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J. Steven Svoboda is a member of TheMensCenter Advisory Council, an Independent attorney active in human rights law and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC).
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By J. Steven Svoboda... |
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
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