Posted on 06/05/2006 10:59:28 AM PDT by JSedreporter
Feminist professors go ballistic when observers such as your humble correspondent report that the constituency they are appealing to finds women’s studies irrelevant, if not ridiculous.
“Does the typical woman graduating from college have the information she needs to make decisions that will improve her chances for long-term health and happiness?,” the Independent Women’s Forum’s Carrie Lukas asked in a recent column in The Washington Examiner. “Probably not.”
“Chances are she’s been given a lot of bad information—much of it in the name of political correctness.” Lukas, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, will speak at an Accuracy in Academia event on the evening of June 6th from 6:00 until 7:30 PM.
Imagine how feminist professors feel when they hear the same thing from the girls they are trying to reach and teach. You don’t have to use your imagination, though. Just read the dispatch from the front lines of academia that appears in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education.
“As that distinction between feminisms suggests, a generational conflict is currently being played out on college campuses,” Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young write of the apparently raging controversy surrounding so-called “Chick Lit.” “For some of us who identify ourselves as feminist professors, the concerns of young women represent a betrayal—not only of our academic work, but of our life’s work.”
“Why are they worrying about their appearance more than their education?” Ferriss is an English professor at Nova Southeastern University. Young is a professor of English and French at Tarleton State.
“Understandably embittered at the rejection of their most cherished ideals, many professors prefer to ignore or dismiss student’s concerns—and certainly prefer not to teach the literature they believe glorifies what they so strongly resent,” Ferriss and Young explain. “As for the students, they often start out bemused by their teachers’ inexplicable bitterness and end up frustrated and disappointed.”
“From their point of view, the choice between becoming, say, a neurobiological surgeon without kids or a pharmacist with a family is a very real one.” And those are just the girls that sign up for the classes.
“The academic conflict between the second- and third-wave generations is by no means limited to literature departments,” Ferriss and Young report. “We hear laments about similar disagreements from colleagues and students in history, sociology, communications, and the sciences.”
“But at a time when popular literature and culture of almost all forms have been accepted by the academy, the struggle is particularly apparent in the response to chick lit.”
This is a genre that includes works such as Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (1996). The novel became a popular film in which Renee Zelwegger played Bridget.
“Even the term ‘chick lit’ embodies the conflict: happily embraced by students, it grates annoyingly on the sensibilities of feminist professors, who see monikers like ‘chick’ as a way to demean women,” Ferriss and Young note. “As one student told us, her professor refused to use this term without making quotation marks in the air as she said it.”
“As members of an older generation of women ourselves, we do not generally identify with the chick-lit protagonists.”
Interestingly, the authors find, what the younger readers might be looking for in chick-lit is something feminist writers rarely produce—actual literature. For a sample of feminist literature, try reading some of Sandra Cisneros’ charming poetry about breaking beer bottles over the heads of barflies.
Chick lit, then, will do until genuine literature comes along but when the real thing arrives, Bridget Jones is gone. “In recent courses on classic women’s fiction and chick lit, our students came to a surprising conclusion: they overwhelmingly preferred the classic fiction,” Ferriss and Young conclude. “They weren’t completely certain if that was because of the older novels’ intricate plots, subtle characterizations, memorable language or some other factor.”
“But they were convinced that although chick-lit raises fascinating cultural issues, it can’t compete with the work of Jane Austen, the Brontes, Virginia Woolf, and Zora Neale Hurston.” And most of their achievements predated modern feminism.
So why wait to get to the good part? Give Ellen Messer-Davidow a rest.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia. For another take on modern feminism, come see Carrie Lukas, vice president of policy and economics for the Independent Women’s Forum, at AIA’s June 6th Pizza Party at Armand’s on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., starting at 6:00 PM.
The utter refusal of the courts to enforce the pedophile laws against female teachers the same way that they enforce them against men, and the failure of the public to effectively object to that different treatment, is proof that even feminists cannot accept true equality under the law for men and women.
Haven't had a chance to do any reading yet, just saw Miss Lucas quoted.
I once embraced feminism. Then I grew up.
I'm not surprised that students aren't taking to this feminist self-flagellation. But it would be foolish to think it's going to go away anytime soon. Literature departments are absolutely stuffed with feminists, Marxists, professors of queer studies, professors of postcolonial resentment, and all other the proliferating versions of hate-filled political correctness.
These folks control the departments. They are tenured. They won't go away for the next 20 or 30 years. They are already ensuring that every new hire is in their own image, or even worse.
This can only be resolved in the usual way. Established departments--English Departments, French departments, Comp Lit departments, and the rest--will gradually self-destruct, running out of warm bodies to teach. New departments will start up to take their places.
Politicians and administrators are happily prepared to support this nonsense, but the students will go elsewhere. But it will be a difficult transition. An awful lot of students will be deprived of the opportunity to study real history and to read good books.
Maybe they just don't care for the current pickings. Out of the dozens of books I've read in the last two years or so, two of them would probably qualify as "chick lit": Wicked (can't recall the author) and a book whose complete title escapes me, something about the "Yaya Sisterhood." Probably the worst two books I've read since tackling Even Cowgirls Get the Blues in my late teens. Atrocious. If those works are indicative of the quality of modern chick lit, I'll be sticking with Austen.
I think the utter refusal of certain people to accept that there IS a difference miss the point. Men and women are different--sorry, they just are. Anyone who knows of a girl who had sex with an older man and a boy who had sex with an older woman can tell you this.
It ain't PC, but it's true.
ding ding ding- this man (or woman) wins a cigar!
I think they prefer the term "broad".
Indicative of their stupidity... just what is a neurobiological surgeon? Is there such a thing as a nonbiological neurosurgeon?
Thanks for the heads-up... I hadn't seen this article. Carrie had a nice interview today on the G. Gordon Liddy show which we were able to find on streaming audio.
With the cost of college being expensive. Anyone who would waste the cost of 3 semester hours has to be a moron.
Let's say you were growing up in flyover country, as the libs call it. Rural area, people know their neighbors, conservative, generally speaking.
A girl is "seduced" by an older man.
A boy is seduced by an older woman.
Which kid is hiding the situation from friends and the father grabbing his rifle, and which is going to be bragging to friends and have the father secretly proud?
Again, it ain't PC, but them's the facts.
“Why are they worrying about their appearance more than their education?"
Could it be that they are normal, healthy young women who like men and that their highest priority is to marry and bear children sired by a loving husband? In other words, that they are the complete opposite of their feminist instructors?
I used to consider myself a feminist and might still be one if feminists cared about issues like the oppression of women under Islam. NOW doesn't even see this as a problem.
My dad occasionally refers to me as "one tough broad." I've never taken it as an insult.
...and in the other majors where people actually get jobs, too.
Me, too. I walked away from the feminist movement when I realized that they weren't actually FOR women. They were simply FOR left-wing politics.
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