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Christina Marie Hoff Sommers (born 1950) is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist. Sommers' positions and writing have been characterized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "equity feminism", a classical-liberal or libertarian feminist perspective holding that the main political role of feminism is to ensure that the right against coercive interference is not infringed. Sommers has contrasted equity feminism with what she terms victim feminism and gender feminism, arguing that modern feminist thought often contains an "irrational hostility to men" and possesses an "inability to take seriously the possibility that the sexes are equal but different". Several writers have described Sommers' positions as anti-feminist. Early life Sommers was born in 1950 to Kenneth and Dolores Hoff. She attended the University of Paris, earned a BA degree at New York University in 1971, and earned a PhD degree in philosophy from Brandeis University in 1979. Career Ideas and views Sommers has called herself an equity feminist, equality feminist, and liberal feminist The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes equity feminism as libertarian or classically liberal. Several authors have described Sommers' positions as antifeminist. The feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar wrote in 2006 that, in rejecting the theoretical distinction between sex as a set of physiological traits and gender as a set of social identities, "Sommers rejected one of the distinctive conceptual innovations of second wave Western feminism," arguing that as the concept of gender is allegedly relied on by "virtually all" modern feminists, "the conclusion that Sommers is an anti-feminist instead of a feminist is difficult to avoid". Sommers has criticized women's studies as being dominated by man-hating feminists with an interest in portraying women as victims. According to The Nation, Sommers would tell her students that "statistically challenged" feminists in women's studies departments engage in "bad scholarship to advance their liberal agenda". Sommers has denied the existence of the gender pay gap. Early work From 1978 to 1980, Sommers was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In 1980, she became an assistant professor of philosophy at Clark University and was promoted to associate professor in 1986. Sommers remained at Clark until 1997, when she became the W.H. Brady fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. During the mid-1980s, Sommers edited two philosophy textbooks on the subject of ethics: Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics (1984) and Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics (1986). Reviewing Vice and Virtue for Teaching Philosophy in 1990, Nicholas Dixon wrote that the book was "extremely well edited" and "particularly strong on the motivation for studying virtue and ethics in the first place, and on theoretical discussions of virtue and vice in general." Beginning in the late 1980s, Sommers published a series of articles in which she strongly criticized feminist philosophers and American feminism in general. According to philosopher Marilyn Friedman, Sommers blamed feminists for contributing to rising divorce rates and the breakdown of the traditional family, and rejected feminist critiques of traditional forms of marriage, family, and femininity. In a 1988 Public Affairs Quarterly article titled "Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?", Sommers wrote that "the intellectual and moral credentials of academic feminism badly want scrutiny" and asserted that "the tactics used by academic feminists have all been employed at one time or another to further other forms of academic imperialism." In articles titled "The Feminist Revelation" and "Philosophers Against the Family," which she published during the early 1990s, Sommers argued that many academic feminists were "radical philosophers" who sought dramatic social and cultural change—such as the abolition of the nuclear family—and thus revealed their contempt for the actual wishes of the "average woman." These articles, which Friedman states are "marred by ambiguities, inconsistencies, dubious factual claims, misrepresentations of feminist literature, and faulty arguments", would form the basis for Sommers' 1994 book Who Stole Feminism?. Later work Sommers has written articles for Time, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist on YouTube. Sommers created a video "course" for the conservative website PragerU. Sommers has also appeared on Red Ice's white nationalist podcast Radio 3Fourteen. Sommers later said that she did not know about the podcast prior to her appearance. Who Stole Feminism? In Who Stole Feminism?, Sommers outlines her distinction between gender feminism, which she regards as being the dominant contemporary approach to feminism, and equity feminism, which she presents as more akin to first-wave feminism. She uses the work to argue that contemporary feminism is too radical and disconnected from the lives of typical American women, presenting her equity feminism alternative as a better match for their needs. Sommers describes herself as "a feminist who does not like what feminism has become". She characterizes gender feminism as having transcended the liberalism of early feminists so that instead of focusing on rights for all, gender feminists view society through the sex/gender prism and focus on recruiting women to join the struggle against patriarchy. Reason reviewed Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women and characterized gender feminism as the action of accenting the differences of genders in order to create what Sommers believes is privilege for women in academia, government, industry, or the advancement of personal agendas. In criticizing contemporary feminism, Sommers writes that an often-mentioned March of Dimes study, which says that "domestic violence is the leading cause of birth defects,” does not exist and that violence against women does not peak during the Super Bowl, which she describes as an urban legend. She argues that such statements about domestic violence helped shape the Violence Against Women Act, which initially allocated $1.6 billion a year in federal funds for ending domestic violence against women. Similarly, she argues that feminists assert that approximately 150,000 women die each year from anorexia, an apparent distortion of the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association's figure that 150,000 females have some degree of anorexia. The War Against Boys In 2000, Sommers published The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. In th.... Discover the Christina Baehr popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Christina Baehr books.