This column was written in response to a protest by 10 to 15
students angered by a column I wrote criticizing claims by a campus
group that 1 in 4 college women are victims of rape/attempted rape. The
campus paper refused to run this reply.
“If you cannot answer a man’s argument do not panic. You can always
call him names.”
-Oscar Wilde
Since the first column
I wrote for the Western Herald
concerned a protest by Students Addressing Gender Equality directed at
the Western Herald, it was only fitting that SAGE return the favor by
protesting me over my column on rape
prevalence.
While I am certainly glad
to see students of any credo speaking their minds, there is a peculiar
aspect to much of SAGE’s criticism which seems a bit odd. Namely,
the group makes the claim that merely pointing out flaws in the 1 in 4
statistic pushed by the Women’s Resource Center could have harmful
and dangerous consequences.
For millennia this has been
the rallying cry of fundamentalists of all stripes, whether religious,
statist or feminist. The Roman Catholic Church once feared catastrophic
results if its adherents learned the Earth was not at the center of the
universe. The religious right today fears what happens when people learn
about birth control and abortion options. And today the fundamentalist
feminists despise it when anyone offers any sort of criticism of their
dogma.
The advantage of portraying
a claim as a danger in itself is, of course, that the protester can then
avoid addressing the real issue which is whether or not the claim is accurate.
If it is dangerous to say that the 1 in 4 statistic is inaccurate, then
there is no need to sully ones hands digging around the complicated and
often controversial studies and analysis of rape prevalence. Why worry
about spending a few afternoons in the library searching through journals
when everything one needs to know can be reduced to a catchy slogan to
write on a placard at a protest?
It should not come as a surprise,
however, that SAGE members inevitably end up claiming speech they agree
with is safe while speech they disagree with is dangerous, since in a
nutshell that is one of the major themes of the sort of fundamentalist
feminism popular on campuses today.
Students taking Women’s
Studies 200, for example, are required to read Issues in Feminism an introductory
textbook for that class compiled and edited by Sheila Ruth. In the introduction
to that book, Ruth sets the tone for a woman’s study pedagogy by
addressing the issue of harassment by men in women’s studies classes.
What constitutes harassment
in Ruth’s mind? Excerpting from an essay by Marcia Bedard and Beth
Hartung, Ruth agrees with those authors that harassment includes: “challenging
facts … to undermine the credibility of feminist reading materials and
instructors,” “dominating class discussions (talking too much
and too long …),” “aggressively pointing out minor flaws in
statements of other students or the instructor, stating the exception
to every generalization,” and “taking intransigent and dogmatic
stands on even minor positions.”
In other words taking a position
in opposition to the professor constitutes harassment (and given the endemic
logical and factual errors in Ruth’s book, those teaching from it
must experience a lot of this “harassment.”) Since Ruth explicitly
defines the goal of women’s studies not as truth seeking but as achieving
certain political ends, the end result of that idea tends to be a mind
numbing conformity to political doctrine rather than critical thinking.
The other reinforcing paradigm
at Western Michigan University is the “social justice” quests
staged at regular intervals by professor of social work Don Cooney. A
few years ago SAGE and Cooney tried to pressure the Western Herald into
dropping ads for Deja Vu because they both believe pornography harms women.
The model Cooney uses is that
of a righteous zealot. Certain of the absolute boon or bane of something
such as pornography, Cooney uses political pressure to attempt to either
institutionalize or remove something. This is a fine strategy so long
as one is infallible. It is a disaster when you make a mistake.
There is no room in that world
for reasonable people to disagree, since all issues are boiled down to
their core. Supporting pornography is akin to supporting violence against
women. Criticizing a study of rape becomes equivalent in the mind of SAGE
protesters of denying rape altogether. SAGE members learned well from
Cooney’s example.
But unlike some people, I
do not believe WMU students are mindless zombies who lose all power of
reason under my or Linda Lumley’s influence. Students can read my
column on rape. They can read the Women’s Resource Center’s
brochures on rape. They can go to the library and read the study which
is the cause of all the controversy. And then they can make up their own
mind.
What’s so dangerous about
that?