The Latest at Fonda U. - Of boys & girls & Barbarella.(why Jane Fonda donated $12.5 million to Harvard Graduate School of Education)

In the style of Dwight Eisenhower's well-known valedictory warning to the American people, the editors of this magazine some months ago spoke of the rising danger of a "celebrity-activist complex." A perfect illustration of what we meant occurred in early March, when it was announced that Jane Fonda had donated $12.5 million to a "gender- studies center" at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. You may think that this is just a case of a Hollywood airhead with more money than sense subsidizing a bunch of ivory-tower leftists. Why should anyone-anyone not a possible beneficiary of Ms. Fonda's will-be concerned? Listen, and you shall hear.

Fonda's gift is in honor of Carol Gilligan, Harvard's first Professor of Gender Studies, author of the feminist classic In a Different Voice (1982). In that book, Gilligan established herself as a "difference feminist," arguing that women and men have fundamentally different ways of thinking about themselves and those around them, the women's way being of course superior. Men, according to Gilligan, operate on an ethic of separation from others, building their view of the world on abstract principles and rules. Women, by contrast, use an ethic of connection to deal with moral issues, seeing them in terms of "caring" and "intimacy."

The book's effect on Jane Fonda was, by her own report, dramatic: It made her cry. Hence the donation, which includes provision for a chair to be endowed in Gilligan's name. Fonda is a keen supporter of feminist causes. She funded, to the tune of about a million dollars, the "V-Day" event at Madison Square Garden in February, at which assorted feminist luminaries attempted to launch a redefinition of St. Valentine's Day as "V for Violence [against women] Day," or possibly, depending on which feminist you talk to, "V for Vagina Day"-the event included a reading, in which Fonda participated, of Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues.

Gilligan's own main inspiration was an earlier feminist thinker, Nancy Chodorow. Back in the 1970s, Chodorow argued for "transforming the social organization of gender." She believed that men and women were equally capable of "masculine" and "feminine" behavior, but that capitalist society forced the familiar, traditional divergence of roles on them, so that a male "patriarchy" could lord it over downtrodden womankind. Chodorow's own intellectual lineage goes directly back to Karl Marx, of course. Society exists, therefore some class must be oppressing some other class. The first task of the social scientist is to identify oppressor and oppressed, to answer the question Lenin stated so very succinctly: "Who, whom?"

Such straightforward appeals to Marx will not do nowadays. Outside a small and dwindling number of intellectual bunkers, the old boy is no longer respectable. This does not, however, mean that the Left has changed its goal of a revolutionary transformation of society, nor its view of human nature as infinitely plastic. Gilligan's "difference feminism" was actually attacked from the feminist Left when it first appeared, on the grounds that any assertion of fundamental differences between men and women might undermine the dogma that gender is a mere social construct with no foundation in physical reality. The Left need not have worried, and in fact no longer seems to be worrying. I could not find in Gilligan's book any hint that the difference she is describing has any biological foundation. Her thesis is perfectly consistent with the gender-is-a-social-construct school of thought. We're not hard-wired to be this way. An oppressive patriarchal society forces these deformations on us.

Now, you might suppose that all this "gender studies" stuff is strictly for the girls-that the males of our species are not much in evidence at the Gender Studies Center, and that the whole shebang is, in reality, nothing more than a respectable academic front for man-hating feminist agitation. You would be right on both counts, but things are changing fast. The Gender Studies crowd have discovered masculinity. They have, in fact, grasped a very profound insight, a way to transform what old- line Marxists would have called "the dialectic." You see, once you have dropped all references to classical Marxism, you can take a position that would never have occurred to Marx himself-that would, in fact, I think, have caused him to fly into one of his famous rages: You can sympathize with the oppressor class.

Men, from this kinder and gentler point of view, are just as much victims of what Chodorow called "the sex/gender system" as are women. They don't really want to be oppressors-human volition has no place in the pure-leftist world view. Men are twisted and bent into being the way they are by impersonal forces, embodied in the ...