Feminists Against Speech
The Independent Women’s Forum has exposed UCLA feminists as enemies of freedom.

By Stanley Kurtz, fellow, the Hudson Institute
May 24, 2001 9:40 a.m.

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.