” Hill replied, “I think if we fix the guys and change the culture, we don’t need to fix women.”
“Good luck,” Kipnis replied. Good luck indeed.
It’s the new Soviet Man! Or as Leon Trotsky wrote nearly a century ago:
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.
Ahh, the search for the perfectibility of man. Stalin couldn’t will him into existence, but I’m sure Hollywood and Anita Hill can.