“The Hunting Ground:” Agitprop in the Service of a Moral Panic

Student Government and Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies to Show Discredited Film on Campus Rape

A story in the Marquette Tribune includes this short note at the end:

The CGSS (Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies) and MUSG (Marquette University Student Government) will show “The Hunting Ground” on April 25, followed by a panel of faculty and staff who will discuss campus sexual assault.

In fact, “The Hunting Ground” has been widely discredited in liberal and mainstream media outlets for its distortion of facts, and its attempt to convict for rape two fellows who are almost certainly innocent. See for example:

• Slate
• Harvard Law Record
• Reason
• New York
• The Harvard Crimson
• (And the conservative) National Review.

Are people who got to see the film going to be told about the controversy, or if so, will all the critics be dismissed as “rape apologists?”

When supposed scholars become activists, nothing good comes of it. And intellectual honesty is always the loser.  That’s the story of academic feminism.

Two Generations of Feminist Democrats

Campus Rape: Scholars Accused of Misconduct for Politically Incorrect Findings

Of course, the claim of “misconduct” will eventually be found to be baseless. But until that happens, the authors will have to endure a tedious “investigation.” The process is the punishment.

Ironically, Mary Koss is one of the people responsible for the current hysteria about campus sexual assault. Her pioneering study in the 1980s, financed by Ms. Magazine, claimed that one in four college women have been victims of date rape. The number was entirely bogus.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

So one could view her current troubles as poetic justice. We think this would be unfair, and credit her with being honest about the data in spite of the current politically correct dogmatism.

Decadent European Elites Hate Israel (And So Do American Academics)

From Jewish News Online:

What we have today is a moral, intellectual siege of Israel, by the academic and media elites of Europe’s chattering-class citadels. They’ve turned Israel into Global Enemy No1, the source of all the world’s sorrow, a nation to be railed against more than any other on Earth.

My dictionary says a siege is the “surrounding of a place” with the intent of making its inhabitants surrender. Could there be a better description of European progressives’ myopic singling out of Israel for invective, and their shunning of its wares, books and even people via the BDS movement? People in Israel feel this moral siege, this intellectual blockade, very strongly.

Some Israelis I spoke to seemed more upset about the turn against Israel in Europe than they were about the more immediate threat posed Islamists in the Middle East. It wasn’t hard to work out why. As one said, “We considered Europe a friend”: “We thought Europe and Israel had a lot in common, being Western and democratic.”

This cuts to the heart of the Euro-elites’ paranoia about Israel, their turn against it: it is really European values, the ideals of modernity and democracy, they’ve given up on. The thing that riles them most about Israel is that it reminds them of what they used to be like, of the values they once espoused, before they lost the moral plot and sank into the cesspit of relativism and post-Enlightenment self-loathing.

Plucky, keen to protect its sovereignty, considering itself an outpost of liberalism… Israel is a painful reminder to today’s morally anchorless European thinkers and agitators of what their nations once were.They hate Israel because they hate themselves.

Israel has become the whipping boy of guilt-ridden Western liberals who’ve given up on the very idea of the West.

Of course, the same critique applies to leftist elites in the U.S., who are reflexively anti-Israel. Academics (especially in the humanities and social sciences) are the most typical examples of this sort of decadence. As reported by Frontpage:

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another academic association—this time the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—has followed the lead of the American Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Asian Studies Association, and several others by ignobly voting to approve another academic boycott of Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, the NWSA’s recommendation to approve a boycott announced that, “As feminist scholars, activists, teachers, and public intellectuals we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression,” that “interconnectedness,” no doubt, justifying the singling out of Israeli academics for their particularly odious role in the oppression of women in the Middle East. “In the spirit of this intersectional perspective,” these moral termagants continued, “we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.”

As Orwell made clear, corrupt language indicates corrupt thinking, and we have it in spades here.

And the fact that feminists think this way is particularly bizarre.

Perhaps it has escaped the notice of the NWSA experts on gender and sexuality issues that if one wanted to punish any Middle Eastern country for its subjugation and abuse of women, Israel would probably not be the first nation to come under reasonable or justifiable scrutiny for a group dedicated “to principles of human rights, justice and freedom for all, including academic freedom.” Totalitarian and despotic regimes throughout the region have created an oppressive group of social pathologies that negatively affect women, including genital mutilation, stoning of adulteresses, “honor” killings by fathers and brothers who have been shamed, cultures of gender apartheid in which women are seen as property with no emotional or physical autonomy, ubiquitous sexual assault, and a general subjugation of women, complete with regulations governing behavior, movement, speech, and even requirements that women be covered by burqa or hijab.

This is just more evidence, if any is needed, that feminism isn’t about women. It’s about left-wing politics and a set of cultural biases typical among leftists.

And among advanced industrial nations, American is the most like Israel. Which is why the leftists elites don’t like America either. And why ordinary Americans (especially Republicans) like Israel.

Former Director of the Gender And Sexuality Resource Center Moans and Complains About Removal of Mural of Terrorist

This blog broke the story, and it went national: a mural of cop killer and domestic terrorist Assata Shakur in the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center at Marquette. Quickly, the mural was painted over, and the Director of the Center, Susannah Bartlow, was fired.

She has now published an article on the issue in Feminist Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, “Gendering Bodies, Institutional Hegemonies” (2015), pp. 689-697.

The mere title gives away the fact that this is going to be an example of the arcane and stilted rhetoric common among academic feminists. And indeed it is.

As the founding director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC), my job was to build an academic support office for women’s, gender, and LGBTQ+ education and empowerment. In the center’s third year, Amanda Smith (a Marquette senior) and Jeanette Martín (a community artist and program assistant at the center) envisioned, planned, and executed the Assata Shakur mural project as a way to invite greater community interest. In my role as director of the center, I supported the project, communicated it to senior leaders, and spread the word about the community-painting day in late March 2015.

So it wasn’t Bartlow’s idea. But she knew perfectly well who Shakur was, having signed a petition requesting that President Obama take Shakur off the Most Wanted Terrorists List. And she approved the project anyway.

Her claim to have “communicated it [plans for the mural] to senior leaders” is interesting, since if she informed “senior leaders” about who Shakur is, and they approved the mural, they are responsible and Bartlow was a mere sacrificial lamb.

Faced with a similar claim months ago, we wrote Bartlow, asking for details of what was communicated to higher-level officials, and she did not respond.

Defense of the Mural

Bartlow continues:

Over the six weeks it was on display at the center, the mural invited people into a quiet space off a hallway, and it had sparked discussion among staff, faculty, and students who used the space. The mural was one of very few images of a black woman anywhere on Marquette’s campus, and it contributed to a sense among many students of color that the GSRC was a space in which they were welcomed and safe and where they could be comfortable.

Yet in the distortions of white supremacy, the mural looked like a threat, rather than an intellectual and community representation central to the university itself.

So it’s “white supremacy” to object to object to a mural of a cop killer?

Did the mural “invite” people into the Center? If so, why was a mural of a cop killer particularly “inviting?” Does the clientele of the Center think killing cops is fine?

If one wants an image of a black woman, we can think of a lot of black women who have not killed any cop, and are not on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists.

As for the mural looking like a “threat,” this is what psychologists call “projection.” Politically correct feminists and other leftists are always claiming to feel “unsafe” when they face arguments and facts they find inconvenient. So they assume that other people feel “threatened” (rather than merely appalled) by an image of a black militant cop killer.

Bartlow goes on:

What happened specifically to this mural and to my job is also connected to the charged context of contemporary racialized violence. What happened to the mural is really a minor symptom of the full-on assault against poor people, people of color, queer people, and others who cannot access or play by the rules of twenty-first-century social dominance. No words fit the loss of life and the daily violations against black, brown, and poor people: in Milwaukee, where Marquette is located, more than 100 of the 105 homicides reported so far in 2015 involve black or Hispanic victims.

The chutzpah here is astounding.

Painting over a mural is part of the same phenomenon of black people getting killed?

Worse still is the assertion that 100 of the 105 homicides thus far this year had black or Hispanic victims. Is she implying that cops killed all these people? Klansmen?

No breakdown of victims by race of offender for Milwaukee is available at the moment, but national statistics pretty much tell the story. In 2012 (the last year for which tabulations are available), of 2648 blacks murdered, 2412 were murdered by other blacks. That’s 91 percent.

And the map of the locations of murders in the city of Milwaukee, published by the Journal-Sentinel, also tells the story.



It shows murders concentrated in black neighborhoods on the north side, and Hispanic neighborhoods on the near south side.

More Arcane Verbiage

Bartlow continues:

Our choice of Assata Shakur—a powerful, controversial black leader, an uncompromising woman, for better and worse—came out of a year-long process of supportive, consensus-based, power sharing between students and staff at our center. The mural was visible evidence that our feminist collaborations were working.

So she thought the process was great. But the outcome of the process was odious.

Why could not a “supportive, consensus-based, power sharing” process have produced a mural of a black woman that almost everybody on the campus could admire, and a mural that the Administration could have supported (rather than having to distance itself from). Quite simply: Bartlow and her collaborators were political extremists who didn’t particularly mind black militants killing cops.

Thus the hiring of Bartlow stands as a major fiasco. Perhaps the Administration will be more careful in the future. If so, this débâcle has served a useful purpose. But given the current administration’s habit of pandering to the activists, we have our doubts.

“Bluebloods” on Campus Social Justice Warriors

Not all network TV is liberal propaganda. Example: a recent episode of “Bluebloods” that has a campus feminist playing the victim. It starts with a campus leftist wanting some fellow student punished for unkind (but perfectly legal) messages posted on the campus message board.

Would campus leftists do this? Absolutely. As The Volokh Conspiracy records:

A large coalition of advocacy groups has asked the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights to pressure colleges to (1) punish students for their speech and (2) block student access to certain Web sites — especially sites such as Yik Yak, which allow students to anonymously post their views.

Now, some of the speech that the groups mention consists of true threats of violence, including threats of attack and even rape. Such speech is constitutionally unprotected. (Indeed, some of it — threats against people for speaking, for instance, in support of feminist causes — itself attempts to suppress speech.) It is rightly criminalized and can certainly be punished.

But the letter goes very far beyond just calling on universities to punish threats. Here are some other examples of speech that the coalition points to:

• “[S]uccessive invidious comments targeting African-Americans, such as ‘Their entire culture just isn’t conducive to a life of success. It just isn’t. The outfits. The attitudes. The behavior.’”
• “Another comment” that said “Slavery was the worst thing to happen to this country, bringing them over here . . . ugh.”
• A statement that “I would be completely ok with Clemson being an all white school. Except for football.”
• A statement that “The only thing niggers are good for is making Clemson better at football.”
• A statement that “Jesus I hate black people.”
• A comment saying, “Guys stop with all this hate. Let’s just be thankful we aren’t black.”
• Statements “target[ing] Indian students and East Asians, referred to as ‘chinks,’ in addition to LGBT students, Mormons, and women.” ”[S]tudents post[ing] dozens of demeaning, crude, and sexually explicit comments and imagery about three female professors.”

All of this speech, offensive as it may be, is protected by the First Amendment. (There is no “hate speech” exception to First Amendment protection.) But despite that, the coalition is arguing that the speech should be restricted precisely because of the viewpoints it expresses, and the offense and “hostile environment” that those viewpoints cause.

The first statement seems to us a perfectly reasonable comment about ghetto culture, and the penultimate one accepts the notion of white privilege and says “stop the hate.” Wanting Clemson to be segregated is certainly a racist comment, but is probably just hyperbole from students unhappy with being berated for being white and being told to “check your privilege.”

But as Volokh says, all are constitutionally protected.

A Bogus Hate Incident

“Bluebloods” then goes further by including in the plot something that frequently happens on college campuses.

Yes, campus activists have often staged racist incidents in order to provoke more “diversity” initiatives.

So what we have here is the reality of contemporary college life. Social Justice Warriors really believe that any expression of opinion they dislike should be made illegal and punished. And since they believe the end justifies the means, they will stage fake incidents to promote their cause.

Yik Yak: Enemy of Campus Political Correctness

Given the stifling political correctness that prevails on most college campuses, and the fact that a dissenting opinion is likely to be met with bullying (if not actual official punishment), it’s not surprising if conservative students keep their heads down, and are afraid to speak up.

But one type of social media allows them to speak up anonymously. Yik Yak allows student in a particular geographic area or at a particular school (say: Marquette) to speak up and dissent from the intolerant orthodoxy.

Naturally, the politically correct leftists don’t like this. For example, they label posts that fail to show sufficient respect for their proclaimed grievances as “racist.” This has happened at Claremont College, and here at Marquette.

At both Marquette and Claremont, the the vast majority of “racist” tweets were not racist at all. They just disagree with the activists.

Not surprisingly, campus leftists and college administrations want to put an end to this. As an article in The College Fix explains, “Campuses ‘symbolically’ ban Yik Yak as battle over app rages.” Some colleges have blocked Yik Yak from their college Wi-Fi networks. Of course, this isn’t very effective, since students can connect via the cell phone infrastructure.

In this, college campuses resemble authoritarian nations, in which the party in power tries to censor and block communications that the regime dislikes, but technology keeps undermining the effort.

And yes, contemporary U.S. campuses are the nearest thing in American society to foreign authoritarian regimes.

Update

Students used Yik Yak to pan, and kill a required environmentalist indoctrination course at Eastern Michigan University. Interestingly, the faculty union demanded that students who posted nasty tweets about the course should be tracked down and punished. They were not.

Further Update

Of course, the politically correct want politically incorrect voices silenced, and nobody is more intolerant of politically incorrect speech than feminists. Thus we have the following from the The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Seventy-two women’s and civil-rights groups on Wednesday announced a campaign to enlist the federal government in pressuring colleges to protect students from harassment via anonymous social-media applications like Yik Yak.

The groups have sent the U.S. Education Department a letter calling for it to treat colleges’ failure to monitor anonymous social media and to pursue online harassers as a violation of federal civil-rights laws guaranteeing equal educational access.

What do they mean by “violation of federal civil-rights laws guaranteeing equal educational access?” They mean people are allowed to criticize feminists!

The article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education has some of the offending posts, and all of them clearly fall into the category of constitutionally protected speech, directed against the a campus Feminists United club. The list is below:



Calling feminists “feminazis” or “femicunts” is grossly uncivil, but it’s no worse than calling Republicans “Republithugs” which leftists do all over political discussion groups and comments sections on the Internet.

Likewise, suggesting sending the feminist women off to an all women’s college where there are no men and no non-feminist opinions to tolerate is a jib against feminists. But implying that feminists hate men and are intolerant of other opinions is no worse than claiming that Republicans hate the poor, which liberals do all the time. In fact, it’s closer to being factual.

The Yik Yak posts, in other words, are not threats, and not even hate speech directed toward women as a group, but political taunts directed at people with particular opinions.

But feminists think they represent women generally, and they think that criticizing them is hate speech directed against all women. In other words, feminists think their political opinions are privileged, and nobody should be allowed to criticize them.

And they want government to punish anybody who does.

Which is to say that they (or at least the campus activists among them) are nasty authoritarians.

Actually Addressing Sexual Assault on Campuses

From Commentary Magazine, some data on how to actually reduce the number of campus sexual assaults.

Any successful approach to reducing sexual assault on campus will require the reconsideration of these very notions. We have completed a study of more than 1,300 colleges and universities and have found that far fewer accusations of sexual assault are levied at the schools that ban alcohol and prohibit opposite-sex overnight guests in residence halls. Our findings suggest that students are not so much victims of a “rape culture” as they are victims of faulty institutional policies that contribute to a higher risk of sexual assault.

Not surprisingly, religious schools and single sex schools also have lower levels of sexual assault.

Stated so simply, one might raise a bunch of caveats and methodological objections. But the authors of the article (Bradford Richardson and Jon A. Shields) are well-trained social scientists who understand the objections and have dealt with them well.

By all means read the whole thing.

Of course, the people who are most vocal about campus sexual assault are also the most adamant about absolute sexual freedom. That there might be a conflict between these two values will take a long time to penetrate their minds. Until then, they will double down on things like teal ribbons and telling male students they are all guilty of rape since they are part of a rape culture and stripping due process protections from males accused of sexual assault. Those things serve their ideological biases and bureaucratic interests.

Marquette Climate Survey: Debunking Bogus Sexual Assault Hype

It’s just out (in the form of an Executive Summary): Marquette’s much touted “Climate Survey.” Given that it was mounted by an LGBT activist, we expected it to be rather politically correct, and claim that the climate on the Marquette campus is really horrid for each and every politically correct victim group.

But it didn’t turn out that way.

Which is not to say that we don’t have some quibbles with parts of it, for example the low participation rate (only 31% for undergraduate students) and the fact that the report sometimes offers generalizations based on very few respondents.

One key part involves the issue of “sexual violence” on campus. An outright hysteria has surrounded this issue during the last few years, fueled by feminist activists, a mainstream media that is both liberal and ignorant of social science, and the Obama Administration. Vastly, absurdly inflated figures about the number of college women who have been victimized have been uncritically accepted.

The report starts out citing a bogus White House document:

In 2014, Not Alone: The First Report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault indicated that sexual assault is a significant issue for colleges and universities nationwide, affecting the physical health, mental health, and academic success of students. The report highlights that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college. One section of the Marquette University survey requested information regarding sexual assault.

But it then goes on to note:

4% (n = 186) of respondents indicated that they had experienced unwanted sexual contact while at Marquette University.

Of course, for the demographic to whom this is stereotypically applicable, the incidence is a bit higher:

A higher percentage of Women respondents (6%, n = 164) than Men respondents (1%, n = 19) reported having experienced unwanted sexual contact.

This, of course, is radically below the “one in five” figure widely touted. Further, “unwanted sexual contact” is a broad category including a lot of things far short of forcible rape.

Oddly, the report doesn’t reveal what percentage of women who experienced unwanted sexual contact reported it to authorities or university officials. But it does reveal:

Respondents were offered the opportunity to elaborate on why they did not report unwanted sexual contact. Sixty-eight respondents provided written responses. Common themes included: (1) Not that serious, 60 respondents indicated that they did not report the unwanted sexual contact because for them it was not that serious.

There are a lot of things a guy could do that are “out of bounds,” but it’s hard to believe that actual rape would not be considered “serious.” And remember, this is 60 out of 68 women who volunteered a reason for not reporting to authorities.  It’s not 60 out of a larger number who failed to report the incident to authorities.

Universities (and the media, and the Obama Administration) need to quit lying about the incidence of campus sexual violence. Social Justice Warriors who pride themselves on being opposed to sexual violence and use bogus statistics to bolster their case deserve to lose credibility as the truth slowly seeps into public consciousness. The implosion of the University of Virginia tall tale of “Jackie,” and the exposure of “Mattress Girl” at Columbia, have put the sexual violence hustlers on the defensive. That’s a good thing.

Sexual Hysteria on Campus: Absurdly Broad Definition of “Sexual Assault”

From Reason.com:

A new survey of Rutgers University students reinforces the idea that one in four college women will be victims of sexual assault... but only if you don’t look at the study too closely. Zoom in and you’ll find the same problems that plague so much research about sex crimes on college campuses, from defining violence to include rude comments to failing to differentiate between an unwanted kiss and forcible rape.

The Rutgers survey—conducted by the school’s Center on Violence Against Women and Children at the request of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault and the Department of Justice—was carried out last academic year at the state school’s New Brunswick campus, attended by about 42,000 students. Around 10,800 students completed the online survey; the majority were undergraduates (80 percent) and women (64 percent).

Rutgers used definitions of sexual violence and sexual assault based on material from the White House task force. “‘Sexual assault’ and ‘sexual violence’ refer to a range of behaviors that are unwanted by the recipient,” notes a school summary of survey findings, “and include remarks about physical appearance, persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient, threats of force to get someone to engage in sexual behavior, as well as unwanted touching and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.”

Survey respondents were presented with that definition, then asked whether they had experienced sexual violence prior to starting school at Rutgers. Nineteen percent of all respondents and 24 percent of undergraduate women said they had.

That’s right. “Remarks about physical appearance” could constitute “sexual assault.” So could “persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient.” The latter are a form of harassment, and somebody in authority might need to tell the dork who does it to back off, but it’s absurd to call it violence.

Surveys like this are virtually always conducted by people with an agenda. Often, they are feminists who want to promote a narrative of men as evil oppressors. But often they come from campus bureaucrats who want an excuse for more programs and initiatives to justify more staff, a larger budget, and more power.

And of course, the two groups overlap.

Further, participation in these studies is typically entirely voluntary, and in this study fewer than 30 percent of the student population took the survey. Thus there may be a skew toward those who have been sexually assaulted (or have some grievance about some sexual encounter).

Things like this may explain why the very best survey of victimization, the National Crime Victimization Survey, shows a radically lower level of campus sexual assault, and campus rape. It mostly limits the definition of “sexual assault” to things that people in the real world (outside college campuses) consider an assault, and the response rate is quite high (88%).

This survey shows the rate of sexual assault among college women as 4.3 victimizations per thousand.

Yes, per thousand. That is the rate for six months, so for a college career, one might need to multiply it by eight. But it’s a little more complicated since college women are apparently less likely to be assaulted in the summer (when they are likely away from the party atmosphere of campus). On the other hand, some women take five years to graduate. But there is no way to get anywhere near the scary statistics the rape activists use.

Click on image to enlarge

Where actual rape is concerned, the rate is two per thousand, and the rate for attempted rape is 1.5 per thousand (see Table 1 here).

Further, rather than there being a rape crisis, the rate of campus sexual assault has been declining.

So what we have here is yet another case of college campuses being a Wonderland were hard empirical facts don’t matter, and the proper politically correct attitudes are all that counts.

Missive From Provost: More Gay Indoctrination For Students, More Reeducation?

An e-mail to all Marquette faculty: You can read the whole thing here, and it’s mostly boring stuff. But some parts stand out as potentially dangerous:

But first, some boring introductory things.

May 12, 2014

Dear colleagues:

As we wrap up finals week and another academic year, I wanted to share some updates related to academic life at Marquette. We are poised to begin a new chapter with President-elect Lovell, who attended the University Academic Senate meeting earlier this week. President-elect Lovell brings a new sense of energy and enthusiasm to our collective pursuit of academic excellence, and is looking forward to working closely with UAS and the academy. Many of us in the room were moved by his remarks at the meeting and his collaborative philosophy, which he said is based on the African proverb: “We can go fast alone or we can go far together.”

Shedding more light on this year’s major milestone for the university – our successful reaffirmation of accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission – the HLC report brief is now available and it documents the review team’s high regard for education at Marquette. Thanks to the leadership of Dr. Gary Meyer, vice provost for undergraduate programs and teaching; the more than 200 members of our campus community who served on committees and volunteered their time and talents during the past two years; and the more than 500 faculty, staff and students who met with the HLC site team while they were on campus; Marquette is reaccredited through 2023-24.

But then we get to the politically correct stuff:

The one area that the HLC visit team recommended for improvement is “operationalizing our commitment to diversity.” To help us make strides toward that goal, Dr. William Welburn, associate provost for diversity and inclusion, has accepted my invitation to lead the development of a campus-wide diversity plan. Components of this plan will include a campus wide climate study conducted during the 2014-15 academic year; a new, anonymous bias incident reporting and response system for students; and enhanced student education on diversity beginning in fall 2014 and administered by the Division of Student Affairs. This will be a campus-wide effort, and I’ll be calling on many of you to help lead this important initiative, which is also a key objective under the strategic theme “Formation of the Mind and the Heart” in our Beyond Boundaries strategic plan.

Of course, a “campus wide climate study” is going to be a survey to see whether students harbor any politically incorrect attitudes about any politically correct group. Gay and lesbian students will be asked to report instances where anybody let on that they think that homosexuality is not a normal condition, or that homosexual acts are sinful or immoral.

In other words, any instances where some student might let slip that they accept Catholic teaching on homosexuality. That can’t be allowed at a modern Catholic university.

And of course, student activists can be counted on to seize on even the most trivial slight or “micro aggression” to make into a grievance. That’s what the grievance mongers do.

Likewise, if a student lets on that they think that problems in the black community are not the result or white racism, of if a white student fails to “own” his or her “white privilege,” that will count as an example of a “hostile” and “non-inclusive” climate.

Admittedly, by the time they come to Marquette, most students have either been indoctrinated into the politically correct way of viewing these issues, or at least gotten they message that they better keep quiet about their views. But there might be a few hold-outs who are bold enough to speak out. Reeducation is what they will likely face.

Another inclusivity effort initiated this year, the Action Group on Campus Conversations on Gender and Sexuality, has met throughout the spring semester to discuss how to improve dialogue on campus related to issues of gender and sexuality and our Catholic, Jesuit mission. That group is organizing campus forums this fall for faculty, staff and students to share their thoughts, and I urge all of you to participate in these meaningful discussions.

Such discussions, of course, will be dominated by secular politically correct types (as all previous such discussions have been) and will doubtless reach a consensus that Marquette should adopt the entire agenda of the campus gay lobby and the campus feminists.

Finally, I want to thank you for your support this year. Serving in dual roles has been eye-opening, demanding and rewarding – sometimes all at once. I appreciate your kind words, prayers and constructive feedback, and look forward to continuing our work this summer and fall until the search for a permanent provost is completed.

Marquette blessings,

Dr. Margaret Faut Callahan
Interim Provost, Marquette University
Dean and Professor, College of Nursing

But will this be much of a change from what students already face? Not necessarily.

In the first place, students already face a good bit of indoctrination and reeducation, at Freshman Orientation, for example.

But secondly, this may turn into an example of what journalist Charles Peters famously said is a key motto of bureaucracy: “Make believe equals survival.” Thus, an accrediting agency goes through the motions of demanding more “diversity” and a more “inclusive” climate — meaning a climate more friendly to politically correct groups, but also more hostile to non-conforming students. Marquette bureaucrats then go through the motions of implementing “programs” to promote “diversity” — those programs being a great excuse for meetings and reports, and a good way to keep bureaucrats in places like the Provost’s office and Student Affairs busy.

But given the increasing intolerance that marks Marquette (as it marks most U.S. universities) one can’t dismiss the likelihood of real persecution of the few students who hold (and are bold enough to express) independent views.

Marquette Honors Program Will Not Sponsor FemSex

We have it from Andy Brodzeller, of the Office of Marketing and Communication: the Honors Program will not be sponsoring the FemSex Program this semester. This reverses an earlier decision of Honors to do exactly that.

Brodzeller explained that “the context from last semester” was “shared with the Honors Program,” by the Office of the Provost, and the Honors Program “decided” not to sponsor FemSex.

Was the “Honors Program” — meaning Director Amelia Zurcher — hiding in a cave last semester, such that the program didn’t know the context?

Or were they flatly ordered by the new Acting Provost, Margaret Faut Callahan, not to sponsor the program.

Last semester, the program was to be sponsored by the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. After an uproar in the local media, and numerous complaints, the Administration canceled the sponsorship by that Center.

Brodzeller said that the women who wanted to mount the program had been in discussions about other ways of getting it on campus, for example, via Student Affairs. Presumably this would mean that a recognized student organization might sponsor it.

[Update]

Andy Brodzeller sends the following response to this post:

I did notice you have a blog post up already, and want to clarify it was academic leadership in the college that met and shared the context from last spring with the Honors Program. – Andy

[Update]

Chris Miller, Vice President for Student Affairs says:

We have received no inquires with regard to this program.

This, of course, does not mean that it won’t happen.

[Update]

The University released the following statement about the decision:

As a Catholic, Jesuit university, Marquette supports the educational and intellectual exploration of issues regarding gender and sexuality. Early this week, a student-led Female Sexuality workshop was promoted on campus with sponsorship from an academic program. Following a discussion with the program about academic sponsorship, including the requirement of faculty presence, the program chose not to continue sponsoring the Female Sexuality workshop.

While it was evident that changes to the workshop outline were made since spring, additional changes were needed to align with Catholic teaching. We understand that our students engage in discussions on gender and sexuality, but when they happen as part of a university-sponsored event, we must address these topics in the context of our Catholic faith. We continue to be confident that we will find mutually respectful ways to engage in these important discussions in a way that is consistent with our mission and identity.

That is quite a good statement, so far as it goes.

The problem is that this program got as far as it did, first getting sponsorship from the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, and then (when that was pulled) from the Honors Program.

So when subject to extreme provocation, and when an attack on the Catholic nature of the University creates enough of an uproar, the Administration will come down on the side of Catholic teaching.

But it remains disturbing that several parts of the University (Honors and the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center are far from the only ones) are flatly opposed to Catholic teaching on sexuality, and will undermine that teaching when they can get away with it.

Marquette Gender and Sexuality Resource Center: Demonizing Men

From Facebook, notice of an event that will be starting about the time we post this:

Come and join the GSRC and Dr. Gerry Canavan in a group discussion of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” “Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.”

This, of course, is from the Marquette Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, the same people who brought the campus FemSex.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” is a feminist dystopia. More detail is provided by a synopsis of the movie based on the book:

In this dystopian fable, a librarian wife and mother becomes the childbearing pawn of a Christian theocracy. In the near future, as war rages across the fictional North American Republic of Gilead and pollution has rendered 99 percent of the female population sterile, Kate (Natasha Richardson) sees her husband killed and her daughter kidnapped while trying to escape across the border. Kate herself is transformed into a handmaid -- a surrogate mother for one of the privileged but barren couples who run the country’s fundamentalist regime. Although she resists being indoctrinated into the bizarre cult of the handmaids, which mixes Old Testament orthodoxy and misogynist cant with 12-step gospel and ritualized violence, Kate soon finds herself ensconced at the home of the Commander (Robert Duvall) and his frosty wife, Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway). Forced to lie between Serena Joy’s legs and be penetrated impersonally each month by the Commander, Kate longs for her vanished earlier life; she soon learns that since many of the nation’s powerful men are as sterile as their wives, she may have to risk the punishment for fornication -- death by hanging -- in order to sleep with another man who can provide her with the pregnancy that has become her sole raison d’être.

This, of course, plays to all the prejudices of feminists -- the notion that “religious fundamentalists” (you know, those people who oppose abortion) want to oppress women, and further men want to reduce women to mere brood matrons excluded from all activities other than producing offspring.

Aside from the naked ideological bias, there is a huge irony here.

Just which males in American society oppress women? Those who want them to bear children? Those are the guys who want to marry a woman and create a family and be a father to the children.

But then we have the guys who just want sex. Perhaps they actively don’t want the woman to be pregnant, since that comes with all kinds of hassles (pressure to marry, child support, the need to leave the state). Or perhaps they just don’t care, knowing that they are not going to be responsible for the children they create anyway. Just have a good roll in the hay, and don’t worry about the consequences, which you can usually avoid.

Out in the real world (if not in the fever swamp of feminism) women are a bit more opposed to abortion being legal than men.

But feminists have blinders that won’t allow them to see this. Recognizing this reality would be to admit that women and men have a common interest in forming families. That’s not an effective way to demonize men.

Further, this kind of “knock her up and evade the consequences” mentality is especially common among black males. Over 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock. But blacks are a politically correct victim group, and admitting that black females are victimized by black males creates too much cognitive dissonance. Black males have to be victims too. Better that the oppressors are while males, especially Christian white males.

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” in other words, is hate speech. A similar book that demonized blacks, or illegal immigrants, or homosexuals would be instantly recognized as such. We think the First Amendment protects hate speech, but this doesn’t require that Marquette University promote it.

[Update]

Check out the comment from the leader of the discussion (which has been postponed) Gerry Canavan. He promises a more critical and nuanced view of the text than it typically receives.

FemSex at Marquette

Now happening at Marquette, according to a flyer posted around the campus two weeks ago:

The Female Sexuality Workshop (FemSex) is a 12 week co-facilitated, student-led workshop that aims to create a mindful, safe, respectful, and open environment for participants to validate their experiences, challenge their ideas, and learn with and from others. Evolving from long-running courses at UC Berkeley and Brown University, FemSex seeks to bring values of empowerment, diversity, and collective learning to Marquette University and the Milwaukee community.

Mission: To provide a safe space for exploration, encourage honest dialogue, facilitate collective learning, engage and grapple with the social forces that inform individual experiences, and build allyship. The workshop is free and open to the community.

Workshop topics: health, gender, identity, body image, sexuality, desire, power and privilege, spirituality, pleasure, communication, consent, relationship, empowerment, and more!

Workshop Activities: large and small group discussions, speakers, readings, in-class activities, and take-home exercises

When: Monday evenings, 6 p.m.-9 p.m. the first session is Monday, February 4th. The last session is Monday, April 29th.

Who: We welcome people of all genders, sexualities and sexual orientation, ethnicities, religious affiliations, political inclination, and abilities. All participants must complete an application and sign a participant contract.

Interested in Learning More? Attend an Information Session.

Dates: Tuesday, January 22nd or Thursday, January 24th

Time: 8 pm. – 9 p.m.

Location: The Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, AMU 425

Come to learn more about the workshop, complete the application, review the workshop syllabus, and ask questions. All are welcome!

If you have any questions, please contact Rachel Bruns at Rachel.bruns@marquette.edu or Claire Van Fossen at clairevanfossen@gmail.com .

*FemSex is sponsored by the Marquette Gender and Sexuality Resource Center*

So just what is FemSex? Since it started at Berkeley, an article in the Berkeley student newspaper may be a good place to begin.

According to facilitator Amelia von Gerer, two queer women started FemSex in the spring of 1993, after taking a class called Feminism and Pornography. Inspired, they spent the semester learning to orgasm and later sought to teach a Decal course on the matter, initially titled “The Orgasm Class.”

The pair ended up broadening the curriculum to include additional topics in female sexuality, and the DeCal has continued to evolve since then. Today, FemSex is a space for free discussion of power and privilege related to gender, women’s health and sexual practices, among other things.

FemSex students (fondly called “FemSexies”) are instructed to be open-minded, non-judgmental and respectful when discussing the controversial issues put forth by facilitators. Discussions range from views on pornography and sex work to gender-based violence and having healthy relationships.

Of course, if women have trouble having organisms, it would seem that a licensed sex therapist would be the person to see, and hard to see how the undergraduates who typically lead these discussions would be much help.

At Berkeley, the students leading the class all seem to major in Sociology, Psychology, Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, with minors in related fields. In other words, they know all about how to talk about how women are victims, but actually know little about sex.

So it’s not surprising that the description goes on to add an explicitly political dimension:

The pair ended up broadening the curriculum to include additional topics in female sexuality, and the DeCal has continued to evolve since then. Today, FemSex is a space for free discussion of power and privilege related to gender, women’s health and sexual practices, among other things.

How you help women have better sex by telling them that men are evil exploiters isn’t clear, at least if we are talking about women who aren’t lesbians.

A more complete account of what the typical course involves can be found on a syllabus used at Carleton University, and on a syllabus from the FemSex website a Berkeley.

Some of the entries seem innocuous enough, for example “Communication in Relationships” (Carleton) and “Women’s Health and Menstruation” (Harvard). But most involve hot-button moral and even political issues. For example:

Carleton:

• Porn and Erotica
• Reproductive Choices (including abortion)
• Exploration of sexual practices and lifestyle
• Orientation of sexuality and gender
• Power and Privilege

Berkeley:

• Pornography, Erotica, and Sex Work
• Self-Love, Pleasure, and Orgasm
• Sexual Practices and Orientation
• Contraception and Sexually Transmitted Infections
• Power & Privilege
• Womyn’s [sic] Empowerment & Final Projects

A syllabus for Femsex at the University of Nevada-Reno is quite similar.

At Cornell an even wider variety of subjects is discussed:

Topics include: anatomy and physiology, cultural influences on sexuality, body image, STIs and safer sex, reproductive choices, solo sex, partner sex and relationships, gender identity, orgasms and inhibitors to orgasms, pornography, kink sex practices, BDSM, and more ...

If the syllabi of these course suggest some rather provocative topics, the actual activities are far more provocative. The student newspaper at Berkeley gives some examples:

In 2002, Female Sexuality-as well as the male version of the course-faced scrutiny by administrators after a Daily Californian article cited illicit sexual behavior in class. The incident sparked new guidelines for faculty oversight of student-run courses, but both DE-Cals have endured.

“Some people have a negative impression, but it’s not like that at all,” said senior Christie Santos, who took the course last semester. “The total goal is empowerment.”

For one project, students were asked to pen their own erotic story. Facilitators have also aired pornography clips in class to counter negative preconceptions about the industry’s treatment of women, Raymond said.

“Before the class, I would be really hesitant to use porn,” Santos said. “I think as women, we have a lot of hang-ups about porn and self-pleasuring ... I think it’s really interesting, because it’s exciting, it’s arousing-there is a lot of porn out there that isn’t degrading.”

Speakers in the DE-Cal have included sexologist Carol Queen-co-founder of the Center for Sex and Culture-as well as midwives, porn performers and members of the transsexual community.

The course has also held optional field trips to bondage clubs to allow students to explore alternative sexualities, Santos said.

The version of the course at Harvard was hardly less outrageous. As described by a woman blogger who was not at all sympathetic to the project:

Some of the topics being discussed don’t seem that outrageous to me and instead are worthy of discussion: portrayals of women in popular media, body image, women’s health, motherhood, and communication and relationships. But another glance at the syllabus and my jaw dropped. Assignments include coloring an anatomical diagram from the C*** Coloring Book, doing an erogenous exploration exercise, and let’s not forget the creative writing exercise—writing your sexual fantasy (don’t worry, it’s anonymous).

Each of the speakers will bring something valuable to the table: a midwife, someone from the BDSM community, a professional dominatrix named Princess Kali, a speaker on open relationships, the two leaders of Harvard’s Office of Sexual Assault and Prevention Response (an organization whose existence I’ve lamented in other posts) and sexologist Carol Queen. If that’s not enough fun, there is a writing workshop on pornography and erotica, a guided tour of Good Vibrations of Boston (a women-owned sex shop), and other field trips involving a porn night and a strip club visit.

Of course, one could quite plausibly argue that all these things are worth discussing. And indeed, they are. But the strong emphasis is that any discussion must be “nonjudgmental.” Indeed, an email sent out to advertise the event at Harvard said participation required the “suspension of judgment.”

In the first place, one can’t imagine a workshop that takes a nonjudgmental attitude toward things the organizers really believe to be evil. One can’t imagine a workshop on rape, or drug abuse, or racism that would be taught in a “nonjudgmental” way.

But far worse is the fact that FemSex is not nonjudgmental at all. It is littered with strong moral judgments. For example, Carleton students “discuss ways in which we learn about sex in sexist and heteronormative terms. Personal stories as well as media portrayals will be welcome.”

What about prostitution? What about pornography? The Berkeley syllabus promises to discuss “. . . the taboos that surround pornography and sex work.” Taboos, of course, are a bad thing.

Abortion? What would one expect when a speaker is from Planned Parenthood? Of course, no version of FemSex that we can find ever invited a speaker from a pro-life group.

Promiscuity? A look at the Berkeley website shows featured readings titled “Slut! Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation,” and “He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know.” Of course, from a Catholic, or indeed any Christian perspective, a double standard is a bad thing. But the proper response is not to encourage women to be promiscuous.

It’s odd that feminists think you can stick it to the patriarchy by making it easier for guys to get laid!

Indeed, when guys respond to female promiscuity in the predictable way, the feminists get huffy about it. An article in the Columbia Spectator gripes:

May we remind you that the joke “Columbia girls to wed, Barnard girls to bed” is still not funny? Barnard women have been immortalized as sluts and sex objects that aren’t worth a guy’s attention for a serious relationship, and the tradition is passed on every year to the next generation of students.

Moralism on Steroids

FemSex, in sum, is not nonjudgmental. It’s intensely moralistic. But the morality is a secular morality that says “if it feels good do it,” and “any sex act one wishes to engage in is OK.” Harsh moral judgment is reserved for anybody who says differently.

A woman blogger at Harvard saw this quite clearly. Contemplating enrolling, she observed:

I thought, perhaps naively, that I would be able to participate. That I could go in each time, listen to other women’s stories without judging, and then give my own perspective. That abstinence until marriage is the best way to avoid STD’s and is in fact a pretty liberating thing (I won’t have to compare myself to my husband’s previous partners, I don’t have to listen to society telling me what to do, I don’t have to deal with the emotional baggage of premarital sex). That sex work and pornography objectify women. That women wouldn’t need to be empowered if they stopped calling themselves victims and instead worked alongside men.

I’m not sure what their reactions to my opinions would be. I’m not sure if my views would be tolerated. I wonder if I’d inadvertently violate the contract I’d have to sign, which requires that I contribute to making the space safe and comfortable. But I do know that as long as we’re watching a film entitled “When Abortion Was Illegal,” being told how great polyamory is, and discussing self-love and masturbation, it can never be a safe, comfortable space for me.

And of course, a questionnaire that women wanting to lead sessions at Carleton have to submit makes clear the rigid political correctness of the enterprise. The women are required to explain:

What can you do to make sure issues of privilege are addressed in class? Have you had experience working with diverse communities or dealing with issues of diversity/privilege?

Femsex at Marquette

The program at Marquette is similar to those elsewhere. This is, after all, “monkey see, monkey do,” and administrators and activists on college campuses ape each other. And of course, those folks at Marquette ape what is done on secular campuses (or on “Catholic” campuses which, like Marquette, are not really Catholic).

Here is the syllabus for the Marquette program.

It has a few concessions to the supposed Catholic nature of Marquette. For example, among the “models of sexual behavior” to be discussed alongside “fantasy, kink, fetish, and more” are “asexuality” and “abstinence.” And it promises “both negative and positive views of masturbation.” And they have stuck in a discussion of “Sexuality and Spirituality.”

But then, projects at the end of the syllabus include:

• Cunt Coloring: Color an anatomical picture from The Cunt Coloring Book.
• Affirmation Assignment: Affirm someone in a manner of your choosing.
• Birth/Adoption Assignment: Talk to your parent(s)/guardian(s) about the experience of your birth, adoption, or how they came to have you.
• Erotica: Create an anonymous piece of erotica exploring fantasy and desire.
• Pleasure Point: Find a new pleasure point or pleasurable activity, and write about (or express in another medium) the experience

Then finally, probably the most interesting:

• Empowerment Object: Bring in something that you find empowering to share with the group.

The last one is particularly interesting. Do they want a sex toy, perhaps? We’re guessing that no woman in the group will bring a pistol for which she has a concealed carry permit!

Quite obviously, a program that endorses implicitly (and often explicitly) abortion, sadomasochism, prostitution, homosexuality, masturbation and promiscuity is way beyond questionable at a Catholic university — and even at a university that pretends to be Catholic.

But even from a secular liberal standpoint, the program is questionable. As a woman writing in the Harvard Crimson put it:

Oddly, the focus of FemSex is purely sexual liberation. Despite the numerous other issues confronting the modern woman, the class focuses eight out of 10 sessions on sexual and/or anatomical exploration. The syllabus seems to suggest that sexual liberation is a woman’s only path to empowerment—funny, I thought that was law school. Where are the seminars focused on women in corporate America, or women in the military? By diversifying its syllabus, FemSex might lose its shock value, but it would be able to address a broader range of concerns and appeal to more students.

Even worse, in its attempt to force its members into an archetype of what liberation should be, FemSex’s approach overpowers the individual instead of empowering her. Empowerment is about making your own choices, not about adhering to the FemSex agenda. I wonder how a class member who made the liberated choice to abstain from sex would be received in this group.

According to its information e-mail; “this class requires dedication, openness, willingness to communicate, suspension of judgment, and BRAVERY.” Bravery? It is difficult to understand what bravery has to do with attending field trips to porn shops or listening to a dominatrix give a lecture, both of which are potential offerings of a FemSex curriculum. Bravery would be having these conversations and trips out of your own curiosity, not as some sort of misguided attempt at finding a pre-determined “liberated” identity.

At the information session earlier this month, one FemSex alum recounted her favorite assignment from last term: taking a speculum and a light and getting intimate with her own private parts. Nothing could serve as a better example of FemSex’s misguided philosophy: while its participants are searching their own insides, they’re missing what’s going on outside. We live in a world with those other people — you remember them, the men — and until we can stop judging our liberation as women (sexual or otherwise) by how separate we are from men, we will never be truly empowered.

The image of college women one gets from FemSex is that of whining neurotics. Really, which would be better for the cause of women’s equality: studying to make a good grade on a Physics exam, or attending a feminist hen party to obsess on sex? FemSex, in reality, is the ultimate way of treating women as sex objects.

More on Bogus Statistics on Campus Date Rape

We have, with some frequency, discussed the fact that feminist activists produce radically inflated and completely bogus statistics about the number of college women who fall victim to date rape.

Indeed, we were once charged with sexual harassment for telling a class of ours this. (The complaint was dismissed by Marquette, and we continue to say exactly the same thing in all our classes where the fact is relevant.)

The number usually bandied around is that 20 or 25 percent of college women are victims of date rape. Sometimes it’s not “rape” but “rape or attempted rape” or sometimes merely “sexual assault.” But the usual tactic is to scare women with inflated statistics.

Of course, this also serves the feminist agenda of demonizing men.

But what happens when the Department of Justice, and not feminist university professors, ask about rape? And what happens when their concern is not just with rape, but with all violent crime?

The numbers come back vastly lower.

Consider the following table, taken from an official report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (you’ll need to click on the image to see it clearly):

You’ll see that the incidence of rape among college women is 6.0 cases per thousand students. That’s .60 percent per year. Multiply that by four years in college and you have between two and three percent.

But then you have the fact that this is not merely rape, but rape and sexual assault. How is this defined?

Rape/sexual assault

This category includes forced sexual intercourse including psychological coercion as well as physical force.

Forced sexual intercourse means vaginal, anal or oral penetration by the offender(s). This category also includes incidents where the penetration is from a foreign object. It includes attempted rapes, male as well as female victims and both heterosexual and homosexual rape. Attempted rape includes verbal threats of rape.

Sexual assault is also included in this category which includes a wide range of victimizations, separate from rape or attempted rape. These crimes include attacks or attempted attacks generally involving unwanted sexual contact between victim and offender. Sexual assaults may or may not involve force and include such things as grabbing or fondling. Sexual assault also includes verbal threats.

In other words, a lot of things that are gross and vulgar, but are vastly less serious than rape (because they are vastly less psychologically damaging to the victim) count as sexual assault.

Even ignoring this, there is no way to get to the 20 to 25 percent figure bandied around by feminist activists.

Note that the Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers are derived from a victimization survey, and are in no way dependent on the victim having reported the crime to the police.

So the things that politically correct faculty, and politically correct administrators, tell students about the incidence of rape are simply untrue. They serve the ideological interests of feminists, and the career interests of campus bureaucrats. But they are lies.

Feminism Explained

The Feminists’ Bogus Rape Statistics

We recently took the “anti-rape” activists on campus to task for the general lameness of demonstrating against something that everybody is against, and especially for their use of bogus statistics about the incidence of rape.

The activists cite a 2000 Justice Department report as showing that a quarter of American college women have been victims of rape. The study, of course, is online, and can be easily analyzed — at least by somebody used to the labyrinthine structure of reports like this.

The authors struggle mightily to jack up the numbers of women who have been victimized by rape, but end up far short of the numbers they need.

The report claims, for example, that 1.7% of college women had (as of the time of the survey) been victims of rape since the beginning of the school year. They then add another 1.1% who had been victims of attempted rape. Of course, attempted rape is a bad thing, but not nearly so bad as a completed rape. We would not like to be the victim of an attempted murder, but . . . well, you get the point. (See page 11 of the report.)

So the authors, by combining the two numbers, get 2.8%. They then note that this is for a period of (on average) 6.9 months and the extrapolate and say that this is really 4.9% per year, and that with five years (on average) needed to finish college, “the percentage of completed or attempted rape victimization among women in higher educational institutions might climb to between one-fifth and one-quarter.” (p. 10)

But of course, their own report admits that women in college are more likely to be raped than women who are not, and it seems questionable to assume that over the summer months, when many women are working, living with parents, away from the party atmosphere of the campus, etc. that they would face nearly the same threat of rape (or attempted rape, remember). The report concedes:

College campuses host large concentrations of young women who are at greater risk for rape and other forms of sexual assault than women in the general population or in a comparable age group. (p. iii)

Yet another problem is that multiplying the yearly victimization numbers by five makes sense only if no woman is a victim more than once. If particular women are victimized in the first year, and again in the following years, you have fewer new victims, and the total number of women who have been victimized is not so high as it would be if each woman had been victimized only once. Indeed, the study admits:

Consistent across the models, it was found that four main factors consistently increased the risk of sexual victimization: (1) frequently drinking enough to get drunk, (2) being unmarried, (3) having been a victim of a sexual assault before the start of the current school year, and (4) living on campus (for on-campus victimization only). (see page 23)

We might add dating frequently, dating scummy guys, and going to venues where the guys view the women as sexual prey.

But even worse, the authors do a comparison study, based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, and find that the rate of rape to be only 0.16% for completed rape, and 0.18% for attempted rape (see page 14).

The massive discrepancy between the two studies should create huge skepticism.

In the main study, women where asked why they did not report the rape (95% did not report it). A broad range of possible answers were suggested, most of them plausible and reasonably socially acceptable — for example “did not want other people to know” or “afraid of reprisal by assailant or others.” Yet 65.4% of the victims of “completed rape” and 76.5% of the victims of “attempted rape” said that they “did not think it was serious enough to report” (pp. 24-26).

Among the 86 incidents that the researchers classified as “completed rape,” the women, when asked “Do you consider this incident to be a rape?” answered “no” 48.8% of the time (p. 15).

Worse, the authors report that “Victims in the sample generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries.” (p. 22)

These findings suggest that the definition of rape used by the researchers was too broad. We can’t imagine results like this among women victimized by real rapes.

Findings like this ought to make any social scientist hesitate to make any strong assertions about the exact incidence of rape. But latching onto an outlier that produces the highest possible incidence of rape (but still not high enough to support feminist claims) is not responsible.

Protesting Against Something That Everybody’s Against

[Updated to correct identity of organizers.]

Yes, just a couple of hours ago, we walked across campus and found a demonstration against rape. It was organized by students. On the scene: Prof. Nancy Snow, the lesbian philosopher with the bullhorn very much in view a year ago, protesting Marquette’s refusal to hire lesbian Arts & Science Dean candidate Jodi O’Brien.

A few photos (not our best work, since we were using a cell phone):





Why protest against something that everybody is against?

It’s a kind of superstition on the politically-correct left: all problems can be solved by “raising awareness.” If any social problems persist, it’s just because not enough people have had their “awareness” raised.

Of course, sometimes the simple fact is that there are evil people who will do evil things, and the way to deal with them is to deter them with the threat of punishment if possible, and if that doesn’t work lock them up for an extended period.

There is another reality that campus leftists don’t want to face, but before we get to that we need a reality check about the supposed 25% of college women who have been raped.

During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. So Ms. [Magazine] commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

All subsequent feminist rape studies have resulted in this discrepancy between the researchers’ conclusions and the subjects’ own views. A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped—a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.

So what is going on here? Why the discrepancy between what the feminists consider rape and real, clear cases of rape? According to Heather McDonald of the Urban Institute:

So what reality does lie behind the campus rape industry? A booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the sixties demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.

But of course, one is not supposed to pass judgment on any sexual behavior. Unless you call it “rape.” Saying that one should exercise some sexual restraint is just so old-fashioned. But that attitude doesn’t help women who were not raped, but did things they were profoundly unhappy about in the morning.

Vagina Monologues Will Be On Campus

[Updated with new information and moved to the top]

We blogged, a few weeks ago, about plans by the feminist campus student group Empowerment to perform “The Vagina Monologues” on campus.

The play, quite simply, flatly contradicts Catholic teaching on sexuality, and Student Affairs’ longstanding policy holds that no events by a student group contrary to Church teaching will be approved.

However, Student Affairs has no control over academic departments in the University, and Chris Miller, Vice President for Student Affairs, informed the representatives of Empowerment that sponsorship from an academic unit would be possible. When the play was performed on campus in 2007, the Honors Program sponsored it.

This time, it will be Social and Cultural Sciences. Roberta Coles, Chair of that department confirms that the play will be performed in the Weasler Auditorium on April 30, at 8:00 p.m.

According to Coles, there will be a talkback session with the cast and faculty after the performance. Apparently, no tickets will be required. According to Coles “it’s free and it’s a good-sized venue.”

Empowerment, by the way, was one of the selected organizations that met with lesbian academic/activist Ronnie Sanlo, when she was invited to Marquette to hold secret meetings with groups on campus considered sympathetic to the gay/lesbian agenda.

The play is morally questionable in an easy half-dozen ways, anti-male sexism being only one.

The play is ultimately insulting to women. The best analysis comes not from any conservative source, but from the liberal Slate website.

The first thing that will strike nonideologues is Ensler’s clumsy prose, which ranges between bad Rod McKuen (“It was a mouth. It was the morning.”) and the very worst of Henry Miller (“Then the quivering became a quake, an eruption, the layers dividing and subdividing”). While Ensler would call this a work of desacralizing, it’s ultimately a work of desexualizing. I take a backseat to no one in my enthusiasm for the vagina itself, but the Vagina According to Ensler is a combination between a bath toy and a household appliance. Its vision of female sexuality is at least as narrow and insulting as Henry Miller: A woman is a machine you work like a crank until you produce the desired quantity of fluid — from you and from her.

Does that mean it should not be performed on the campus of an ostensibly Catholic university?

Not necessarily. Performing the play and having a critical discussion of it would be dandy. Unfortunately, the last time it was performed, only left-leaning feminists were on the panel that discussed it. It only got criticized by English professor Heather Hathaway for not being sufficiently politically correct in several ways. (In fairness, she did criticize it for being badly written and incoherent.)

So, in the “talkback,” will any genuinely critical comments, from a Catholic or other Christian perspective, be offered?

Or is it going to be another attempt to indoctrinate students into a warped feminist view of sexual liberation?

We will continue to report on this.