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The Feminine Mistake (Allowing only liberal leftist to teach womens study)
cornellreview ^ | 9/16/2002 | Joseph J. Sabia

Posted on 09/16/2002 10:35:39 PM PDT by TLBSHOW

The Feminine Mistake

Cornell University's Women Studies department has long been a haven for anti-male, fanatical, feminist ideologues. Earlier this year, faculty members in the department demonstrated just how far out of the cultural mainstream they have become. Deciding that "Women's Studies" was not a sufficiently radical department title, the College of Arts and Sciences has formally adopted a new name: Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FGSS). Break out the whips, chains, and army boot-clad lesbians! The abortion-loving crowd is busting out of the "women's studies" closet and joining the gender-bending world of feminist sex.

On the one hand, you have to admire the women's studies faculty for finally conceding that it has no intention of presenting a politically balanced view of women's issues. There have never been any registered Republicans on the faculty in the department. Women such as Christina Hoff Summers, Phyllis Schlafly, Laura Schlessinger, and Ann Coulter have never been invited to guest lecture in women's studies classes.

While professors in this field have been indoctrinating students with left-wing dogma for many years, the "women's studies" moniker gave administrators plausible deniability against the allegation of a pro-feminist bias. No more. As Rush Limbaugh says, "They're fierce, they're feminists, and they're in our face!"

Professor Sandra Bem described the importance of the new Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department by stating:

"Gender and sexuality are best understood when examined in relation to one another, in relation to the oppression of women and sexual minorities, and in relation to other structures of privilege and oppression, especially racism and exploitation, both in the U.S. and globally."

Wow, now that's impressive! Professor Bem managed to include every single politically correct cliché known to man in a single sentence. Give that woman the Halle Berry Award.

This new department is openly committed to preaching an ideology of victimization. Women are taught that they are under men's thumbs and can only achieve liberation through promiscuous nonmarital sex, multiple abortions, divorce, and rejection of Christianity. Perhaps it is time that the department goes that extra mile and endows chairs to Lorena Bobbitt, Betty Broderick, and Hillary Clinton. These women are the true icons of the feminist faculty.

New FGSS guidelines demand that students take one course from Cornell's Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay Studies field, one course on institutional structural oppression, and one course on global perspectives. Christopher Dial, a leftist gay rights activist at Cornell, described the three new course requirements in an interview with the Cornell Daily Sun:

"I think it was a very appropriate move because the issues surrounding hegemony are not exclusive to women's rights. Furthermore, when you are studying a subject, you want to have a breadth of knowledge."

In this case, "breadth of knowledge" is apparently defined as the teaching of cultural Marxism from three different perspectives.

Among courses offered in the Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies field are Queer Fiction, Decadence, and Music and Queer Identity. According to official University course descriptions, one of the modules in Music and Queer Identity includes:

"The course will also examine the reasons behind the general popularity of queer-coded but 'straight-identified' performers such as Elvis Presley, Prince, and Michael Jackson."

There's nothing like a watching a self-identified queer faculty member sliding across the classroom floor singing "Cream." Welcome to the world of Ivy League education.

Professor Lourdes Beneria, in an interview with the Sun, was the only faculty member to display a modicum of common sense:

"The disadvantage [of the department name change] is that by dropping 'women' out, we have lost a lot of the connection to the women's movement. Some women don't identify with feminism."

On this point, Professor Beneria is exactly correct -- fewer and fewer young women are identifying with feminism because its leaders have become more and more radicalized. Today's young women are more concerned with what Christina Hoff Summers calls "equity feminism"(e.g. equal pay for equal work) than with abortion, lesbianism, atheism, and Marxism. To compensate for the loss of straight female students from the department, faculty members are targeting leftist lesbians and "sensitive guys" for indoctrination.

What can be done to remedy this horrific situation? First, Cornell University administrators ought to think about whether a feminist studies department ought to exist at all. A college education is supposed to serve at least one of two purposes -- (1) make individuals more productive in the market or (2) signal to future employers that their potential employees are of high quality. By most objective criteria, the feminist studies department fails on both counts.

If Cornell chooses to keep this irrelevant department on campus, there must be massive overhaul in the faculty and of course requirements to assure greater ideological heterogeneity. The diversity of thought should not continue to range between Susan Sontag on the Left to Patricia Ireland on the Right.

At the present time, the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department remains a politically homogenous monolith, shut off from the real world diversity of political, religious, and cultural thought. Without real reform, students will be robbed of the opportunity to be exposed to mainstream views on women's issues. Sadly, it seems, Cornell has abrogated its responsibility to educate and is instead content to churn out feminist robots to lobby for Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women.


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: cornell; josephjsabia; women

1 posted on 09/16/2002 10:35:39 PM PDT by TLBSHOW
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To: TLBSHOW
Today's young women are more concerned with what Christina Hoff Summers calls "equity feminism"(e.g. equal pay for equal work) than with abortion, lesbianism, atheism, and Marxism. To compensate for the loss of straight female students from the department, faculty members are targeting leftist lesbians and "sensitive guys" for indoctrination.

She's also pointed out a lot more then this. She's pointed out why most females do not identify themselves as feminists and these idiots can't understand why, and it's essentially because the feminist movement has devolved into this insanity, something even dyed in the wool liberals have difficulty with. If a lot of school's had no requirement that one had to take a course from this department. They'd have so little attendance they'd have have to close every feminist study department in every school in the country.

2 posted on 09/16/2002 11:06:30 PM PDT by Coeur de Lion
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To: TLBSHOW
WOOOT, this poor SOB will be tarr'd and feathered and run out of town on a large feminine pleasure extractor.
3 posted on 09/16/2002 11:15:48 PM PDT by Winston Smith
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Comment #4 Removed by Moderator

To: TLBSHOW
The Feminine Mistake


5 posted on 09/16/2002 11:39:22 PM PDT by martin_fierro
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To: coulson
Yes I bet businesses love to get those Women's (Black, Latino, etc.) Studies majors. "Ms. Smith prepare a report showing the latest sales figures for our new widgets vis-a-vis the feminist struggle against White male oppression in the marketplace, and have it in by Thursday."
6 posted on 09/17/2002 1:50:27 AM PDT by driftless
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To: TLBSHOW
Not surprising at all. I took a class on Spenser's "Faerie Queene", only to be told on the first day that we were going to be examining the poem using Feminist Theory and Queer Theory (?!) I dropped the class, but was angry enough to complain to the head of the English Department that the teaching of this great poem was being reduced to some kind of sociological experiment.
7 posted on 09/17/2002 2:09:35 AM PDT by Calico Cat
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To: TLBSHOW
Apparently our kids can't get enough Marxism, feminazism, and heterophobism in one course. They need three to make sure the politically correct cliches have be installed in their minds for life. Its beyond evil what they're doing in the universities with our tax dollars. No wonder college students sound like mind numbed robots spouting PC catechism when they're interviewed.
8 posted on 09/17/2002 2:15:59 AM PDT by goldstategop
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To: TLBSHOW
These idiotic departments are one reason tuition is so high. They are really employment agencies for vengeful femenazi critters who can't hold down a real job except maybe at Buger King. No way can they survive except glomming of a government job or an edu job. They are redundant. Useless eaters.
9 posted on 09/17/2002 2:23:41 AM PDT by dennisw
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To: TLBSHOW
Well, of course only loony leftists teach women's studies! What conservative in their right mind would want to have anything to do with a department so bogus!?

Come to think of it, what employer in their right mind would want to hire any militant, brainwashed shrew, who majored in that cr@p, anyway?

"You opened a door for me; you oppressive PIG!"

"Did you call me a mailman? The proper term is 'Equal but Superiorly Different Carrier of Letters and Parcels'; you Testosterone-Crazed Neanderthal!"

"You want to buy me lunch? Sexual harassment! Sexual harassment!"

"Shaving and bathing is degrading and an affront to the Earth Goddess."

"The office dress code allows army boots and tattoos, right?"

10 posted on 09/17/2002 4:59:28 AM PDT by schmelvin
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To: goldstategop
Where were the women shouting down the Betty Friedan's in the 60's? The practical implementation of feminism, especially by force of law, has lead to catastrophe. Like anarchism it calls for categorical opposition to authority and hierarchy, and like communism for ceaseless radical reconstruction of all aspects of life, and consequently for absolute bureaucratic control of everything. Both principles are thoroughly destructive, and the fact they contradict each other does not render them harmless. We've come a long way baby!
11 posted on 09/17/2002 5:30:11 AM PDT by 2Trievers
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bttt
12 posted on 09/17/2002 2:51:13 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
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To: TLBSHOW
I read the title and had a Mel Brooks flashback.

Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give 'em a push...

13 posted on 09/17/2002 2:56:01 PM PDT by Redcloak
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To: Black Agnes; rmlew; cardinal4; LiteKeeper; hoppity; Lizard_King; Sir_Ed; TLBSHOW; BigRedQuark; ...
Leftism on Campus ping!

If you would like to be added to the Leftism on Campus ping list, please notify me via FReep-mail.

Regards...
14 posted on 09/17/2002 6:00:03 PM PDT by Hobsonphile
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To: TLBSHOW
anyone foolish enough to pay for their childs education at an ivy league school might as well just send their kid to be educated at the hillary clinton school of politics if my child got accepted to one he or she would have to hope for a full scholarship cuz there is no way in hell they will ever get a penny from me
15 posted on 09/17/2002 6:16:53 PM PDT by TheRedSoxWinThePennant
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To: TLBSHOW
Wow! That's where I want my grandchildren to be educated. NOT!
16 posted on 09/17/2002 10:36:16 PM PDT by LiteKeeper
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To: coulson
It's an academic university, its missions are education and research. The goal is to teach people to think for themselves....

This is a cliche that deserves to be challenged. Having taught at a University for 20 years, I really don't think we do train people to 'think for themselves'. In science, we give people an intellectual framework so they can analyse data within certain limitations, but the fraction of science majors that actually learn to come up with anything genuinely new is minuscule.

I mean, think about it. Quantum mechanics is the combined work of scores of incredibly smart, dedicated physicists. If you're very smart and very hard working and quite lucky, you might get to add a small piece to the edifice. But will a college senior with the smattering of the subject they get in a standard physics of chemistry major be able to come up with an independent idea that isn't either duplicative or wrong? No, he/she won't.

In the liberal arts, it's even worse. Students come in with a fair diversity of views and opinions, many of which they have formulated partially for themselves, and are told most of these opinions are impermissible; the goal being to make them all think like their professors, i.e. as monolithic multicultural leftiists. The goal is to eliminate independent thought.

The ideal of the liberal University might have meant something once, when a tiny minority of very smart for rich people went to places like Oxford. It's about a century and a half out of date

17 posted on 09/18/2002 6:59:40 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
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To: TLBSHOW
Abandoning Christianity doesn't make these girls atheists. If only there were more Objectivist Atheist types a la Ayn Rand. No, these silly little numbers just switch Catholicism for paganism and Gods for goddesses so they still have someone to light candles and burn incense to, some one to dance around in gauzy skirts to, some supernatural element to imagine in order to give meaning to their otherwise pointless lives. It's a pity, and I really hate to see true, clean, clear atheism even remotely associated with these Earth Mother primitives.
18 posted on 09/18/2002 7:29:27 AM PDT by A_perfect_lady
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To: TLBSHOW
They should name the department "Victimization" and get it over with.
19 posted on 09/18/2002 7:34:24 AM PDT by AppyPappy
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