The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  Channing also assigned Judith Lorber’s essay “The Social Construction of Gender.” After reading it, R. pondered whether, if men and women stopped playing socially constructed roles (that is, if men baked cookies and women competed in NASCAR), men might no longer be “faster, stronger”—an idea that would, of course, be considered foolish anywhere outside of the academy, but that, in Women’s Studies, represents a respected version of social constructionism. H., too, entirely accepted the idea of gender as a social construction, admitting that she herself was “prone to gendering” (she buys blue gifts for baby boys and pink gifts for girls) and quoting a Marge Piercy poem titled “Barbie Doll.” The poem inspired Channing to post a comment on H.’s blog:

  There is quite alot [sic] of debate about “Barbie”-ing of femininity in U.S. culture, and the diminuization [sic] of female social, economic and political power as a backlash against females in general—in U.S. culture. Although there is a mass consumption idea that females have “gained” “power”, I wonder . . . [ellipsis in original] to what degree? Is there a corollary between increasing violent crime rates targetting [sic] females (from infants to elderly women) in general, in U.S. culture, and a general sense of apathy and resistance of patriarchal leaders (political, religious, economic) against women’s (Black, Native American, Mexican-American/Latina, Asian, White, poor, working class, immigrant) progress (i.e. healthcare, education, economic stability, reproductive choices, . . .)????

  One of H.’s classmates, T., agreed that “[g]endering really is part of society” and so did another, S.: “as a woman you are gendered to act a certain way.” They had all swallowed the social-constructionist dogma, in short, without even realizing that it is dogma. And why shouldn’t they? They had obviously been presented with social constructionism as if it were a scientifically demonstrated and universally accepted concept, like the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

  Anti-Americanism figured significantly in Channing’s course. To H.’s credit, after reading a chapter in the Burman book titled “How the World Sees America & How America Sees the World,” she said she felt “like he is bashing the United States of America. . . . I don’t think America is that bad. . . . Is it just me or is there a lot of negativity in this text?” Neatly complementing readings on the evils of America were readings on the evils of capitalism. “The United States of America,” wrote B., “survives on capitalism, we live off of production and time is constantly on our minds. . . . I have always been told since I was a child that we had to work hard so we could get a good job. Whenever I said things like, I don’t want money or don’t need money I was shot down.” L. had this to say: “It’s sickening to me that people actually have an incentive to continue inequality. . . . Again, it seems to go back to these white men in corporations and all they want is to make money without regard to whom they hurt.” L.: “This reading really opened my eyes to the power big corporations really have over the individual lifestyles we lead and the inequalities prevalent in our society today.” C., for her part, suggested that violence in America is due “to American’s strong desires of being the best. The competition in America is outrageous. . . . There is such a large emphasis on getting a good education, making a lot of money, and buying all of these material objects that make us look good to the public eye.” How mischievous to implant such hostility to capitalism in students who know virtually nothing about the history of either capitalism or socialism.

  Channing’s course paid special attention to the supposed role of capitalist greed in military spending—and again, the students dutifully parroted what they were told. C.: “The amount of money and focus that goes into the military is excessive. . . . It is a conspiracy as to how the big business corporations team up with the government to improve their personal profits and maintaining the status of having the newest weapons etc.” K.:

  This selection emphasized how sneaky and seductive U.S. militarization can be in our society. . . . It doesn’t help that since September 11th, not showing support of the military has been seen as unpatriotic and disloyal. In fact, it is this increased militarization of our culture that largely allowed George W. Bush to go to war in the first place. This cultural militarization has made war seem patriotic, romantic, and has even inspired a sense of security in our society. . . . In high schools all over the nation, ROTC, Marines, Air Force, and Navy representatives are allowed to station booths in lunch rooms in order to advertise the benefits of joining to young, impressionable teens.

  That wasn’t all K. had to say. “The amount that the U.S. spends on its military and on militaristic operations,” she wrote in another posting, “is absolutely staggering. A lot of this has to do with the agendas of personal investors in big businesses. . . . If there is no reason to go to war with another country, then we shouldn’t! If they have a resource we want, we should negotiate with them! Didn’t we learn in pre-school that it’s nice to share?” This is the level at which college students are being taught to “think” about national defense. (Talk about taking advantage of “young, impressionable teens”!)

  Now, if you’re going to turn young people against America, it’s important to convince them that Americans are uniquely racist. One of K.’s postings addressed a chapter in the Chasin book that “focused on crime committed by white individuals against black individuals.” Her comment: “as I read through this, I was wondering whether our society has become less violent towards other races over time.” (There is no need to ask, of course, whether the chapter contained statistics comparing the frequency of white-on-black violence with that of black-on-white violence.) Then there was the essay in Women’s Lives titled “Media Representations and the Criminalization of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans.” K.’s take:

  This article discusses how Muslim and Arab women are typified [she means depicted] as weak, battered women due to their culture and the stereotypes placed on Arab men. I think that as a people in the U.S., we tend to see Arab and Islamic men as embodying the terrorist ideals; it’s only natural therefore that we feel compassion for the women that these terrorists live with. Since we typecast them as such horrendous people, we shudder at the disposition [sic] of the wives and young girls that get abused by them. When a terrorist activity or a crime is committed, we tend to label them as “Islamic/Arab/Muslim fundamentalists or extremists.” By including the word “Islam” as their primary identity, we start identifying Islamic with crime and evil. In actuality, the Islamic religion is a very peaceable one that believes in the equality and support of women. In fact, in one of the Prophet Muhammad’s last speeches, he illustrates: “Treat your women well and be kind to them, for they are your partners and committed helpers.” . . . There is nothing wrong with the Islamic religion; it preaches equality for both men and women. . . . The Islamic culture is a very rich and beautiful one; we shouldn’t blame it for being the cause of these extremist groups.

  In this posting, K. perfectly summed up the standard Women’s Studies position on Islam and women—namely, that Westerners shouldn’t describe Muslim women as oppressed, because if we do so we’re saying that they’re weak and that their men are tyrants, and this is culturally insensitive (even though it’s acceptable to say that all Western men are potential rapists). Nor should it ever be suggested that the acts of violence committed by Muslim terrorists have anything to do with Islam. Second-wave pioneers like Friedan, Millett, and Greer would have recognized solidarity with subjugated Muslim women as a vital feminist cause; today’s Women’s Studies refuses to take a clear, firm stand on the rights of the most downtrodden women on the planet.

  Channing had her students read the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Their blog postings made it clear that they understood what was expected of them. Calling the Declaration “incredibly biased and slanted,” R. wrote that “when you scan the document all you see is ‘He.’ . . . Immediately I think ‘Great, my founding fathers did not want me to be apart [sic] of this nat
ion.’” (R. appeared not to notice that the reason why the word he recurs so frequently in the Declaration is that the document consists largely of a litany of charges against King George III, whom it refers to as “he.”) “All people were not created equal when the Declaration of Independence was written,” R. lamented. H. seconded the condemnation: “The Declaration of Independence & the Bill of Rights . . . were written by a group of white, Christian, heterosexual males.” C. was on board, too: “Before this was pointed out in the class discussion, I had never noticed the complication that can be derived from the U.S. Declaration of Independence when considering who ‘we the people’ is referring to.” (Of course, the words “we the people” don’t appear in the Declaration but in the preamble to the Constitution.)

  Clearly, Channing had not taught her young charges that the Declaration and Constitution, while two of the noblest documents in the history of humankind, were also, naturally, products of their time that reflected the limitations of their time (which, needless to say, is why the Constitution has been amended so many times since its ratification); no, she had taught them to revile the founding fathers—men whose vision, courage, and sacrifice made possible the freedom these students have known (and taken for granted) all their lives. These young women were incapable of grasping that the very criteria by which they presumed to judge the authors of the Declaration and Constitution would not be available to them if not for those men’s efforts. To say this, of course, is not to blame these students for their ignorance, but to underscore just how profoundly ill-served they are by courses of this sort.

  On her blog, apparently addressing nonstudents, Channing acknowledged that her students “come into the class with very little critical preparation of historical processes and movements of the 20th century, much less U.S. history, or the history of U.S. foreign policy”—all of which, naturally, made them perfect subjects for indoctrination in Women’s Studies dogma. Indeed, Channing, far from trying to rectify her students’ nearly total ignorance about history, focused instead on instilling in them the “fundamental theories and literatures of ‘gender and power,’ through the matrix of race, class, sexuality, labor, migration, militarism, family, religion, and empire.” To be sure, though Channing, on her blog, gave (as she put it) “prominance [sic] to the standpoints and differentiation which is [sic] occuring [sic] as students give voice to self and community identifications”—in other words, she posted some of the views they’d expressed—she lamented that they’d exhibited “resistances to applying critical theories required of the course syllabus, which are general applications in the fields of Social Sciences, Gender Studies, Critical Race, etc.,” and had instead proffered “opinion.” In other words, the students did too much independent thinking. Channing outlined the ideological approaches (or “tools”) that she’d pressed upon her students, actually equating social constructionism and other ideologies that they had been too slow to parrot with “microscopes, petri dishes, beakers,” and “the stuff of ‘evidentiary scientific laws’”—her point being that while students don’t question the laws of hard science “in the context of a ‘science lab,’” they dared to question social constructionism, multiculturalism, and so on. This lack of readiness to become perfectly obedient feminist soldiers had led Channing to decide that, in future classes, she would challenge students to “confront critically the personal and group resistances to the sciences, methods and theories of gender, race, sexuality, systems, and histories of oppressed communities and polities”—in other words, she’d push them even harder to exchange their own views for Women’s Studies orthodoxy. While Channing’s students, then, were by any traditional academic measure disturbingly pliant, they weren’t pliant enough for Channing. How strange to recall that second-wave feminism was born out of an urgently felt longing for a generation of women who would think for themselves!

  To be sure, Women’s Studies isn’t only about lockstep ideology. After all, in feminism today, intellect is subordinate to emotion, and the movement’s foundation lies in women’s experiences, not their ideas. Consequently, many Women’s Studies courses involve something very much resembling therapy. An essay included in The Feminist Teacher Anthology describes one such innovation: the “NO circle.” When overcome by “wrenching pain” in reaction to some brutal act against a woman, students form a circle and call out the names of things they say “no” to: “Rape! beatings! harassment! racism!” “For empowerment to occur,” explains the author, Martha E. Thompson, “we must act collectively to challenge violence against women.” Note that she is not talking about engaging in actual activism—no, the classroom therapy is itself the “act,” the “challenge.”

  One familiar justification for study-as-therapy is that it’s not enough for a professor simply to pump young women full of the proper precepts; they must also have enough drive, motivation, and self-esteem to be able to act properly upon those precepts. And many female students (or so goes the theory) simply don’t have the requisite self-esteem because they’ve grown up in a society run by men who’ve labored to keep females’ self-esteem down, so that they might remain subservient. (So, at least, goes the theory. In reality, what often happens is that young female students in Women’s Studies classes tend to be treated with such kid gloves, as if they were tender saplings, that they become tender saplings—they learn, in short, to see themselves as precisely the kind of fragile flowers that Friedan and Greer strove to convince women they weren’t.) Another reason to put emphasis on subjective feeling and not objective fact is that, as we have seen, many Women’s Studies practitioners view objectivity as a false concept—a masculinist concept—and consider personal experience the one true thing.

  All of which helps explain the existence of a 2010 NWSA session titled “Writing Our Feminist Selves: Uses of Memoir in Feminist Pedagogy and Action.” The four panelists are drawn from a group of about thirty Oregon State University students who took part in a memoir-writing project. One of them, a pretty white girl in a stylish green-and-white outfit and a chic hairdo (and with a disconcerting beauty contestant smile), speaks of the project as “transformative feminist pedagogy” and describes memoir writing as an act of “identity building” and “feminist knowledge production” that “disrupt[s] hegemonic ideologies” (which is “especially important in terms of race and ethnicity”). The point of writing the memoirs, she says, was “to convey how we were situated in oppressive circumstances”: indeed, by writing the memoirs, students “came to a new understanding of how we participated in these systems of oppression” and learned how to “engage” those systems. While students from privileged backgrounds were “forced to confront” how their lives “oppress others,” underprivileged students learned to recognize and resist their oppression. All in all, she enthuses, the project showed how “the feminist classroom is an outlet for creating social change,” gave “our feelings and emotions . . . a place in the classroom,” and reflected the fact that Women’s Studies offers “more than just a focus on the mind”—it “builds empathy.” (She does acknowledge one problem with the memoir project: namely, some students “are unwilling to be liberated.”)

  The next speaker celebrates the cathartic aspect of memoir writing: it purges, “brings traumatic events to the surface,” allows one to “process emotions.” And, of course, “empowers.” “We want [students’] eyes to be open,” she says, “to social constructions” that have affected them. She tells us (as several speakers at this conference have done) that “the personal is political and the political is personal.” Writing memoirs “gives women time and permission to process” their emotions, “sets [them] free to express [their] stories in personally meaningful ways,” and allows them to “take ownership of the interpretation” of their experiences and to have those experiences “validated” by their classmates. Describing the project as “cathartic pedagogy,” the student acknowledges “the value of being heard”: “validation is a very important need for human beings,” she says,
and “we found that validation among our sister classmates.” She points out that when the memoir-writing group touched upon violence against women, students were told that if the material hit too close to home they could leave the classroom at any time, and were given the phone numbers of people who could help them get through the trauma of having heard these things discussed. The speaker adds that students who had been abused or raped were told (in line with rape-feminism orthodoxy) that their trauma wasn’t the work of an individual but was “orchestrated by a larger system that depends on the terrorization of women and other marginal groups.”

  The third participant celebrates memoir writing as a boon for “traditionally marginalized students” because it can create “counter-narratives that challenge racist and heterosexist” positions. She confesses that when the project began, she wondered: “Who would want to hear the story of a Latina multiracial queer woman?”—meaning herself (though, like all the other panelists, she looks white). But then she realized that she had internalized the prejudices of a “racist, heterosexist society.” Now she views memoir writing as “radical pedagogy” and “liberatory education” that challenges “traditional” practices, “offers alternatives” to the “hegemonic,” and “interrogat[es] biases in curricula.” Once she “felt invisible”; now she and the other memoir writers are “hearing one another’s voices and recognizing one another’s presence.” She says she doesn’t like the word memoir because it’s a Western word for “a decidedly Western construct.” The word, she tells us, “comes from the French—I think—I have no French.” She looks around to see if anyone else on the panel knows any French. Nope. Another panelist ventures: “It sounds French.” (This brief exchange about whether or not memoir sounds French underscores just how far removed all this activity is from actual education.) In any case, panelist number three explains that because the word memoir carries so much Western baggage, she “use[s] ‘life writing’ exchangeably [she means interchangeably] with the word memoir.”