Sex, Lies &
Feminism. By Peter Zohrab. Wainuiomata, New Zealand: New Zealand
Equality Party, 2002. 177 pp. US $10.
With “Sex, Lies & Feminism,” Peter
Zohrab has proven himself capable of singlehandedly matching the high
quality of the two Australian Finch publications I also review here
this issue. Zohrab’s book is a bit of a different bird though. Given
the absence of a successful publishing house’s resources, production
values are necessarily not as high, nor is the writing as smooth or as
seamlessly executed. But the compensating virtues are strong ones.
“Sex, Lies & Feminism” is one of those rare books that instantly reads
like a movement classic. Many of the topics the author raises have
been discussed before, sometimes even at greater length and in more
detail. Yet Zohrab’s intellect and knack for fresh re-examination of
even the seemingly most familiar topics brings the book alive and had
me turning the pages almost as raptly as if I were reading a novel.
The author supplies a wealth of original insights and a plethora of
felicitous yet unusual juxtapositions of different facts. He gets you
to start thinking about these issues more systemically and at the same
time more specifically. A book that can actually get the reader to
develop or expand useful new modes of thought is rare indeed.
The current version of this work
is the third edition, and the author has evidently been revising and
reworking his book over the past few years. More polishing could still
be done. “Sex, Lies & Feminism” starts off rather abruptly without
effectively introducing itself and setting up its topics, creating an
effect somewhat like entering the movie theater halfway through reel
one. Yet once we are seated, we quickly realize the movie is so
absorbing that it almost doesn’t matter.
Here are some of the facts and
useful syntheses Zohrab deals out: The “under 1” age group suffers by
far the most murders per capita, most at the hands of their mothers.
Moreover, once infants are included, we create a “grim equality” given
that men and women commit about the same total number of homicides.
The author formulates the five main lies told by feminists about
domestic violence. In response to Susan Brownmiller’s claim that power
relations between the sexes are colored by any man’s ability to rape
almost any woman at any time, Zohrab notes that these relations are
also colored by the fact that any woman can cry “rape” after any
incident of lovemaking. He deconstructs in six principal steps the
“specific Feminist Catch-22 on domestic violence,” noting that
feminists NEVER raise the issue of female violence. He brilliantly
demolishes feminist claims to be promoting equality. (Later, he also
tabulates a number of the issues on which feminists do NOT want gender
equality.) He provides a convincing summary of the differences between
women and genuinely oppressed minorities.
Although I personally disagree
with Zohrab’s fierce opposition to choice, I find his analysis of this
issue to be as compelling as his other discussions. I can’t recall
ever having read before his powerful point that if men are subject to
military conscription and many must even die to promote the general
good, why should not women be subject to “conscription by conception”
for the general good? (I might also add that with birth rates below
replacement levels in certain social groups, this question is becoming
more and more timely every day.) Zohrab goes on to ask why we almost
automatically allow women a “pass” to abort their fetuses when their
lives are in danger, but we would not think of allowing a man ordered
to participate in a suicide attack to kill his superior officer. Nor
would we allow a wealthy man married to a gold-digger trying to kill
him off with high cholesterol foods and nagging to kill her as an act
of self-preservation. Later the author performs another similarly
skillful reversal, employing feminist criteria to show that women
oppress men!
Zohrab makes great capital out of
even those issues that have been repeatedly addressed before by
others: For example, if women are the oppressed sex, how do feminists
explain why men have dramatically higher incarceration rates? He
reminds us of the two-hundred-year history of “mainly male governments
enact[ing] legislation benefiting women more than men, including
giving women the vote, according women equal pay with men,
liberalising abortion laws… increasing penalties for rape, and so
forth, all without protecting men’s interests in family, mating
rituals, work-place behaviours or educational institutions.” Zohrab is
not so far to the right that he is willing to countenance homophobia
in the men’s movement, which he laments.
One of the best parts of his book
is a few brilliant, brave paragraphs where he provocatively attempts
to analyze how groups come to be designated as “oppressed,” and
discusses some of society’s blind spots on these issues. How did we
decide the Croats were good and the Serbs bad? Was it purely based on
an impartial analysis of the facts? To paraphrase Mark Twain, nothing
is so uncommon as the sort of common sense Zohrab displays when he
offers us simple reminders such as the notion that if women behaving
badly results from their socialization in patriarchal society, then so
does their good behavior.
Zohrab comes across as a bit of a
disorganized genius. Typographical errors crop up periodically, as
well as a few places where he doesn’t quite say what we know he means.
But luckily he is not TOO disorganized, and his writing has lots of
pearls to offer. In one of the greatest metaphors I have ever
encountered in men’s movement literature, Zohrab writes that feminist
“agencies have a sort of ‘gravitational’ force which they exert on the
truth, bending it in their direction.” Because these groups are part
of our universe, after a while most of us scarcely notice the
distortions they have created in the space-time fabric.
We have heard much of this before
but we have never heard it quite like this. Zohrab heightens and
sharpens everything he says. If we lived in an era of sane gender
politics, he would be, or at least would write like, one of the most
sensible men in the world. In the meantime, he can enlighten us, even
at times inspire us, and help us to guide society toward that day for
which we all yearn.
©2000 J. Steven Svoboda
