Day: January 8, 2001

Penn State Feminist’s Show How Far Feminist Movement Has Fallen

Penn State uses student and taxpayer funds to pay for sexually explicit feminist festival.

Disclaimer: This article includes descriptions and quotations of events that occurred at Penn State that some readers might find offensive. Unfortunately events filled with shocking and/or offensive displays are considered cutting edge by radical feminists.

Pennsylvania State University became embroiled in controversy after a November 18th program sponsored by feminists at the university. The program, “CuntFest,” was paid for entirely by student and taxpayer funds.

Sponsored by Womyn’s Concerns and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, the program garnered $10,000 from Penn State’s University Park Allocation Committee (UPCA), which is responsible for disbursing student fees and general funds earmarked for promoting student activities on campus.

UPAC claimed afterward that it was deceived about the nature of the activities, but as Eric Langborgh of Accuracy in Academia noted, what exactly did UPAC think it was getting when the two groups submitted a description that said the event would “feature woman-centered, cuntlovin’ fun entertainment”?

The events of that evening would be unbelievable if there weren’t so many precedents — and if the feminists who sponsored them didn’t immediately defend them against “right wing” attack.

(Again, this description is going to get very graphic because what happened at Penn State was very graphic.)

Langborgh wrote a long description of the events that he witnessed,

Walking in the host building’s door, potential audience members and other students just going about their business were unwittingly confronted with a four-foot tall ceramic model of a vagina. Conference organizers would then offer what appeared to be fruit juice poured from a spout just underneath the “clitoris” to passersby by asking, “Would you like some ‘pussy juice’?”

The event’s title takes its name from Inga Muscio, who read from her book, “Cunt: A Declaration of Independence,” as well as a new book she is working on.

In a new novel she is writing, for example, Muscio portrays a women who is gang raped and then becomes a serial killer who victimizes six families killing all of the fathers and sons while leaving the women untouched, with the protagonist saying, “They should not have mated with the beast. I left them their daughters.”

That was nothing compared to performance “artist” Jess Dobkin. Dobkin performed partially nude and clearly aimed to shock and titillate her audience rather than enlighten. Here’s one of the less explicit scenes that Langborgh describes,

Innuendo then took a back seat to nudity when she removed her top to reveal her breasts which she had painted to look like smiley faces with her nipples acting as a noses. Coupled with audible gasps from the crowd, she proceeded to suck each breast; presumably to enable her to subsequently thread strings through her pierced nipples. These strings were then used to maneuver her breasts like puppets as she stood behind a prop made to look like a brick house with two holes cut out for her breasts so they could “talk” to one another.

Later Dobbin showed a film she made called Butt-F—ing Bunny which featured paper puppets engaging in various sexual acts including the one described in the title.

Crude? Lewd? According to its organizers, as well as some of the participants, this sort of stuff is empowering for women and anyone who questions it is part of a right-wing backlash against the women’s movement.

Muscio, in particular, pointed out the presence of AIA’s Langborgh saying,

Your school is under attack by this group. They want students to not have access to funding unless it is something Accuracy in Academia thinks is okay. Personally that’s scary, and to me that’s scary as a human being. For you all, and for other people going to school, I’m really scared. It scares me to think that people would prefer to silence someone rather than just let everybody be, you know?

That claim really captures just how much feminism has degenerated from its original goals of sexual equality to a radical faith that seems to be largely unprincipled.

Where once the cry was to end oppression by removing discriminatory barriers to entry in universities, today the campus feminists claim that they are oppressed and silenced unless the state agrees to pay for their four-foot tall replica of a vagina and their speaker who will have her breasts talk to one another.

Sources:

Feminists festival upsets student, state legislator. Daryl Lang and Erica Zarra, The Digital Collegian [Pennsylvania State University], December 7, 2000.

Penn State Feminists Stage X-Rated Event on Students’ Dime. Eric Langborgh, Accuracy In Academia, December 2000.

Unfair attention is given to recent event on campus. Jared S. Cram, Letter to the editor, The Digital Collegian [Pennsylvania State University], December 8, 2000.

That Festival. Jeffrey A. Budney, December 7, 2000.

‘Cuntfest’ Promotes Rights, Responsibilities. Erika Dunsen, December 2000.

If You’re Going to Trash Talk

Brian Billick, coach of the Baltimore Ravens, defends his players’ trash talking saying,

Folks, when you go into the lion’s den, you don’t tippy-toe in. You carry a spear. You go in screaming like a banshee and you kick whatever door in and say, ‘where is the son of a bitch.’ If you go in any other way, you’re going to lose. Somebody has forgotten they had to fight their way up there last year.

Fine, but did Chris McAllister really need to say something as absurd as claiming that Eddie George “folded like a baby” after getting hit by Ray Lewis in an earlier game? And certainly if you’re going to dish it out, do not whine like a baby — as Billick did — because the Titans broadcast some of Billick’s comments on their Jumobtron just before the game (Billick had the nerve to suggest the action lacked class — which it did, but how would Billick recognize class if he saw it?)

The two things that annoy me most about sports these days are players who a) incessantly complain to referees about bad calls (it’
s part of the game, get over it) and b) spend more time trash talking than actually playing the game. It is as if it is no longer good enough to simply beat the opponent, but rather the opponent must be held in absolute contempt (and this attitude is highlighted most in the sports setting, but seems to be on that has spread throughout our society).

The Number One Problem with Super Bowl XXXV

Here’s the worst thing about this year’s Super Bowl: it is being broadcast by CBS. CBS has the worst set of football commentators I have had the misfortune to watch.

Mike Ditka demonstrated in New Orleans that he no longer has his pulse on what it takes to win in the National Football League and he provides further evidence of this every Sunday. That might not be so bad if he wasn’t paired with Jerry Glanville. I guess Glanville’s supposed to be comic relief, but, unlike Dennis Miller, he doesn’t even come close to being funny.

Randy Cross and Jim Nantz are not annoying or outrageous, but neither are they particularly interesting to watch. Aside from Dan Dierdorf and Phil Simms, CBS’ announcers are similarly dull and pointless.

On Super Bowl Sunday, CBS is actually going to air “MTV’S TRL @ THE SUPER BOWL.” Carson Daly shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Super Bowl.

Planetside and Play Balance

Daily Radar has a short preview of Planetside, the persistent online multiplayer FPS being developed by Verant (the Everquest folks). It looks like they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the problems that might make a persistent FPS frustrating, but I wonder what they’re going to do about the biggest problem with playing FPS online: the drastically different skill levels of players.

This is, of course, a problem with all games, but is especially so with an FPS since so much of the game depends on reflexes. Anytime I go online to play an FPS one of two things happens. Either I run around fragging neophyte players repeatedly until it gets boring or else some 14 year old completely owns me and I can barely aim my weapon before going down in a hail of rockets.

This is an even bigger problem when it comes to team-oriented games, where typically a server is often dominated by a group of people who probably play together frequently and simply own the other team (and it’s boring to be on either end).

Jon Katz, Pseudoscience and Memes

Even when he’s right, somehow Jon Katz manages to be wrong. This time around he reviews Walter Gratzer’s Undergrowth of Science. Gratzer’s book has receive a lot of positive reviews and although I haven’t read his book I’ve read a lot of other things he’s written and Undergrowth of Science is probably well worth checking out. One of the major problems today is that Gratzer’s message isn’t self-evidence — most people seem to have a very unrealistic image of how science operates, which makes them gullible recipients of often distorted media messages about science.

This is why I suspect so many Internet-spread myths work so well — the Internet tales mimic closely mainstream sensationalistic reporting.

Anyway, while Katz goes on about how horrible it is that people buy into Pseudoscience, he slips in a bit of his own, writing,

In the media page, these scientific stumbles are particularly dangerous, as they become powerful memes that are rapidly and virally transmitted to the general population by information technologies like TV and the Net.

Memes? Yuck. I agree with Martin Gardner’s assessment that memes are simply not scientifically useful concepts, but rather represent an extremist sociobiological position that is untenable. Gardner notes that in The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore goes so far as to say that the self is an illusion.

Sometimes, for example, I am unsure what to think about some new phenomena. So I find every article on the topic I can on the Internet, print out the most promising looking ones, read the articles and then try to make up my mind. According to Blackmore I am living a lie. What is really going on is a competition between different memes in my brain which gives me the illusion of free choice, but in fact what I finally decide about the matter is dictated completely by the memes,

The self is not the initiator of actions, it
does not ‘have’ consciousness and it does not ‘do’ the deliberating. There is no truth in the idea of an inner self inside my body that controls the body and is conscious. Because this is false, so is the idea of my conscious self having free will.

While I tend to agree with the sociobiological position a great deal, it is this sort of extreme and clearly false claim that makes people reject sociobiology altogether as inherently unscientific and absurd. I assume that Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others would object as superstitious the claim that a person was literally motivated to perform a given action because a demon inhabited his or her body, and yet the claim that memes and genes are responsible for all human actions is simply this demonic claim wrapped up in scientific finery.

Tolkien Family Struggles

A lot of people (including me) are looking forward to the release of the Lord of the Rings films (assuming they don’t suck), but among those less than thrilled by the move is the Tolkien family. According to the Daily Telegraph (UK), the Tolkien family has been hounded by fans of the books who make themselves a nuisance, and have had no input on the films.

Of course the latter fact is due partly to the family’s opinion that the books should not be made into films. According to Richard Crawshaw of The Tolkien Society, “The Tolkien family are definitely not on board as far as the film is concerned.The general view is that there is not a need for it as it is a book of words and was not created to be a dramatic presentation.”

Father John Tolkein, one of JRR Tolkien’s sons, tells the Telegraph that, “The Tolkien family is under perpetual abuse of one kind or another. It goes on all the time. I am anticipating endless bother when the film actually comes out.”