Women, Womyn, & More Wimmen

A Critical Study of Women's Studies

"Feminism" has become a dirty word in many circles. While the responsibility for this falls to a select number of overpublicized, crackpot zealots, the entire field of thought feels the heat. Complicit in this detrimental extremism is the University's Women's Studies Program. This article was first published April 26, 1999.

"The feminist classroom is the place to use what we know as women to appropriate and transform, totally, a domain which has been men's... Let us welcome the intrusion/infusion of emotionality --- love, rage, anxiety, eroticism-into intellect as a step toward healing the fragmentation capitalism and patriarchy have demanded from us."

The paragraph above, authored by five professors at the University of Massachusetts in a work published in Gendered Subjects: The Dynamics of Feminist Teaching, reflects ideas common among the Women's Studies faculties at many universities. Professors often rail against patriarchy, assigned readings by Marxist feminists rail against capitalism, and students are expected to react emotionally rather than intellectually. Here at the University of Oregon, Women's Studies 101 courses include discussion sections, designed in part to be a forum in which students can vent their emotional reactions to class material.

As syndicated columnist Cathy Young noted in a 1995 article, "While there are excellent [Women's Studies] programs with high academic standards, too many others are mired in loony political rhetoric and true confessions. Professors often encourage classroom 'sharing' of alleged experiences of rape, incest, battering or 'emotional abuse' by men, or even see fit to reveal their own traumas."

It is this tolerance and promotion of emotionalist rhetoric and reaction which is most dangerous to the treatment of feminism and women's history as academic issues. Far too often, the "feminist classroom" is treated as a consciousness-raising group or "rap group"-and even the (ostensibly more academic) assigned materials typically include hysterical material which is based on emotionalism rather than rationality. How can one take seriously a discussion of forced sterilization in Puerto Rico, or of women's historical contribution to the labor movement, when academic discussion is placed on the same level as a student sobbing about how she feels "violated" when men look at her, or a writer's illogical raging about how heterosexual intercourse is really an act of rape?

It is often difficult for the average student in an introductory Women's Studies course, who by definition knows little about the subject, to sort out the rational theory from the irrational rhetoric. Because of this, one might think that professors in this discipline would choose their course materials carefully, or at least make clear to students that there are many varieties of feminism, and no one author's material should be taken as Absolute TruthTM.

Unfortunately, it appears that instructors in the nation's 700-odd Women's Studies programs are often not as responsible in this regard as one might expect. What are our students being taught?

In Harvard's course "The Roots of Feminism," students are required to read Mary Daly's GynEcology, which contains such gems as, "This Spinster-Spooking is also re-calling/re-membering/re-claiming our Witches' power to cast spells, to charm, to overcome prestige with prestidigitation, to cast glamours, to employ occult grammar, to enthrall, to bewitch."

PSU's impressionable freshmen are taught, by Florence Rush's work, that "Men generally do not take sex with children seriously. They are amused by it, wink at it, and allow adult-child sex to continue through a complex of mores which applauds male sexual aggression."

Introduction to Women's Studies students at UCLA are required to read an article by Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey, "More Power Than We Want: Masculine Sexuality and Violence," which, among other bizarre and male-bashing statements, claims that "Rape is the end logic of masculine sexuality."

Brandeis University's WST students get Nancy Mairs's "On Not Liking Sex," which asserts that "Sex is not merely a political act; it is an act of war."

At the University of Utah, students are told that, in the feminist worldview, sex is shameful and anti-feminist. Professors teach Andrea Dworkin, requiring students to swallow the notion that "Internalizing the devaluation of self is fundamental in being the screwed one, the slut, the whore, celebrating it, not rebelling one bit, female complicity does not even have the dignity or the insight of world-class misogyny."

Women's Studies classes at Rutgers, Wesleyan, and the University of New Hampshire include on the reading list Cheryl Clarke's "Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance," which contains such anti-male, victim-complex sentiments as "...the institution of heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained, and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of semen."

The arguably insane but ever-popular Andrea Dworkin shows up again at MIT and other universities, where students must read sections of her book Pornography, including her rant against OB/GYNs: "The epidemic of cesarean sections in this country is a sexual, not medical, phenomenon. The doctors save the vagina-the birth canal of old-for the husband; they fuck the uterus directly, with a knife."

Here at the University of Oregon, WST students are regularly assigned works by Dworkin, including Letters From a War Zone, which includes this fairly representative excerpt: "For fun they gag us and tie us up as if we are dead meat and hang us from trees and ceilings and door frames and meat hooks; but many say the lynched women probably like it and we don't have any right to interfere with them (the women) having a good time.

For fun they rape us or have other men, or sometimes animals, rape us and film the rapes and show the rapes in movie theatres or publish them in magazines, and the normal men who are not pimps (who don't know, don't mean it) pay money to watch; and we are told that the pimps and the normal men are free citizens in a free society exercising rights and that we are prudes because this is sex and real women don't mind a little force and the women get paid anyway so what's the big deal? The pimps and the normal men have a constitution that says the filmed rapes are 'protected speech' or 'free speech.' Well, it doesn't actually say that-cameras, after all, hadn't been invented yet; but they interpret their constitution to protect their fun... There are photographs in which... things (including knives, guns, glass) are stuffed in our vaginas-in which we are gang-banged, beaten, tortured-and journalists and intellectuals say: Well, there is a lot of violence against women but... But what, prick? But we run this country, cunt."

This is feminism?

It is this type of work which lends credence to the popular stereotype of feminism: the notion that feminists are ugly, man-hating, frigid, pro-censorship, and irrational. This stereotype is inaccurate, but it continues to be fed by the media's preference for sensationalist rather than representative material.

Andrea Dworkin gets far more press with her rants than does Patricia Hill Collins with her writings on Afrocentric feminist epistemology; Catherine MacKinnon's crusade against pornography is more well-known than the Feminists for Freedom of Expression; Susan Faludi's Backlash was a much-cited best-seller, while Christina Hoff Sommers' brilliant and well researched Who Stole Feminism?, critical of the fringe feminists who have seized control of the movement, received little serious attention in the mainstream media.

Of course, the media must always strive to hold the attention of its consumers, and can thus perhaps be forgiven its lust for sensationalism. The Women's Studies classroom, however, should be based on solid theory and rational dialogue. Far too often, it is not. A large proportion of the materials regularly assigned in Women's Studies courses can only be called extremist. When students are encouraged to read critically, "against the grain," such materials can be educational, offering a glimpse into the wide variety of beliefs and attitudes which constitute the feminist movement. When fringe writings are presented with a straight face, and professors expect students to accept them as representative of mainstream feminism, however, the class becomes a course of indoctrination rather than education.

Here at the University of Oregon, the full professors within the Women's Studies department (e.g. Barbara Corrado Pope, Sandra Morgen, Judith Raiskin) often do encourage students to read against the grain, which is more than can be said for professors at many other universities. Unfortunately, most WST 101 courses, along with many other courses within the department, are taught not by professors, but by GTFs, truly a mixed bag.

Problems with GTF instructors have ranged from deep-seated misandry, to grading based on ideology rather than knowledge, to one GTF's alleged refusal to give an A to any white student.

Even in the courses taught by full professors, and even where critical thinking is ostensibly encouraged, students often find themselves under fire for daring to challenge certain so-called "feminist" ideas. Discussions of evolutionary psychology are not encouraged. Sticking up for free speech rights as they apply to pornography can get you labeled a misogynist. Question the amount of time and money spent by the feminist movement on lesbian issues (which affect only a small proportion of feminists), and you're a homophobe; ask why a third of the class is about multicultural feminism and you're a racist.

If you point out that the widely-cited (within Women's Studies courses and without) statistics on rape and domestic violence are not just cooked, but scorched, be prepared to face the hatred of the other students and the contempt (and fear) of the professor for the remainder of the term. And by goddess, don't even think about pointing out the well-documented fact that men are frequently battered by women as well as the other way around.

As young author Katie Roiphe wrote in her highly acclaimed critique, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, "How have we arrived at a place where banal assertions like 'All men are not potential rapists' are worth hundreds of letters to an author? The answer seems to me to be that as a culture we have become astonishingly intolerant of dissent...[With many feminists,] tolerating dissent appears to mean nothing more than forcing agreement...In that setting, the toleration of dissent [begins] to seem like something that would be produced by George Orwell's Ministry of Truth."

With fringe ideas being taught as mainstream feminism, dissent punished, and internalization of ideology encouraged, all tied together in a package with vital and incisive theory which addresses issues pertinent to many young women's lives, it is little wonder that so many young feminists go through a stage of radical ideology. WST 101 students (young, inexperienced, and with little higher education under their belts) often cannot separate the wheat from the chaff, so when professors refuse to do so for them, many swallow the grain of radical feminism whole.

It seems fitting to conclude with a statement made by Christina Hoff Sommers in her highly acclaimed-and controversial-book, Who Stole Feminism?:

"I would like to see [gender-feminized colleges and women's studies departments] print the following announcement on the first page of their bulletins:

"'We will help your daughter discover the extent to which she has been in complicity with the patriarchy. We will encourage her to reconstruct herself through dialogue with us. She may become enraged and chronically offended. She will very likely reject the religious and moral codes you raised her with. She may well distance herself from family and friends. She may change her appearance, and even her sexual orientation. She may end up hating you (her father) and pitying you (her mother).

"'After she has completed her reeducation with us, you will certainly be out tens of thousands of dollars and very possibly be out one daughter as well.'"

Kerry Delf, a libertarian feminist and a senior majoring in Women's Studies and Psychology, is an Associate Editor of the Oregon Commentator