July 2, 2015



Victim Feminism: A New Form Of Extortion

A trend seems to have arisen: Women (mostly) are using accusations against men (and sometimes women in power) as a way of having unearned power.

These accusations typically don't meet any sort of standard for the "crime" committed and they tend to not seem the slightest bit reasonable to anyone not hypnotized by identity politics. Yet, they often seem to have surprising traction.

Take the case of former SciAm blogs editor Bora Zivkovic -- accused of sexual harassment and pilloried for it on social media and elsewhere, until he was out of a job and pretty much ruined. The only problem? What he did never met any legal standard for sexual harassment -- or even any reasonable standards.

But women said he did it and their accusations stood. And then a herd of supposed skeptics -- self-proclaimed skeptics known as science writers -- simply nodded their heads on Twitter in unison and decided to schedule an Internet-wide witch-burning. (Never mind that nobody ever got Bora's side of the story.)

What kind of woman takes advantage of the power of the "J'accuse!"? Not a woman of power and position. Not a woman who is going places. A woman who has failed to make much of herself or her life. A woman who doesn't have the grades or the chops or who hasn't done the work.

She sees an opening, though, an opening in our careless passage of laws, for example, like Title IX, which was supposed to be about giving girls soccer time in high school but is now used, for example, to remove due process rights of men accused of sexual crimes on campus.

It's truly sick.

The latest set of stories about these increasingly prevalent witch hunts are in an article by Michelle Goldberg in The Nation. One professor, LSU's lauded Theresa Buchanan, was fired, in part, for saying "fuck, no!" in class.

Yes, that's right. Upon hearing these words, the tender ears of some college student simply caught fire right there in the classroom and she was wheeled out on a stretcher. (Kidding. You knew that, right?)

Buchanan's other "crimes":

Making a joke about sex declining in long-term relationships, as well as using the word "pussy" in an off-campus conversation with a teacher.

And then there's this little bit of student opportunism:

Last fall, David Samuel Levinson, the author, most recently, of the literary thriller Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, taught a course called "Introduction to Fiction" at Emory University, part of a two-year fellowship he'd been awarded there. Blunt and scabrous, he prides himself on being frank with his students. "My class is like a truth-telling, soothsaying class, and I tell them no one is going to talk to you like this, you will never have another class like this," he says. One student, he says, a freshman woman, sat besides him throughout the course, actively participating. At the end of the semester, he gave her a B+, because, although she worked hard, her writing wasn't great. "They don't really understand that they can do all of the work, and turn in perfectly typed up, typo-free papers and stories, but it doesn't mean they're going to get an A, because quality matters, talent matters," he says. While he was on vacation over winter break, he got a Facebook message from her. He ignored it, figuring it was a complaint about her grade. She started sending him imploring e-mails asking him to reconsider her B+. Finally, he says, he got an e-mail from the director of his program saying, "You need to take care of this. You don't want this to escalate." The student, he learned, was threatening to bring him up on sexual harassment charges. "Oh, I felt unsafe," he whines, imitating her. The director, he says, told him, "I know this is bullshit, you know this is total bullshit, since you're gay, [but] you really don't want to deal with this bullshit. Just give her the grade." Asked about this, the director says, "I don't recall that, but I do recall advising him that as with all faculty, per our policy, that this was up to his discretion and thus his decision to make."

Overprivileged brats and identity politics, more and more, are shoving out free speech, free inquiry, reasonableness, and decency.

Free speech is the loser here, and once it starts getting rolled back, things generally don't just stop and go the other way.

Oh, and if you are over 12 and can't handle "fuck" and "pussy" without feeling some sort of trauma, your mommy and daddy shouldn't be allowing you to go to college -- or be letting you out of your yard without your caregiver.

*