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 he
growing dispute over an ad critical of campus
feminism,
sponsored by the Independent
Women's Forum (N0W's great nemesis), tells us something important
about campus political correctness. The IWF's
feisty and fact-filled ad, penned by Christina Hoff Sommers, punctures
"the ten most common feminist myths" — the false or exaggerated
claims of bias at home and at work that are the staple of today's
women's movement. The ad itself is wonderfully illuminating, but more
revealing still are the moves to censor the ad by feminists at UCLA.
Those attempts to suppress the IWF ad tell us something about our
wounded campus culture that even the fracas over the Horowitz ad did
not.
The Horowitz reparations ad served as the inspiration for Sommers
and the IWF. (And how sadly instructive it is that critics of today's
campus orthodoxies on race and sex have been forced to resort to
paid ads to make their voices heard.) But when aggrieved students
besieged the offices of the Daily Cal demanding an apology
for the Horowitz ad, or when students at Brown University seized
and confiscated an entire run of the school newspaper containing
the Horowitz ad, it was still possible to believe that students
had not so much rejected free speech as forgotten it. Obviously,
the actions of these angry students contravened the ethic of free
speech, and the nation as a whole was rightly alarmed. But how many
people understood at the time that the principled belief in free
speech has not merely been forgotten on our campuses — it has
been actively and consciously repudiated?
The
interesting thing about the feminist opponents of the IWF ad is
how obviously they have been shaped by theories that openly and
bitterly condemn free speech. Although many of the opponents of
the Horowitz ad harbored the same suspicion of our democratic traditions,
they focused on Horowitz's alleged racism, and were less open about
their contempt for free speech. True, the letter signed by nearly
sixty faculty members at Brown University excusing the inexcusable
actions of the students who confiscated the papers containing the
Horowitz ad was a clear sign that a large swath of the professorate
has consciously abandoned the ethic of free speech. But it's really
women's studies programs that have specialized in teaching young
Americans that free speech itself is nothing but a patriarchal ruse.
You can hear this in the rhetoric of the leaders of the UCLA women's
center as they demand that the Daily Bruin "retract" the
IWF ad, apologize for running it, and promise never to run such
an ad again. According to Christie Scott, head of UCLA's feminist
"Clothesline Project," the ad "was basically justified through a
free-speech argument. I feel that's somewhat cowardly." Obviously,
Scott has no patience for the distinction, carefully and rightly
made by the editor of the Daily Bruin, between the paper's
endorsing the ad and simply allowing it to run as a stimulus to
public debate.
But it's worse than that. UCLA's "Clothesline Project" is part of
a national program to combat "violence against women." The great
theorist of that movement is University of Michigan Law Professor
Catherine MacKinnon, who frankly argues against the classic liberal
theory of free speech underlying the First Amendment. According
to MacKinnon, in a society pervaded by "gender inequality," so-called
free speech simply disguises and ratifies the dominance of powerful
men over victimized women. From this, MacKinnon concludes that Playboy
Magazine — and maybe even the Constitution itself, with
its power-disguising theory of free speech — are actually more
than just words printed on a page. They are themselves violent assaults
upon women, and deserve to be rejected or censored.
You can hear MacKinnon's ideas in the words of Christie Scott, when
she says of the IWF ad, "I think it was a violent ad, a very hostile
ad," or when she says, "[the ad is o violent in nature and is presented
in such a hostile way." Of course, once words we don't like have
been equated with acts of violence, there's no place left for free
speech. Every debate must inevitably become a war, exactly as debates
over race and sex have become wars on our college campuses. So the
attempts by UCLA's feminists to suppress the IWF ad are not simply
emotional outbursts from people who, in their calmer moments, would
favor our traditions of free speech. No, the move to censor the
IWF ad is the logical outcome of the profoundly undemocratic and
anti-democratic way of thinking that now pervades large sections
of the academy. A direct and conscious attack on the core traditions
of liberal democracy has been systematically undertaken by professors
who hold positions of honor at our greatest universities, and we
ignore this at our peril.
The attempts by UCLA feminists to quash the IWF ad also neatly illustrate
just how insidiously campus speech codes can be used as weapons
against our traditions of free speech. The feminist protesters against
the IWF ad discovered a provision in guidelines laid down for advertisements
in student publications that forbade any ad that "stereotypes…persons
of a particular gender." Since the IWF ad claimed that "males are
greater risk-takers; females are more nurturing," the protesters
insisted that the ad be pulled for violating the ban on stereotyping.
Of course, as the Daily Bruin editor pointed out, "If you
look at the policy very literally, we almost couldn't run any ads."
That's right. And if you take this speech code literally, you almost
couldn't have any debates about "gender" at a university —
even a debate among feminists.
Consider the section of the IWF ad that carries the allegedly "offensive"
stereotype:
While environment and socialization do play a significant role in
human life, a growing body of research over the past 40 years suggests
there is a biological basis for many sex differences in aptitudes
and preferences. In general, males have better spatial reasoning
skills; females better verbal skills. Males are greater risk takers;
females are more nurturing.
Of course, this does not mean that women should be prevented from
pursuing their goals in any field they choose; what it does suggest
is that we should not expect parity in all fields.
If so reasoned and balanced a statement can be banned on our campuses,
then any intellectual argument about the nature of sex differences
becomes impossible. Under such a standard, the findings of a whole
range of academic disciplines are presumptively ruled out of court
— which, in many sections of our universities, they already
have been.
And could even "difference feminists" like Carol Gilligan survive
the anti-stereotyping standards embodied in this speech code? Gilligan,
after all, argues that women are governed by a flexible "ethic of
caring," a perspective that contrasts with the "formal logic of
fairness" that informs the "ethic of justice" favored by men. Of
course, we can support Gilligan's right to speak freely about male
and female differences without endorsing her specific views. The
truth is, Gilligan's seemingly more moderate brand of feminism undermines
free-speech traditions at least as deeply as MacKinnon's direct
attacks. After all, if, as Gilligan holds, the "formal logic of
fairness" embodied in our Western conceptions of justice has been
foisted upon women by men, then feminists can certainly be "flexible"
enough to suspend the "formal logic" of free speech whenever their
opponents try to get in a word edgewise. Isn't Scott's claim that
the Daily Bruin was essentially hiding behind the principles
of free speech a call to suspend the harsh formal logic of "male"
justice in the name of the need to "care" for the feelings of offended
women? Yet, ironically, it was the feminists themselves who resorted
("male-like") to legal manipulations of the UCLA speech code's "formal
logic" when it gave them a chance to suppress their opponents.
What the emerging flap over the IWF ad shows is that the assault
on free speech on our campuses is no fluke. However silly and harmless
the authoritarian rants of feminist ideologues might seem in the
wider culture, they are taking a toll every day on the traditions
upon which our nation depends. Democracy is not a given. It needs
to be cherished, protected, and actively transmitted from generation
to generation.
With a sense that it's just not worth the trouble it takes to actually
criticize feminists (and it is indeed a troublesome enterprise),
we have unwisely dismissed their importance and ceded them yet more
and more unchallenged ground. Already this mistake has chilled debate
over cultural issues in America and turned many in the new generation
against democracy itself. But now the courageous and welcome challenge
to campus feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers and the IWF has punctured
feminist myths, and may even open up a larger national debate about
the role of women in society. More than that, in forcing their opponents'
anti-democratic views to the surface, Sommers and the IWF have finally
put feminists on the defensive, and proven once again that democracy
works only for those who have the guts to stop running from a fight
and openly speak their minds.
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