The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter
Winter 1997, Vol. 4, No. 1.

The Princess at the Window:
A New Gender Morality

by Donna Laframboise

Reviewed by Daphne Patai

Donna Laframboise, a young Canadian journalist with excellent feminist credentials, doesn't mince words. The women's movement, she states, "has taken leave of its senses." That is why in the early 1990s, she began to devote some of her columns in the Toronto Star (Canada's largest daily paper) to criticizing certain aspects of the North American women's movement. The unsurprising result? She was labeled an antifeminist, a racist, a right-winger, and "a good girl whose opinions are dutifully in line with prevailing prejudice." This all too familiar antifeminine tactic lends further support to a point made by virtually every renegade feminist book published to date: contemporary feminism displays a profound lack of tolerance toward its critics from within. Far from giving up her stance as a dissident feminist, however, Laframboise has responded to her critics by devoting an entire book to her objections. Still writing as a feminist, she concludes: "North American feminism is giving female equality a bad name, [because] it is extremist, self-obsessed, arrogant and intolerant." Even worse, Laframboise argues, these traits have become indistinguishable from the characteristics of mainstream feminism, and are permeating popular culture and influencing public policy.

The dominant metaphor giving Laframboise's work both its title and its principal theme is explained in a fable that introduces the book: a princess is rooted to one spot in her castle, from which she has only one perspective on the landscape outside her window. This vantage point defines all her ideas about the world. When, after many years, she finds herself rooted to a different spot, looking out of a different window, she throws out all her old beliefs and embraces her new perspective as the sole source of truth.

Since in the literal-minded world of feminist polemics Laframboise is likely to be attacked for having opted for such an "elitist" fable, readers should know that she comes from a rural working-class family and seems to have made her way in the hard-nosed world of professional journalism through her own talents.

Not that this will appease the feminist ideologues who are her targets. They will, of course, dispute her picture of both the severity and the extent of the downside of feminist achievements. The portrait Laframboise paints is by now a familiar one, covering feminist excesses in writing about sexual abuse, rape, legislation, education, employment, pornography, violence, and the rest of the standard feminist litany that sets "women's" interests (strictly as defined by some feminists) over and above all others.

Laframboise makes short shrift of such arguments, declaring that her commitment to "justice" for example, cannot countenance injustice for men. Nor will she quietly accede to the gendered worldview that sees such concern for principle as "masculine." Like earlier feminist dissidents, Laframboise writes out of a stated concern that feminism's legitimate aims will eventually be undone by the very real and predictable backlash that is likely to come as social and political institutions are increasingly reshaped by feminist dogma. To the examples of such reshaping familiar to U.S. readers -- brain-washing by therapists "recovering" repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, endorsement even by mainstream feminist journals such as Ms. magazine of allegations of satanic ritual abuse, sexual harassment charges run amok -- Laframboise adds important Canadian cases. The Canada Panel on Violence Against Women is, to Laframboise, "a national embarrassment." It reported that Canadian women are mired in inequality and violence, and tethered to "lives few in the world would choose to lead." This and Lafrarnboise's other Canadian examples (some of which may be familiar to readers of John Fekete's Moral Panic, a devastating 1994 expose of Canadian feminism's biopolitics), add an international dimension that should interest American readers.

Laframboise's aim, here as throughout her book, is to show that inflamed rhetoric and extremist feminist claims are not confined to the lunatic fringe, but have become part of mainstream feminist discourse. Thus she legitimately speaks of "North American feminism" as a distinctive ideological entity, and her book aims to confront it in the name of fairness for all human beings.

This concern leads to Laframboise's most controversial position: her evident sympathy for men, whom she sees not as evil patriarchs but as individuals whose lives, too, have been defined and restricted by social rules and expectations. She is particularly contemptuous of the feminist betrayal of reason: "[D]ouble standards that work against men, that stereotype them deplorably, are not merely acceptable to feminists, they are being promoted by us. And the rest of society has gone along for the ride." In addition to protesting the dishonest and unethical side of such double standards, Laframboise sets the record straight by discussing (as do such men's movement advocates as Warren Farrell) men's higher suicide and murder rates, job accident rates, lower life expectancies, and so on. She is justifiably impatient with the current feminist practice of "picking and choosing the facts and figures that make your argument while deliberately ignoring everything else." Her own moral position is clearly stated: "One achieves a brighter future through moral consistency -- not by playing favorites."

Feminist defenders of the faith who view such evenhandedness as apostasy will be even more incensed by Laframboise's sympathetic response to the men's movement, asking what can be learned from it and what its legitimate gripes are. In a chapter on "Men and Power," which ranges from George Eliot's Middlemarch to contemporary debates about competing parental rights and responsibilities, Laframboise challenges the feminist orthodoxy on women's "powerlessness," and argues for a more nuanced understanding of power as it affects human relationships.

A feisty chapter called "Our Secret Garden" examines the romantic fiction so popular among women readers, which includes juicy scenes of sexual domination. Laframboise insists on the distinction between fantasy and reality, and denounces the simplistic antipornography arguments of feminists such as MacKinnon and Dworkin (which were adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada in its notorious 1992 Butter decision -- with predictable consequences). Here as elsewhere, Laframboise defends tolerance and flexibility, arguing that "we should endeavor to keep laws off our fantasies as well as off our art."

The book's final chapter, titled "Sex, Lies and Court Transcripts," tackles the difficult subject of contemporary feminism's legislative reach. "Gender harmony" may be what Laframboise wants; perhaps it is what most women want, but is it really what mainstream feminists want these days? It doesn't seem so. Tracing the ideological underpinnings of feminists' ever-expanding definitions of sexual harassment and sexual assault (which includes ludicrous demands for "comfort" in all professional and social settings), Laframboise finds a distinctive "feminist hostility toward men and male sexuality."

This, I agree, is the ugly heart of much contemporary feminist rhetoric, evident enough in the writings of MacKinnon, Dworkin, and Jeffreys, and at least passively acceded to by the many other feminists who promote and do not criticize their work. As in her other chapters, Laframboise is careful to show the effects of this pernicious ideology on legal and social institutions: sexual overtures come to be redefined as "assault" in a climate dominated by "zero-tolerance" thinking. Court time and public resources are being spent on cases that should embarrass reasonable people.

Laframboise calls for a stop to the "shoddy feminist thinking" that is creating a world in which all women are construed as victims and all men as villains in blatant contradiction to the extraordinary changes in women's roles that the past few decades have brought. Her book ends with a call to "restore reason, compassion, and tolerance to gender relations." If enough feminists join her, if they avoid the temptation to dismiss her as a "pod-feminist" (Susan Faludi's contemptible term for feminists she disagrees with), perhaps there is a chance.

Daphne Patai is Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.