Countering feminist misinformation with facts has landed Christina Hoff Sommers, an avowed feminist and avid number cruncher at the American Enterprise Institute, into a cauldron on American college campuses and into a new alliance with gamers.
Over the last two years when a swarm of gender studies feminists attacked gaming as sexist, racist and offensive based on their social justice narratives, the incensed gamers pushed back against the authoritarian leftists and found an ally in Sommers, a scholar and author who calls on feminism to be grounded in reality and truth. Looking at the games and the research, she decreed the gamers falsely accused. They called her “Based Mom.”
A lecturer on college campuses since the 90s, this year she witnessed something noticeably darker and more troubling. Upon her arrival at Oberlin, Georgetown and other campuses, they issued “trigger warnings,” saying “her very presence is a form of violence,” and that she “is threatening their mental health.” At Oberlin College, 30 students and a therapy dog retreated into an infantilizing “safe room” to escape uncomfortable facts by the entertaining writer.
Comparing the contagion afoot as reminiscent of the Salem Witch trials, these feminists bent on whipping up a frenzy of victomology, are absurdly describing the United States as a patriarchal hegemony that oppresses women, a label this long-time emancipated, liberated feminist calls “absurd” and a result of “twisted feminist theory and bad statistics.”
Because Sommers challenges the raging narrative that women are living in a violent, paternalistic rape culture, which she says is vastly overstated based on credible statistics, she has been “excommunicated from campus feminism” in order to protect women from uncomfortable facts.
Using one of many epithets, while Sommers commented on the “fainting couch feminists,” she says “there’s a move to get young women in combat and yet on our campuses they are so fragile they can’t handle a speaker with dissenting views.”
A former professor of philosophy who enjoyed exposing students to a wide array of differing competing view is now watching campuses become factories of certainty and increasing intolerance of dissent.
“Micro-aggressions have led to macro-foolishness,” Sommers says here.
In this exclusive 34 minute video interview, Sommers describes a 1992 Austin convention of gender studies organized based on healing needs and grievance identities. Her description reveals a humiliating process of infighting among the women gathered – “victimology spinning out of control.”
While reasonable feminists seemed to win the raging cultural battles in the 90’s against the “sex phobic authoritarian eccentric feminism,” she says, the losing side became embedded into higher education and we are probably seeing their students today.
Title IX is morphing into a “declaration of martial law on men on campuses,” something few anticipated.
Asked whether Hillary Clinton should call for recent trends in feminism to be curtailed, Sommers wonders if Clinton even knows about feminist developments on campuses. She thinks Carly Fiorina should ask Mrs. Clinton.
As for solving or slowing down these intolerant trends, Sommers offers three possibilities. First, people in authority on campuses — deans, college presidents, professors, Boards of Trustees — need to show impatience with what is happening.
Barring that, the contagions of hysteria could be slowed with effective defamation lawsuits.
Lastly, if all else fails, she wonders if the students themselves might rise up, as the gamers proved to be an effective adversary and “example of how to talk back to Big Sister, big government, the authoritarian juggernaut moving through institutions of higher learning.”
For more on Christina Hoff Sommers, see here and follow her on Twitter @CHSommers. A proud feminist herself who has authored several books and articles, she has a popular podcast, Factual Feminist.
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