Slouching Towards Gomorrah (35 page)

Students subjected to propaganda in the name of history will graduate with no clear comprehension of what took place and what was important. Students whose instruction is in fighting “isms” and giving recognition to different sexual groups and cultures of disability are unlikely to graduate with any knowledge that would qualify them for positions other than as sensitivity counselors. As part of their campaign to convert higher education into a propaganda tool, feminists are deforming literary studies by seeking to discover classical allusions to feminism. George Will recorded a few of the choicer items:

Radical feminists, then, are contributing more than their share to the dumbing of America. And not just America. Oxford University Press has announced
Ideologies of Desire
, “a startling new
series in the cultural study of sex, gender, sexuality and power: redefining the meaning of erotics and politics!” The Press informs us that sex is not a matter of physiology but of culture. “The aim of the series is to illuminate both the play of desire in the workings of ideology and the play of ideological forces in the formation of sexual experiences—and, ultimately, to map more precisely the available avenues of cultural resistance to the contemporary institutional and discursive regulation of sex.“

That the object of these courses is to indoctrinate students with an all-inclusive condemnation of American or Western culture is shown by the frequent expansion of the feminist accusation from the victimization of females to a charge of general oppression. One feminist professor argues, “All students suffer when the more volatile issues central to feminist analysis … [such as] racism, poverty, incest and rape, battering, lesbianism, and reproductive freedom … are dropped from a woman’s studies course.“
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It seems odd at first glance, given this wide-ranging list of complaints, that the programs are not changed from women’s studies to oppression studies. Perhaps it is not so odd, however. If faculty representing all of the oppressed were brought in, feminists might lose control of the curriculum and the funds. Yet it is in keeping with feminism’s revolutionary neo-Marxism that the movement attacks bourgeois culture on many fronts.

As one might suspect from their hostility to men, marriage, and family, radical feminists are very much in favor of lesbianism. This involves more than the demand that lesbianism be accepted by society as just another “lifestyle “They want not only lawful lesbian marriages but “reproductive rights” for lesbians. That means the right to bear children through artificial insemination and the right to adopt one’s lesbian partner’s child. Since sperm is sold freely in the United States, much more freely than in other nations, there are lesbian couples raising children. It takes little imagination to know how the children will be indoctrinated.

In its effort to transform the curriculum, a National Women’s Studies Association conference, attended by about 700 administrators, teachers, and students, gave major consideration to including lesbian issues in feminist programs.
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The Lesbian Caucus was one of the largest contingents at the conference. Among the presentations were “Teaching Queer: Incorporating Gay and Lesbian Perspectives
Into Introductory Courses”; “War on Lesbians”; “Lesbian Perspectives on/in Literature”; “Lesbian Theory in Poetry”; and “Dykeotomy.” Not surprisingly, there is in women’s studies programs a good deal of proselytizing for lesbianism. At the University of Washington, a women’s studies instructor showed the class how to masturbate, stating that “the preferable tool is a tongue, a woman’s tongue.“
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The objectives of radical feminists are not confined to the recruitment of converts through women’s studies programs alone. Their aims are imperialistic. The feminist influence has spread to other departments and graduate schools. It is most visible to outsiders in the process of faculty recruitment, where preference is given to women and minorities. A young man I know went to the American Association of Law Schools convention in Washington, the traditional market for those desiring teaching jobs. He entered the hotel and passed a room marked “Women’s Hospitality Room.” Through the open door he saw young women having Danishes and coffee and chatting amicably with one another. Next he came to the “Minorities Hospitality Room,” and observed the same activities. He walked on and discovered that there was no hospitality room he could enter. He and the other white males stood around the lobby until the interviewing began.

The same young man, possessed of splendid records at both Harvard College and Law School, and a clerk to a court of appeals judge and to Justice Anthony Kennedy, the sort of credentials law schools used to hunger for in their teaching applicants, applied for a position at the law school of the University of Texas. He was, however, in competition with a Mexican-American lesbian who had graduated well below the middle of her law school class. She got the job. A memorandum from a member of the appointments committee explained to the faculty that she should be hired because “She does appeal to three constituent groups.“
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The point is not merely that white males are being subjected to sexual and racial discrimination in higher education, though that is certainly an outrage. The point is also that faculties are lowering their standards in hiring in order to be politically correct. That necessarily lowers the quality of education they offer their students and the standards of scholarly publication. A friend of mine, a law school professor, resigned from his school’s appointments
committee because the conversations he had with applicants likely to be hired were inferior in intellectual content to the conversations he had with his students.

Radical feminist insistence upon seeing slights, harassment, and male victimization of women everywhere has made campuses, workplaces, and society less comfortable places. The eagerness of radical feminists to see insult in every male action, coupled (if one dare use that word) with the spinelessness of the supposedly oppressive patriarchy, has led to so much discomfort and loss of freedom. Some of women’s complaints are merely funny, though they do reveal a mindset: A young woman at the University of Pennsylvania who wore a short skirt complained of a “mini-rape” because a young man walked past her and said, “Nice legs.”
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At the University of Maryland, some female students posted the names of male students selected at random, young men about whom they knew nothing, under the heading “Potential Rapists.” The message was that all men are potential rapists, though the men actually named probably did not find much comfort in that.

Far more serious are the accusations of actual rape when nothing of the sort occurred. A female student came to a male student’s quarters with her toothbrush, planning to stay the night. The next morning she was seen having a peaceable breakfast with the man. Later she charged him with rape and he was briefly held in jail.
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Accusations of date rape are flung freely by women who consented and later changed their minds about what they did. Universities have capitulated by creating rape-prevention and sexual-harassment workshops that offer virulently anti-male propaganda. It is little wonder that young men are uncertain about themselves and their relationship with women and, perhaps for self-protection, perhaps because they have been brainwashed, tend usually to take the women’s side of issues.

Male faculty also feel the lash of feminist anger. The use of “insensitive” language in the classroom often results in formal complaints being filed, followed by a hearing notable for its lack of the rudiments of due process, and then suspension or a requirement of submitting to sensitivity training. Required sensitivity training is a humiliating experience, whether it is imposed by a university or, as is increasingly frequent, by a corporation. (Corporations are heavily into diversity training, apparently in part
because federal regulators pressure them.) Nor is it usually possible for the professor or employee to retain his dignity by refusing to accept such coercion. That would bring dismissal, after which no other employment is likely to be available—other universities or businesses will be reluctant to hire someone found guilty of insensitivity to women. The feminists at the new organization will be alerted and will object to the man’s employment. Who would want to hire the possibility, indeed the certainty, of more trouble with feminists?

Sensitivity training is often required even of people who have not displayed “insensitivity.” Cornell’s training session for resident advisers featured an X-rated homosexual movie. Pictures were taken of the advisers’ reactions to detect homophobic squeamishness.
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Thus, entering freshmen in colleges are increasingly subjected to sessions indoctrinating them in the correct attitudes not only to women but to homosexuals and members of minority groups. The object is thought control. As a reader of
Measure
(a publication of the University Center for Rational Alternatives, an organization dedicated to preserving the traditional virtues of scholarship and teaching in universities) said of compulsory training dictated by the Department of Education: “[It] is not enough for citizens to obey the law, they must be reeducated to love Big Brother”
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Often feminist complaints seem to reflect less a feeling of real outrage than a desire to provoke a confrontation and to intimidate. Radical feminists today, like the radical students of the Sixties, have discovered that they have the power to make the Establishment cringe and back down, and so their demands escalate. At Penn State University, a female English professor had to move her class into the arts building because of lack of space elsewhere. Hanging in the classroom were five museum reproductions: Goya’s “The Naked Maja,” a depiction of the crucifixion, a Madonna and child, the portrait of a youth, and a pastoral scene. Some male students snickered at the nude. Instead of ignoring them, telling them to grow up, or taking the picture down, the professor formally demanded that the administration remove it, thus forcing the school to take an official position. After lengthy negotiations which included considering the suggestion of a “diversity expert” to hang a painting of a nude male, the administration removed the
picture. A spokeswoman for the Womyn’s Concerns Committee said that “these older paintings served as a type of pornography—
Playboy
wasn’t around back then.” She added: “I don’t think our society is capable of dealing with paintings such as these.“
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Society had dealt comfortably with Goya’s masterpiece for well over a century, until a feminist chose to make a major issue of it.

Not the least of the feminists’ sins is their mangling of the language. “Womyn” or “wimmin” for “women,” just to avoid the hated letters M-E-N, is an atrocity. But it is not much better to go to a restaurant and be informed that your “waitperson” will be with you shortly. So ideologically crazed are some feminist academics that their seminars are now called “ovulars.“

So alienating are the messages of the women’s studies programs that Professor Sommers writes that she would like to see some of the more extreme institutions (e.g., Wellesley College, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Mills, and the University of Minnesota) put warning labels on the first page of their bulletins:

To that warning label Sommers might have added “You are also likely to have a badly educated daughter.” The young women who are lured into women’s studies should be spared what they obtain there: total immersion in a false world view coupled to a fourth-rate education. While other students are studying history, mathematics, science, languages, and similarly useful disciplines, those in women’s studies programs are working on acquiring belligerent attitudes and misinformation. Instead of preparing students for the world, the programs impose severe handicaps upon
them. Robert Nisbet offers the “affecting story” of a young woman who majored at her university in eco-feminism, and graduated with honors. She went to Washington, D.C., a city richly endowed with lobbies for ecology and feminism. Because of her dual degree, she assumed that a well-paying job would be waiting. “But even ecological and feminist lobbies require people who can read, write, count, and in general ratiocinate; she thus became one of the large number of genteel unemployables.“
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When later in life the products of radical feminist education fail to achieve as they had hoped, they will undoubtedly blame the patriarchal system by which, they have been taught, they and all other women are oppressed. In compensation for providing poor educations, then, the women’s studies programs offer their victims a ready-made, all-purpose alibi. They, and we, will be paying the price for years to come.