Feminism's false triumph.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Cultural politics - Column

Hey kids, pop those champagne corks. The culture wars are over, and guess what? "The left has won," announces Janny Scott in a New York Times Week in Review article titled At Appomattox in the Culture Wars. (The very next day, another headline in the Times proclaimed Culture Wars Go On, but never mind.) Multiculturalism, feminism, gay rights--all are victorious throughout the land, especially, of course, in academia.

What does victory mean? "More porn videos," Scott informs us. A legacy we on the left fought for--and can be proud of--you bet. Drawing from a shrewd and complex analysis of the culture wars by Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice, and taking his quotes out of context, Scott singles out the left's proudest achievements--Gay Day at Disneyworld and "the cornucopia of abject degradation that is popular music."

And although the courts "have struck down race-based admissions, campus life has been transformed." Yes, and in California and Texas, it's about to be transformed even more, as preliminary data indicate that in the aftermath of the death of affirmative-action programs, admissions of African Americans and Latinos have plummeted. At UCLA's law school alone, the drop is approximately 80 percent. Let's boogie on down.

Dinesh D'Souza told the Times that "conservatives have the upper hand in the battle of ideas, and the liberals have the upper hand in the battle of institutions." Gee, that's a snappy soundbite--too bad it doesn't make a lick of sense. Since when do institutions like higher education, the media, Congress, and the courts, operate independent of ideas? And who, exactly, controls those institutions? Not Katha Pollitt, Bernie Sanders, or June Jordan.

I feel most festive about our victories in the culture wars when I read the reviews in the Sunday Times Book Review section. This publication seems to require that its reviewers write about feminism with the same venom that Cold Warriors used to write about the Red Menace and "subversives."

Here's Karen Lehrman reviewing Meredith Maran's memoir, Notes From an Incomplete Revolution: Feminism is about women being able to "spit, smoke, and sit with their legs apart"; "good feminism" invariably produces "bad mothering"; the women's movement has "a line" about how all women should feel and behave; and feminism is "outdated, repressive, and condescending." The review was titled Truth in Feminism.

In Carol Tavris's review of Elaine Showalter's Hystories in the same issue, we...