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Why, Howe asks, "cannot intelligent and humane people look upon sexual differences as a source of pleasure?" From Sexual Politics, "you would never know that there are families where men and women work together in a reasonable approximation of humanness, fraternity and even equality."
That equality might be more easily attainable, says Lionel Tiger* in a recent New York Times article, if feminists recognized biology. No one can avoid the fact that menstruation appears to make a difference. In one study cited by Tiger, girls taking exams just before their periods earned grades 14% to 15% lower than was usual for them. Other studies show that 46% of female admissions to mental hospitals come in the seven to eight days before menstruation. So do 53% of women's suicide attempts and 49% of crimes committed by women.
When society accepts this difference, Tiger suggests, it can minimize the effects. How? By adjusting exams and work time (the flying time of women pilots, for example) "to the realities of female experience." When feminists ignore biology, claims Tiger, they may make it harder for women to compete for scholarships, jobs, graduate school entry and other prerequisites of wealth and status.
Refusal to Grow Up. To Midge Decter, writing in Commentary, the feminist's problem is her refusal to grow up: "To judge from what she says and does—finding only others at fault for her predicaments, speaking always of herself as a means of stating the general case, shedding tears as a means of negotiation—the freedom she seeks is a freedom demanded by children and enjoyed by no one: the freedom from all difficulty."
According to Journalist Decter (who is 43, married, and the mother of four children), the liberated woman, with most of men's options open to her, has found work less interesting and sex less fun than she had hoped. By her very discontent with what most men find rewarding, she has proved herself different from men. But to this she is blind; in Women's Lib she has created a "culture of dissatisfaction," and she has found someone to blame—men.
Women are not men's victims, Editor Decter says. Both sexes have the same freedom: "To make certain choices and take the consequences." A feminist need not be a "sexual object." Instead, she may remain chaste, "thereby restoring to herself that uniquely feminine power over men which many women so cavalierly make light of in the struggle for equality."
What concerns Janet Malcolm is feminine power over children. In the New Republic, she raises a moral issue: "From feminists' writings, one gathers that the claims of children are incompatible with the rights of women, and that it is the children, being the less important of the two, who must be sacrificed." Liberationists writing about children remind her of Playboy authors writing about women: "There is the same condescension and tendency to see the child as an object rather than as a person."