The recent death of Gloria Steinem has naturally produced an outpouring of adulation for this feminist “icon” and Steinem actually does deserve much of the praise, for she did “legitimize” feminism in a way that many of her colleagues, like Betty Friedan, could not, “proving” that feminists were not uniformly a collection of bitter, unhappy, unattractive women denigrating what they could not have. The fact that Steinem did so in significant part by being strikingly good looking, stylish, and self-confident in a way that few women in the public eye could match, regardless of their political attitudes, was, well, what can one say? It worked, and, what’s more, Steinem was able, one way or another, to coordinate successfully with many reluctant colleagues who must have resented, bitterly, her unbeatable star power.
How glorious was Gloria in her prime? Writing in Jezebel in 2015,1 journalist Susan Braudy remembered meeting Ms Ms. all the way back in 1969.
“I was hypnotized by Gloria. She was as gorgeous as anybody I’d seen on the movie screen and was what I longed to be—a sophisticated New York woman. She exhaled dazzle. Her exquisite Upper East Side brownstone apartment had been decorated by the Warhol superstar “Baby Jane” Holzer. Gloria slept on a hip platform bed and used her bedroom as a home office. She stocked her refrigerator with only two green bottles of Perrier water and a lime.”
But Steinem was much more than just a pretty face. She was verbally adroit and articulate in debate. She was a gifted organizer, one of the co-founders of Ms. the ground-breaking publication that managed, to a remarkable extent, to avoid being torn apart by the sort of rivalries that naturally spring up in a “revolutionary” movement. Although Steinem was closely associated with the magazine for decades, and its de facto public image, Suzanne Braun Levine was the actual editor from 1972 to 1988. When the magazine was struggling at the end of Levine’s tenure, Steinem was able to find a new editor, Robin Morgan, who headed Ms. from 1988 to 1994, after which time Steinem continued to work with others to keep the magazine functioning until 2001, when something called the “Liberty Media for Women” took over.
Levine’s departure may have signaled the waning of the original energy of the women’s movement. The “dream” of a left-wing coalition of the oppressed—blacks, Hispanics, women, and a few “acceptable” men—never materialized, and the reign of “the Reagans”—both Ron and Nancy, whose ability to “charm” the media must have been deeply irritating to any true feminist—made it seem like the passion of the Seventies could never be regained.
In early 1992, Steinem unfortunately “confirmed” this diagnosis by the publication of a memoir, Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, that could be very unsportingly described as “How To Be Happy Even When You’re No Longer Attractive To Men”, talking about getting in touch with your inner child and finding yourself through meditation, yoga, etc., as though the fault were in yourself rather than the oppressive white capitalist patriarchy, a work furiously “deconstructed” by an angry Deirdre English in the New York Times under the headline She’s Her Weakness Now, distressed, among other things, that Steinem “confessed” that she wasn’t the proud, stunningly self-confident, independent power woman that she apparently pretended to be during her glory years in the seventies. English, editor in chief for the famously left-wing magazine *Mother Jones” from 1978 to 1986, has this to say about Steinem:
Beyond symbolism, her achievements are impressive -- from establishing the use of the term "Ms." to sustaining the only mass-circulation feminist magazine in America's history. With all this to her credit, why does she now turn the power of her leadership to following fashion in psychological self-help?
Her answer is that while crusading for feminism she created a mythical creature, so sophisticated and confident that she barely recognized herself on television: “What I felt like inside was a plump brunette from Toledo, too tall and much too pudding-faced, with . . . a voice that felt constantly on the verge of revealing some unacceptable emotion.”
Say it ain’t so, Gloria!
Unfortunately, there was a darker side to Steinem’s newfound fascination with exploring “repressed feelings” and discovering your true self. She also gave active support for one of the absolutely worst public obsessions in American history, the “Satanic Panic”—the plague of entirely fictitious reports of murderous rituals—more than 12,000, according to Wikipedia—that tore apart communities in the U.S. during the 1980s, hideous nonsense exactly comparable to the witch trials that spread across Europe as a result of the profound emotional unrest created by the Reformation. In her book, Steinem, making explicit allusion to the horrifying and entirely false accounts that circulated throughout the 1980s, says the following:
And we must remember: any form of abuse that comes from the very people who are supposed to protect us, to whom we have no choice but to make ourselves vulnerable, is the most destructive of self. Until the last decade or so, sexual abuse especially was compounded by the disbelief and blindness of psychiatrists, teachers, law-enforcement officials, social workers, and other parent surrogates to whom children are supposed to be able to turn when the parents themselves are the problem. Imbued with such well-meaning but still “poisonous pedagogy” as the Freudian doctrine that child victims desired and therefore fantasized having sex with adults—perhaps also with many professionals’ own need to keep their childhood pain buried—they refused to believe children, who were developmentally incapable of having imagined such adult acts. This unwillingness to take children’s testimony seriously still characterizes a court system where young witnesses are refused the right to testify, broken down by lawyers on the stand, and discredited. In fact, studies show they are more likely to be telling the truth than are adults. Nonetheless, children are even less likely to be believed when their stories involve extremes of sadism, collusion among families and communities (sometimes extending over several generations), and so-called ritual or cult abuse—including the torture and killing of animals to frighten children into silence—that are so terrible that authorities decide these things just can’t be true. Yet many instances of such “incredible” crimes are documented, sometimes by adults after years of suppressed memory, sometimes by authorities who are now beginning to believe children enough to investigate their stories.
In fact, all of the accounts of these “incredible” crimes were false. Yet Steinem assisted in the investigation of these monstrous horror stories. One of the most spectacular of the cases was the “McMartin preschool trial”, where the pursuit of “truth” led to massive excavations in search of “underground tunnels” that supposedly allowed the disposal of victims. In his 2015 book on the Satanic Panic, We Believe the Children, author Richard Beck cites a 1993 report on the excavations by archeologist E. Gary Stickel stating that “a generous donation by Gloria Steinem” helped fund his report. Also in 1993, Ms. magazine published a horrible “first person” article, Cult Ritual Abuse Exists by the pseudonymous “Elizabeth S. Rose”, who claimed, among other things that “I personally witnessed the murders of two children, one of whom was my baby sister. These deaths were a direct result of satanic ritual sacrifices.” All of it pure satanic nonsense, purveyed by the “bible” of feminism.
Steinem, and many others, followed a hideous “logic.” The more deeply repressed a memory is, the truer it is. The more horrible a memory is, the more deeply it will be repressed. Therefore, the more horrible a memory is, the more likely it is to be true. A more poisonously circular syllogism was never conceived.2
I was put on the trail of Steinem’s “unfortunate” involvement in all this hideous nonsense by reformed right-winger Richard Hanania, who linked me in turn to Michael Tracy, who has the full story in his post, Gloria Steinem: leader of the “Women’s Movement,” peddler of “Satanic ritual sex abuse” garbage. Mike gets a little overwrought at times—working himself into a fury over the fact that Gloria got a big fat advance on Revolutions From Within, for example—but beyond that he’s pretty much a straight shooter. If I got upset every time an “undeserving” author got a big fat advance, I wouldn’t have time to listen to Mozart. When I was a kid it used to bother me that people like Milton Berle and Liberace had careers. You learn to roll with these things.3
1. The link to the article in Jezebel seems to be dead, but Braudy probably ran the Jezebel piece in The Week as well. (It's behind a paywall, and I’m cheap.)
2. In the old days, it was disgraceful to make ugly charges. Today, in some quarters, it is disgraceful to doubt them. In the Sept. 11 issue of the New York Times, a review of a biography of banker and Jeffrey Epstein friend Leon Black refers to Epstein as a “convicted pedophile”. Actually, being a “pedophile” is defined as taking a sexual interest in prepubescent children and it isn’t a crime in Florida, where Epstein was convicted, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Epstein was sexually attracted to prepubescent children, though he clearly was attracted to “underage” adolescent girls, as young as fourteen. He was convicted of “felony solicitation of prostitution” and “procuring a person under 18 for prostitution” and was required to register as a sex offender. Fortunately for the Times, you can’t libel the dead.
3. There were even Milton Berle comic books. Brutal!
