Male Call

By John Leo

Life in the prehistoric era, as Marilyn French tells it, was apparently much like that in a modern Scout camp. Early humans fished and frolicked, lived off the land and sat around communal fires at night talking, singing and indulging in sexual banter. Life was generally not hard, she says, and peace reigned between the sexes and between humans and nature. This idyllic era, a source of some nostalgia for the author, fell victim to the most decisive and perfidious event in history: the rise of patriarchy.

Perhaps gathering in cultic groups "rather like women meeting in consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s," men groped their way toward an ideology of dominance and manipulation. Patriarchy took over the world and has distorted human culture for more than 5,000 years with its obsession with power. Male self-identity depends on the ability to control women and nature. No dominance, no manhood. Parodying Vince Lombardi on football, French writes: "In a patriarchal world, power is not just the highest but the only value." Elsewhere she seems to say that slaughter is required for male identity: "Killing became the mark of the truest man, of manhood itself."

Beyond Power is part ideological tract, part history of the world according to feminism. In a brisk romp through the ages, readers learn that an 18th century woman playwright, Olympe de Gouges, came down firmly on both sides of the French Revolution, and that Crystal Eastman founded the American Civil Liberties Union but got no credit for it. No male abuse of females goes unchronicled, and to give the author her due, the long litany, from foot binding to burning for witchcraft, has a sobering effect. French, an academic who has taught English at Harvard, Hofstra and Holy Cross, seems incapable of nuance. The history of fatherhood, she believes, is the history of tyranny, and dialogue is impossible in corporations and other hierarchical institutions. One of the primary aims of military training is to teach young men how to hate.

Every mean-spirited or mistaken action by a male is chalked up as yet another manifestation of patriarchy in action: Stalin's murder of Polish army officers, the deterioration of language, textbooks that fail to discuss the debate over clitoral vs. vaginal orgasms.

Along the way, French dispenses reams of disinformation. Middle-class women of the 18th century, she writes, got pregnant easily because they were inactive. Regarbling an already muddled item from Ms. magazine, she says that President Carter wanted to send female soldiers into Afghanistan, and that the Afghan rebellion occurred partly because of the Soviet demand that women be allowed to read, write and attend village meetings. China and the Soviet Union are listed as the world leaders in allowing women to fulfill themselves.

French will have no truck with biological explanations for male-female differences in attitude and behavior. Even the larger size and greater musculature of males, an obvious factor in discussing male domination of women, is dismissed. Size cannot be important, she reasons, since young males do not usually beat up their smaller fathers. By discounting all other factors that might explain why males think and act similarly around the world, French is left with the patriarchal theory. This long-running conspiracy, insists Beyond Power, is responsible for the abuse of the environment, the invention of the state and the idea of heaven. Transcendence is the name of the male game: under patriarchy, men have come to hate the corporeal world, including their own bodies.

French is sure that feminism is the first opponent of patriarchy that cannot be co-opted or assimilated. "Feminism," she writes, "is in a state I call blessed: its ends and its means are identical." How feminism will overthrow patriarchy goes unexplained, though she believes it requires the replacement of power with pleasure. This is not the narrow, selfish pleasure of patriarchy, but "a gratified response to quality" that will somehow blossom into compassion and community.

The notion that an unacknowledged male ideology exists is not a frivolous one. Science and politics might be very different if women were more involved in the fields. Male thinking runs easily to the linear and abstract, and men's search for control does need examination. Beyond Power poses as such a work; instead, its 640 pages promise a rigorous analysis and deliver a series of cartoons. --By John Leo