January 2002
Imagine that a feminist heroine like
Carol Gilligan or Catherine MacKinnon had been silenced by federal officials
at a government-sponsored conference, simply for airing her feminist views.
Then imagine MacKinnon or Gilligan being put upon by a group of paid government
consultants and told by a man to “shut the f*ck up, bitch” while the rest
of the crowd laughed at her derisively. Now imagine our feminist heroine,
having been publicly silenced and insulted, finally leaving the conference,
while the federal officials running the show did nothing to challenge or
chastise the man who had hurled the insult.
Of course, none of this happened to
Catherine MacKinnon or Carol Gilligan. Just imagine the media firestorm
if it did. But this did happen to the famous critic of feminism, Christina
Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Sommers was delivering an invited speech at a conference on “Boy Talk”
(a program sponsored by the Center for Substance Abuse and Prevention (CSAP)
of the Department of Health and Human Services) when CSAP official Linda
Bass summarily interrupted, and commanded Sommers to end her talk. Minutes
later, as Sommers was forced by a hostile crowd to defend her claim that
scientific studies ought to be used to help evaluate the effectiveness
of government drug-prevention programs, Professor Jay Wade, of Fordham
University’s Department of Psych-ology – an expert on “listening skills”
– ordered Sommers to “shut the f*ck up, bitch,” to the laughter of the
others in attendance. Having been muzzled by Bass and put upon by the crowd
in a manner well outside the bounds of civilized discourse (and with not
a move made by those running the conference to chastise Professor Wade)
Sommers had little choice but to leave – effectively ejected from a government
conference, simply for airing her views.
I called Professor Jay Wade for a comment
on his insulting remarks to Sommers at the conference. It turns out that
Wade had himself gone back to HHS and asked them to tell him, using the
tape, exactly what he had said to Sommers at the conference. So Wade’s
remarks to me reflected the official transcript, which does not include
the word “bitch.” Wade said he remembers saying “Shut the f*ck up,” to
Sommers, but was unsure about whether he said “bitch.” “I could have said
‘bitch.’ I probably thought it,” Wade told me. Sommers says that Wade did
in fact say “bitch,” and careful listening to the tape reveals that the
word was uttered, although almost drowned out by the derisive laughter
of the crowd.
Under questioning, Wade was apologetic
for his remarks, which he acknowledged to be thoroughly unprofessional
– although he’s made no move to apologize to Sommers herself and spent
most of our call taking potshots at her. According to Wade, Sommers roused
the anger of the people in the crowd – especially minorities, many of whom,
according to Wade, had no advanced degrees – by insisting that scientific
research was needed to validate the effectiveness of government programs.
That hardly seems a crime.
But Wade also said that what was really
bothering Sommers was that she had been left feeling “insulted” and “flustered”
by HHS officials, who had refused to let her finish her presentation. So
why exactly had Sommers been silenced by HHS officials to begin with?
I called Alvera Stern, acting director
of the Division of Prevention Application and Education at HHS, for comments
on what had happened to Sommers. Readers of National Review Online
will know that I’m a fan of Sommers and her work, so I thought it was particularly
important that I have a taped copy of the session, so as to fairly establish
the truth of what happened. To her credit, Stern was kind enough to provide
me with both a transcript of the session and a copy of the tape. Unfortunately,
Stern’s explanation for what happened simply doesn’t hold up.
Stern told me that Sommers’s talk had
been cut off because she’d run overtime. But it’s obvious from the tape
that Sommers was silenced at the moment she began to raise questions about
“Girl Power” – the female counterpart of the “Boy Talk” drug-prevention
program that was the subject of the conference. And even Jay Wade – hardly
a Sommers fan – told me that it was Sommers’s attempt to discuss Girl Power
that had led to her being silenced. The tape makes it clear that Linda
Bass, the HHS official who shut Sommers off, said nothing at all about
Sommers’s time being up. Bass simply insisted that any discussion of “Girl
Power” was out of bounds – although it would seem to be impossible to properly
evaluate a proposal to create a “Boy Talk” counterpart to “Girl Power”
without considering the effectiveness of the Girl Power program itself.
So what exactly is “Girl Power,” and
why were HHS officials so determined to prevent anyone from raising questions
about it? The Girl Power program was a cornerstone of Clinton HHS secretary
Donna Shalala’s pro-androgyny feminist agenda, and a favorite of Hillary
Clinton’s. It’s obvious from the transcript that the officials who run
“Girl Power” were unwilling to allow any questions about the efficacy of
the program to be raised. Sommers’s daring to imply that overcoming femininity
in girls and masculinity in boys might not be the most effective way to
fight teenage drug abuse is the real reason she was put upon and effectively
ejected by this crowd of HHS consultants and administrators.
The highly questionable premise of
the Girl Power program is that making girls less traditionally feminine
will somehow cause them to be less likely to smoke, take drugs, or get
pregnant. Of course, most people would expect the opposite effect. Isn’t
it precisely because girls are nowadays less bound by traditional codes
of feminine behavior that we are seeing increases in smoking, drug-taking,
and premarital sex among girls? Given the exceedingly debatable assumption
upon which it rests, Christina Hoff Sommers can certainly be forgiven for
asking to see some empirical research confirming that the Girl Power program
actually succeeds in reducing substance abuse by making girls less traditionally
feminine.
But of course it would be naive to
think that reducing drug abuse is the real purpose of either the Girl Power
or Boy Talk programs. A careful reading of the reams of slick, expensive
pamphlets put out by HHS under the heading of Girl Power makes it clear
that the problem of drug abuse is just a convenient bureaucratic excuse
for housing these programs in the Center for Substance Abuse and Prevention
division of HHS. The obvious purpose of Girl Power and Boy Talk is feminist
social engineering.
How exactly does encouraging girls
to shoot, hunt, or play the drums, instead of sew and dance make them less
likely to smoke or get pregnant? The Girl Power pamphlets cite statistics
in which female athletes get pregnant at lower rates than non-athletes,
but that could easily be a “selection effect,” rather than actually caused
by going out for the team. This is obviously something that needs to be
carefully researched. And doesn’t Girl Power’s own resort to statistics
validate Sommers’s point that real empirical studies are needed to show
that the Girl Power program actually reduces drug abuse?
The truth is, Health and Human Services’
Girl Power and Boy Talk programs are simply government-funded attempts
to promote the training for sexual androgyny mandated by feminist Carol
Gilligan and her followers. Studies by Gilligan, and such groups as the
American Association of University women – studies that describe alleged
“crises” of sexual identity among American girls and boys – are the only
“evidence” that HHS officials will allow to be invoked in assessments of
these programs. Of course, in a series of brilliant studies, psychologist
Judith Kleinfeld – as well as Sommers herself, in her extraordinary book,
The War Against Boys – have already thoroughly debunked Gilligan’s
notion of a “girl crisis.” That is why Sommers was cut off by HHS officials
as soon as she was about to raise questions about the shaky empirical foundations
of the Girl Power and Boy Talk programs.
Do Girl Power and Boy Talk really reduce
teen drug use? It doesn’t matter. Is there really a “girl crisis” or a
“boy crisis?” It doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the Clinton holdovers at HHS
aren’t interested in these questions, because the real rationale for their
pet programs never really had anything to do with teen substance abuse
– or even educational competence – to begin with. All of these rationales
are simply bureaucratic window dressing for channeling literally millions
of government dollars into a misguided and chimerical attempt to break
American girls of their femininity and American boys of their masculinity.
Christina Hoff Sommers understood this, and that is why she was silenced,
insulted, and ejected from a conference before she could speak the truth.
Will the Bush administration acquiesce in this outrage?
December 5,
2001, National Review Online.
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