Rape Hysteria by Faculty and Administrators, Part 3 / Misandry in Education

Earlier in this series we discussed the vagina monologues, a Feminist university play in which women dress up as vaginas, and where, in the original production, a 13-year-old girl is given drinks by a  24-year-old lesbian until she becomes drunk, has sex with her, and afterward says  “If it was rape, it was a good rape.” This play was performed on college campuses across the west for years with no objection by the academic community. From the magazine The National Review we hear of a much lighter version of the play, with a twist:

College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters of Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate “V-Day” (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. Two participating students, Monique Stuart and Andy Mainiero, have just received sharp letters of reprimand and have been placed on probation by the Office of Judicial Affairs. 

The costume of the P-Day “mascot” — a friendly looking “penis” named Testaclese, has been confiscated and is under lock and key in the office of the assistant dean of student affairs, John King.
The P-Day satirists are the first to admit that their initiative is tasteless and crude. But they rightly point out that V-Day is far more extreme. They are shocked that the administration has come down hard on their good-natured spoof, when all along it has been completely accommodating to the in-your-face vulgarity of the vagina activists. 

V-Day has now replaced Valentine’s Day on more than 500 college campuses (including Catholic ones). The high point of the day is a performance of Ensler’s raunchy play, which consists of various women talking in graphic, and I mean graphic, terms about their intimate anatomy. The play is poisonously anti-male. Its only romantic scene, if you can call it that, takes place when a 24-year-old woman seduces a young girl (in the original version she was 13 years old, but in a more recent version is played as a 16-year-old.) The woman invites the girl into her car, takes her to her house, plies her with vodka, and seduces her. What might seem like a scene from a public-service kidnapping-prevention video shown to schoolchildren becomes, in Ensler’s play “a kind of heaven.” 

Lollipops. Vagina lollipops.

The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus was plastered with flyers emblazoned with slogans such as “My Vagina is Flirty” and “My Vagina is Huggable.” There was a widely publicized “orgasm workshop.” On the day of the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape of–-guess what? Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires asking unsuspecting students questions like “What does your Vagina smell like?” None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands, probations, or confiscations.

The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed Testaclese reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America. 

Provost Kavanaugh and Testaclese

“Testaclese” tipped the scales when he approached the university Provost, Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking him/it for a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus “Penis Warrior,” the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom. After this incident, which was recorded on videotape, the promoters of P-Day were ordered to cease circulating their flyers and to keep Testaclese off campus grounds. Mindful of how school officers had never once protested any of the antics of Vagina warriors, the P-warriors did not comply. The Testaclese costume was then confiscated and formal charges followed.

It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a six-foot phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not to paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do. But that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing, year after year, on hundreds of campuses. In fact, P-Day at Roger Williams was mild by comparison. Wesleyan College hosted a “C***” workshop; Penn State held a “C***”-fest [both of which were named after crass four-letter names for female genitalia]. At Arizona State, students displayed a 40-foot inflatable plastic vagina. It was not confiscated and no one was ever threatened with probation.

Unhappily, P-Day may be the only effective means of countering V-Day with all its c-fests, graphic lollipops, intrusive questionnaires, outsized effigies of vaginas and its thematic anti-male play. The prospect of public readings from P-Monologues on campuses around the country just might be the reductio ad absurdum that could drive the vagina warriors to the bargaining table. The student activists opposed to V-Day will gladly cancel P-Day the moment the V-warriors abandon their vagina–fests.
But for the short term, college administrators should brace themselves. The rebels at Roger Williams are talking about a Free Testaclese Fund. And word is spreading to other campuses. P-Day and Testaclese will be back next year. And not just in Rhode Island.

Why is it the case among some faculty and administrators that sexual expression is pornographic – and hence crude – only when it is displayed by men? When we covered rape hysteria by students, we discussed the story from the student newspaper Harvard Crimson, in which a few Harvard students built a 9-foot “snow penis” on campus, which was torn down by a Feminist student who equated the erection of the sculpture to the support for rape. But focusing here on faculty and administrators, it is the section featuring a professor that presently concerns us:

The Harvard Snow Penis

Women’s Studies Lecturer Diane L. Rosenfeld, who teaches Women, Violence and the Law this semester, said that the implications of the snow phallus go beyond the legitimacy of the statue’s presence. “The ice sculpture was erected in a public space, one that should be free from menacing reminders of women’s sexual vulnerability,” Rosenfeld wrote in an e-mail yesterday.”

She said the snow penis follows a long line of public phallic symbols, including the Washington Monument and missiles. “Women do not need to be reminded of the power of the symbol of the male genitalia,” Rosenfeld said. “My guess is that they are constantly reminded of it in daily messages.” A discussion about feminist perspectives on the statue, sponsored by the Radcliffe Union of Students, will take place Tuesday night in the Adams House small dining room.

Some questions come to mind: based on what we have seen so far, is it likely that this Feminist perspective will be one that values male and female sexuality equally, or is it more likely to be a perspective that attaches a positive sign to one and a negative sign to the other? If the latter is the case, is it then more likely or less likely that the students will adopt the anti-male attitudes of their professors and join with her in contributing to a hostile learning environment for male students? And if such is the case, could we be making a better use of our academic institutions?

Dr. Christina Hoff-Sommers, a Feminist who disagrees with much of establishment Feminism, tells us in her book Who Stole Feminism of the driving attitudes behind this reform project:

The New Jersey Project for reforming the public schools circulated a document entitled “Feminist Scholarship guidelines.” The first guideline is unexceptionable: “Feminist scholars seek to recover the lost work and thought of women in all areas of human endeavor.”

Sounds good so far. Hoff-Sommers next says, “Feminist scholarship begins with an awareness that much previous scholarship has offered a white, male, Eurocentric, heterosexist, and elite view of ‘reality.’”

Men have all the best jobs! Male privilege!

This is a typical Feminist argument in academia: that scholarship has historically focused on the “greats” in society and history: war generals, presidents, great poets and great artists. In other words, people, ideas, and events who and which are “at the top,” and are the movers and shakers of the world. Their approach sounds benevolent, until you consider the fact that it’s not like they care about the under-representation of men at the bottom of society: the common man who died in the coal mine, or the lowly and unnamed soldier. We will explore more of this vein of thought more fully elsewhere. 

I include such quotes to demonstrate that these so-called scholarly guidelines aim to teach people – usually people who sit on committees and decide what gets published - to recognize how male scholars (allegedly) have traditionally thought, and once they are aware of it, to move away from publishing such material. But problems emerge when Feminist professors begin to stereotype what they believe to be male “ways of knowing,” or as they might instead say, “phallocentric epistemologies.” Dr. Hoff-Sommers goes on to say:

The guidelines elaborate on the attitude toward masculinist scholarship and methods by quoting the Feminist theorist Elizabeth Fee [who says]: “Knowledge was created by an act of aggression – a passive nature had to be interrogated, unclothed, penetrated, and compelled by man to reveal her secrets.” Fee’s resentment and suspicion of male “ways of knowing” follows a path well-trodden by such Feminist thinkers as Mary Ellman, [professor] Catharine MacKinnon, and Sandra Harding, whose views of patriarchal knowledge and science have quickly become central gender feminist doctrine.

Playing on the biblical double meaning of knowing to refer both to intercourse and to cognition, Ellman and MacKinnon claim that men approach nature as rapists approach a woman, taking joy in violating “her,” in “penetrating” her secrets. Feminists, says MacKinnon, have finally realized that for men, “to know has meant to fuck.” In a similar mood, Sandra Harding suggests that Newton’s Principles of Mechanics could just as aptly be called “Newton’s Rape Manual” (page 66).

Why does everything have to be about rape to certain Feminists? One might think that if they actually cared about expanding women’s autonomy, they would recognize that there is enough fear of rape in the world without needing to make it up out of nothing. But this is precisely the opposite of what they do. In the Chapter Five of Who Stole Feminism, Dr. Hoff-Sommers tells us,

Women: A Feminist Perspective is said to be the best-selling women’s studies textbook of all time. The first selection, “Sexual Terrorism” by Carole J. Sheffield, is a good example of how the Feminist classroom can “infuse” anxiety and rage.” Ms. Sheffield describes an “ordinary” event that took place early one evening when she was alone in a Laundromat:

“The Laundromat was brightly lit; and my car was the only one in the lot. Anyone passing by could readily see that I was alone and isolated. Knowing that rape is a crime of opportunity, I became terrified.” Ms. Sheffield left her laundry in the washer and dashed back to her car, sitting in it with the doors locked and the windows up. [Sheffield goes on to say] “When the wash was completed, I dashed in, threw the clothes into the drier, and ran back out to my car. When the clothes were dry, I tossed them recklessly into the basket and hurriedly drove away to fold them in the security of my house. Although I was not victimized in a direct, physical way or by objective or measurable standards, I felt victimized. It was, for me, a terrifying experience.” At home, her terror subsides and turns to anger: “Mostly I was angry at being unfree: a hostage of a culture that, for the most part, encourages violence against females, instructs men in the methodologies of sexual violence, and provides them with ready justification for their violence…following my experience at the Laundromat, I talked with my students about terrorization” (87-88).

If this event had occurred late at night – say, after dark – it would be understandable to possess a reasonable fear of being out alone – regardless as to whether one is female or male. But the timeframe of this event is “early one evening,” before dark. There is a fine line between prudence and paranoia, and by the time of day we are able to reasonably infer that she is crossing it. And more: she is teaching her students to see the imminent threat of rape everywhere. There are some people who are so strongly bound in the clutches of their self-imposed fears that they lack the ability to perform basic functions during normal daytime hours. What is often missed in such an approach is that we cannot empower women by teaching them to limit their autonomy by pretending they are always in danger of victimization when they are not. And we cannot build respect between both sexes by teaching one sex the irrational fear of the other.

Heterophobia

Daphne Patai and Norette Koertge, two former women’s studies professors, interviewed women’s studies students and recorded their perspectives in their book Professing Feminism. Here is one student’s experiences, which deserves to be quoted at length:

“Caroline, a social worker in her mid-twenties, says that the one Women’s Studies course she took at a private women’s college was more than enough. Caroline deplores ‘this ongoing knee-jerk reverse sexism which everyone tolerated and encouraged.” She later says, “The course was Introduction to Women’s Studies. I was a senior, and I was, I think, pretty confident by that time, and I remember clashing with the professor very quickly…In the class I took, the answer was always ‘men.’ Whatever the question was, the answer was ‘men.’ It could be, ‘What style of architecture is that?’ And the answer is, ‘Men’s architecture.’ Or, ‘Who contributes to all the violence in the world?’ ‘Men.’ ‘Who’s responsible for everything we endure?’ ‘Men.’

“I was involved with a man at the time, and I thought that he didn’t fit their categories of what men were like. And I also saw him as having been pressed into stereotypes of his own. When he’d been in high school, he took up computers. He’d been very nonathletic, hated team sports, wanted to read, wanted to fuss with his computers. And he was called a nerd and hassled constantly over this and abused in various ways.

And I felt like I really identified with that – I hadn’t been all that feminine in high school. I wore a black leather jacket, hung out with the guys, and people had made fun of me. I hadn’t been desirable as a woman; he hadn’t been desirable as a man…so I guess I was interested in a more global analysis, like: What is it in our society that creates some of these tensions? What is it that we’re doing to ourselves here? I’m not saying I wanted the whole course to be about this, but these questions weren’t acceptable at all, and I felt the professor responded really aggressively to me.

“The time that it really sort of came to a head was when we were talking about rape: ‘Rape – the act of violence that men do to women, that men do to women because they want to keep them down.’ And we got all these reasons why men rape women. And I thought, well, there’s this act of violence of men against women, and why don’t we explore a little bit why people are so frustrated and so violent and so angry that they do these things? And why don’t we take into consideration that men get raped too?

I had a friend in high school, a man, who was raped by a bunch of other men his age, and when I tried to enter this information, it was met with a stone wall: ‘Those statistics are insignificant compared with how many women are raped.’ And I thought, Well, how many men are reporting it? And why are you discounting what I’m trying to share here, which would be adding to the picture?

And I don’t remember the comment the professor made, but it was very condescending, to the effect: ‘Are you saying that rapists are just poor misunderstood people who should be patted on the back and sent out?’ And I’m thinking: You miserable bitch! You know, she was really like ‘Let me humiliate you in front of everyone,’ because of course, that was not what I was saying!

“I have friends who’ve been raped; it’s not like some far-away thing to me. It’s something to get really angry about and be upset about, but something to search for a better solution to than castration! But the only solution the professor was getting at was that men are the problem and without men there’d be a solution. There was no talk of real solutions (82-84).

A poster at UCLA

When discussing rape hysteria by students, we covered numerous demonstrations by primarily Feminist students, the attitudes of which were pervasively one of spite and hostility toward men and boys. At the end of those videos questions that are worth asking again: does this approach work toward helping victims of rape, or encourage others to work toward helping victims of rape? And if it is not about helping victims of rape, what is it really about? 

Freshman orientation at 60 colleges

And now that we are knee-deep in discussing rape hysteria by faculty and administrators, the time has come to ask the question: where are these students who we discussed in our earlier videos getting their anti-male attitudes? Are these students just randomly and out of the blue waking up one day with an attitude of hostility toward men and boys, or is that attitude being taught? We will continue to explore these questions in our next video in this series.

Rape Hysteria by Faculty and Administrators, Part 1 / Misandry in Education

In other videos on rape hysteria in education we discussed misandry by students. The time has come to more closely examine the role of faculty and administrators in creating and maintaining the culture of hostility toward male students in our education system.
 

At Vassar College, two male students were falsely accused of date rape. When they were found innocent, the assistant dean of students Catherine Comins argued that men who are unjustly accused can sometimes gain from the experience. Her argument is quoted in an article by Nancy Gibbs in the June 2001 online edition of TIME magazine. Comins says of the falsely accused, “They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. 'How do I see women?' 'If I didn't violate her, could I have?' 'Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?' Those are good questions." 

Let us remember that an assistant dean of students is the administrator who either adjudicates rape accusations, or presides over a panel consisting of faculty and sometimes students who adjudicate rape accusations. If a male assistant dean of students had suggested that women who are raped can gain from the experience, and that it is not an experience he would necessarily have spared them, how long would he have been an assistant dean of students? Male professors and administrators have been forced by others in education to apologize, or have been fired, for saying much less. But when Catherine Comins made the statement that male students essentially deserve to be falsely accused of rape, there was no outrage. There was no apology. There was nothing. It was one of the many anti-male elements that the culture of higher education just passed over as if nothing unexpected had happened.

From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), we hear this story:

[F]irst-year men at Hamilton College will be attending a mandatory presentation of "She Fears You," a program at which they will be pressed to acknowledge their personal complicity in a "rape culture" on Hamilton's campus and to change their "rape-supportive" beliefs and attitudes. First-year men were informed via e-mail that attendance was required and that they needed to bring their ID cards. "She Fears You" will be presented by Keith Edwards,"a national speaker and trainer on diversity and social justice and college men's issues [which, by the way, Keith Edwards describes himself as on his website]."

"She Fears You" is based on the theory that men need a "combined cognitive and emotional intervention" in order to change their "rape-supportive beliefs." Attendees will be told that when they “make this an environment where it is no longer acceptable in any way to objectify women or define masculinity as sexual conquest, or subordinate women's intelligence, capability, and humanity, or allow issues of racism, classism, and homophobia to go unabated, then this campus will be a better place for all of us to be.”

Don’t be misled by Keith Edward’s claim that he supports college men’s issues. As we can see, it is clear that She Fears You is not about addressing the needs of male students as a group, such as inequities concerning educational attainment:

Keith Edwards is part of what is called the pro-Feminist men’s movement. It is the men’s auxiliary wing of the Feminism, which is primarily found in academia.

First, why the title She Fears You? Are male students as a group categorically deserving of fear? Is any group categorically deserving of fear? It is also a well-documented criminological fact that people of color tend to commit violent crime, and in particular gang violence, at a higher rate than white people. Would it then be right for our universities to declare that black students as a group are categorically deserving of fear simply because they are black? What if, instead of stopping male violence against women, our universities want to stop violence black violence against white people by hosting an event titled “Whites Fear You” and forcing only black students to attend?

If you listen to the video, you will hear Edwards express regret over his humanity being taken away for being presumed a potential rapist simply for walking near women at night. But should his humanity be taken away simply because he is male? Is it the responsibility of every male student to prove that they are not rapists? Or - to use role reversal - is it the responsibility of any given black person to prove that he or she is a “good black person” unlike all those “other black people?”

This is the email from Hamilton College’s Dean of Students Nancy Thompson regarding the event:

Class of 2014

Orientation Continues
 

Men are required to attend

She Fears You

A presentation by

Keith Edwards, founder of Men Ending Rape

Monday, September 27

7:00

Chapel

Please be sure to bring your Hill Card

As FIRE later reports:

More than two weeks have passed since Keith Edwards delivered his "She Fears You" presentation at Hamilton College, yet Hamilton has still not responded to FIRE's letter requesting that attendance be made voluntary. Nor has Hamilton made any public statement about the event. (The event also wasn't filmed, so non-attendees will never know exactly what Edwards said that night.) 

We may never know whether Hamilton is too embarrassed to explain whether it really believes there is a "rape culture" on campus, or whether Hamilton is so arrogant as to choose not to engage its critics. But thanks to Managing Editor for Commentary (and former FIRE intern) J.P. Freire in the Washington Examiner, we now have a better idea of Edwards', shall we say, difficult to reconcile views on freedom of speech and conscience.

We appreciate the fact that Edwards took J.P.'s call. Edwards freely revealed that he usually charges $2,000 for a "She Fears You" lecture, but depending upon demand for a longer visit, that price could rise to $5,000 or even $10,000.

How many of these lectures has Edwards given? On his website he gives a list of 60 colleges and universities. Since the list ends in 2010, it is also possible that list might not be updated, and that there may be more. In academia, where you make a living from promoting ideas, you can make misandry into a career. As we recall from the blog post/video on the Duke lacrosse false rape case, when the group of 88 professors publicly signed a statement that presumed the three male students guilty simply because they were male, professor KC Johnson told the story of a women's studies professor who claimed that she entered higher education because it gave her the opportunity to "explore the idea that women were superior and that a new world could be built on that superiority."

Beyond asking what the presentation “She Fears You” says about Keith Edwards as an individual, more importantly, what does it say about the culture of the colleges and universities who not only gave it their stamp of approval, but paid thousands of dollars for this kind of presentation? If they are buying what he is selling, is the problem just Keith Edwards? And this is one thing that we will repeatedly come back to, because it is so central to understanding and addressing the systemic neglect and abuse of male students: the problem is not individuals like Keith Edwards, or Catherine Comins, or Kathy Rudy, or the rest of the individuals we will address in this series; the problem is the academic culture that creates and supports them. And so long as we focus exclusively on individual cases and fail to acknowledge that culture, we are missing the bigger picture.

Keith Edwards is right about one thing: the widespread dehumanization of men and boys is indeed a direct product of rape hysteria in our education system. [PLAY:] “My humanity is damn important to me and I don’t know how to do that.” Where we disagree is that Edwards believes in not only giving in to his own dehumanization, but also teaching men and boys to do the same, while I believe that the correct way is to assert your humanity by dissenting with the perspective that men and boys are deserving of fear simply because they are male.

If this kind of presentation were directed toward any other group, our current institutional champions of “diversity,” an ideological tribe of which Edwards is a part, would have responded very differently. Instead of taking the message at face value and asking “what is wrong with black people, or Hispanics, and so forth, our universities would be asking the correct question: “what is wrong with the culture of our educational institutions that we promote events fostering prejudice and bigotry against our own students based upon their membership in a particular genetic birth group? But they do not ask these questions, which they would ask with any other group, because in the culture of higher education, the system of moral checks and balances has broken down.

In a facially lower-key presentation titled "Asking for it," professor Harry Brod of the University of Northern Iowa  states that (concerning consent in sexual matters) "just because there's no 'no' does not mean there is a 'yes.'"

So according to Professor Brod, a woman who wants to have sex can nod her head, she can wink, lick her lips, smile, grab a man’s penis and pull him into her, he can be completely drunk and do nothing and she could be completely sober and make all the initiating moves, but if she doesn’t specifically say “yes,” he’s a rapist. This is not the legal definition of sexual assault. This is an ideological and political definition, under which I and many of my male friends are also rape victims.

 

His rationale is a lesson from his driver's ed instructor from over forty years ago: that consent is like the right-of-way that someone else gives you, and that you are not entitled to by default.
 

Beyond the obvious problematic element that men and women are not cars and a woman’s vagina is not a four-way intersection, there are other problems with his analogy – even if we accept it as self-evident. For example, when drivers give others the right of way, they do not rely on the other driver hearing their words, but by employing a variety of gestures, many of which are non-verbal, such as flashing their lights or using hand gestures – which is exactly what many people do when they consent to sex, but do not necessarily say yes. Another problematic factor is that when drivers approach intersections, many times they do not ask for or give the right of way at all, but instead take turns based upon whether the signal is green or red – another form of nonverbal communication.

While a disciple of Pro-Feminist ideology, Harry Brod is actually a professor of philosophy and religion. When it comes to ideologues among the faculty, it’s always interesting to see student feedback. So I checked up on him atRatemyprofessors.com. Here’s what two students had to say:

His class was based on personal agenda on his perception of men. Myself and others felt he attacked men for being men, the class has little to do with masculinity as a whole. He was most responsive to the women in the class speaking on men's issues solely from a fem. perspective. Almost made men feel bad for being men. Very pompous and not kind to men.

And another student commented, “Hates himself for being male, and loves radical feminism… Can I please have at least one teacher who doesn't have an agenda? Come on!”

The hysteria concerning sexual assault on campus has reached such a fever pitch that male students are now punished for promoting sexual violence for participating in minor sexual humor that does not even involve women at all. Another reportby the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education tells us:

In April 2012, members of the men's crew team wore T-shirts at Tufts' Spring Fling featuring a silhouette of a rowing team on a boat and the phrase "check out our cox" (referring to a boat's coxswain [which is “a sailor who has charge of a ship's boat and its crew and who usually steers”]). According to multiple accounts, several members were suspended from the team after a bias incident report was submitted due to the shirt's content, two senior captains were removed from their positions, and team members had to write apology letters. The accounts reported a dean exerting disciplinary pressure on the team, stating that the shirts promoted rape and aggression toward women. Additionally, a confidential source reported to FIRE that Tufts' rowing director ordered his assistants to choose a punishment, which he and the dean's office would then approve.

The details of this report can be confirmed by reading Tufts Daily, the university’s student newspaper.

So a shirt reading “check out our cox” promotes rape and aggression? It’s times like these that I don’t have to make an argument. Our education system writes the argument for me. Unfortunately, however, we are not halfway done discussing rape hysteria by faculty and administrators. We will discuss more in the future.