Bruce Bawer Quotes
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In 1970, Women's Lib preached universal sisterhood and resistance to "patriarchy" anywhere and in any form; today, Women's Studies, like contemporary establishment feminism generally, is meekly multicultural, treating non-Western social practices with deference even when they involve the brutal subjection of females.
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When, over lunch in Philadelphia, I ask the distinguished University of Pennsylvania historian, Alan Charles Kors about Cultural Studies, he shakes his head in dismay. "Cultural Studies," he laments, "is now dominant in all departments of literature and is increasingly big in history, sociology, and cultural anthropology, though less so in political science." His own capsule definition of Cultural Studies? "It sees culture as a means of assigning roles, power, obedience, and resources—and examines the way in which culture accomplishes that.
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Apparently, lesbians and gay men who have no desire "to become queer" have failed at a task that is obligatory for them, whether or not they are aware of it. Halperin, like Foucault, in short, is yet another busybody who has an agenda for other people's lives.
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The denunciation and smearing of truly gifted people like Rodriguez—people the Chicano community should be proud of—by the self-appointed gatekeepers of Chicano Studies is, alas, an everyday spectacle. Did anyone in the Chicano Studies community even take note when Dana Gioia, who is one of the best poets of his generation and happens to be half Mexican American, was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002? No, because he made it on his merits and not by being a victimization hustler.
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Christina Hoff Sommers quotes one professor's compliant about "students who have been trained to take a 'feminist perspective'": "For them reason itself is patriarchal, linear, and oppressive." In other words, Women's Studies agrees with the Victorians that women are the less intellectual sex; the difference is that in the view of Women's Studies this doesn't make them inferior but superior.
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Chesler cites the claim by the Palestinian American writer Suha Sabbagh that Western feminists, simply by writing about Muslim women, exert "a greater degree of domination" over those women "than that actually exercised by men over women within Muslim culture." A brown woman in (say) some Pakistani village, then, is actually more oppressed by some white woman tapping away at a computer at some American university she's never heard of than by a man who's beating and raping her in her home.
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The most important of these activists was Jimmy Garrett, a member of both the Black Panthers and SNCC. Garrett led discussion groups at which, as he later explained, "we would talk about ourselves seeking identity, and stuff like that. A lot of folks didn't even know they were black. A lot of people thought they were Americans".
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By the end of Barber's talk, this event she's celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury—a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference.
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The point here is that straight men, by definition, have nothing to cry about, ever—since, after all, the hold all the cards in contemporary society. What's bizarre is that the author of these words spent forty years of her life married (happily, by all accounts, including her own) to a straight man. The only way to reconcile such rhetoric with her actual life and feelings is to recognize that Sedgwick truly is engaged in an act of performance here—playing a role, putting one over on us.
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Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.
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The most remarkable thing in Binder's article may be her reference to a Women's Studies professor at the University of Michigan who, in Binder's words, worries that Fat Studies "may lead to a social proselytizing rather than serious study." In short, identity studies are becoming so far removed from any hint of academic or intellectual legitimacy that even teachers of a more established and only moderately asinine disciplines are reacting to the far more extreme asininity of newer ones.
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Unsurprisingly, given the eagerness of professors and students of identity studies to claim as many labels for themselves as possible, some individuals have sought to expand the definition of disability to include … well, themselves. At the "Wrong/ed Bodies" session at the Cultural Studies conference, Angela Lea Nemecek complained that when she breastfed in her office at the University of Virginia, she was made to feel as if she had a disability. In short, her breastfeeding was "constructed in the workplace" as a disability. Therefore, she reasoned, breastfeeding is a disability and should be protected under the Americans with Disability Act.
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But Friedan and Greer’s movement had passed them by: rape hysteria became fully integrated into mainstream feminism, resulting in such events as the so-called Take Back the Night rallies at colleges around America, which are premised on the idea that when darkness falls over the quad, male students metamorphose, werewolf-like, into potential rapists.
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Straight Americans need an education of the heart and soul. They must understand - to begin with - how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul.