Richard Reeves’ Zero-sum Conundrum

Feminists have been cooking their books

Five times in his book Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves waves us off zero-sum thinking. As well he should. His optimism and positivity are working well for him and for the entire effort to attend to the manifest troubles of boys and men.

Not that men were the perfectly agreeable partners by any means, but most men by now have acknowledged that the traditional male domain had some nice features that were, in a spirit of comity, honor and fairness, good and right for us to share with women.

Women sharing with us? Still not so much. Some women, yes. It’s hard to know how many, but it’s a safe bet that a goodly proportion of the most powerful gender partisans, the ones who make their livings as Professional Feminists or in related salaried endeavors and who exert tremendous influence on gender discourse, are reluctant to talk about reciprocity with men. Taking but not giving rules out the magic of synergy. It’s the classic and clearest zero-sum game.

Feminism wasn’t always like this.

In 1963, Betty Friedan, who went on to become a co-founder of the National Organization for Women and NOW’s first president, published the blockbuster book The Feminine Mystique, which is often credited with sparking the current wave of feminism. She cautioned us against zero-sum thinking almost as much as Richard Reeves does. She acknowledged that men, too, were harmed by sexism, sexist stereotypes, and the injustices that stereotypes always help to establish and rationalize. Here are just a few of many honest, candid, male-friendly items Friedan included in her book:

• The book’s dedication: “For all the new women, and the new men”

• Favorable mention of a story in the April 1962 edition of Redbook magazine titled “Why Young Husbands Feel Trapped.”

• “[T]he problem that has no name… is the key to… new and old problems which have been torturing women and their husbands and children… for years.”

• “[A] young man learns soon enough that he must decide who he wants to be. If he does not decide in junior high, in high school, in college, he must somehow come to terms with it by twenty-five or thirty, or he is lost. But this search for identity is seen as a greater problem now because more and more boys cannot find images in our culture—from their fathers or other men—to help them in their search. The old frontiers have been conquered, and the boundaries of the new are not so clearly marked. More and more young men in America today suffer an identity crisis for want of any image of man worth pursuing, for want of a purpose that truly realizes their human abilities.”

• “Apart from the psychological pressures from mothers or wives, there have been plenty of nonsexual pressures in the America of the last decade—the compromising, never-ceasing competition, the anonymous and often purposeless work in the big organization—that also kept a man from feeling like a man… The men were not always kidding when they said their wives were lucky to be able to stay home all day. It was also soothing to rationalize the rat race by telling themselves that they were in it ‘for the wife and kids’.”

• “The work of most American men… leaves a vacant, empty need for escape—

  television, tranquilizers, alcohol, sex.”

• “[I]n all the arguments about men not doing enough of the housework and child care, I’ve heard women recently admit that they don’t like it when men take over so much of it that the kid comes to Daddy first with her report card or cut finger. ‘I wouldn’t consider letting Ben take him to the doctor,’ my friend Sally said. ‘That’s my thing.’ There was a lot of power in women’s role in the family…”

The feminist conundrum that was solved by the creation of Reeves’s conundrum

The wild success of The Feminine Mystique led directly to the founding of NOW. One of the primary needs of the new organization, of course, was to build membership. Here we get our first inkling of zero-sum thinking in the errant evolution of feminism. Some prospective members of NOW, women who were interested in the new options and opportunities Friedan urged for them, had reservations about sharing their female advantages with men, many of whom started looking forward to new options and opportunities of their own even before the term “work-life balance” entered our vocabulary of gender.

Taking, of course, is usually easier than giving, so some women calculated that this “women’s lib” idea might not be such a good thing if it would require reciprocation. Some women concluded, “Thanks. But no thanks. I love being in charge of things around the house, at the kids’ school, in the neighborhood, taking them to the doctor. I don’t really want to share that. I’m the mother.”

Redstockings to the Rescue

The Redstockings, a group of radical feminists in New York City, saw the solution. If the problem is that justice and fairness require reciprocity with men, let’s reframe and redefine who and what men are and re-write the script for what they deserve.

On July 7, 1969, The Redstockings issued their Redstockings Manifesto. Its most memorable, effective and influential phrases were:

• “Women are an oppressed class.”

• “Our oppression is total.”

• “We identify the agents of our oppression as men.”

We don’t need to call out a conspiracy here. It was and largely remains a public messaging strategy not unlike innumerable communications efforts by other sophisticated special interests.

The media feasted on the Redstockings’ outrage, originally with ridicule and then with complicity. Academia was tantalized by the whiff of Marxist class warfare. Politicians cowered before the emerging Women’s Vote. Voilà! Problem solved. Oppressed people don’t need to negotiate with their oppressors. Oppressed people are justified in attacking their oppressors every chance they get.

Ever since, feminism has been largely a unidirectional, zero-sum game.

No value of x can satisfy the equation.

- ∞ + x > 0

With Professional Feminism’s insistence on the infinite negativity of women’s total oppression, no value of x — men’s contribution — no matter how great, no matter how exhausting, can satisfy the equation; the sum will always be zero or less.

What would be good for Reeves and IABM to do?

The idea of Women’s Oppression and Men’s Oppressiveness must be at least moderated. Perhaps the claim that women are totally oppressed should diplomatically be called “a slight but crucial exaggeration.” Perhaps it should be confronted head-on as “possibly the most damaging assertion in gender politics ever.” We can’t build a win-win on the idea that women and girls are totally oppressed and have nothing of value, importance, health and healing to share with men and boys.

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