Customer Reviews

Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism (American Intellectual Culture)

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This was an extremely valuable book that exposes the sexual harassment industry for what it is- a self-serving, dangerous bureaucracy, backed by heavy-handed governmental policies, that routinely runs roughshod over the rights of the accused. I read this book after a close colleague, an almost asexual, thoughtful man who is the exact antithesis of a sexual harasser, was accused of SH and subject to endless investigation. He was accused by a female underling who didn't even bother to come up with a single instance when the accused man even mentioned sex, even in the most tangential way. The effects have been devastating nonetheless. Trying to come to grips with what happened to this unfortunate man, I stumbled upon Dr. Patai's book. Frighteningly, I learned that the definition of SH is expanding so widely that even complimenting a female subordinate for a good paper, or a good term report (by a student) is now among the events that can lead to an SH charge! This is just one of countless ways that the SH industry is trampling the rights of accused, encouraging ever more charges, and destroying careers.

I don't agree with everything Patai says. She is weakest when she goes beyond the empirical reality of the current situation and tries to explain it as a feminist conspriracy. None of this takes away from her exposure of the disturbing truth behind the SH industry.

Read this book. Stop these people!

This book is like a breath of fresh air. With devastating precision, Patai sweeps away all the platitudes surrounding discussion of sexual harassment. She shows that due process is often deemed irrelevant after someone is accused of sexual harassment, that definitions of what constitutes "unwelcome behavior" are generally kept deliberately vague, that attempts to curb behavior are often fuelled by resentment and vindictiveness, and that the desire to control other people (put in motion by claims about power imbalances) is, at bottom, impossible to appease, let alone to achieve. The cure is far worse than the disease, as she usefully reminds us.

Unfortunately, the very people who need to read this book will probably take one look at the title and run a mile. This is a real shame, because Patai's book is extremely thoughtful and deserves very careful consideration by men and women alike, whether pro- or antifeminist.

A close academic colleague of mine, the absolute antithesis of a sexual harasser, was recently accused by his graduate student trainee of 2 years. While none of the charges remotely resembled classic sexual harassment (there was never a single charge that the topic of "sex" came up directly or indirectly, and no hostile work environment), his accuser set extremely reputation-damaging wheels in motion simply by couching her complaint in those terms. My friend has spent thousands of dollars in his legal defense and the investigation has gone on for nearly a year. He has become deeply depressed and his productivity has been all but demolished. I grappled with the implications. How can a malicious student, unhappy with some other aspect of her interaction with her mentor or perhaps some other aspect of her life, wreak so much damage to a great guy with no fear of any adverse consequence to her? Is this normal practice in America in the 1990s, or an aberration?

Dr Patai's work was a godsend in terms of helping me, and now my colleague, to understand what has happened. Sadly, this event is in no way an aberration. Accusers face absolutely no adverse consequence for making false or frivilous charges, but the alleged harassers are routinely denied anything resembling due process. I won't try to reproduce all of the incredible insights that Dr. Patai brought to the table, but the key things I learned include the following:

1. The manuals, websites, and literature on SH endlessly encourage the filing of claims, with nary more than a passing nod to the rights of the accused.

2. ANY male (professor, student, whatever) who has ANY interaction with female students is at risk. The "victim" gets to decide whether an offense has occurred and the bureaucracy grinds into high gear to verify that the offense occurred.

3. The system is maddeningly one-sided. It promotes the filing of trivial charges in countless ways, supports an industry of pseudo-experts, and makes it almost impossible for the accused to recover their damaged careers and legal expenses.

I think that this sad state of affairs will cause huge injustices (Dr. Patai shows it already has) but ultimately makes people incredibly cynical about SH allegations, while weakening the perception of women as adult, independent-minded people. I know of faculty members (male and female) who now are starting to quietly refuse to serve as mentors for female students. The imbalance of power is outrageous.

On the down side, Dr. Patai gets overheated and overly tendentious and repetitive at times. This does not detract significantly from the incredible service she has done by writing this extremely valuable book!

The past decade has seen a proliferation of books debunking feminist ideology. Most of these smart denunciations have been written by articulate and intelligent ladies like Christina Hoff Sommers, Katie Roiphe, Danielle Crittenden, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, but Daphne Patai seems to have zeroed in on a more specialized topic. Her contribution is devoted to exposing fanatical feminism's unhealthy war on heterosexual behavior. Some would dismiss the philippics of a few feminist extremists, but Ms. Patai is wisely consistent advising, "cultivating hatred for another human group ought to be no more acceptable when it issues from the mouths of women than when it comes from men, no more tolerable from feminists than from the Ku Klux Klan."

Heterosexuality generally comes under fire as a result of unchained misandry and a ridiculous sense that all "offensive" behaviors are equal. This equivocation leads to disturbed precepts. Many of the heterophobes she quotes regularly put the use of a sexist word like "manhole" on a par with rape. The juxtaposition of these vastly disparate transgressions has lead to many bizarre sexual harassment laws. Despite the good intentions behind these rubrics, the book presents many cases where they have done far more harm than good. Ms. Patai presents what she terms the Sexual Harassment Industry (SHI) as a big business that has gained tremendous power over a short period of time. From the universities who indoctrinate students to scholars who establish restrictive speech allowances, and the lawyers who prosecute the most nonsensical case, the SHI is shown to be a growth industry on the fast track.

Professor Patai includes some anecdotes which would sound like jocose fantasies were they not such absurdly sad realities. She tells of one college lecturer who repeatedly discussed her "partner"-never letting on that it is her husband and the father of her children. She also describes a self-loathing man who believing heterosexuality was invidiously patriarchal, converted to homosexuality, but still felt guilty and became celibate. Among the most wearying of feminist rants is the often expressed claim that all women see heterosexuality as their oppressor or else they are just fooling themselves. From evidence Ms. Patai puts forth, "fooling oneself" seems to be a cornerstone of much of modern feminist reasoning.

Although she is generous in quoting avatars of heterophobia like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, readers possessing at least a passing familiarity with these radicals will most likely derive enhanced value from this thoughtful book.

Daphne Patai's credentials as a feminist scholar were established some time ago by her work in Brazilian literature. More recently she has felt duty-bound by the same motivations to turn her attention to the imbecility and squalor of the flourishing Sexual Harassment Industry. The result is a lucid, systematic, concise, and explicit description of its animating ideology, contradictions, self-indulgence, flagrant injustices and extravagant goofiness. In this connection it should be noted that Prof. Patai can be quite harsh: she quotes them. There is not better book on the subject now available.

In order to get a sense of where the sexual harassment industry started, and where it is going to end up, you have to read Simone de Beauvoir's book The Long March, a very positive appraisal of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Simone de Beauvoir, whose texts are canonical within women's studies, was an ardent Maoist, and continued passing out Maoist pamphlets in the 1970s in Paris.

Probably the second biggest feminist thinker in the American pantheon is the French theorist Julia Kristeva. She was also a huge fun of Mao into the late 1970s.

Reading those two books will give you the full picture of what is happening in American academia in women's studies today.

What happened in Tianamen Square in the late 1980s to students who opposed Mao's Cultural Revolution is what happens to anybody who stands up to women's studies in academia. They get steamrolled. At this point it is a movement that is totally out of control. Nobody on earth can stop it.

Patai had the guts to document this movement while it is at full throttle. It is amazing that she is still alive.

Thank God this book exists.

Somewhere back down the line, the academic left took a disastrously wrong turn and has now seemingly come full circle and emerged on the far _right_ of the political spectrum, adopting authoritarian tactics and hate-based, scapegoating ideologies, effectively forestalling any possibility of real freedom and equality. Daphne Patai, a long-time, committed feminist, has written an excellent expose of these developments within academic feminism and their disastrous effects on university life and on society as a whole. Her work also has important implications for the rest of the identity-politics movement as it continues its deranged quest to re-enact the Maoist Cultural Revolution in America. It's time for any progressives who still remain in possession of a conscience to acknowledge that postmodernism, identity politics, and political correctness haven't done a damn thing for poor people, to get off their over-theorized asses and get back to the basics.

This was a very provocative inside look at the virulent misandry that has infected a great deal of American academia. When a boy is frightened to ask a girl to a school dance for fear of being accused of sexual harassment, something is WRONG.

Daphne Patai is a brilliant writer, who many radical/gender feminists wish would just go away. Once again, she shines the light of truth on the insidious goings on in the shadowy world of the women's industries. This time she shows example after example of injustices that have been perpetrated against innocent men, based on nothing more than pure sexist prejudices empowered by misandrist (man-hating) sexual harassment laws. If Ms. Patai did nothing more than clearly expose the double standard by which sexual harassment laws operate she would have written a great book, but she goes far beyond that. She shows mere allegations being used as enough to ruin a man's life. She shows the sexual harassment industry requiring a "reasonable woman" to be necessary to determine what sexual harassment is, when allegations of sexual harassment are made. Isn't that just a little over obviously sexist? She covers examples where false allegations of sexual harassment are made against men. That's something the sexual harassment industry tries very hard to not even address. She shows that instead of being innocent until proven guilty, the unAmerican, unconstitutional sexual harassment industry treats an accused man as if he were guilty until proven innocent. To Daphne Patai I say, "You go girl." Please keep shining the light of truth into the dark and insidious world where radical/gender feminists endeavor to work their mischief so that all may see the damage they have done, and are still doing, to all the innocent victims they target with their sexist hate (misandry). If you liked the book "Heterobphobia" by Daphne Patai, you'll probably love "Professing Feminism" by Daphne Patai. She gives the whole area of Women's Studies programs on college campuses a good going over with the same thoroughness and insight that she gave to "Heterophobia." It is only through the insight of an insider like Daphne Patai that we are able to get such a good look at the sinister agenda of these man-hating people (hiding in plain sight). I highly recommend that everyone take the time to read what Daphne Patai says and look into the sanctioned prejudices that are going on in our schools and work places under the guise of ensuring a radical/gender feminist minded, politically correct society.

Thank *you* Daphne!

This book provides an excellent critique of a hypocritical, latently mean-spirited and anti-male industry. I'm a self-proclaimed "nice guy" with all the usual imperfections...and I gotta tell ya I've paid heartily for my own efforts to speak out about what Daphne says here. So have many male and female friends, most of whom choose to stay quiet lest we be pilloried or worse as misogynists. She says it better - more power to her!

As a doctoral candidate, I compliment Patai for a very insightful and well-crafted response that has been many years waiting.