🚀 go-pugleaf

Locate Us of Bronze <brisonr@eskimo.com> wrote:

>Exactly! This is what I've been saying for years. I never understood the
>feminist methodology, which seems to be "Lets hit them over the head, then
>demand that they help us in hitting them over the head." IOW, how do they
>expect cooperation when they practice abuse like this? The main problem
>with today's feminism (the reason for the feminist butts: you know, the
>women who say I'm a feminist, but...) (what you, Professor Steiger, call
>gender feminism, I think) is that it is devisive. It creates unnecessary
>divisions between the 2 species. I'm beginning to suspect deliberatly so.
>What their motive is, I don't know. *I* can't figure them out. (Note to
>Barbarous Amerous: No lectures please. I would like to hear from some
>sensible posters, for a change.)
>

The absurd, overstated, redundant lying with statistics that
characterizes much of gender feminist "research" (and of course
nearly all of Barbara Amero's posting) has a simple
goal -- to discredit men. 

Discussions of "male violence" or "men's violence" are marked
by an *insistence* on the part of the gender feminist "mourners" that
the "men's" or "male" is essential to the message. What this
tells us is that it is not simply the violence itself that gender
feminists are interested in. Rather, it is blaming and discrediting of
men.

Check Slate Magazine this week, and look for the dialog on affirmative

action. In that dialog, there is a brief discussion on the anger and
dismay black Americans feel when they hear dialogs on "black crime"
and "black violence."  The correspondents note that the repeated
invocation of such terms becomes like subtle hate propaganda. The
majority of blacks are not criminals, and are not violent. Linking 
the two tends to subtly establish the belief that they are.

Exactly the same thing is true of the use of the term "male violence."
It is propaganda, pure and simple.

Gender feminism is all about power. It is not about justice, and
it is not about equality. When gender feminists talk about "equality
for women," what they are really talking about is a system where 
women have numerous unfair advantages through reverse discrimination
in the workplace and through "favored status" in universities.

By the way, an "equity feminist" is one who supports the view
that women must be guaranteed equal rights, equal opportunities, and
a level playing field. As a man who, with his wife, attended NOW
meetings in Oklahoma in 1972, I feel qualified to call myself an
equity feminist. 

A gender feminist is one who is an advocate for gender based
discrimination in favor of women. Gender feminists do not want a level
playing field. They want the whole system tilted in favor of women.

Below is an eloquent commentary by Daphne Patai, well known (equity)
feminist author. It details how gender feminists will not be satisfied
with equality. They want to take over the whole system, and put
themselves in a position to railroad anyone who disagrees with them.

*******************************************************************


      Women's Studies and the Future: "Vision 2000" or 1984?
 
                           Daphne Patai
 
 
      An attempted coup has struck New England universities.  A
 remarkable document has surfaced, the handiwork of the New
 England Council of Land-Grant University Women. It sets forth a
 number of "goals" for the next century, designed to "promote
 equity for women."  What Neanderthal would challenge such a
 worthy aim?  Answer: One who worries about means as well as ends;
 one who questions dubious premises and recognizes an ideological
 transformation in the making; one who wonders what might happen
 to academic liberties once the self-appointed agents of an
 allegedly oppressed group are allowed to plan and direct a
 corrective program. 
      The "Vision 2000" proposal was developed over a three-year
 period at a series of conferences that brought together
 representatives from Women's Centers, Women's Studies Programs,
 and Commissions and Councils on the Status of Women at the six
 New England Land-Grant Universities.  The group came up with nine
 long-term recommendations, accompanied by a short-sterm strategy:
 ask each university to endorse the document "in principle,"
 specific measures to be worked out later according to each
 campus's needs.  This reasonable-sounding approach has met with
 success at several universities. The presidents of the University
 of Vermont, the University of New Hampshire, and the University
 of Maine have already given the document their personal
 endorsement and the authors of "Vision 2000" are hoping to have
 the proposal approved by the entire Presidents' Council of the
 six land-grant universities at its February meeting. 
      At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, however,
 alert faculty members have learned to be on their guard against
 reform schemes driven by a social agenda.  As a result, when
 "Vision 2000" was brought to the Faculty Senate in early December
 by the UMass Council on the Status of Women (made up of twenty-
 five mostly female UMass faculty and staff), instead of winning
 the anticipated instant endorsement, the document was referred to
 committees for further study. 
      What is it that prompted misgivings in this case? When
 examined critically, "Vision 2000" reveals itself as a stunningly
 imperialistic move to put in place a questionable feminist
 agenda, thinly disguised as a plea for equal opportunity and
 fairness. 
      "Vision 2000" covers virtually all aspects of university
 life, from salaries (assumed to be inequitable) to contents of
 courses, subjects of research (to be geared to benefitting
 women), styles of teaching, and campus life.  It begins by
 invoking the sorry state of women in higher education, a
 condition which, though some feminists apparently believe that it
 exists, is challenged by many others.  Is it true that women do
 not receive equitable treatment at most universities?  The
 evidence of one's senses on this point is not easily sorted from
 the ceaseless propaganda about how bad things are for women.  At
 the University of Massachusetts, for example, women students
 interviewed by a local paper readily asserted that they had not
 personally encountered bias in the classroom, but they
 nonetheless supposed it exists.  But the question--is it true?--
 is worth asking, and answering, before endorsing measures such as
 the "Vision 2000" plan for "women-friendly" classrooms and
 obligatory sensitivity training for professors and others who
 just don't get it.  If implemented, such measures would establish
 women's studies and its activists (turned into "equity"
 specialists) as the pilots of university policy with rights of
 supervision over both faculty and programs ("We ask our
 presidents and chancellors to [h]old department heads accountable
 for improvement in achieving gender equity. Reward those
 departments that can demonstrate measurable progress.")
      Most of the charges made in "Vision 2000" assume their own
 validity. Their case rests on inflammatory rhetoric ("Women face
 sexual violence and sexual harassment in the classroom and in the
 workplace, and are too often silenced by a system that protects
 the perpetrators of these crimes").  "Survivors" of rape, sexual
 harassment, and "dating and domestic assault" (all lumped
 together) require basic services, including the agency of a
 "confidential advocate."  Are rape and sexual assault indeed
 routine occurrences at the university? Is harassment really
 widespread?  "Vision 2000" assumes that they are, and that they
 reflect "fundamental social and physical conditions" which the
 university must change.  
      Wherever "disproportion" is detected, discrimination is at
 fault; under-representation, in this view, can never be the
 result of other factors.  As part of a sweeping corrective,
 women's centers will be established, where they do not already
 exist, and supported so that institutional leaders can rely upon
 them in their efforts to encourage more prominent roles for
 women, including "family friendly" policies--something, by the
 way, not all feminists support.
      As for the course of studies, it must be transformed
 into "women-friendly and culturally diverse curricula" through
 "scholarship on women and other historically oppressed groups."  
 This process is "best conducted with guidance from an autonomous
 Women's Studies site and active Women's Studies scholars."  Not
 just the curriculum, but the entire academic enterprise as it now
 exists is defective:  "Women's status within American higher
 education reflects an intellectual bias that is deeply rooted in
 the disciplinary methods and social assumptions of university
 communities."   Students will be denied the full benefits of
 higher education until a thorough-going transformation of "the
 production and dissemination of knowledge" is effected. 
 Departments with consistently disproportionate female drop-out
 rates are to be penalized; student evaluations are to include
 questions on inclusiveness of the curriculum and teaching
 methods. By the year 2000, "[f]aculty whose students identify
 their courses, teaching styles, and mentoring as failing to be
 inclusive do not receive teaching prizes, satisfactory teaching
 evaluations, or merit raises."  Graduate work in Women's Studies
 must be available within the institution, which is to give
 "equitable recognition" to Women's Studies' "substance and
 methodologies." 
      Inevitably, "training" is prescribed for everyone at the
 university in the matter of sexual harassment.  Disciplinary
 action (unspecified) taken against offending superiors must
 satisfy the injured "supervisee."  There is to be "zero
 tolerance" of "sexual harassment and violence against women." 
 Groups (again unspecified) shown to be implicated at rates higher
 than the general campus population in acts of violence against
 women" are to be deprived of recognition and support.
      One would hardly guess from this scenario that universities
 in late twentieth-century America are being described. It is of
 course indispensable for the authors to paint such a dismal
 picture if they are seeking the broad redmedial powers that
 Vision 2000 unfolds.
      One cannot fully understand the impulses behind "Vision
 2000" without taking a long view of how feminism has developed
 within academe over the past three decades. In the early 1970s,
 when feminism was beginning to make an impact on the academy,
 there was much debate about which of two strategies it should
 follow. Should it work through separate Women's Studies programs-
 -separatism--or, alternatively, through existing departments,
 attempting to transform them one by one--mainstreaming?  The
 Women's Studies route won out, and by now about 650 Women's
 Studies programs exist in American universities, offering
 undergraduate concentrations and majors and, increasingly,
 graduate programs as well.  But, as was foreseen in the early
 debate, this success has also had a certain ghettoizing effect.
 While Women's Studies courses at most schools depend upon faculty
 in many other departments, institutionally Women's Studies
 Programs exist as a separate entity. This was an important asset
 in the early days: it helped feminist scholars achieve tenure and
 promotion when they might not have readily done so in
 "traditional" departments. 
      Women's Studies (often defined as the "academic arm of the
 women's movement or feminism") then slowly expanded its sphere of
 influence.  By now, many schools have adopted "diversity"
 requirements that include certain Women's Studies courses.  These
 courses draw large enrollments as undergraduates select them to
 meet their credit needs. Still, many areas of the university have
 not been touched. Although the humanities and social sciences
 have changed in response to both feminism and other social
 movements, the hard sciences scarcely have done so.  Women's
 Studies courses often attack science as "masculinist," but do
 faculty in physics or chemistry care?  Has engineering responded
 to the feminist challenge? 
      Now comes "Vision 2000" to complete the great
 transformation.  It is above all a plan for policing the struggle
 for gender equity, based on the anachronistic insistence that
 inequality characterizes women's status in every aspect of
 university life.  It depicts faculty, department chairs, and
 deans as incapable of doing what it conceives of as the right
 thing unless directed by some as-yet unnamed agency that will
 hold them "accountable."  The tools of this accountability are
 spelled out: student evaluations, peer reviews and all
 performance assessment are to measure gender equity--"both to
 identify and reward superior achievement, and to identify and
 intervene in undesirable practices."  Training sessions to
 promote desirable sensitivities are to be instituted. Though the
 word "mandatory" does not appear in the document, there seems
 little that is voluntary in the spirit that animates it. 
      Given the role assigned to "women's studies scholars" and
 their allies in overseeing the transition to a "women-friendly"
 university, it makes sense to ask what sort of a track record
 women's studies programs themselves have amassed.  On this
 subject the evidence is in, and it should give us pause.  In our
 1994 book Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange
 World of Women's Studies, Noretta Koertge and I identified a
 series of characteristic moves made in Women's Studies: language
 policing, insistence on social construction, concentration on
 gender as the key issue in all matters, the rejection of
 knowledge and information that does not suit the feminist agenda,
 regardless of its historical, factual, or logical basis, and the
 pursuit of identity politics. We did not claim that every single
 program displays these moves, but that enough of them do, and
 that they are frankly advocated in much of the literature
 produced in the name of feminist pedagogy.   
      The point of our critique was to demonstrate that many
 programs were deliberately allowing their political mission to
 override their educational one. "Vision 2000" seems to prove our
 point once again.  All the anticipated touchstones are here: the
 attack on "disciplines" (defined as inherently problematic), the
 attempt to institutionalize Women's Studies (that is, feminist)
 methodologies and contents, which might well mean: qualitative
 over quantitative research methods, classrooms run more like
 therapy sessions than as intellectually challenging forums;
 journal writing and the study of approved feminist texts in place
 of a much-maligned (though in fact highly diverse) "canon"; the
 myths about pervasive salary inequities; the scare statistics
 about rape and violence; the persistent characterization of women
 as perpetual "victims"; and everywhere, policing through
 ubiquitous sensitivity training. 
      As the "Vision 2000" document makes abundantly clear,
 Women's Studies wants to be the central player, the guide to the
 restructuring of university life in line with feminist assertions
 and distortions.  If they were to succeed, feminist orthodoxy --
 contentious and much criticized though it has been--would suffuse
 the university. Feminism, represented by local Women's Studies
 scholars and their allies who staff the Women's Centers, would be
 its governing authorities.  At my own university, these are the
 same people who supported rather than challenged a radical speech
 code; approved of queries about faculty members' "significant
 contributions to multiculturalism" added to the annual faculty
 report forms; and showed concern over censorship of the Internet
 only inasmuch as it might inhibit discussion of abortion.  Is it
 really to such as these that departments and faculty should be
 handing over control of the university?  
      In our book, Noretta Koertge and I pointed out that Women's
 Studies got its foothold in academe by relying on liberal values
 in education.  Once entrenched, however, and in defiance of both
 the historical record and commonsense, Women's Studies turned on
 those very values as "masculinist" sustainers of the hated status
 quo.  If their vision of the future, under feminist leadership,
 were to come into existence, the year 2000 would look remarkably
 like 1984.   At the University of Massachusetts, students and
 faculty can look up at the windows of the second-floor Women's
 Studies office and see there, painted in red, a clenched fist
 inside the Venus symbol. Will it be any comfort that Big Brother
 will have turned into Big Sister?