Seriously unimpressed with the demonstrated sexism of Trilling and Dupee, for Christ’s sake. So what? You honestly think complaints like this one is where people like Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, the NOW people, Brownmiller, et al. their little carbon-copy munchkins are? MacKinnon is on record saying that all heterosexual males are sadomasochists b/c all heterosexual sex is sadomasochism. I was personally read the riot act by a feminist “professional colleague” when way back when some looney shot up some women with an automatic weapon in Montreal and said he did it because they were “feminists.” I was personally responsible, of course, because I was a heterosexual male. We’re talking about people who are terminally (literally) POed.
These women don’t give a damn about “sexism” though they use the word a lot because they’re mentally lazy. As per my post above on envy, these people are psychologically enslaved to males because whatever you envy your desire and whatever you desire controls you.
They talk about “equality” and “power” and “dominance” and “hierarchy” because they believe that they have been seriously deprived of what is their right by way of their having been “relatively deprived” (q.v.). It isn’t a question of withheld equality,it’s a question of desire. And consistent with the history of envy ever since Rousseau articulated the notion of “having more than others” is a bad thing in his essay on inequality, relative deprivation has been mistaken for denial of political equality.
The trouble with current 2nd and 3rd-wave feminists is they are only deprived of what they don’t possess (we both and all of us know, of course, that all males have it all), and the only things they desire is what they don’t possess. As Rene Girard showed in “Deceit and Desire in the Novel” apropros Stendhal and Proust (should have mentioned his unacknowledged mentor Sartre as well–Being and Neant holds that relative deprivation is the heart of all human relationships-) the characters in these novels only value and desire things and people which are out of their reach. Gain them, they fall instantly in value, ennui sets in, and you have nothing left to do if you’re a woman but become a feminist. This is the secret doctrine of Friedan’s “Feminine Mystique”: bored housewives think that if they’re “liberated” they’ll be happier. As Friedan unwittingly shows, bored housewives are constitutionally incapable of happiness.
So this young lady goes to a snob school and discovers–wow!–that it’s full of snobs, part of whose snobbism is manifested by not allowing females in specific classes. I wouldn’t call that “sexism”. I’d call that poetic justice.
