Yesterday I wrote about the provocative newspaper that the Independent Women’s Forum has been running in some campus newspapers. In April the University of Califronia-Los Angeles student newspaper, the Daily Bruin ran the ad. In May, two UCLA campus groups — the Coalition for the Fair Representation of Women and the UCLA Clothesline Project announced they would organize a protests against the Daily Bruin demanding that the newspaper apologize for running the ad and print a retraction.
Now certainly these groups have a right to protest whomever they want, but the rhetoric from campus feminists is so hilariously inept that it only buttresses the IWF’s contention that Women’s Studies departments foster an anti-intellectual environment.
According to the Clothesline Project executive co-chair Christie Scott, the IWF advertisement “was a violent ad, a very hostile ad. It breeds a very bad attitude toward campus women.” Anything which disagrees with campus feminist rhetoric apparently breeds a bad attitude toward women — at least a bad attitude toward those women’s studies students who blindly accept everything they reread.
Tina Oakland, the director the UCLA Center for Women and Men went further saying, “It [the ad] strikes me as revisionist history. It’s the same thing as the people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.”
Oakland demonstrated her own faithfulness to accuracy, however, by claiming that both the FBI and the American Medical Association cited the statistic that one in four college women have been victims of attempted rape or rape. In fact, although many feminist sources tend to attribute this claim to the FBI or AMA, this claim is completely false (in fact the FBI estimates rape rates are far lower than 1 in 4).
If you’re going to run around accusing other people of being philosophical counterparts to Holocaust revisionists, it would behoove one to at least get your own facts straight.
As Christina Hoff Sommers told National Review, “This is a common response, hysteria and irrational reactions. Free and open discussion doesn’t exist in most academic forums. Instead of research or debate, they hold rallies and protests — not exactly the most reasonable way to spark discussion.”
Of course when you’re touting statistics and don’t even know the source, much less the methodology behind the statistics, a reasonable discussion is the last thing you’d want.
Source:
The Ladies Doth Protest. Ben Domenech, National Review Online, May 18, 2001.