Big Sister:
How Extreme Feminism
Has Betrayed the Fight
for Sexual Equality
By Neil Boyd
Greystone, 211 pages, $22.95
When I started playing squash, I did some very stupid things. I would run into walls, fail to duck when a ball was headed straight toward me and hit myself with my own racquet. This went on for a very long time (two years), and it left me tattooed with an odd assortment of bruises and welts. They were everywhere, up and down my arms and thighs, and in the summer there was no covering them up. In the streets, women would stop and stare, looking searchingly into my eyes, their message writ large in their horrified expressions: "Some man did this to you, didn't he?"
And that, in a nutshell, is Neil Boyd's complaint with the new generation of radical feminists. They blame men for everything. It all began when Boyd was appointed chairman of the harassment tribunal at Simon Fraser University. He seemed like the perfect choice. A professor of criminology, a lawyer and a one-time parole officer, Boyd was also a committed feminist. Or so he thought. But he soon found himself embroiled in a case in which a female student had lied about being raped. It got worse. An innocent man was fired without due process; the university refused to back down when he was exonerated, and the women's studies department rallied around the supposed victim. Boyd started to wonder: What had happened to the feminism of his youth?
Big Sister is a book that is looking for a fight. It is controversial, deliberately so, and its self-proclaimed mission is not to trash feminism but to rescue it from those who have hijacked it. "My opposition," Boyd explains, "is to a poisonous strain of feminism, a concoction of regressive policies only masquerading as belonging to a vanguard of progressive thought or action. The people behind these policies oppose free expression and due process and favour solving complex problems through an inflexible imposition of punishment by the state."
They are, he writes elsewhere, "a cadre of radical extremists who are spouting bogus science and silencing their critics with a combination of illogical mantras and vicious tirades." Even worse, in their prudery and intolerance, they have made common cause with "the evangelicals who want paintings and sculptures of naked women or men removed from the workplace and from all forms of advertising."
Boyd gives four examples where radical feminists have gone too far: They are intolerant of all pornography; they have defined sexual harassment in ways that are too vague and that ultimately infantilize women; they are apt to define any male sexual advance as rape; and they exaggerate the extent to which women are the victims of domestic violence. These are sweeping claims, to say the very least, and some are more convincing than others. Boyd is right to tell us to relax about pornography, but his remarks about domestic violence are less convincing. The numbers may have been exaggerated, but that does not mean that the problem is in any respect trivial.
This is a serious book. The title is off-putting. And it is about a movement that is not exactly famous for its sense of humour. I did not expect Big Sister to be entertaining or even funny, and yet it was both. In many ways, it reminded me of David Lodge's academic spoofs. The reader is treated to an insider's view of the squabbles, both personal and ideological, that are the stuff of academe. At times, the book is downright gossipy, not that this is a complaint. Did you know that a certain prominent academic who shall go nameless lost her virginity at the age of 27? Did you know that the feminist lawyer and pundit Catharine MacKinnon has Republicans in her family?
Case histories further enliven the narrative. Who, for example, can forget the story of the developers who were contemplating buying land next to a Hooters restaurant? What they had to say on the subject and what they planned to name the property (Hootersville, Twin Peaks, etc.) ultimately cost them $250,000 in damages.
Boyd is writing about academics, but he does not write like one. That, combined with a certain acerbity, makes Big Sister a good read. (It also helps that it is short.) The book is free of the usual jargon, and it even includes a well-deserved swipe at postmodernism and its pernicious effects on critical thinking. Postmodernism, we read, "encourages a mushy-headed kind of moral relativism," in which "subjective interpretations of reality are preferable to objective interpretations." From this it follows, "If you think you are a victim, you are." Too true.
You do not have to agree with all or even any of Boyd's points. But even if you disagree, you will find that they are well-intended, constructive and well-informed. There is, it is true, an element of épater le bourgeois in Big Sister, but its larger goal, to promote a feminism that is more inclusive and just a little more playful, may make Boyd more converts than enemies.
Jessica Warner is a research scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason and the forthcoming John the Painter.