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