The Daily Signal - #346: UPenn Law Professor Says Radical Feminism Has Made Women ‘Dumber’

Episode Date: November 23, 2018

Has “radical feminism” been bad for women? University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Amy Wax argues a resounding yes. “Radical feminism has had a baleful influence on college campuses, and on women’s education, in all sorts of ways,” she said. “It's really made them dumber.”In this week’s edition of The Daily Signal’s “Problematic Women” podcast, Kelsey Harkness interviews Wax on free speech, gender roles, #MeToo, and “radical feminism.” Wax talks about the dangers of young women taking offense “at remarks that really are not meant to be offensive,” and the left’s constant search to “find sexism under every rock.”In addition to having a bachelor’s degree from Yale College, a medical degree from Harvard University, and a law degree from Columbia Law School, Wax has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the Justice Department. Listen to today’s podcast to hear her take on free speech, #MeToo, and modern-day feminism.The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Maybe you're up doing a marathon or something crazy. Who am I kidding? Anyway, for today's episode, we're going to turn it over to Kelsey Harkness. She's going to do an interview for a special problematic women edition of the podcast. And welcome to a special edition of Problematic Women, a podcast where we're sitting down with Professor Amy Wax. Amy Wax is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She addresses issues in social welfare, law, and policy as well as the relationship of the family, the workplace, and the labor markets. She is a BS from Yale, an MD from Harvard Medical School and a JD from Columbia Law School.

Her most recent book is Race, Wrongs, and Remedies, Group Justice in the 21st Century. And fun fact, she has argued 15 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Amy, welcome to the show, and I have to admit I'm a little intimidated in talking to you. Well, don't be. Take a leave from my children's book. They're not the slightest been intimidated. Well, you have quite an impressive resume, and you've covered so many different issues throughout your career. There's so much we could get into. But first, I want to start out more on a personal note, getting to know you a little bit.

So the name of our podcast is Problematic Women. And I want to ask, is that something you might identify with? Well, I'm probably a reluctant problematic woman on some level because I find myself out of step with the zeitgeist in many respects, certainly the zeitgeist that I'm surrounded with in academia, and I guess you would call it elite academia, or top rank to law schools. So that's something that I,

don't find deeply disturbing. I find it a little dismaying just on the substance of it that I am aghast at some of the positions and opinions that my colleagues take, and I find them extremely puzzling as well. So I'll embrace that appellation for this purpose, for the purpose of this podcast. Well, I appreciate your willingness to embrace it. The whole idea behind problematic women is that a lot of women on the left, it seems, view conservative women as problems who need to be fixed rather than people worthy of having productive discussions and debates with. That's where the idea came from. And instead of viewing it as negative, I decided to embrace it too. So I'm okay with that. So, On the personal note, I want to ask, you've had such a long accomplished career.

How did this all get started? And where did your interest in law come from? Well, I never thought of myself as going to law school, doing law throughout my grade school years, my high school years. I gravitated to science. I was very interested in science and in the biological sciences and enjoyed the study of that, and that made me think that I wanted to go to medical school and be a doctor, but there was always another side of me that was interested in ideas, in philosophical issues, and in the policy issues of the day. And I always remember reading about those, even though I

never thought of a career in those areas. But I think as I grew older, I realized that medicine was not a good profession for me. It was not a good fit. I would say I was radically temperamentally unsuited to the practice of medicine. I'm not a particularly nurturing person. I'm more kind of a scholarly intellectual type. If you were to give me one of these personality tests, they probably would tell me that I should embrace some kind of introverted profession, although I do enjoy teaching. I do enjoy my students and I'm pretty social. I'm not very good at dealing with people all day long. So as humble as that sounds, those are the sorts of reasons that at the end of the day matter when you're choosing your life course, not really

abstractions, but the down-on-the-ground experience of doing something is really what matters. So it took me a while to sort it out, but I realized that law was much more fun for me and more interesting, and I was more cut out for it. Part of it is that I was born argumentative. And actually, there's an interesting angle on that. If you know anything about personality psychology, you know that on average women are more agreeable than men, and the big five personality traits, agreeableness, is one of the personality traits that psychologists rate people on. And I am really quite unagreable for a woman. So that made me very well suited for litigation.

I was an appellate litigator for a very long time. I liked arguing particular positions. I enjoyed trying to persuade people to change their mind about things. I always, my impulse was to find the flaw in a position anybody took and try to come up with counterarguments for why they were wrong. So I think those are the hallmarks of being an unagreable person. It's the perfect profile for a litigator. So that suited me well. Do you think it's a good thing for women to be agreeable? Because I actually identify with that very much. You might be surprised to hear this as someone who is in media and recently has been doing

far more public television appearances than I ever imagined. I used to never speak up. I used to be that person who was scared to even raise my hand in the classroom to ask a question in college. You know, I was in college. President Obama had just been elected into office and I had doubts, but I was too scared to ever speak up about it. I think a lot of people assume, you know, people like me, women in the conservative movement must have been active on college campuses. But in a lot of ways, I was scared to get out there and get involved. In many ways, I was probably too agreeable.

Yeah, well, I think there's a separate phenomenon of conservatives being intimidated, whatever there's sex on campus. So that's a separate issue. But I think, you know, as with anything else, agreeableness is a double-edged sword. There are, you know, virtues and there are drawbacks to being agreeable. And it is, as they say, gendered because I think women are expected to be more agreeable, and that is what people find charming about them. So, you know, there are virtues to being agreeable depending on the role that you play in life.

And men sometimes, I think, suffer from being less agreeable than perhaps they should. should be. So it's very complex situation. I will say this, though, and these are lessons that I have had to learn, the key and the trick is to be unagreable in a charming way, in a way that doesn't upset people or rub them the wrong way or, you know, elicit a very negative reaction. And I think women in a way have lost that art. It's interesting because this resonates to the whole me-to thing. I think women have ironically and oddly lost the art of saying no in a charming way. And that's a form of being unagreable, sort of not going along with requests or expectations. So, yeah, I mean, I really think women need to learn to be less agreeable for occupational reasons, for personal reasons.

But to do it deftly, to do it with finesse is the hard part thing. I'm someone who was an early supporter of the Me Too movement. You know, when you hear stories like Harvey Weinstein and you see some of these realities in your, day to day. It is refreshing to see a time when men are being held accountable. But two years later, I'm also someone who now feels like the pendulum has swung the completely opposite direction and gone too far. I'm curious, what you think a productive message would be for women where they can be charming and find that right balance for the Me Too movement. Well, once again, it's a very complicated situation.

Obviously, Me Too, I mean, what women are getting upset about, many women runs a vast gamut from, you know, clearly offensive and even overtly harmful behavior to just a little bit of awkwardness or boorishness. And I think to lump all of that together is extremely destructive. And I really think it's at this point done more harm than good. But going back, I think part of the problem, as I see it, is that there's a social, it is a product of a social phenomenon, which is that the norms that protected women, and I'm going to specifically zero in on the default presumption, women were not available sexually and that men had to woo women or persuade them to have sex, you know, the answer was no. That was the answer that was kind of the baseline answer,

has now flipped to where the answer is yes. And I think that puts a lot of pressure on individual women because if they really don't want to engage sexually with someone, it's almost like they have to go it alone to justify it, and men know that they can always find someone else. So oddly enough, I think the way that our norms have changed have become less protective of women and put women at a greater disadvantage. I think a lot of feminists would disagree with that, but I think they're wrong about it, right? So until we get those more protective norms back, women are going to be faced with this dilemma of how to negotiate requests, invitations that become expectations, that become demands. That has to do with the Me Too part of, you know, asking for sex, for sexual favors, as they

used to say. But there's a whole other aspect to it, which is the propensity of young women to take offense at remarks that really are not meant to be offensive, I think can be regarded as inoffensive if looked at the right way. And I don't think women do themselves any favors by having such a thin skin and being just at the ready to get upset and find sexism under every rock. A young woman, I respect greatly, a friend of one of my children told me an anecdote that I think really illustrate this very well. She told me that she was at a reception for some business that she was trying to get a job at, and one of the senior partners, everybody had had a few drinks, was making chit-chat with her and said, tell me, are your parents still married?

And she said, yes, why? He said, well, that bodes very well for you making somebody a very good wife. And she was like horrifically offended at this. And I was completely puzzled by it. I thought that is just a completely inoffensive remark. I would, he was trying to praise you, flatter you. I said, don't you want to be a good wife to someone someday? If someone tells you that, you know, you come from a social circumstance where you're likely to be a good wife, that is a compliment. You should not take offense at that. And that is absolutely an example of what I am talking about. I would just let something like that roll off my back. I think when women are surrounded by people telling them that they're victims, they start to embrace it without even realizing that they're embracing it. And I fear

that much of these ideas are coming from college campuses, as you're seeing. You're seeing. what's happening there firsthand. Can you tell us more about it? Well, yes, women are trained to take offense at the inoffensive. You know, that's mainly what they're learning as far as I can tell. Yeah, I think radical feminism has had a baleful influence on college campuses and on women's education in all sorts of ways. I mean, I just detailed one to take innocuous remarks and turn them into some kind of sexist offense that I think is it's counterproductive and it's destructive actually because people don't want to be around women who are always scanning the horizon for some kind of sexist outrage. And that is going to tell, I think, on their future prospects.

The second way in which I think radical feminism has been bad for women, it's that it's really made them dumber. And what I mean by that is I find that on average, and obviously there are exceptions, that women are less intellectually curious than men. I think, you know, you could argue that it's always been that way. And certainly some of the old thinkers, you know, indulge that that generalization. on that stereotype that, you know, men have been more intensely interested in and focused on abstract ideas on average than women have. I happen to believe that that's true. But it's getting

worse. And the reason it's getting worse is that instead of women being encouraged to be polymaths, learn a lot, learn a lot about history, about philosophy, about ideas, which was certainly true when I was an undergraduate in the early 70s, we were expected to adhere to this male model of what it meant to be a student and an intellectual. And that was very self-consciously held up as the standard and the ideal. Now women are basically taught that, you know, there's no reason why they should have to read all those old toxic white males, which is, you know, 98% of our Western thinkers, the people who've shaped our way of life, our political system, our economic system, our values, our Constitution, and our scientific establishment, everything good that we enjoy

every day, whether we like it or not, is the product of men and mostly European men. But of course, men, white men, European men, it is now fashionable to despise them, to trash them, to blame them for everything. and I think part of what comes out of that is an unwillingness to engage historically and analytically with their ideas. You know, why would I bother with the Federalist Papers? Why would I bother with de Tocqueville, with all the great Western philosophers as a bunch of white guys? What could they possibly have to teach me? That's patriarchal nonsense.

So I just get that sense that, you know, women don't think that stuff is worth studying. Of course, there are exceptions. But I have encountered that attitude. I have encountered that attitude, and I find it very disturbing. Well, there's so much more I would love to get into with you. But we are running out of time here, and I have to end with perhaps my favorite question to ask women. that beam, I take it you don't identify as a radical feminist, but do you identify as a feminist or have you ever identified as a feminist? Well, you know, Richard Nix's fix and famously said, we're all Keynesians now, and I would have to say we're all feminists now in the sense that we live in a period of prolonged women's emancipation, that we are understanding of a decent society, involves,

certain elements of equality, of rights, of legal rights, of political rights, of commercial rights. And, you know, if you go back in time, all that is only a few hundred years old because there was a time when women didn't have legal political rights. They couldn't own property. They weren't even considered a person before the law. So, you know, if you're asking me whether I accept all of the changes away from those elements of society, I say, well, yes, of course I do. And if that makes me a feminist, then I am a feminist. But I think at this point, feminism, you know, it's one of these protean terms, has gone way, way beyond that to embrace philosophical tenets and elements that I think are not only false and infeasible, but downright destructive, that men and women are the same,

that male and female sexuality is the same, and that that sexuality is male primarily, and I think that's very destructive to women, that, you know, marriage is a problematic institution, that men and women have to be represented equally in every field, in every endeavor, in every sector of our society, and I don't think that is ever going to happen in a true meritocracy. So we have to distort the meritocracy, and we have to tell a lot of noble lies in order to bring about that equality of results. So if radical feminism stands for that, then I'm not with it. I appreciate your perspective on that because I, this is something conservative women are divided on and I actually applaud that. We're able to have diverse opinions in the conservative space among women about whether or not we identify as feminist.

I personally have decided to embrace it for many of the reasons you listed because I know I did not always have equal rights had I been born at a different time. and, you know, I feel that I'm honoring the women before me who did the hard work to get me the rights that I need to be able to do what I'm doing today. And that's why I do identify as a feminist. But I do respect the pushback on that. And I always have, when I say that, I always have to include an asterisk to say, I'm a feminist, but. Right. These terms are at this point not very helpful. They've become weaponized. And so we spend a lot of time arguing over what they mean, and that's not very fruitful or positive. I think we're better off just asking ourselves, you know, which positions we embrace, which positions we find problematic, which we reject, and develop our own philosophy on a lot of different issues and questions of the day, and then whatever that adds up to. I think we're going to see that there's quite a bit of

difference between what so-called progressive left women embrace and what people who identify themselves, women identify themselves as conservative embrace. And that's a good thing. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Problematic Women. For those interested in reading, learning more about your work, where can they find it? They just Google me. The Penn website will have a lot of my articles. They will find you are indeed. a problematic woman. They will. Thank you so much.

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