The banality of Gloria Steinem: a final word

Credit: Hillary Clinton on Instagram

I didn’t expect to get sucked into such a Gloria Steinem rabbit hole, but there’s just too much irresistible stuff here, and the best time to surface it is while the reverential tributes are still coming in hot and heavy.

Her official New York Times obituary is truly a boundless source of wonder. For instance, without a hint of irony detected, it reports that Steinem once famously titled herself “an entrepreneur of social change.” I find it difficult to imagine ever encountering anyone, regardless of sex, who would earnestly introduce themselves as such, and not feel a giant wave of sardonic disbelief and/or existential despair wash over me. “Good evening Ma’am, I’m an entrepreneur of social change. Make sure to follow me on LinkedIn.” But it’s ridiculous self-descriptions such as these that organs of mainstream American liberalism have decided to accept with total credulity when it comes to Savior Steinem. Because we mustn’t forget, per NYT, that she “helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.” How did she manage to finagle herself into all these vaunted “rooms,” anyway?

It certainly couldn’t have been by utilizing her uniquely penetrating insight, or impressive original thinking. Because if you survey enough of Steinem’s oeuvre, what may stand out the most is how banal, cliched, and uninteresting it invariably is.

Note: this observation is distinct from saying “I disagree with her.” It’s very possible for someone to have thoughts, opinions, and theories that one might disagree with, but still find edifying on any number of levels. In and of itself, disagreement is no good reason to peremptorily discard the work of others. A much better metric, I’ve found, is whether the work reflects originality — if any useful insights can be gleaned from it, or other kinds of value derived, above and beyond the narrow question of whether one might personally “agree.” But in Steinem’s case, it’s difficult to find much of anything that could conceivably fall into this category.

Here’s a telling example. In her latter years, she came up with a weird dogma about how “women of all races and men of color” share inherent political interests, and are implicitly in coalition with one another against the repressive monopolizing power of white men. This came to a head during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, when the two top candidates squaring off were a white woman and black man, and many vituperative debates ensued between their respective supporters. So as a seasoned Grand Poobah of the Democratic Party, Steinem saw fit to pronounce from on high how everyone should go about soothing these nasty intra-party tensions.

In February 2007, she rattled off one of her many timeless NYT op-eds, and repudiated what she called the “irrelevant debate” that was raging over the relative virtues of Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama. The idea was that all Steinem-minded Democrats should join her and vaguely embrace both candidates. This gave no insight whatsoever into how any Democrat should decide which candidate to actually vote for — kind of the whole point of a primary contest. As historical basis for her vague injunction, Steinem purported to reprise a well-known quote from the 1940s: “The parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life.” This was supposed to resolve any consternation between Obama and Hillary supporters: both were equally suitable, Steinem insisted, given the “deep truth” of their intertwined destinies. She updated this dogmatic precept in 2019 to a newfangled “intersectional” platitude: “There’s no such thing as trying to uproot racism without also uprooting sexism, and vice versa.”

Gloria Steinem with a fellow Gloria (Allred) in a 2019 photoshoot for the Guardian

Ultimately, Steinem’s warmed-over 1960s pretensions to “radical” activism/critique were subsumed into the supremely boring prerogative of preserving internal Democratic Party cohesion. In the 2007 column, she made a slew of dubious empirical claims about this purported natural political alliance between white women and blacks. Maybe the actual “source” was just her own head? “White women have been more likely than white men to support pro-equality candidates of color, and people of color have been more likely to support pro-equality white women.” First of all — [citation needed]. Second of all — this is just a bunch of hooey, signifying nothing.

It’s not even that her argument, such as it can be ascertained, is necessarily wrong — though the NYT sure let her get away with a doozy of an unsourced statistical assertion. Still, one could theoretically imagine an argument along these lines that was at least compellingly rendered, or persuasively crafted, or which reflected some measure of novel observation/insight. But with Steinem, one finds over and over again that she really just churned out a steady stream of hackneyed tedium. Which then got received by Default Libs as though it were awe-inspiring wisdom — delivered from the sacred mountaintop of another intellectual dimension. If you take a cold hard look though, she seldom had anything interesting to say. (Which I would not reflexively say of all well-known “feminists” — whether or not I personally agreed with them.) At the very least, the caliber of her political/cultural “analysis” is nowhere near commensurate with the overblown effusive stature she’s granted by NYT obituarists and other disciples.

Mouthing weird platitudes to maintain Dem racial and sexual unity for purposes of party coalition management during a contentious presidential primary is not some profoundly radical endeavor, either — if anything, it’s more like a bland fundraising tactic. Because that’s ultimately what Steinem spent much of her life doing: soliciting donors to keep afloat her sprawling “women’s movement” NGO apparatus, which was running on reputational autopilot since the 1960s. Her “brand” was typically sufficient for deep-pocketed “friends” to keep forking over cash to continue this “work.” Circa 2007-2008, alienating or embittering half of the Democratic Party donor base would not have been productive to that end. So she authors this wholesome “unity” op-ed, on the pretense of some convoluted theory for why blacks and white women must unite to secure their alleged joint interests. This likely paid dividends in terms of her fundraising receipts; indeed, in an obituary pre-interview she gave to the NYT, just one year later in 2008, Steinem reflected on her “career” as a “writer, organizer, and fundraiser” — the latter almost certainly the most determinative facet of her day-to-day “work.”

Although it should be said that by 2016, she did decide to temporarily abandon her coalition-management impulse, and infamously ridiculed Young Progressive Women for overwhelmingly supporting Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in that cycle’s Democratic primaries. According to Steinem, the girls were only doing this because they were boy-crazy: “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie.” A backlash ensued, and she gave a thoroughly unconvincing “apology,” claiming she “misspoke.” But she never actually clarified what she supposedly “misspoke” about, or had regretted saying on the merits. It was another odd instance of Steinem playing the role of de facto cookie-cutter politician, who every now and then would make a “gaffe” she had to clean up. There was no good reason to think she didn’t actually believe the underlying point of her remark denigrating young women. After all, she’d basically said the same sort of thing before.

In 2000, she was dispatched around the country as one of the lead surrogates for the notoriously exhilarating Al Gore presidential campaign. In The Nation, Alexander Cockburn recounted a last-minute “carpet-bombing by flacks for Gore like Gloria Steinem” across the state of Oregon, where polls were looking increasingly precarious. (Indeed, Gore only ended up winning the state by a fraction of a percentage point over George W. Bush.) In this pre-election Dem crisis mode, Steinem was tasked with striding through university towns to hector college-age supporters of Ralph Nader, whom the Gore operation was worried (not unreasonably) could siphon off just enough votes to tip the election to Bush. On the campus of UCLA one day, Steinem scolded: “There is a reason why Nader’s support is overwhelmingly white and middle class and more male than female. It’s because these are the people who do not suffer as much if Bush were in the White House.” This wasn’t quite identical to her later “Bernie Bro” attack, but it was somewhere in the same ballpark — deriding young voters’ candidate preferences on the basis of their identity traits. UCLA’s student newspaper reported Steinem proclaiming that the 2000 election would perhaps be the “most important of her lifetime.” And this made it all the more troubling, in her mind, that “Nader disparages the women’s movement.” By election eve in November, she had the obligatory dire op-ed ready to go, and declared without reservation that “there has never been in my lifetime an election that was more important.”

Steinem’s self-description as “entrepreneur of social change” was apt here, because she had clearly mastered the “politically entrepreneurial” art of bloviating that every US election in which she had a personal/professional stake was “the most crucial election in my lifetime” (Bush vs. Kerry 2004). She once wrote in a fundraising appeal, “I want to alert you to an emergency” — with the “emergency” being the 1980 Senate election in South Dakota. She even managed the impressive feat of declaring much the same about the 1996 election — yes, the one between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, maybe the most objectively low-stakes presidential election in the past century, which she said was “the most crucial and frightening [election] in my lifetime.” This was in response to a student interviewer at the University of Iowa who had asked her: “What is the newest battle for feminism?” Her stock answer was always the same: comically inflate the enormity of every US election coming down the pike, as a service to her friends in the Democratic Party high command! Indeed, Hillary Clinton was just on “Morning Joe” today (September 10) reminiscing about how she’d been “fortunate enough to know [Steinem] over a lot of years… she was a great friend.” More than a “friend,” though, Steinem was a dedicated partisan functionary for the Clintons and every other conventional Dem figure — a key node in the party’s adjacent professional class network. It was from this vantage point that Steinem would launch into her five-alarm-fire haranguing whenever the next election approached, and invoke her Top Woman Leader credentials to lecture weary voters about the existential necessity of installing Dems to power.

“I’ve never, ever, ever, in my very long life, seen an election that is more crucial,” Steinem said of the 2016 election, even diverting some of her own fundraising prowess to the cause: “The Clinton campaign also is sending out a number of surrogates for fundraisers. Capricia Marshall, the former US Chief of Protocol, will headline a fundraiser at the Beverly Hills home of entrepreneur Victoria Jackson on Friday, with Gloria Steinem co-hosting. Tickets are $1,000 per person.” Albeit with slightly deflated enthusiasm, given that it was Joe Biden rather than Hillary, she still kept up the refrain four years later, dutifully announcing that the 2020 election was “the most important election in my lifetime, ever.”

This long-term banality even extended to what was supposedly her most fervent of all issues: abortion. After the Supreme Court overruled Roe vs. Wade in 2022, Steinem was summoned to Woman Oriented Podcasts to say things, such as that without abortion, “there is no democracy.” She bolstered this contention with the standard all-purpose historical parallel: “The first thing that Hitler did, as you know, when he was elected, was to declare abortion a crime against the state... Mussolini followed suit.” In addition to being historically inaccurate in all manner of ways, this also suggested a curiously half-baked worldview, and even a stunted grasp of the relevant policy debate. To posit that abortion is somehow interchangeable with “democracy” — and that any curtailments to abortion access is tantamount to Hitler — isn’t even a good argument in favor of abortion! And yet, these were still the words of wisdom sought by the Associated Press when the Supreme Court decision came down, because who else would they ask to opine on behalf of all concerned women. Steinem obliged by declaring there would henceforth be “no democracy” in the United States, due to abortion no longer being a protected “right” under the federal Constitution. Even though it remained readily available in jurisdictions such as the one Steinem had continuously lived in (New York) since the 1970s.

Her full June 2022 quote to the AP was as follows: “Obviously, without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.” There is nothing “obvious” about the logic conveyed by that sequence of words. It’s really just a bunch of cliches strung together, which may sound superficially nice to certain readers who already spiritually agree with the “cause” or the “movement,” and don’t believe the topic of abortion requires any further thought. But most conspicuously: it’s not even a decent argument for preserving the legality of abortion! Assembling some buzzwords to galvanize the already-converted, stuck in some obsolete Ms. Magazine timewarp, is arguably counter-productive to efforts at pro-abortion persuasion.

But fine, she was pretty old by then, so maybe we give her a pass. What about her origin story?

Steinem’s reputedly landmark Ms. Magazine only came into existence as an insert of New York magazine, we learn from the NYT obituary, thanks to the largesse of an apparently licentious male named Clay Felker — an editor whom the NYT describes as “Ms. Steinem’s mentor.” We’re informed Felker once said he gave Steinem an early writing assignment (circa 1960) because she had “great legs.” In any event, Felker would go on to finance and promote the creation of Steinem’s media venture, which soon spun off into its own standalone magazine. Whatever exactly went on between Clay and Gloria — he aged 35 at the time of the “nice legs” editorial assignment, she aged 26 — it sounds like something that in the 2010s could’ve easily been denounced as “problematic,” and even warranted a presumptive “MeToo” excoriation. (“Mentorship”? Heh.)

And yet… so what if Gloria may have used her physical beauty to get ahead? We all have to play with the hands we’re dealt? I wish I had some “nice legs” to show off when I was 26 and trying to convince magazine editors to take my forlorn article pitches. Maybe they would’ve even funded me to launch a new publication altogether! So I can’t begrudge anyone making the most of their God-given assets. But at the same time she was receiving these apparent benefits, Gloria also bewailed her larger womanly plight, including in May 6, 1970 testimony before the US Senate that she’d been invited to give for some reason — not long before she’d been revealed as a CIA-subsidized “youth” activist. “During twelve years of working for a living,” Steinem lamented at age 36, “I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country” — such as exclusion “from professional groups,” and refusal of “writing assignments on so-called ‘unfeminine’ subjects such as politics.” But most damningly, she was “denied a society in which women are encouraged, or even allowed to think of themselves as first-class citizens and responsible human beings.” This was after 12 years subsisting as freelance writer in New York City, by way of her immersion in a media clique that for whatever its “unfeminine” faults, seemed to work out rather well for her in the end, despite the non-enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment.

For an account of Gloria’s blessed trajectory, we can look to a Publishers Weekly profile of her life and times from 1983. (One gets the sense that she might have been constantly profiled for being a person who was constantly profiled):

Another turning point, this one momentous not only for Steinem alone, came in 1972. She, Jane O’Reilly and others had tried unsuccessfully to raise money for a new, collectively run, slick feminist magazine. Clay Felker came to the rescue, offering to put up production costs–the staff would all work gratis–for a first issue of the magazine. In addition, New York’s 200,000 copy special year-end double issue would contain a 30-page excerpt from the new magazine. The first issue of Ms. itself, which contained over 100 pages, had a print run of 300,000 copies and came out in January 1972. “We called it Spring so that it could lie there on newsstands for a long time.” They needn’t have worried: within eight days all 300,000 copies of Ms. had been sold. The magazine was launched.

What a fortuitous spell of success! Even in an era where obtaining opportunities might have required women like Gloria to navigate a more openly “sexualized” workplace environment. She somehow found this success before she subsequently helped bring the term “sexual harassment” into the popular lexicon. Which may be a bit ironic, because if the “anti-harassment” strictures she would later champion had been in place at New York magazine in the 1960s, it may well have precluded her own advancement. She seems to have felt no particular need back then to catastrophize the “legs” remark from her older male superior — the same one who went on to enable the founding of her own proprietary media enterprise.

But fast forward to 2019 and Post MeToo, and Steinem was decrying the mere prospect of any workplace sexual tension on the grounds that it “turns work into prostitution; in order to continue to get paid you have to put up with this unwanted sexual attention.” Her own endlessly profiled life would seem to belie this simple assessment; perhaps her past allure as an attractive, resourceful young lady was something she was able to skillfully leverage? And why shouldn’t she have? It worked! Good for her! Again — there but for the grace of God go I.

For anyone who might be stupidly getting the wrong idea: no, none of this is to justify any legitimately crude/boorish male behavior that can cross the line into something legitimately “harassing,” or even at the far-extreme, predatory. But to pathologize any latent “sexual” undertone in or around a workplace as something that must be inherently woman-subjugating, and needs to be ruthlessly stamped out with HR bureaucratic dictates, or brute-force litigation, perhaps did not lead to the wondrous outbreak of “empowerment” that Steinem and her admirers seem to imagine it did. For the most part, rational adults of both sexes should probably be assumed capable to navigate any “sexual” dynamics that might arise without the whole thing having to automatically blow up into a soul-crushing fiasco. In the odd cases where there’s something genuinely abusive at issue — sure, other measures might have to be taken. But with more run-of-the-mill stuff, like the fateful “legs” comment to which Steinem was once shockingly subjected, it should tell us something that she apparently never thought it warranted a blistering “call out,” or internal reprisal — and may have even been something that she smartly used to her advantage. Indeed, her widespread depiction as a “pretty girl” in the 1960s and 1970s is framed by the NYT obituary as a degrading roadblock, but… it doesn’t seem to have blocked her off from much? Kind of… the opposite? Yeah, she was an attractive young woman! Great! This probably conferred her with certain advantages and disadvantages — likely weighed quite a bit more heavily toward the “advantages.” As Frank Sinatra once said: “That’s life.”

But it also may be useful context when pondering how implausible it seems that anyone could have actually looked to Steinem for incisive political insights. More plausible: people looked to her because she was “Gloria Steinem,” and therefore her utterances were accorded a presumed sagacity. Which stemmed from the grand “Leader of Women” accolade she was bestowed with early on — by men! That’s how her NYT obituary recounts it, anyway: With the rapid success of Ms. Magazine, “the male-dominated news media all but anointed Ms. Steinem as the [women] movement’s spokeswoman.” And she essentially just coasted from there!

Perhaps the only semi-interesting, or at least amusing thing I’ve come across so far about Steinem is that in 2009, our late financier friend Jeffrey Epstein was informed (by Ghislaine) about an upcoming reception for Manhattan DA Cy Vance — featuring none other than “special guest” Gloria Steinem. Ghislaine asked Jeffrey what his thoughts were about this event. Did he even care? “No,” Jeffrey replied, without elaborating. Steinem later claimed after Epstein’s death that she always “thought we should have a street demonstration” in front of his estimable townhouse, located just a few blocks away from her own stately brownstone on the Upper East Side. But she strangely never got around to it.

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