Graham Good describes the categories of identity studies: “Each individual belongs to three [categories]: white or nonwhite, male or female, heterosexual or homosexual. The first category in each case is perceived as dominant, the second as oppressed.
The new sectarianism can be defined as (1) the understanding of human experience primarily in terms of the identity category of the experiencer; (2) the reversal of the previous power relations.” (22) Good: “Each of the categories of identity is reinforced by an external enemy that helps to create group unity by causing the group to feel it is under constant threat. These threats are racism, sexism, and homophobia (RSH) – the contemporary forms of Evil.” (Humanism, Betrayed, 25) Add Islamophobia. Jim Goad: “In many instances, bitterness over having been ‘the oppressed’ seems to be little more than jealousy over not having been the oppressor….to see them [black supremacists] as fundamentally different from white supremacists is dishonest” (Redneck Manifesto, 210) The difference is they may have no alternative but violence, whereas whites can nurse their wounded pride.
As a white, male, heterosexual, and Christian, I am presumably a racist, sexist, homophobe and Islamophobe in the terms of identity students, or social justice warriors. Dinesh D’Souza: “In a manual for race and gender education, distributed by the American Sociological Association, Brandeis University Women’s Studies professor Becky Thompson acknowledges the ideological pre-suppositions of her basic teaching methodology: ‘I begin the course with the basic feminist principle that in a racist, classist and sexist society we have all swallowed oppressive ways of being, whether intentionally or not. Specifically, this means that it is not open to debate whether a white student is racist or a male student is sexist. He/she simply is.’” (Illiberal Education, 8) David Horowitz refers to the “progressive shibboleth…that all whites were racist.” (Left Illusions, 237)
In this view it seems that only whites can be racist, only men can be sexist, only heterosexuals can be homophobic, and maybe only Christians and Jews can be Islamophobic, but Christians can also be Jew haters or anti-Semites. Similarly, it may be that only whites, men, Christians, and heterosexuals can be guitly of hate speech. Horowitz: “The fact is that it is not tolerable in America to hate blacks, but it is okay in our politically correct culture to hate white people.” (Hating, 27) This ideology and terminology seems to be a way of deflecting SJWs’ and feminists’ hatred towards white, male, Christian heterosexuals and projecting it on to the objects of their hatred.
Jesus taught to love one’s enemies. Muhammad killed his enemies, and the Koran teaches this. Brigitte Gabriel: “The prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, was a warrior who preached violence and the slaughter of thousands in establishing and spreading Islam. He participated in seventy-eight battles and approved the beheading of prisoners taken in battle. He ordered the assassination those who offended him….He said to his Muslim followers: ‘Whoever relinquishes his faith, Kill him.’ He also said: ‘I have been ordered by Allah to fight with people till they testify that there is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger.’” (Because They Hate, 202)
Good concludes: “Both Hamlet’s vision of world culture as a set of prisons (his own being one of the worst) and his solipsism (thought creates reality) are characteristic of today’s cultural studies….the strongest influence on cultural studies is Michel Foucault’s carceral vision of society and all its institutions as a prison.” (75-76) Leonard Cohen advises, “’If you find yourself in a prison, you know, there’s a way to live graciously in a prison, but there’s no point in denying that it’s a prison. We are often in a prison, and it’s important to recognize it and treat it like a home.’” (from Inside the Music, 201)
Paul Russell cites American author Barbara Ehrenreich, who “perceives an increasing impediment to conversation as the former central culture fractures and atomizes, leaving putative conversationalists stranded within their mutually hostile ‘interest groups.’ The ever-growing question be-[77]comes what to talk about with strangers.” (Bad, 77-78) Stanley Crouch describes identity politics as a “form of segregation in which distinctions never rise free of one form or another of separatist politics.” (The High Ground; from Best African American Essays: 2009, 282) Jordan Peterson (15:35): “You know what you call people you can’t talk to? Enemies. And if we want to divide our society into armed camps of emnity all we have to do is keep doing what we’re doing. And I would recommend that we don’t do this. I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time.”
Shelby Steele calls the new sectarianism “a ‘new sovereignty,’ in which each minority carves out a sovereign territory and identity based on the atavisms of race, ethnicity, and gender. And this new atavistic sovereignty supersedes the nation’s sovereignty and flaunts its democratic principles. One is a black or a woman before one is an American.” (A Dream Deferred, 128) Steele cites a chairperson of a Women’s Studies Department: “’You must know as a black that they won’t accept us’ – meaning women, blacks, presumably others – ‘in the English Department. It’s an oppressive environment for women scholars. We’re not taken seriously there.’…She said it was a waste of valuable energy to spend time fighting ‘old white males.’” (171)
Steele in 1998: “Today there are more than five hundred separate Women’s Studies Departments and programs in American colleges and universities. There are nearly four hundred independent Black Studies Departments or programs, and hundreds of Hispanic, Asian, and Native American programs.” (172) Steele: “the justification for separate women’s and ethnic studies programs has virtually nothing to do with strictly academic matters and everything to do with the kind of group-identity politics in which the principle of collective entitlement has resulted.” (173) Steele: “To keep alive the urgency needed to justify itself, the grievance organization will….work to inspire a perpetual sense of grievance in its constituency so that grievance becomes the very centerpiece of the group itself. To be black, or a woman, or gay is, in the eyes of the NAACP, NOW, or Act Up, to be essentially threatened, victimized, apart from the rest of America.” (175) Steele concludes: “The New Sovereignty is ultimately a vanity. It is a narcissism of victims, and it brings only a negligible power at the exorbitant price of continued victimhood. And all the while integration remains the real work.” (185)
Camille Paglia describes “clamorous, competitive special-interest groups. The universities led the way by creating a ghetto of black studies, which begat women’s studies, which in turn begat gay studies….Each [99] has simply made up its own rules and fostered its own selfish clientele, who have created a closed system in which scholarship is inseparable from politics….Rational discourse is not possible in an atmosphere of such mob derangement.” (Vamps and Tramps, 99-100) Paglia: “Women’s studies is institutionalized sexism….It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women. Sunk in a cocoon of smug complacency, they are blind to their own clichéd Rousseauist ideology. Feminists are always boasting of their ‘diversity’ and pluralism…[58].Women’s studies is a jumble of vulgarians, bunglers, whiners, French faddicts, appratchiks, doughface party-liners, pie-in-the-sky utopianists, and bullying, sanctimonious sermonizers. Reasonable, moderate feminists hang back and, like good Germans, keep silent in the face of fascism….Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.” (Free Women, Free Men, 58, 60, 61)
The new sects are like religions in which white men are devils and women are goddesses – as in ideological feminism and Women’s Studies – or black men are gods – as in Black Nationalism. D’Souza: “Women’s Studies professor Sandra Gilbert of the University of California at Davis compares feminism to a religious conversion, noting that ‘most feminist critics speak like people who must bear witness, people who must enact and express in their own lives and words the revisionary sense of transformation.’” (Illiberal, 211) Daniel J. Flynn: “ideology serves as a proxy religion for people who view themselves as too smart for traditional religion. And since worshiping a god is an impossible task for the self-obsessed, the intellectual moron worships himself….’If you’re on the wrong road,’ C.S. Lewis famously wrote, ‘progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.’” For too long, intellectuals have been traveling briskly down the wrong paths, taking the rest of us along for the ride.” (Intellectual Morons, 5, 8)
Steele: “The white racist believes that God made whites superior.” (123) Steele: “White Americans became a stigmatized group after the civil rights victories of the sixties. They became identified with the shame of white racism that the nation had finally acknowledged….Since the sixties whites have had to prove a negative – that they are not racist – in order to establish their human decency where race is concerned.” (156) Steele: “The idea of racial equality has given a new and unique contour to the white American experience. Perhaps a White Like Me is now called for, a book that looks into the world behind the white stigma and reports back to us.” (122)
In 2000 Richard Zeller wrote, “now, any challenge to the campus sacred cows – feminism, affirmative action, and multiculturalism – is denounced as evil.’” (from Left Illusions, 238) Warren Farrell: “Liberals call it sexism if it hurts women, but blame men if it hurts men. For example, male-only clubs hurt women and therefore liberals call it sexism; male-only draft registration hurts men so liberals blame men for causing the wars they’ve just required only men to fight.” (Myth, 234) David Macey: “On Armistice Day 1971, wreathes were laid on the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triumphe and banners were unfurled proclaiming: ‘One in two men is a woman’ and ‘There is someone more unknown than the unknown soldier: his wife.’” (The Lives of Michel Foucault, 319)
Marilyn French: “Pregnancy is the greatest training, disciplining device in the human experience. Compared to it, army discipline that attempts to humble the individual, get him into the impersonal line that can function like a machine, is soft.” (The Women’s Room) John Gordon comments: “You think the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a moving memorial? Save your tears for the Womb of the Unknown Mother.” (The Myth of the Monstrous Male, 228)
A recent study distinguishes between hostile and benevolent sexism; actress Emma Watson believes that the latter can be overcome by consensual chivalry. Politically sensitive musicians might consider purging their repertoire of songs or genres that could be interpreted as expressions of benevolent sexism, as well as benevolent racism. Alternatively, their songs could portray gentlemen following a code of consensual chivalry and white liberals pursuing consensual uplift.
Horowitz describes a tactic in the gender debate: “To celebrate and sanctify its false religious faith, the feminist left proposes to take the one holiday a year dedicated to the fallible love that men and women manage to show for each other, and turn it into a day of rage against men, as though men had the answers. As though vanquishing men, like defeating the devil himself, could redeem the world.” (Left Illusions, 317) If V-Day represents the apocalyptic vision of “the feminist left,” they would doubtless regard the final line of the jazz standard My Funny Valentine, “each day is Valentine’s Day,” as dystopian; therefore, a performance of this song could be interpreted as an act of anti-feminist musical harrassment. Perhaps each day is V-Day to the feminist faithful. However, such a lifestyle transgresses the Biblical injunction, “let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” (Eph. 4:26) Like sabbatarians, literalist Christian V-Day participants might cease their participation at sunset.
Horowitz: “In a manifesto prepared for the occasion, the organizers defined the purpose of the renaming as an effort to proclaim ‘Valentine’s Day as V-Day until the violence stops. When all women live in safety, then it will be know as Victory Over Violence Day.’ Of course, the idea that someday all women will ‘live in safety’ is a utopian fantasy….Like all faiths that look to politics for redemption, the V-Day religion is also a creed of hate. Those who are saved, are saved only because others are damned….In authentic religions, each person understands himself as a sinner, and none mistakes himself for a savior.” (316) According to Collier and Horowitz, “Belief in the kingdom of socialist heaven is the faith that transforms vice into virtue, lies into truth, evil into good.” (329)
Farrell: “on Valentine’s Day, a day that one would expect love between the sexes, an all-female ‘Black Women in Rap’ concert at the Los Angeles Sports Arena featured a lineup of women performers who put down men as ‘nothin’ but dirt’ (Yo-Yo)….Nikki D….repeatedly exhorts the women in the audience to associate strength with cashing in on their sexual power, telling them, ‘You’re wasting it.’ Isn’t taking money for sex called prostitution? One day we’re being told women who are prostitutes are exploited; the next day, women who are not prostitutes are being exploited. Both our sons and daughters are being taught to be confused; but only our daughters are being taught to be both entitled and angry.” (Women, 205)
The V-Day website admonishes women to “Drum. Dance. Rise.” Ironically, a song in Ellington’s suite, The Drum is a Woman, proclaims: “It isn’t civilized to beat women no matter what they do or they say, but will somebody tell me what else can you with a drum.” In response Jayne Cortez protests: “if the drum is a woman, don’t abuse your drum.” However, if a woman were beating a drum it could be regarded as good abuse, for V-Day was inspired by The Vagina Monologues, one of which is spoken by an adult woman who describes being given alcohol and statutorily raped at 13 by a 24-year-old woman as a positive, healing experience, ending the segment with the proclamation, “It was a good rape.” Does this double standard also deem lesbian violence to be good? Farrell points “to studies that show the level of violence in lesbian relationships in the United States to be similar to that in heterosexual relationships.” (Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men, 155) Farrell concludes: “Lesbian violence shatters the myth that women abuse only when men drive them to it.” (Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, 147)
Daphne Patai challenges such myths when stating “that the only conclusions a ‘reasonable person’ could draw from the [1995 McEwen] report is that professors must watch their every word and every gesture, that silence is no less dangerous than speaking, that attention and lack of attention are equally suspect, and that students are weak and pitiful children the fragility of whose egos must at all times be foremost in professors’ minds.” (Heterophobia, 195)
Milo Yiannopoulos to male students: “At university you will be taught that you are rapists in waiting, that you need to attend consent classes. Your natural love and affection for women will be neutered. You will be faced with an impossible choice: suppress your natural, healthy romantic interest in women or risk a charge of rape or sexual harassment. If you speak out against this hostile and unfair environment you will be persecuted by rabid mobs of politically correct lunatics as well as the full force of the establishment media.”
Concerning a 1993 report by the government-financed Canada Panel on Violence against Women, Fekete cites a “shocking statistic in the report….’According to one source, approximately 83 percent of women with a disability will be sexually assaulted during their lifetime.’ (68).” (138) Fekete comments: “An executive director of a work centre for retarded citizens in rural California interviews a portion of the residents….She finds 28 institutionalized, retarded California women (leaving aside the 10 men in whom the CanPan shows no interest) who can be described as having had, on some occasion, some experience that they can describe as unwilling or unknowing.
On this evidence, and on this evidence alone, the CanPan accepts and announces that 83% of Canadian women with disabilities will be sexually assaulted. The panel is prepared to generalize from 28 retarded women in a California institution to the whole Canadian population….This is the most fabulous example of the clinical fallacy that I have ever seen.
And that’s not enough! When the CanPan issued its training video, ‘Without Fear,’ it raised the figure from [144] 83% to 90%, citing the DisAbled Women’s Network (DAWN) as its source. We asked Professor Sobsey, whom DAWN considers an expert in this area of research, what he thought about this spiraling inflation….A 90% figure, he said, is ‘misleading and dangerous.’” (144-45)
In 1994 Fekete commented on “the most shocking statistic” (138): “The violence-against-women industry, hard as it is now to believe it, is merely a decade in the making, and there is no evidence to suggest that there has been a dramatic increase in any kind of violence during that time, except the rhetoric of violence against women. The Panel participates in this escalating rhetoric of panic.
The 98% Invention: the Women’s Safety Project
‘When all kinds of sexual violation and intrusion are considered, 98% of women reported that they personally experienced some for of sexual violation. This finding, in particular, clearly supports our assertion that violence against women affects virtually all women’s lives’ (CL 10). Virtually all women are victims, and therefore virtually all men are summarily indicated as perpetrators….The Women’s Safety Project (WSP) is quoted at least 15 times in the text of the CanPan’s Final Report, where other reports are mentioned only once or twice.” (147) Fekete: “Virtually all of the press commentary on the CanPan results focused on the WSP portion. How could the supporting documentation be withheld from the public? How could its evidentiary basis not be readily available to scrutiny? How could the whole culture of public inquiries, advocacy groups, funding agencies, policy makers, and the media all be so casual about the way information of this kind enters the culture?” (156)
Fekete: “The 98% figure for sexual violation turns out also to include any and all acts of ‘physical abuse’ in an intimate relationship, such as pushing, shoving, or slapping. Is there anybody whose life has been completely devoid of any uncomfortable sexual language or sexual ambivalence and even the slightest physical friction? It is astonishing that the number is not 100%. Indeed, the 98% is not at all disturbing, considering the definitions.” (152)
Fekete: “the sample seems to have a profile much like the profile of the university population [150] around OISE and the University of Toronto, physically located in and around the Annex area in Toronto. Is this in fact the ‘community’ referred to in the subtitle of the Women’s Safety Project: A Community-Based Study of Sexual Violence in Women’s Lives?” (150-51) Fekete concludes: “the WSP work is inconclusive, inconsistent, and often chaotic.” (161) Fekete: “Biopolitical moral panic just happens to be the mental disease of our day, masquerading as mental health and social welfare.” (163)
Fekete wonders if zero tolerance policies are a result of “the censorious habit of a puritanical anglo establishment urgently trying to recycle sexual reaction in the form of ‘women’s safety’ and ethnic parochialism in the guise of multi-ethnic virtue.” (Moral Panic, 188) Fekete: “Where censorship from the right attacks as immoral any deviation from the ‘normal,’ censorship from the left attacks the norms as themselves deviations from morality.” (201)
Fekete: “The first rule of confronting biofeminist rhetoric is to scrutinize the definitions; the second rule is to challenge their totalizing character.” (321) Fekete: “Zero tolerance of violence against women…is promoted as the right of every Canadian woman to an environment free of violence….’Environment’ is a totalitarian code word in biopolitical usage. It means the whole world – all the conditions of a woman’s life. When the whole world of social interaction is treated as environment, human life is utterly objectified, and made subject to definition and manipulation from a particular standpoint. What is particularly central in this conception of the whole world as environment is that other people are brought into the picture only as features of the environment. Not intersubjectively; not as autonomous beings who have as much title to their needs, desires, attitudes, and expressions as the female focal point of the claim to a pacified environment: simply as part of her environment. Society has become less than social in this formulation; it is just a biological niche. A demand for an environment ‘free of’ the code word ‘violence,’ then, or for a cosy or hospitable ‘climate,’ is a demand for safety and protection from all discomforts arising from other people.
This is all that freedom means in biopolitical code: safety, protection. Women are not expected to be looking for freedom and fullness of life’s adventures. On the contrary they are to look for safety and protection from anything in their ‘environment’ which might pose a risk or a hazard, any discomfort, anything unpredictable: in short, protection from any eruption of other people’s [320] self-expression.” (320) Fekete: “’Violence,’ meanwhile, stands for everything biofeminists do not want….Violence is made all-inclusive of every form of unwanted interaction, including the unwanted attitudes of other people.” (321) Reginald Bibby: “It is clear that for many participants, social crusades represent the collective expression of their individual concerns. For example, women participating in the feminist movement frequently have limited compassion not only for men, but also for women who are not sympathetic to their concerns.” (Mosaic Madness 115)
Patai also criticises “the notorious report published in 1993 by the government-financed Canada Panel on Violence against Women. Two years in the making at a cost of more than $10 million, this report concluded that ‘Canadian women are all too familiar with inequality and violence which tether them to lives few in the world would choose to lead,’ a statement so outrageous that the journalist Donna Laframboise was moved to call the report ‘a national embarrassment.’ Undeterred, another Canadian academic issued a report, in November 2000, defending Women’s Studies and referring to the ‘plight of women in Canada and around the world.’
Such distortions about the status of women should not be seen as a neurotic inability to recognize improvement, and even radical change, in North American society over the past three decades. Rather, the utility of these sorts of claims for feminist activists is transparent. As Cathy Young points out in her book Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, insistence on the pervasiveness of ‘sexism’ helps ‘keep the movement alive,’ as feminist activists themselves on occasion admit. Young cites Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode, who in her book Speaking of Sex
‘frankly acknowledges the stake feminists have in persuading people that women in our culture still suffer inequities that “no just society could tolerate”: the more people believe that the “woman problem” has been largely solved, the less they will support feminist political causes.’” (Professing Feminism, 224)
Farrell describes the consequences of his adopting this belief: “As long as I was writing from a feminist perspective, the New York Times published everything I wrote. Once I began questioning the feminist perspective, the New York Times published nothing I wrote….During my years speaking from the feminist perspective, I was three times a guest on the Today show. Once I began adding men’s perspectives to the mix, I was never invited back. To this day.
Then, in 1986, I first questioned in public the statement that men earn more than women for the same work. I did that on Hour Magazine, a show that was nationally televised at the time. Their guests were Gloria Steinem and me, as allies. But I ventured, ‘Never-married women often earn more than never-married men, because…’ I had no sooner completed the thought than I noticed Gloria, puzzled, look to [90] host Gary Collins as if to signal ‘cut!’ Sure enough, we abruptly cut. The segment was never aired. My status changed from regular guest to never being invited back. I was beginning to notice a pattern!” (Does, 90-91) Farrell detects “a prejudice in the electronic media.” (91)
Farrell: “I had naively believed that leaders as pioneering as I thought Gloria was would be delighted to hear of ways in which women were succeeding. Now I had to face a deeper fear: that some of my feminist colleagues might have an emotional investment in women’s victimhood that went so deep as to prevent any discussion that might dilute women’s victim status. Since my income came from feminist referrals, and since feminist power was solidifying the Lace Curtain, I felt, well…scared. I was eventually to discover that my fear was well founded. My speaking engagements on college campuses were soon reduced to less than 5 percent – not 50 percent, but 5 percent – of what they were.” (Women, 237)
Farrell encountered what Patai refers to as “the ‘victim’ feminism promoted by Women’s studies programs,” the worst of which she and Noretta Koertge believe “will come to be recognized as marks of a debased education belonging to a particular historical moment, an education to be deplored and left behind.” (Professing, 226, 370) Crouch may have had Women’s Studies in mind when comparing Afrocentric Studies to “all of the protest versions of study that are actually extensions of soap operas in which the stars are paid to emote the effects of injustice.” (Skin, 38) Similarly, Graham Good describes the contemporary university as “a theatre [31] of symbolic redress, where penitent white males atone for the past sins of their category.” (Humanism, 31-32) Paglia describes “melodramatic victimage scenarios, that drippy amateur soap opera which fuzzy academic liberals, suppressing recognition of their own innate aggression, aggressively project backwards. The human record is virtually universally one of cruelty barely overcome and restrained by civilization.” (Junk Bonds)
Dinesh D’Souza: “When the motion to establish Women’s Studies [at Princeton University] passed, [Dante scholar Robert] Hollander remembers, ‘Women were embracing and kissing on the floor. This struck me as odd. Was this an academic discussion or a political rally? Were we discussing ideas or feelings? It confirmed what I had feared about the program.’
New approaches to teaching now enjoy prominence and acclaim on campus. Speaking at an October 1989 conference in Washington, Houston Baker of the University of Pennsylvania argued that the American university suffers from a crisis of too much reading and writing. ‘Reading and writing are merely technologies of control,’ Baker alleged. [6] They are systems of ‘martial law made academic.’ Instead of ‘valorizing old power relations,’ universities should listen to the ‘voices of newly emerging peoples.’ Baker emphasized the oral tradition, extolling the virtues of rap music and holding up as an exemplar such groups as Public Enemy and NWA. NWA stands for Niggers With Attitude. The group, among other things, sings about the desirability of violence against white people. Baker himself is regarded as one of the most promising black intellectuals in the country, and a leader of the movement to transform the American academy.
African American scholar Leonard Jeffries claims that whites are biologically inferior to blacks, that the ‘ultimate culmination’ of the ‘white value system’ is Nazi Germany, and that wealthy Jews were responsible for financing the slave trade….such extreme views are now frequently expressed by black scholars and activists.” (Illiberal Education, 6-7)
D’Souza: “When Peter Schaub, a business major at the University of Washington at Seattle enrolled in a Women’s Studies class in early 1988, he expected to learn about ‘the history of women and the contributions they have made.’…
’Introduction to Women’s Studies,’ taught by Donna Langston and Dana-Michele Brown, was not what Schaub had expected. On the first day of class Brown asserted that ‘the traditional American family represents a dysfunctional family unit.’ Students who protested that their families were functional were shouted down by teaching assistants hired by Langston and Brown. ‘Denial, denial,’ they yelled in unison. A few days later Langston brought guest speakers to talk about masturbation. ‘They said you don’t need a man,’ Schaub said. ‘They proceeded to show how to masturbate with a feather duster, and they had dildos right there.’
When Professor Brown claimed that U.S. statistics showed that lesbians could raise children better than married couples, Schaub asked for the source. ‘I asked after class,’ Schaub said. ‘I wasn’t challenging her.’ But the teacher ‘wouldn’t hear of it. She said: “Why are you challenging me? Get away from me. Just leave me alone.”’ A member of Brown’s undergraduate circle called Schaub a chauvinist goddamn bastard.’ The next day, Schaub was banned from class. The teacher had two campus police officers waiting in the hall to escort him away. [202] Schaub protested to the administration but nothing happened for several weeks. Finally he was permitted to go back to class, but advised by Associate Dean James Nason to drop the course.” (202)
D’Souza notes: the “paradox is that Marx and Engels, the most acceptable white males in the new curriculum for diversity, were not themselves averse to bigotry. When he learned that Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, who had a small amount of Negro blood, was running as a socialist in a district which also containted the Paris zoo, Engels observed: ‘Being in his quality as a nigger a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.’ Marx himself praised the discoveries of French ethnologist Pierre Tremaux, who argued that the human race was the product of evolution, but that Negroes resulted from social degeneration. ‘The backward negro is not an evolved ape, but a degenerate man,’ Tremaux, observed. Marx hailed Tremaux’s work as marking ‘a very significant advance over Darwin,’ and termed a Creole man who married his niece a ‘gorilla offspring.’ Marx also approved of European imperialism in Asia because he considered Asian culture so inferior that it was incapable of entering historic development without a European push. Marx frequently referred to the ‘semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities’ of China and India, noting that they had ‘no history at all, at least no known history. What we shall call their history is but the history of successive invaders who founded their empires on the passive basis of the unresisting and unchanging society.’” (Illiberal Education, 88-89) Geoffrey Wheatcroft: “Marx described Lasalle as ‘Baron Itzig’, ‘leprous’, the ‘Jewish nigger’, speculating jocosely on whether he was not descending ‘from the Negroes who joined in Moses’ flight from [30] Egypt (unless his grandmother on his father’s side was crossed with a nigger)’.” (The Controversy of Zion, 30-31)
D’Souza concludes: “Today’s multicultural curriculum….subordinates the understanding of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to Western ideological prejudices. And it reflects a new cultural imperialism no less narrow and bigoted than that of the colonialist researchers in safari outfits and pith helmets.” (Illiberal Education, 81) D’Souza: “Harvard publishes an Affirmative Action Newsletter whose fall 1989 issue contains a section called ‘Myths and Realities.’
Myth: Affirmative action means applying a double standard – one for white males and a somewhat lower standard for women and minorities.
Reality: Double standards are inconsistent with the principle and spirit of affirmative action. One standard should be applied to all candidates applying for a position. This myth implies that women and minorities are inherently less qualified than white males, a proposition that is totally baseless.
On affirmative action, as on other issues, people are entitled to their own opinions but they are not entitled to their own facts. As we saw in the case of Berkeley and other schools, it is unequivocally the case that affirmative action involves displacing and lowering academic standards in order to promote proportional representation for racial groups. Yet in the name of ‘sensitivity,’ Harvard seems not to be above distorting truth and disseminating information that is clearly false.” (220) D’Souza: “The ‘new racists’ do not believe they have anything to learn about minorities; quite the contrary, they believe they are the only ones who are willing to face the truth about them. Consequently, they are not uncomfortable about their views, believing them to be based on evidence. They feel they occupy the high ground, while everyone else is performing pirouettes and somersaults to avoid the obvious….Most of them [“university leaders”], too, are among the new racists on the American campus. Their attitude toward minority students, however optimistic it might once have been, has turned to resigned condescension. They do not believe that they can afford to apply mainstream standards to minority students, because they are certain that minorities would fare badly, causing the institution to suffer serious embarrassment.” (241)
D’Souza: “Conventional wisdom holds the West responsible for slavery. But in fact slavery has existed in virtually all societies known to human history. Asia and Africa and America before Columbus all practiced slavery.” (Illiberal Education, 86) D’Souza: “Davis argues, ‘Moslems not only accepted the legitimacy of Negro enslavement, but were inclined to think of black Africans as a docile race who were born to be slaves. The Arabic word for slaves, abid, was increasingly confined to the negro.’…
According to historian Murray Gordon, in a recently published study on slavery in the Arab world, the Arab countries began their importation of slaves into what is now the Middle East approximately 1,000 years before the European slave trade began. Moreover, slavery persisted in the Arab countries much longer; Saudi Arabia, for instance, only formally abolished it in the early 1960s, and reports of the practice still occur in some of the nomadic Arab tribes, where boys are said to sell for $240, girls for $160. Of the eleven million blacks sold into Arab slavery, Gordon notes, ‘little has been written about this human tragedy.’” (118) Brigitte Gabriel: “in Muslim culture, the word ‘black’ – abeed in Arabic – means ‘filth’ or ‘slave.'” (Beacuse They Hate, 167)
D’Souza notes “that, by and large, non-Western cultures have no developed tradition of racial equality. Not only do they violate equality in practice, but the very principle is alien to them, regarded by many with suspicion and contempt. Moreover, many of these cultures have deeply ingrained ideas of male superiority. The Koran stipulates that ‘men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other.’” (Illiberal Education, 79) Georg Feuerstein finds a similar bias in East Indian spirituality: “in the strongly patriarchal society of India the yogic scriptures…extol the advantages of a male embodiment.” (Wholeness or Transcendence, 115) Feuerstein: “Most Indian authorities….considered women to be at a disadvantage in spiritual life.” (116) D’Souza notes: “Practical violations of equality are widespread in non-Western countries, including the caste system in India, tribal hierarchies in Africa, and a continuation of slavery in parts of China and the Arab world. See, e.g., ‘Chinese Cracking Down on Thriving Slave Trade,’ Washington Times, February 8, 1990, for reports on the traffic in women and children in Anhui province in Eastern China; Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World, New Amsterdam Books, New York, 1989.” (Illiberal Education, note 66; 275)
Kwame Anthony Appiah: “in modern Arabic, the word ‘abd,’ a classical designation for a slave, is used to refer to dark-skinned people.” (A Slow Emancipation; from Best African American Essays: 2009, 169) Appiah describes “the importation of slaves from farther east – sold to the Gold Coast states by the Portuguese, starting in the 15th century….The rise of settled states in West Africa, as in much of the New World, seems often to have depended on the rise of plantation agriculture, and plantation agriculture depended on involuntary labor. Just as in the New World, moreover, the legacy of slavery has proved curiously durable.” (166)
Both Afrocentric and Women’s Studies have indoctrination into an ideology of victimhood as a stated goal. Patai: “In the topsy-turvy world of feminism and ‘multiculturalism,’ to call for an education not simplistically bound to a political agenda is tantamount to being ‘conservative.’ (Professing, 253) Patai quotes from the Women’s Studies website of William Paterson University of New Jersey: “Women’s Studies has been defined by the founders of the National Women’s Studies Association as an ‘educational strategy for change with a double purpose: to expose and redress the oppression of women. Women’s Studies is the intellectual and research arm of the women’s movement.’” (258) From the mission statement of the Women’s Studies website of the University of North Carolina Patai concludes that “the university is perceived as an inhospitable place for women and other oppressed groups and must be ‘transformed.’” (258)
Jordan Peterson: “I believe now, with the exception of the science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) branch, that universities do more harm than good….We’re teaching university students lies, and pandering to them, and I see that as counterproductive.” “Go online, go look at ten women’s studies websites. Pick them at random. Read them. They say ‘western civilization is a corrupt patriarchy right down to the goddamned core. We have to overthrow it.’”
Patai finds a tenet of Women’s Studies in the concept of anti-feminist intellectual harassment, definitively defined by Annette Kolodny: “Anti-feminist intellectual harassment, a serious threat to academic freedom, occurs when (1) any policy, action, statement, and/or behavior has the intent or the effect of discouraging or preventing women’s freedom of lawful action, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression; (2) or when any policy, action, statement, and/or behavior creates an environment in which the appropriate application of feminist theories or methodologies to research, scholarship, and teaching is devalued, discouraged, or altogether thwarted; (3) or when any policy, action, statement, and/or behavior creates an environment in which research, scholarship, and teaching pertaining to women, gender, or gender inequities are devalued, discouraged, or altogether thwarted.” (Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century, 105) This concept could lead to what Graham Good refers to as “rhetorical terrorism, where even mild objections to feminist perspectives are immediately branded as ‘hostile to women’ or ‘sexist,’ even when they emanate from women.” (Humanism Betrayed, 20) Patai thinks that “the true objective” of anti-feminist intellectual harassment is “to inhibit any criticism, trivial or serious, made in good faith or out of pique, that is or can be construed as aimed at women or feminism.” (Professing, 283, 282, 283)
Ultimate inhibition is represented in the work of Andrea Dworkin, whom Farrell describes as a “woman who admits to purposely using certain fictional characters to represent her perspective….one reviewer at least made Dworkin’s perspectives clear: ‘Ms. Dworkin advocates nothing short of killing men.’” (276) Farrell highlights this perspective with a sentence from Dworkin’s Ice and Fire: “I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.” (from Women, 179) Dworkin: “Only when manhood is dead – and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it – only then will we know what it is to be free.” — [The Root Cause, speech, 26 Sept. 1975, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (published in Our Blood, ch. 9, 1976). Farrell: “Gloria Steinem says of Andrea Dworkin, ‘In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.’ Don’t we have a name for people who advocate the death of one group so the human race can ‘better evolve’? The deeper problem here is that advocates of the death of men are increasingly becoming mainstream. Andrea Dworkin has been given mainstream credibility by repeated reviews and coverage in The New York Times….Gloria Steinem [is] mainstream.” (179) Steinem is described in Wikipedia as a “spokeswoman on issues of equality.”
In 1973 Steinem stated: “By the year 2000 we will I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.” In a 1992 New York Times article Robert Stone lamented, “our nation signifies the virtual apotheosis of the interested self.’” (from Hostage, xxiv) Mary Daly equates “the Self-Realizing of women who have broken free from the stranglehold of patriarchal religion, with its deadly symbols, its ill logic, its gynodical laws and other poisonous paraphernalia” with “exorcism of the poisonous patriarchal god and his attendant pathologies.” (The Church and the Second Sex, xii) Daly describes the motivation of such an exorcism: “Women are Disgusted at the apparent absence of Disgust in those around them;” disgust at female submission to patriarchy induces “Nausea.” (xix, xx) Poet Muriel Rukeyser’s line could be inverted: “Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis.” (from Bad, 156) Susan Faludi: “The authors of the era’s [‘70s and ‘80s] self-help classic Smart Women / Foolish Choices proclaim that women’s distress was ‘an unfortunate consequence of feminism,’ because ‘it created a myth among women that the apex of self-realization could be achieved only through autonomy, independence, and career.’” (Backlash, xii)
Leon Podles: “A Dominican Prioress quotes approvingly the Statement of Philosphy from the journal Women of Power, which upholds “the honoring of women’s divinity.’ Women reject ‘the practice of self-sacrificial love’ in favor of ‘self-realization.’ Women reject obedience because they ‘are seeking a God with who they can be one, not to whom they must be subject.’ Jesus’s atoning sacrifice vanishes and is replaced by ‘the vision that Jesus’ phantasy enkindled when he walked among us.'” (138)
As Daly’s feminist theology equates patriarchy with evil, so Cone’s black theology equates whiteness with evil. In this ideological milieu, which also seems to characterize contemporary Western popular music, white men are doubly the devil. Music in such a milieu does not seek to exorcise (or ‘sexorcise,’ following Daly’s puns) the devil’s interval, as in classical Western tonality; rather, it is the demand for resolution that is exorcised. White male musicians could, however, adopt this subversive aesthetic by applying what Malachi Martin describes as a sound “principle…in the Jesuit tradition: Try to enter into the very mind and soul of the people you are sent to convert. Of course, a certain caution had to be exercised; carried too far, this ‘inculturation’ could result in the conversion of the would-be converter to the outlook and even the religion of those he originally set out to convert.” (Jesuits, 248) In 1966 Pedro Arrupe exemplified this principle with the celebration of what Martin describes as “his first ‘folk Mass’ at Fordham University, in New York City…..The Mass…was innovative for its time, and distinctly post-Vatican II. It was mostly in English, and featured a guitarist who accompanied himself as he chanted Black spirituals, while the congregation took up the refrains.” (379)
Patai and Koertge note that Dworkin sees “male [400] dominance as ‘eternal and unchanging.’” (Professing, note 59, 400-01) Patai states that feminists see “heterosexuality…as the linchpin of male dominance.” (317) Patai: “The new Houghton Mifflin Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History (1998) contains a telling entry on ‘Heterosexuality.’ Composed by E. Kay Trimberger, this entry summarizes current feminist dogma:
‘Sexuality is not private, but is political and related to power. “Compulsory heterosexuality” is part of a power structure benefiting heterosexual males at the expense of women and homosexuals.’….Trimberger makes clear why it is important for feminists to press such an argument: ‘If our sexuality is socially constructed it can also be de- and reconstructed.’” (319) Patai concludes: “It is obvious that Women’s Studies has an urgent need to reconstitute everything about men and women’s lives that it sees as hindering its own project of social transformation.” (320)
This “urgent need” of feminist scholars has resulted in acts of intimidation. Farrell mentions a “dissident feminist” who “receives so many death threats, her answering machine announces that she doesn’t personally open packages sent to her.” (229) Farrell cites “Neil Lyndon, author of No More Sex War….’When I finished speaking, the president of the Cambridge Union, a woman, said in no uncertain terms that my book should be burned. Some weeks later, a student told me her history professor said in class that I should be shot. Shot! To me it is too ironic that the same people who are outraged at the censorship of Salmon Rushdie are so quick to censor anything confronting feminism and are blind to their own hypocrisy.’
At least Neil did not experience the death threats encountered by Camille Paglia, or the ostracism experienced by Suzanne Steinmetz, Richard Gelles, and Murray Straus when they published their findings showing women batter equally.” (230)
The Women’s Monument Committee states: “Marker of Change is a horizontal, low-to-the-ground, anti-monumental artwork that was intentionally designed as an invitational space specifically excluding a point of domination, and explicitly about rejecting male violence against women. In contrast, the Ireland Canada Monument design has a central upright focal point six feet high. This focal point is proposed to include a Celtic cross embedded in its top area, which would thus introduce religious and patriarchal aspects to the memorial gestures in the Park. These can easily be read as exclusionary, and in direct contradiction to the design features of Marker of Change.”
This last assertion is refuted by Good, when commenting on the inscription, which reads: “’We, their sisters and brothers, remember, and work for a better world. In memory and grief for all the women who have been murdered by men. For women of all countries, all classes, all ages, all colours.’ The inclusiveness of the last line [is line (sic)] is somewhat belied by the exclusion of women who have been killed by other women….In fact, a true inclusiveness would demand a row of memorials: to men killed by women, children killed by men, children killed by women, nonwhites killed by whites, and so on.” (Humanism, 30) Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson: “Erin Graham of Vancouver Rape Relief said [of Lepine’s murders], it ‘is not an individual act. It is not just one man hating women. It is the social and political reality we live in.’” (Legalizing Misandry, 60) Young and Nathanson comment: “Those who proclaim that all men are mass murderers at heart, of course, could be accused of sexism just as easily as those who claim that all women are whores or witches at heart.” (63)