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In a surprise move with election-year implications, the Obama administration’s top health official overruled her own drug regulators and stopped the Plan B morning-after pill from moving onto drugstore shelves next to the condoms. The decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius means the Plan B One-Step emergency contraceptive will remain behind pharmacy counters, as it is sold today — available without a prescription only to those 17 and older who can prove their age. The Food and Drug Administration was preparing to lift the age limit on Wednesday and allow younger teens, who today must get a prescription, to buy it without restriction. That would have made Plan B the nation’s first over-the-counter emergency contraceptive, a pill that can prevent pregnancy if taken soon enough after unprotected sex. But Sebelius intervened at the eleventh hour and overruled FDA, deciding that young girls shouldn’t be able to buy the pill on their own — especially since some girls as young as 11 are physically capable of bearing children. “It is common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age,” Sebelius said. “I do not believe enough data were presented to support the application to make Plan B One-Step available over the counter for all girls of reproductive age.”

It was the latest twist in a nearly decade-long push for easier access to emergency contraception, and the development shocked women’s groups and maker Teva Pharmaceuticals, which had been gearing up for over-the-counter sales to begin by month’s end. “We are outraged that this administration has let politics trump science,” said Kirsten Moore of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, an advocacy group. “There is no rationale for this move.” “This decision is stunning. I had come to believe that the FDA would be allowed to make decisions based on science and the public’s health,” said Susan Wood of George Washington University, who served as the FDA’s top women’s health official until resigning in 2005 to protest delays in deciding Plan B’s fate. She said, “Sadly, once again, FDA has been over-ruled and not allowed to do its job.” But the decision pleased conservative critics of the proposal. “Take the politics out of it and it’s a decision that reflects the concerns that many parents in America have,” said Wendy Wright, an evangelical Christian activist who has helped lead the opposition to Plan B.

I agree with Gayatn Spivak that our marginality is important—but there is very little room in the margins when that space has been claimed by Marxists and theorists of all stripes. With all this jostling in the margins, who is in the center?...

Shari Benstock challenges us: “Feminist criticism must be willing to pose the question of the differences within women’s writing. . . . Feminist criticism must be a radical critique not only of women’s writing but of women’s critical writing.” She calls for us to “inscribe the authority of our own experience” (147) and to question the assumptions of that authority. I am not sure that Shari Benstock realizes how dangerous this project can be. My own career began with such critiques of feminist criticism and I have concluded that years of joblessness were a direct result of that practice.’ Old girl networks exist; hierarchy is imposed and some feminist journals have “better” reputations than others. Star feminist critics perform their acts on platforms all over the country. The only difference is that we like what they have to say, and fall asleep less easily than at a male critic’s lecture. One feminist critic says that she would not have the “hubris” to criticize Gilbert and Gubar, It is not hubris but a pledge to our collective future as practicing critics to point out differences in theory and practice. I am sure that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would be the first to insist that such sisterly criticisms of their work be offered, for they continue to write, to grow, and to change. If feminist criticism has taught us anything, it has taught us to question authority, each other’s as well as our oppressors’. There are some cases in which theorists ignore scholarship at their peril.

I suspect it emerges from a flaw in the very project of critical theory. When Marxism, semiotics and the rest burst on the academic scene in the 1960s and ‘70s, they were seen above all as ways to probe beneath the sur- face of reality. The idea was always to unmask the hidden structures of power, dominance, and exploitation that lay below even the most mundane and ordinary aspects of daily life. Certainly such things are there to be found. But if this is all one is looking for, one soon ends up with a rather jaundiced picture of social reality. The overall effect of reading through this literature is remarkably bleak; one is left with the almost Gnostic feeling of a fallen world, in which every aspect of human life is threaded with violence and domination.9 Critical theory thus ended up sabotaging his own best in- tentions, making power and domination so fundamental to the very nature of social reality that it became impossible to imagine a world without it. Be- cause if one can’t, then criticism rather loses its point. Before long, one had figures like Foucault or Baudrillard arguing that resistance is futile (or at least, that organized political resistance is futile), that power is simply the basic constituent of everything, and often enough, that there is no way out of a totalizing system, and that we should just learn to accept it with a cer- tain ironic detachment. And if everything is equally corrupt, then pretty much anything could be open for redemption.10 Why not, say, those creative and slightly offbeat forms of mass consumption favored by upper-middle class academics?    Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, page 30

1) Whatabouttehwimmin? Any academic treatment of gender has been focused on the disadvantages faced by women and how women have been “omitted” from research, arts, literature, history, etc. An example of this assumption can be found in another book published in 1994, Angela McRobbie’s Postmodernism and Popular Culture. The book has many discussions of women, girls and “femininity,” but look for “masculinity” in the index, and you will draw a blank. She justifies this glaring omission with statements such as this one: It is in buying and selling clothes that girls and young women have been most active. The male bias of subcultural analysis has relegated these activities to the margins (McRobbie 1994:163). [My emphasis.]

when I have looked at contemporary books, journals, and web-based media that deal with the subject of gender, I have found no evidence of this so-called “male bias” at all. In the Internet age, there are large numbers of websites/online publications in particular, such as Jezebel, Sociological Images Feministing, Feministe and The Frisky, which look at representations of women in popular culture, for example. But there is no comparable critical consideration of how men and masculinity are portrayed in the media and culture. If anyone dares to question this imbalance, and the fact that feminist “gender studies” analyses of the media tend to only consider women as subjects, they are often met with the playground style taunt: whatabouttehmenz?

2) Men are Monsters Heterosexual masculinity, in particular, has been “pathologized” by some feminist gender academics—with heterosexual men being portrayed as the oppressors of everyone else: hetero women, queer women, queer men. The idea that straight men have power that they use to oppress women, in particular, has been used by feminist writers such as Elaine Rapping, an American media and film analyst, to justify statements such as this: Everywhere you look there are books, movies, discussions and news reports about male violence … faced with the deadly serious question: “why are men such creeps?” (Rapping, 1993:114). This idea that men are “such creeps” is born out by the fact there is so much research and data on men’s violence against women, but very little about men as victims of violence, especially not at the hands of women. Is this because men are just thugs? Or is it due to the bias of gender academics? Even the name of this website, The Good Men Project, suggests to me that men are not ‘naturally’ good, but that they have to work hard to overcome the negative aspects of their ‘masculinity’ in order to become ‘Good Men.’

, there is only a marginal pay difference between men and women when it comes to non-executive directors, and no difference in the effectiveness of their networks. It is possible that this reflects pressure for “gender quotas” on corporate boards. Women are able to find their way onto shortlists for lower-paid, non-executive positions. But that’s not where the real power lies.

serious questions have been raised about Badinter’s objectivity, particularly having to do with her arguments against breastfeeding, in light of her financial ties to corporations that produce infant formula, including Nestle and the makers of Similac and Enfamil.

Much work in second wave feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s converged around a diagnosis of the cultural value system that underpins patriarchal societies.  Feminists argued that the fundamental value structure of such societies rests on a series of conceptual dichotomies: reason vs. emotion; culture vs. nature; mind vs. body; and public vs. private.  In patriarchal societies, they argued, these oppositions are not merely distinctions — they are implicit hierarchies, with reason valued over emotion, culture over nature, and so on. And in all cases,  the valorized terms of these hierarchies are associated with masculinity and the devalued terms with femininity. Men are stereotypically thought to be more rational and logical, less emotional, more civilized and thus more fit for public life, while women are thought to be more emotional and irrational, closer to nature, more tied to their bodies and thus less fit for public life.

Some feminists argued that the best solution was for women to claim the values traditionally associated with masculinity for themselves. From this point of view, the goal of feminism was more or less to allow or to encourage women to be more like men.  In practical terms, this meant becoming more educated, more active in public life and less tied to the private sphere of the family, and more career-focused. Other feminists, by contrast, argued that this liberal assimilationist approach failed to challenge the deeply problematic value structure that associated femininity with inferiority. From this point of view, the practical goal of feminism was to revalue those qualities that have traditionally been associated with femininity and those activities that have traditionally been assigned to women, with childbirth, mothering and care giving at the top of the list.