There is a recent oral history book from Clara Bingham, "The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973," which contains interviews with various women who were either drawn into politics from somewhere else (such as Billie Jean King), or directly active in various Sixties political movements. My now late Uncle Mitch/Moishe had sent the book upon its release to our daughter, but she did not receive it until just after she had set sail for the UK. He offered to pay for shipping it to her, but she quite correctly begged off having something else to carry around. I, of course, took the time to read the book. The book shows how often Sixties radical men behaved badly, as in "Me Make Revolution, You Have Sex With Me When I Want." The misogyny on display is shocking to read, even as one recalls such language and behavior being so prevalent then. When analyzing male behaviors through this lens, one sees the Sixties and Seventies were not a break, but a continuation of what the late Barbara Ehrenreich described about the late 1940s through 1960, in her magisterial, "The Hearts of Men." Ehrenrich's book turns on its head the idea that feminism destroyed the nuclear family. Instead, Ehrenreich's book exposes how "Playboy Culture" in the dawn of the 1950s influenced men to leave behind bonds of family, sexually exploit women, and then blame women for demanding equal rights when the men left their wives for office secretaries or someone men somehow met at a bar.
The still-new Bingham book proves, once again, that there was a reason for the rise of modern feminism, as there was a grave contradiction at the heart of even the mostly male youngish radicals demanding liberation, which was the failure/refusal to apply that liberation on behalf of women and girls--and specifically be liberated from male domination. Bingham's book helps us better understand why there were "consciousness-raising" seminars and meetings for women starting the late 1960s and early 1970s, as our nation's culture was so deeply ingrained that women should accept male aggressiveness, condescension, and ultimately domination. These consciousness-raising sessions first demanded unlearning before re-learning could begin.
I was born in 1957. I therefore came of age in the mid to late 1970s, which was still immersed within a culture ingrained with "Yes" means "Maybe" and males being trained by other men, and some women, to overcome female sexual resistance. For those who knew me, I was essentially a nerdy wallflower, interested in going to a college library to read up on public policy issues and history, listening to music constantly at home, and going to progressive rock and jazz concerts. My friends had to drag me out to disco places, where I didn't like to dance, or, for that matter, drink alcohol. However, I definitely accepted as "normal" the ideas of the time with regard to how heterosexual cis men and women behaved toward each other. What reinforced much of my wallflowerness was something I could not really talk about with anyone, which was my reading the works of Ellen Willis, Susan Brownsmiller, Germaine Greer, and Andrea Dworkin in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s. I recognized the hypocrisies and violence which women feminist writers exposed between male rhetoric or claims and male behaviors.
Working in a public library in the mid through late 1970s, I also read Cosmopolitan magazine (under Helen Gurley Brown's editorship), which gave some nods to those women (well, not Dworkin), but also reveled in 1970s sexuality that looked liberating, but was more liberating for men. It was all certainly confusing to me as a young man. Anyway, by the dawn of the 1980s, I began to wonder, Why aren't more women lesbians, considering how badly we men actually behave towards women? I couldn't, and still can't, blame women in the least.
Nonetheless, I believe that the first sexual harassment cases in the late 1980s, and, then trends within the past decade have finally begun to have an effect on our cultural attitudes and behaviors. It is why we now see the problems with John Hughes and other films from the 1980s, for example. More ominously, however, what we are seeing now is a grooming cultural backlash worse than what Susan Faludi reported in her book, "Backlash" (1991), which remains compelling reading in understanding the rhetoric and policies Republicans especially are pushing at this moment. Project 2025 and the Manosphere in social media and YouTube have became explicit in demanding an end to no-fault divorce, putting women into spaces where having babies becomes the only option and, in actuality, a requirement, and attacking all gender diversities from trans to gay to self-confident women doing "men's jobs." For any woman voting Republican and who thinks, "Oh, this would stop if trans people were put back into closets and shameful positions," that is making a serious error. Such an attitude reminds me of Zionist Jews who thought joining in with respect to Islamophobia would stop with Islamophobia. It is wrong to engage in Islamophobia in any event, but even self-interest should be at least considered if one fails the morality test.
What should be clear right now is the right wing has an agenda, and it is not about liberation except for the upper class men who tend to dominate the rest of us. Part of that agenda is restoring male power over women so we as a society can begin again to say, "A Man's Home is his Castle." That phrase has essentially disappeared. However, fascist systems rely on telling working class and poor men across ethnicities and races that, no matter how much the boss at work, and political leaders, will dominate us men, the rest of us men can dominate our wives and children at home.
Tradition is a tricky thing--and often a really bad thing. We really need to move forward with our learning, wisdom, and recognition that invidious discriminations hold back the best in our society. What we have learned is how men, even revered progressive men from more than half a century ago, all had feet of clay at one level or other levels. I am not, however, saying remove them from our memories. Their best values they proclaimed must still guide us forward, even if they failed at following those values. For me, this is not so different from recognizing how so many of our nation's 18th Century revolutionists and constitutional male framers owned other people, and treated women as property. And too many women of the late 18th Century and 1960s and 1970s not only accepted the constrictions women faced in that time, but were willing to reinforce the constrictions to varying degrees. The exceptions in these historical times remain rare, and, even then, one finds troubling language that shows the effects of the larger hypocritical trends within western culture. (And here is where we must face male behaviors on a global scale. I wonder how many know that Chairman Mao was a serial sexual abuser of younger women in the last decade or so of leadership, and possibly before. And Ghandi had some weird rituals which involved sleeping with his younger nieces, not his wife, to test his commitment to celibacy. As I say, Men.).
What we need to face is that, whether it is armed shootings, wars, or domestic violence, men are far more the issue than women. Still, when it comes to war, we now have women politicians who love war as much as the men who love war--and we now understand better how southern white women enslavers were too often brutal, in order to show they were as strong as men. This should remind us that, given a matriarchal version of patriarchal power, I can see a lot of women behaving badly because, after all, it is human beings we are talking about. This is all another reason I root for us, as a species, to get on a path toward the 24th Century and Star Trek Communism. It will take a long time, but maybe can we start with social democracy, and continuing to liberate people to have sexual autonomy. And I say this as one who is still, to this day, squeamish about all of the latter. I just think my political and economic radicalism demands I think more openly and kindly about how other people wish to define themselves, including as sexual beings.
