"Smith [College], one of the nation’s largest women’s schools with about 2,500 students, has been admitting transgender students since 2015, along with several other top women’s colleges. The issue became a lightning rod at women’s colleges after a transgender applicant was denied acceptance to Smith in 2013 because her gender identity did not match her financial aid forms. Since then, most women’s colleges updated their admissions policies to welcome transgender applicants. One notable exception has been Sweet Briar College in central Virginia, which does not admit transgender students and helps students in transition transfer to another college...."
These schools became incapable of freely choosing their own policy after "The issue became a lightning rod" in 2013. If this Trump investigation ends up forcing Smith to exclude transgender women, it will only be forced to do what it originally wanted to do. Obviously, there's a big difference between being forced by social and political pressure and being forced by the government. It's not as though the inclusion of transgender women was required by the government... not that it didn't try. It did. In the Biden years.
Following a Sept. 12 meeting to discuss anonymous postings that alleged the band’s involvement in sexual misconduct, assault and racism, among other things, the band “unanimously and enthusiastically decided to dissolve” after 116 years of performance, according to the band’s statement Monday.
“The Columbia University Marching Band apologizes for insult and injury victims have experienced as a result of actions perpetrated in its name,” the statement continues. “The Band has maintained a club structure founded on the basis of racism, cultural oppression, misogyny, and sexual harassment.”
Despite reform efforts, the band found it “impossible to reform an organization so grounded in prejudiced culture and traditions.”
"... filed Thursday claiming that the changes would 'inflict significant harm' on victims and 'dramatically undermine' their civil rights. The suit, filed [by the American Civil Liberties Union] on behalf of four advocacy groups for people who have been sexually assaulted, including Know Your IX and Girls for Gender Equity, is the first that seeks to block the Education Department's new provisions before they go into effect on Aug. 14. The rules championed by DeVos effectively bolster the rights of due process for those accused of sexual assault and harassment, allowing for live hearings and cross-examinations."
Baker Mitchell, founder of the Roger Bacon Academy, which runs Charter Day School [in North Carolina]... explained in an email that the dress code, along with other policies, were meant to “preserve chivalry and respect among young women and men.” He cited societal concerns such as “teen pregnancies” and “casual sex” for the need to create a learning environment that “embodied traditional values.”...
According to the decision, the skirt requirement forced girls to “pay constant attention to the positioning of their legs during class, distracting them from learning, and has led them to avoid certain activities altogether, such as climbing or playing sports during recess, all for fear of exposing their undergarments and being reprimanded by teachers or teased by boys.”
The school had defended its policy, saying it was based on “traditional values” and “is in place to instill discipline and keep order,” Howard summarized in his decision. “They argue that taking away the ‘visual cues’ of the skirts requirement would hinder respect between the two sexes.”...
“Defendants have shown no connection between these stated goals and the requirement that girls wear skirts,” [U.S. District Judge Malcolm Howard] wrote.
It is hard to see how requiring girls to wear skirts constrains sexual expression. It constrains all sorts of physical activities other than sex. It really facilitates sex, especially if sex includes looking up a girl's skirt and — to use the presidential locution — grabbing her by the pussy.
My schoolgirl days were spent entirely in skirts. It was required, and then we were sent to the vice principal's office for wearing the wrong length skirt. Especially me. I vividly remember sitting through the vice principal's lecture about the sexual suffering of boys when they were subjected to the presence of a girl in a miniskirt. I felt like he was sexually harassing me by talking about sex so intensely. He was making it sexual, imposing man-mind on me, when I, required to wear a skirt, simply insisted on wearing the skirt that was in fashion. Let me wear pants, and your sex problem is gone. Unless it's not. You dirty old man.
Now... that's enough 1966. Back to the present. The most interesting part of the North Carolina dispute is defending it in the name of chivalry. Chivalry is (to pick the most apt definition in the OED) "The brave, honourable, and courteous character attributed to the ideal knight; disinterested bravery, honour, and courtesy; chivalrousness." Wouldn't it be great if there were the choice to send your son to a charter school where they shaped him into a brave, honorable, courteous, ideal knight? But if it's a co-ed school, what are they offering the girls? I'd say having male classmates who are expected to behave like ideal knights is itself a great offer, but I assume the girls too would be called to bravery, honor, and courteousness.
Johnston, who has never wrestled a girl since he picked up the sport in seventh grade, has said that the physical aggression required in wrestling isn’t something he’s comfortable showing toward a girl, on or off the mat....
"I don’t think that I am looking at them as not equal...I am saying that they are women and that is different than being men, because I do believe that men and women are different and we are made differently. But I still believe that women are of equal value to men....”
Jaslynn Gallegos, the girl to whom he forfeited, said, "My whole thing is that I’m not a girl wrestler; I’m just a wrestler. So it kind of doesn’t hurt my feelings, but I do kind of take it to heart."
The most-up-voted comment is: "I will disagree with him all day long and still have MAD PROPS for his conviction and dedication to his personal beliefs. He handled the situation with dignity and so did the young lady involved. Perhaps there is hope for a congenial society."
The Harvard Crimson reports, naming a student who supposedly said she'd filed a complaint with the University’s Office for Dispute Resolution and has been urging other students to do the same. We're told that "at least 48 students had signed an online petition certifying they had filed a Title IX complaint against the nominee."
The student who got this started argued that Kavanaugh could be accused of gender-based harassment under Harvard's definition: "verbal, nonverbal, graphic, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostile conduct based on sex, sex-stereotyping, sexual orientation or gender identity." Kavanaugh's mere presence on campus, she and others said, makes a "hostile environment" under Harvard's definition.
[The student] said she hopes students who have previously felt reluctant to file complaints with the University — whether related to Kavanaugh or to other experiences — will see that the formal process gives them “power” and “a right to our feeling of being safe.”
“I hope that, as students file these complaints and engage with this process of singling out accusers and harassers on campus, that it actually can be seen that this process is a little less formidable than the reputation of the process is on campus,” she said.
Another leader in this activism said:
“If you had a meeting in Wasserstein, you don’t know if he’s going to be there... It would be pretty terrifying for any survivor or any person to walk into a building on campus and see someone who has been alleged of a very serious crime.”
Terrifying to see a person accused of a serious crime? Kavanaugh's temperament is being questioned, but what about the temperament of these potential lawyers? Do they not feel called to deal with the difficult world of legal problems? This made me think about one of the most reviled Supreme Court cases, Bradwell v. Illinois, which allowed the state to bar women from the practice of law, back in 1873. From the concurring opinion of Justice Bradley:
The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life....
Why don't activist, feminist women aspire to strength? Promoting the timidity and delicacy of women and running to the authorities with specious, backhanded complaints — what lowly, destructive activism!
IN THE COMMENTS: Lyssa said:
Every now and then, quote-unquote feminists have s minor freak out because some female celebs or young women in general don’t want to be associated with the word “feminist.” This is why. I don’t claim to know what feminism really means; it seems to be something different to everyone, so I generally avoid the term entirely. But if feminism involves this kind of weakness, I want absolutely no part of it.
If I were still in law school, I’d get that Bradley quote put in a t-shirt. It’s awsome.
"Awsome" = a typo or a word that means cute (that is, inspiring people to say "aw").
Anyway, I've had that problem with feminism for close to half a century, but I still care about salvaging the word. Why give it away to people who are undermining the very cause that matters to you? I remember saying — 35 years ago — that I didn't want to call myself a feminist because I didn't want to wear a label with a meaning that wasn't clear and stable and within my control. But that never meant I didn't care about participating in the struggle over the meaning of the word. It's a big struggle, and I say never surrender.
CORRECTION: I thought the activist students were law students, but now I'm seeing the word "undergraduate" in the first and second paragraphs and have deleted the references to law students. I hope it is true that law students know better than to engage in this maneuver and that they are leaning into strength and readying themselves to confront the roughness of the real world.
"... and she is older: her apparently desperate neediness is part of what makes the case documents such cringeworthy reading. It matters that he identifies as gay and she as a lesbian, because it makes us question how important the sexual really is in sexual harassment. It matters that the investigation was conducted by a private university under conditions of confidentiality, and that the accuser is now suing that university... It also matters a great deal that the latest fallen star is an academic and a feminist.... Perhaps justice can be found neither in closed investigations nor in open court but in a different sort of public forum. If the ultimate objective of #MeToo is a fundamental change in power relationships—if it is indeed a revolution and not merely a series of attempts at retribution—then it may call for confrontations and discussions in the mode of truth-and-reconciliation commissions that societies undergoing change have organized. Perhaps victims should face their abusers and tell their stories not only to and through the media but to one another."
I was particularly interested in this quote about Ronell's method of teaching, which "circulated on Facebook." The author wrote anonymously, reportedly out of fear of retaliation:
We don’t need a conversation about sexual harassment by AR, we should instead talk about what AR and many of her generation call ‘pedagogy’ and what is still excused as ‘genius.’ When people talk about sexual harassment it’s within the logic of the symbolic order – penetration, body parts – I doubt you will find much of this here. But AR is all about manipulation and psychic violence. . . . AR pulls students and young faculty in by flattery, then breaks their self-esteem, goes on to humiliate them in front of others, until the only way to tell yourself and others that you have not been debased, that you have not been used by a pathological narcissist as a private slave, is that you are just so incredibly close, and that Avi is just so incredibly fragile and lonely and needs you 24/7 to do groceries, to fold her laundry, to bring her to acupuncture, to pick her up from acupuncture, to drive her to JFK, to talk to her at night, etc. . . . All I am saying is: the AR-case is not about a single case of sexual harassment, it’s about systematic manipulation, bullying, intimidation, pitting students against each other, creating rivalry between them. . . . I agree the concept of “Avital Ronell” is a great one: I too would love to be friends with a smart, hilarious, queer, Jewish, feminist, anarchist theorist!
Today my school was shown this video. So sad how ONLY girls are shown as the violators. I understand why my school has a dresscode, but what about the boys who wear shorts, or show their shoulders? It’s 2018...Why are we still over-sexualizing teen girls? pic.twitter.com/fCXymYAIEG
1. Were any boys in the school wearing "athletic shorts" (that is, tight, very short shorts)? I'm picturing boys wearing exactly the opposite type of shorts — long and baggy.
2. The school probably thought it was being lighthearted and cool about it — what with the music, the teacher playing a parody of an old school marm, and the emphasis on just not wearing this sort of thing in school.
3. Was the video shown in an all-girls environment? If not, then there is a problem of deploying girls' bodies for the entertainment of boys. If it was just for girls, it might be construed as an attempt at saying something like: You're just fine, you're as cute as you think you are, but please understand that we can't have that in school. And yet, that's still a problem. It's saying: We have a dress code because you're so sexy, please see yourself as sexy so that you will agree with us about the importance of this dress code.
4. Back in 1965, I got sent to the vice-principal for wearing miniskirts. Eventually, they got tough and sent me to the principal, who, unlike the vice-principal, made an argument about the boys: It wasn't fair to the boys. It made school difficult for the boys. I took great offense at this, because he was raising the topic of sex as if I had implicitly made it the subject simply by wearing an article of clothing that was precisely the fashion. In an embarrassing display of how his thinking was grounded in sex, he posed the hypothetical: What if I had come to school in a bikini?
5. But I didn't have Twitter. In the actual Texas case, after the Twitter exposure, the school apologized.
... and then offered her 4 adhesive bandages to X out her nipples. The girl, Lizzy Martinez, had left off wearing her bra that day because a sunburn (we're told) made the bra unusually uncomfortable.
“She told me, ‘I’m thinking of ways I could fix this for you. She said, ‘I was a heavier girl and I have all the tricks up my sleeve,’” Ms. Martinez said....
The incident happened two weeks ago — Ms. Martinez’s initial tweet about the incident went viral — but the backlash is still going strong. On Monday, Ms. Martinez and some of her classmates held a silent protest in support of “the destigmitization of natural bodies.” Despite threats of disciplinary action, about 30 female students opted not to wear bras, and a number of students decorated their backpacks with Band-Aids in the shape of an X. One student wore a shirt that read, “Do my ni**ples offend you?” (The asterisks were hers.)...
In the case of Ms. Martinez, for example, the school is “foisting this notion that unrestrained breasts are sexual and likely to cause disruption and distract other students,” [said lawprof Meredith Harbach]. But this kind of messaging that targets young women — your skirt is too short, you look too sexy, you’re distracting the boys — “deflects any and all conversation about appropriate mutually respectful behavior in schools between boys and girls... Who is disrupted actually? It’s Lizzy. Whose learning experience is impacted?.... It doesn’t sound like other kids had a major disruption, but she sure did.”...
Meanwhile, women whose nipples don't show are getting injections to produce those "Kendall Jenner" bumps because they love the look. This amusing video was in the NY Post recently:
They talk about the new book here (at Volokh Conspiracy):
Despite horror stories like the one at Amherst, the mainstream media has poorly covered the campus sexual assault issue. There has been a handful of good work (most notably this Emily Yoffe article in Slate). More typical, however, has been the approach of the New York Times, which has virtually ignored concerns expressed by civil libertarian organizations and cohorts of law professors about the campus system’s unfairness. To the contrary, in an article about Stanford the Times recently portrayed the university’s process — which uses the lowest possible standard of proof, bans direct cross-examination by accused students, and has featured panelists who have been trained to believe that is it a sign of guilt for an accused student to respond to an accusation in a “persuasive and logical” way — as unfair to accusers. The reason? The school’s one fair rule — that the three panelists must be unanimous to justify a finding of guilty....
As for the universities, the power of identity politics has generally worked in tandem with the schools’ financial self-interest in appeasing federal officials who have the power to exact huge financial penalties to incubate unfairness toward accused students....
I immediately downloaded this book to my Kindle because — after writing the previous post about massive donations to the ACLU — I wanted to see where the organization stands on due process in campus sexual assault cases. I'm interested in the ACLU's vigor in disappointing donors who suddenly love the organization because of one issue. I highlighted free speech in my post, but I'd also wanted to say something about this due process problem, and my casual Googling had not turned up a clear answer.
There's not much about the ACLU in this book. This is the main reference:
[D]uring George W. Bush’s presidency, a handful of cases (at the University of Georgia, the University of Colorado, and Arizona State University) involving highly credible sexual assault allegations against college football and basketball players kept the issue in the public eye. In each case, the accuser filed a Title IX lawsuit against her school, alleging that it had knowingly recruited potentially violent felons solely because they were talented athletes and it had thereby shown deliberate indifference to the well-being of female students. Each case ended with a denial of the university’s motion to dismiss, followed by a settlement, driven by a hailstorm of negative publicity, in which the university apologized for not doing enough to protect women on campus. The American Civil Liberties Union filed amicus briefs supporting the Arizona State and Colorado plaintiffs.
"The voting was conducted on the law school premises and the results were posted in the law school’s administrative offices. The posted results noted the top 10 women as democratically determined."
So writes Scott Johnson, in a post at Power Line called "The Persistence of 'Locker Room Talk.'" I've quoted the paragraph that jarred me — because it's not about locker room talk at all. It's one thing to say men are going to talk about sex when they are alone with other men — because what fires up male sexuality more than being with other men? — and that it's too repressive and too at war with nature to outlaw it. But it's something else altogether when that male-on-male talk breaks out into the common spaces of an educational institution. Then it's not the male bonding of the locker room, and it can be motivated by an intent to communicate that this is a male-dominated institution where women are subordinate creatures.
"We’re in a period now where young people are being processed for the universities, and the gender norms are said to be that gender is a construct. It is simply the product of environmental pressures on people. There’s no... nothing in the body...."
Said Camillle Paglia, in a conversation with Tyler Cowen, who'd asked here "For America, what should an ideal of masculinity look like now?"
COWEN: We have a big culture. Not everyone goes to university, thank goodness. You can go to a NASCAR race and a few of the people there have not been to the Ivy Leagues.
PAGLIA: Working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. But, with that, comes static. So you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men. That is why masculinity is constantly being eroded, diminished, and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak. If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. That’s what we have. Our university system, anything that is remotely masculine is identified as toxic, as intrinsic to rape culture. A utopian future is imagined where there are no men. We’re all genderless mannequins. The movie The Time Machine is like one. We’re moving toward that, the Eloi. That’s how I see the upper middle class graduates of the Ivy League. They’re the Eloi. They’re completely bland. They have no ideas. They all get along very well with each other because they’re nothing. They’re eating their fruits which are given to them by the Morlocks, or the industrial class. That’s how I see the future — unfortunately. I began my career talking about androgyny and talking about the imaginative complexity of androgyny and how the artist and the shaman and the prophet have this androgynous component. But today’s androgyny, it’s just boring....
Here's the precise clip (from the middle of an hour-and-a-half conversation):
I encountered the conversation because a few days ago, a commenter, Kit Carson pointed it it out because of something she said something about travel that seemed, to him, "althouse-like": "I’m like Huysmans’s aesthete, des Esseintes. I am not a great fan of traveling. I just feel like it’s become too onerous. No, I’m a mind traveler."
The pleasure of travel, which only exists as a matter of fact in retrospect and seldom in the present, at the instant when it is being experienced, he could fully relish at his ease, without the necessity of fatigue or confusion, here in this cabin....
Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things.... One could revel... in long explorations while near one's own fireside, stimulating the restive or sluggish mind, if need be, by reading some suggestive narrative of travel in distant lands.....
The secret lies in knowing how to proceed, how to concentrate deeply enough to produce the hallucination and succeed in substituting the dream reality for the reality itself.
Artifice, besides, seemed to Des Esseintes the final distinctive mark of man's genius. Nature had had her day, as he put it. By the disgusting sameness of her landscapes and skies, she had once for all wearied the considerate patience of æsthetes. Really, what dullness! the dullness of the specialist confined to his narrow work. What manners! the manners of the tradesman offering one particular ware to the exclusion of all others. What a monotonous storehouse of fields and trees! What a banal agency of mountains and seas!
Kit Carson may have thought Paglia sounded like me, but Paglia proclaimed that she was like Des Esseintes. Reading the text, I wonder if Paglia really intended to seem to be finding nature dull and boring and best replaced by artifice and imagination. Paglia tends to recommend that brainy folk get out of their cloisters and into the real world, and I don't think she looks down her nose at "the vulgar realities of things."
In fact, the part of the conversation that interested me most, about the draining of masculinity from the loftier realms of American culture, bemoans the lack of experience living in the world, living — as she put it — in the body. That's why she talked about the Eloi. Here's the scene with the fruit-eating:
"I'm going back to my own time. I won't even bother to tell of the useless struggle, the hopeless future. But at least I can die among men!"
What Paglia said that interested me most was that "masculinity is constantly being eroded, diminished, and
dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak." That's a variation on something I've been thinking lately. In my way of looking at it, "allows" is the wrong word. I think we need to consider whether masculinity is constantly being eroded because it serves the purpose of making women weak.
Sexual harassment in science generally starts like this: A woman (she is a student, a technician, a professor) gets an email and notices that the subject line is a bit off: “I need to tell you,” or “my feelings.” The opening lines refer to the altered physical and mental state of the author: “It’s late and I can’t sleep” is a favorite, though “Maybe it’s the three glasses of cognac” is popular as well.
That's strangely miswritten. It's not possible to believe that the exact phrase “Maybe it’s the three glasses of cognac” appears and reappears with frequency. I'm going to assume what's meant is that the subject lines refer not specifically to 3 cognacs but generally to drinking. Let's continue:
The author goes on to tell her that she is special in some way, that his passion is an unfamiliar feeling that she has awakened in him, the important suggestion being that she has brought this upon herself. He will speak of her as an object with “shiny hair” or “sparkling eyes” — testing the waters before commenting upon the more private parts of her body. Surprisingly, he often acknowledges that he is doing something inappropriate. I’ve seen “Of course you know I could get fired for this” in the closing paragraph; the subject line of the email sent to my former student was “NSFW read at your own risk!”...
Perhaps she decides to ignore this first email... Once satisfied with her tendency toward secrecy, the sender then finds a way to get her alone: invites her to coffee, into his office, out for some ostensibly group event. At said meeting he will become tentatively physical, insisting that if people knew, they just wouldn’t understand. At this point, any objection on her part wouldn’t just be professionally dangerous, it would seem heartless....
Oh, I don't know. Why isn't it also "heartless" to deprive this man of the basic information that he is not experiencing a successful response to his attempt to go on a date?
Then there are conferences, field trips, cocktail hours and retreats, whispering co-workers, rolling eyes and sadly shaking heads. On and on it goes, and slowly she realizes that he’s not going to stop because he doesn’t have to....
Why is this smart woman so absurdly slow?
If you read on, you'll see that this shockingly uncommunicative woman finally deals with her problem by leaving the field of science.
A WaPo op-ed by Brian Grasso. The book, which "includes cartoon drawings of a woman masturbating and multiple women engaging in oral sex," was assigned to all freshmen. Grasso doesn't resist the requirement of reading material he disagrees with or reading about sex. Pictures are different, in his view.
He cites the words of Jesus: “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” and “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.”
Jesus seems (to me) to be disapproving of the feeling that results from looking at women (whom one frequently encounters in real life and not merely in pictures). I don't see that as saying don't look at pictures, just don't look at them with lust, and don't look at real, live women with lust. But: 1. You could decide that you need to avoid looking at certain things because you predict that they will inspire lust, and 2. Grasso is entitled to his own interpretation of the religion, including reading "looking at a woman lustfully" to mean looking at a drawing of a woman engaged in sex.
Grasso anticipates that some people will say that he doesn't have to go to Duke, and if he chooses to attend, he needs to do the assignments, and if he can't, he ought to go somewhere else. But he argues: 1. That graphic depictions of sex are rarely part of a class assignment and unlikely to be that important, and 2. People like him contribute to diversity.
There are over 1,000 comments. The first one I saw (the most recent) was:
You should be treated like any one who chooses not to complete an assignment, whether the reason is they were drunk, the dog ate the book, or you flushed it down the toilet. Your religious self-righteous rambling is rather irrelevant. If you get a zero on this part of the class and can still go one, great. If not, then drop the class like all others. What makes you and your beliefs any different than that of a person who thinks certain books are boring or too difficult or "not culturally compatible" with what they believe in?
IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said: "Everybody Draw Jesus Looking Lustfully At Cartoon Drawings Of Women Masturbating And Engaging In Oral Sex Day."
“It’s just a major breach of trust,” said Lynn Floyd, whose 11- and 13-year-old daughters were part of the outing to the Smitten Kitten. “You just can’t erase those images.”...
While at Smitten Kitten, students sat in the front in a library section of the store, [the school's director Starri Hedges said]. Everything deemed pornographic was off limits to the students, though sex toys and other products were visible, Hedges said....
Are you sympathetic with the parents here? First, they chose to send their kids to Gaia Democratic School. From the school's "Our Philosophy" page:
Gaia is a private school that provides holistic educational services to students K-12 with emphasis on democratic process, individualized instruction, academic freedom, self-motivation, cooperative learning, youth empowerment, and environmental stewardship. We are part of an education movement that has a long, fascinating history and a vibrant, viable future.
That page includes a quote from Alan Watts: "You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean."
Inspectors found that the store did not isolate sexually explicit materials in a separate section of the shop, as required by city code, said Grant Wilson, who oversees business licensing for the city. The store also had sexually explicit materials within view of minors, which is also a violation....
“If you are going to be out in the neighborhoods out of downtown, you can have sexually explicit material, but only [in] 15 percent of your retail floor area,” Wilson said.
Smitten Kitten opened in 2003 and is committed to promoting “an inclusive, shame-free environment where it’s OK to talk about all kinds of consensual sex.”
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