The Oct. 28, 1991 issue of The New Yorker contained the following 
article:

A young man writes:

I am one of that generation of men who grew up and were educated at a
time when the central tenets of feminism were more or less dogma among
right-thinking people, and I have spent my whole life among women who
identify themselves as feminists. I have four sisters, each of whom
is, in one way or another, engaged in living out a feminist life. My
wife is a feminist filmmaker. My mother is a feminist professor -- one
of the first women of her generation to get a Ph.D in formal
logic. And yet, proud as I am of all these women, I had always felt,
as almost every man surely does to one degree or another, that to be
ardently or uncritically feminist was to become, in a sense,
feminized, and I maintained a certain ironic distance from what struck
me as the more metaphysical reaches of feminist "theory" -- all those
claims about women and power, women and language, and women and the
male definition of reality which fill feminist texts and papers.

But in the last three days, watching the Senate Judiciary Committee
hearings on Judge Clarence Thomas, and watching the Senate's (and the
press') treatment of Professor Anita Hill, I have had something like a
conversion experience. I have begun to realize that in the past the
more "abstract" and the more categorical reaches of the feminist
catechism -- not to mention its now familiar nuts and bolts -- seemed
a little unreal to me not because they weren't true but because I had
never seen them made concrete and particular.

Women, I have long been told, live within a set of double binds. If a
woman makes a charge against a man, the issue will always become not
the man's behavior but the woman's character. And a corollary is that
if a woman can be shown to have lied in the past about anything at
all, the lie will be taken as compelling evidence that she may be
lying now.

On a Saturday-night news program, two male journalists invoked the
names of Tawana Brawley and Janet Cooke while discussing the hearings,
and then they had a long debate about which woman, Brawley or Cooke,
Professor Hill more closely resembled -- although no connection could
be found between either the frightened teenager or the dishonest
reporter and the college professor, whose integrity had not yet been
impeached. *Of course* the comparison was apt, the two men seemed to
assume: they're black, they're women, they lie.

Women, my sisters explain, talk to other women not just to solve
problems but to share pain, and this is not a difference of
"conversational style" but is rooted in women's understanding of the
realities of power. "Why didn't you give her advice? Why didn't you
counsel her to come forward?" the incredulous senators demanded as the
professor's friends tried to explain that after they heard her
complaints of sexual harassment they had felt powerless to offer any
solution.

They had just tried to offer understanding and an ear, they said --
that was what she *wanted* them to do, knowing that any "solution"
would do at least as much damage to her as it could to to him. I will
never forget the looks on the faces of Professor Hill's women friends
-- a judge and a welfare administrator -- as they tried to explain why
their friend hadn't come forward; they were the looks of pained and
compassionate grownups trying to explain something to children.

Women must always be seen as powerless and passive, my sisters have
pointed out, and any action they take will always be reinterpreted by
men in this light. Grown men, including Judge Thomas himself, put
forward in all seriousness the notion that Professor Hill was merely
mouthing a "concocted" story that had been skillfully assembled from
disparate sources by "special-interest groups" and then taught to her.
In the minds of her accusers, Professor Hill could not even be granted
the dignity of strategies of her own, however malicious; in order to
be dismissed, she first had to be made a "pawn."

A woman's attractiveness will always be held against her, I now
understand, and a woman's unattractiveness will always be held against
her, too. Professor Hill was good-looking, and therefore it was fair
to speculate that she was out to snare Judge Thomas, and that her
accusation was the product of her failure to do so. But she wasn't
*that* good-looking, and so it was also fair to conclude that the
whole thing must be "fantasy." "Quite frankly, Anita Hill is not worth
that type of risk," one of the Judge's supporters said -- not
good-looking enought to throw a career away on.

A man's career is assumed -- by the man, and by other men -- to be the
equivalent of a woman's life; a setback to his ambition will be taken
as a threat to his very existence. A woman's career, on the other
hand, is just a job. Many of the senators couldn't understand why
Anita Hill didn't simply give up her career if she didn't like the way
she was treated. Clarence Thomas is a judge: what he does for a living
is to review the cases of men and women, many of whom believe
themselves to be as innocent as he claims to be. Yet when he was asked
to bear for a moment a version of the same kind of scrutiny, he saw
himself as a martyr -- a lynching victim. His rage was thought to be
impressive. Had Professor Hill shown the slightest sign of anger, of
course, it would have been further proof of her "unstable" and
"vindictive" nature.

As my sisters long ago explained, in the seemingly distant context of
discussions of late-nineteenth-century psychiatry, any woman who is
difficult will eventually be called mad. On Saturday afternoon,
Senator Arlen Specter blandly accused Professor Hill of perjury. By
Sunday night, he had refined this conjecture: it was not that
Procfessor Hill was lying but that she was simply unable to
distinguish truth from fantasy. His tone suggested that this change in
accusation had been made for her benefit -- that she ought to be
grateful for the superior male wisdom that recognized her as helpless
in the grip of her delusions rather that as a deliberate liar.

Men define reality, and women seek refuge within the interstices of
those definitions, my sisters have told me; the feminist theorists
have written similar things, grandly and abstractly. I now see what
this means in terms of practical conduct. Judge Thomas offered nothing
except a blanket denial and a raft of wild accusations. Nonetheless,
his anger was apparently judged by many other men, and by some women,
to be admirable, as a kind of expression of masculinity: so admirable
that it enabled him to redefine the hearings in terms of *his*
suffering, *his* struggle, *his* martyrdom, *his* career -- *his*
reality. He turned the discussion to the historical generalities of
racial oppression -- of which his accuser had certainly had at least
as much experience as he had -- and was allowed to escape the
responsibility of meeting the particular accusations of sexual
oppression. The committee had treated Professor Hill in a "very polite
and professional way," Senator Specter said on Tuesday, and this time
he went on to accuse her of both perjury *and* delusional lying. Since
she had been treated "politely," her claims could be dismissed,
instead of refuted, and she could once again be rendered negligible.

Talking to my wife and mother and sisters about the hearings, I heard
in their voices not so much anger as resignation and familiarity.
"This comes to you as a *surprise*"? they said, in so many words.

Watching these women over a lifetime, I realize, I had often been a
little surprised when they would burst into rage and indignation about
what seemed to me "petty" injustices and slights at the hands of men.
They had on tap a vein of anger that bewildered me, rising, as it did,
from lives that were so obviously successful and happy. I owe them an
apology. They had experienced things that I had not, and had tried to
tell me truths that I had chosen not to hear.