Save the Coeds!
Gen Y finds a victim it can get behind
Meet the put-upon conservative coed, the prototype pushed by conservative feminists to demonstrate liberal bias on college campuses. We'll call her Claire. Claire doesn't want any part of this vulgar spectacle known as The Vagina Monologues, but her Feminine Mystique-touting, Germaine Greer-quoting friends are tying her to a chair and making her watch. She desperately wants to be chaste, but condom-peddling feminists are driving her to her knees at the frathouse next door. She really just wants to be a mom, but her mentors in the gender studies department say that's just not acceptable.
Claire may or may not exist, but there is a whole movement dedicated to setting her free. I recently watched Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, give a speech on Eve Ensler's Monologues to like-minded women. The play is performed on hundreds of campuses around Valentine's Day ever year, and Sommers is annually appalled, most deeply by what she calls "a four-letter-word that begins in c, ends in t, and is not coat."
Despite its gleefully gratuitous vulgarity, Ensler's play is a horrendous piece of theater. It's a reactionary message (women are reducible to their genitalia) wrapped in trite palaver ("My vagina is a shell, a tulip, and a destiny"). But every Valentine's Day, women like Sommers, National Review's Dawn Eden, and the Independent Women's Forum crowd vastly inflate its importance. It's dangerous, they tell us, and it's stifling young Michelle Malkins in the making.
Valentine's scaremongering is easy to dismiss, but the hype that posits the oppressively liberal campus against the victimized conservative college student is not going away. It's the subtext to the right's take on the Ward Churchill controversy, the Larry Summers flap and the Hoppe hysteria. And it's being harnessed to force change into curriculums through schemes like David Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights. Horowitz stands ready to christen the new P.C.: Intellectual Diversity.
A prominent would-be victim is Benjamin Shapiro, a former UCLA student and a conservative who has been oppressed right into Harvard Law School. His book, Brainwashed, spawned a fury of woe-is-me editorials in college newspapers, but also helped to change a discussion about difference to one about repression. Every prominent school has its articulate, active conservative groups, but now they're "captives" on hostile territory.
No one seriously doubts that the average campus is a liberal enclave or believes diversity on elite campuses extends past skin color. But is it really so poisonous? The words "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" cannot possibly be less applicable to media savvy American students, and the idea that an 18-year-old is an empty receptacle waiting to be pumped full of Marxism is its own brand of absurdity. Harvard Yard is not a totalitarian state, and after a required helping of queer lit, a student can always switch to C-Span and watch a gay escort throw softballs to President Bush for a heady dose of conservative ideology.
Keep in mind that (the unfortunately labeled) Gen Y is the antithesis of political radicalism. Like their parents, a majority of 18-29 year olds supported the war in Iraq in its early stages. These are the organization kids, not the Weathermen. Their professors may be using the classroom as an anti-capitalist soapbox (isn't that what professors are for?), but it's hard to hear when you've got an iPod permanently affixed to your head.
The urge to infantalize turns a shade darker when the focus is on women. In an L.A. Times opinion piece last Sunday, Charlotte Allen theorized that there are no female intellectuals worthy of following Susan Sontag. Every one, it seems, has been swallowed by the excesses of feminism. This is the frustrating irony of conservative feminism: As the movement rightly condemns modern feminism for being a paralyzing ideology of victimization, it leaves a bloody trail of victimhood in its wake. Whether they be Yale freshmen or Princeton professors, the weaker sex is apparently unable to withstand the excesses of Naomi Wolf. Claire doesn't stand a chance.
At the close of Sommers' dire warning about Ensler's play, a concerned mother had a question: "Where can I send my child so she's not exposed to this?" The audience obliged with suggestions of Ensler-banning, second-rate colleges; Sommers nodded gravely. When women who call themselves feminists see censorship as the way forward, we have bigger problems than bad playwriting.
