Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex by Shmuley Boteach

In a world without ladies, there cannot be gentlemen.
— Shmuley Boteach

The major assertion of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s controversial book Hating Women is that women contribute heavily to their own objectification. This is not a new argument, but it seems to be gaining some ground, especially as feminists heatedly debate the potential power in controlling and using one’s own sexuality. Yet, as feminists have moved away from gender absolutes (“the oppression of the female species comes solely and knowingly from the male species”) critics like Boteach are embracing them in order to address pertinent social issues. While Boteach’s more esoteric aim — gender equality — is admirable, and his identification of its obstructions (often women themselves) not entirely off base, his immanent solutions are terribly misguided. In fact, Boteach’s greatest power and his greatest failing lie in this contradiction; he has identified an overarching social problem in the form of female degradation (and, to some extent, moral relativism and sexualized forms of power), yet I fear that his solutions merely reinforce the problems he seeks to solve.

Criticisms of Boteach’s logic have taken comparable form. Publisher’s Weekly calls Hating Women a “jeremiad”, and chastises Boteach for relying on essentialist notions of gender, yet praises the rabbi for offering concrete, real-world solutions. Most Amazon.com customer reviews are similarly confused. Most laud Boteach for tackling a tough problem (after all, most fairly conservative men wish to deny the historical objectification of women), yet feel a bit queasy at the implications of some of his analysis. As I was reading Hating Women, I was reminded of a similar (though arguably more virulent) book, Tammy Bruce’s The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds. My reaction to this book (provoked in my younger years) was much like the reactions of these Amazon customers. Bruce, a lesbian, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of N.O.W., and friend of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, violently rebukes fellow feminists and liberals for their elitist and exclusive tendencies, and criticizes many of their media tactics. Mostly, Bruce defends right-wingers like Schlessinger against the torrents of abuse spewed at her by leftists, and admonishes such leftists for disallowing dissent in their rhetoric of inclusion and harmony. As a young woman just discovering feminist theory, Bruce’s argument made some sense to me. After all, I saw some of the negative outcomes of p.c. speech codes at work in my liberal arts university; I saw my fellow students (some of whom were committed social liberals) spat at the term “feminist”. Surely there’s something wrong here, I thought. President Clinton is crooning congratulations on National Coming Out Day, and then signing DOMA; academics all over the country are (rather unfairly) pissing on Camille Paglia. Clearly, correctness and proclamations of inclusion and free speech aren’t doing what we think they are. Maybe Bruce is right, I thought. Maybe it’s all our fault for telling the bigots that they’re just flat-out wrong and to shut the hell up.

The danger and the disorder in Boteach’s book are similar. He is right to identify the problems he does, and right also to suggest that certain leftist ideas can perpetuate those problems. He is also able to do what many, more sophisticated, social critics are not by offering tangible, possible solutions to the problems he names. Yet, beyond that, he’s an absolute mess. His notions of gender formation and roles are archaic and painfully idealistic; indeed, his argument totally relies on the assertion that women are a naturally gentler, more nurturing species whose most admirable ability is to tame and civilize men.

Most problematic is the underlying assumption that heterosexual marriage is the culminating goal of civilization, and that the greatest harm in women’s sexual and intellectual degradation (and, thus, by Boteach’s reasoning, men’s degradation as well) is the unmooring of traditional marriage. Any doubt that his argument is driven by this belief is allayed by his previous books, namely Why Can’t I Fall in Love?, a self-help guide for young people looking for lasting relationships. Why Can’t I Fall in Love? thwarts traditional psychotherapeutic thinking by insisting that no one can truly be happy without romantic partnership, and that any thinking to the contrary is not only perversely wishful, but also dangerous.

My worry, of course, is that young people concerned about the current state of entertainment and women’s rights in this country will read Boteach without skepticism, pleased that someone (a man!) in a position of power dares address the complications and limitations of women’s lives. Even I was giving Boteach the benefit of the doubt, occasionally even applauding his attempts to uncover the complex sources of inequality (though I have to admit I really stopped trying when he asserted that many women become lesbians to get away from knuckle-dragging men, which, of course, only makes such men drag their knuckles even lower over the shoals of Girls Gone Wild videos).

The impetus and logic behind Hating Women is especially sticky for this reason, and two others: first, Boteach’s argument against pornography, prostitution, and other “bad” female activities falls into the same trap as the feminist arguments he blames for certain ills (namely “women behaving like men” in order to attain economic privileges otherwise withheld from them) by attacking social groups rather than limited possibilities for social expression and advancement (or, say, a vulgar market economy). Any doubt that suppression of basic human rights is still big business in this country is quickly quashed by the dozen or so states who have amended their constitutions to prohibit gay marriage, and anyone who insists that it is actually the queers and the racial minorities who hold sway over public discourse need only look so far as Kansas (my home state) where many still find it perfectly acceptable to call men “faggots,” beat them up, and “nigger-rig” them to telephone poles. I really can’t imagine that this is the fault of gay men and African-Americans.

Second, Boteach fails to consider how cultural expectations are created and maintained, thus blinding himself to the repressive realities of heterosexual forms of partnership (which need not always undermine their benefits) and that models of positive and productive behavior are in reality both ungendered and utterly acculturated. Mostly, though, the problem is that Boteach’s argument is horribly exclusive, applying only to women who want to be wives and mothers, and who want, moreover, to be proper “women” rather than, say, useful citizens outside the confines of gender. If anything, this book relies too heavily on gender constructions and inequality as the handmaidens of social ills. Boteach’s book merely reinforces that women and men are from different planets, making women horrifyingly responsible both for themselves and their Martian counterparts in a culture where, as Boteach admits, they have limited social and economic power.