Impotent Feminist Rage

Rebecca Traister is a boring neo-Marxist, consumed with rage. How angry is she? She is filled with white-hot incandescent, vitriolic outrage. She directs it against the usual suspects: white males, patriarchs, capitalists… what have you.

What she really, really wants is for all women to feel their rage, that is, to feel their real feelings, and to make anger a revolutionary force, one that will overthrow the patriarchy and bring about the Workers’ Paradise. OK, she does not quite use those terms, or at least I do not think she does. I have not read her book and have no intention to do so. I merely read Laura Kipnis’s review in The Atlantic. It sufficed.

Kipnis sums up Traister’s non-argument thusly:

I recalled this joke while reading Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, which shares what might be called a divorce-court view of the gender situation in America. Men and women are on opposing sides, and women will succeed only by quashing men and seizing the spoils: the big jobs, the political offices, and the moral high ground. Walking us through recent events and still-fresh wounds—Black Lives Matter, the election of Donald Trump, the “Harvey-sized hole” blown in the news cycle (otherwise known as #MeToo)—Traister, who writes for New York magazine, is on a mission. Women’s anger about all of this, she argues, can propel us from the “potentially revolutionary moment” we’re in to one that actually alters the distribution of power. The main impediment to this taking place, in her view, is women’s habit of hiding our rage.

“Women’s anger spurs creativity and drives innovation in politics and social change, and it always has,” she writes. Stop crying when you’re angry (tears can be tactical, but they also telegraph feminine weakness), and stop trying to make your bitchy self palatable—as Traister confesses to sometimes doing, about which she can be quite droll. (“So I was funny! And playful, cheeky, ironic, knowing!”) The small problem: “Many of us who may have covered our fury in humor have occasionally found ourselves exploding.”

It is truly astonishing, at this moment in history, after what we have seen about Marxist revolutions, that anyone with half an IQ point would propose that we need a revolution, one that will overthrow the capitalist patriarchal order. Does Traister know nothing of history? Is she so consumed with a will to destroy that she has not given the matter any serious thought? Apparently, such is the case.

Back in the day, we non-women were implored to respect women for their minds and not their sexuality. It was perfectly reasonable. Now, if only we could persuade certain women, like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, to stop talking about women’s sexuality… the task would be much easier.

Traister proposes that women need not think. They need not analyze. They need not collect evidence and draw rational conclusions. No, they should rage, like histrionic maniacs, because it will make them feel powerful. And, because their rage will work like Crazy Glue, connecting them all from here to eternity.

None of us would dare to say that women are too emotional. It’s a sexist trope that we have long since abandoned. And yet, what is Traister, rabid feminist that she is, proposing: if not that women need to be more emotional, less rational, less thoughtful. They need to let loose, let fly, attack men… because men are the problem. Female outrage would then be the solution to everything that ails everyone.

The problem is, too much outrage, poorly applied, makes people sound stupid. It makes them sound stupid because it makes them stupid. Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee joined with the feminist power elite to spew vitriol at Judge Bret Kavanaugh. They have tried to destroy him, no matter the cost for… women. After all, if they succeed in destroying Kavanaugh, they will also destroy his wife and daughters. About that the merchants of outrage have absolutely nothing to say. They cackle like Hillary Clinton, their heroine, a woman who bears more responsibility than anyone for the surge in workplace sexual harassment, especially the assaults committed by her friends and supporters in the media and entertainment businesses.

Anyway, all of this righteous anger is just a lot of feminist bluster. If Traister thinks its the solution to whatever is ailing her and her sisters, the truth must be that it’s the problem. Feminism has long since turned men and women into antagonists. In that it was following the instructions laid down by none other than Friedrich Engels… but don’t tell anyone. Given the hostile cultural environment that feminism has stoked, no one should be too surprised that men and women are at daggers drawn. Or that the weaker sex is losing the battle.

Anyone with a semi-functioning intelligence would have recognized that if you direct your rage against men, if you try to destroy them, no matter the consequences, you are going to get it back. It’s a boomerang effect. If you attack people with uncommon feminist fury you are going to receive the same in return.

Why do you think that there is so much sexual harassment in the workplace and even out of the workplace? Consider the possibility that it has something to do with the fact that feminists declared men to be the enemy and have wanted above all to dethrone them, to destroy them, to make their lives miserable. Did you think that men were simply going to roll over and to take it?

Apparently, Traister has mistaken anger for strength. She must imagine that an angry woman will feel strong and empowered, even if her outrage feels more like a histrionic display, ineffective and ineffectual. At a time when #MeToo has made women appear to be weak and vulnerable, prey to male harassment, Traister and those who prefer emotion to thought seem to believe that they can make themselves feel stronger by being more angry.

Of course, the problem with outsized and out-of-control anger is that it becomes impotent. It serves no real purpose but to show that the individual expressing it is not weak. And yet, if you  need to make that much of a display of your pseudo-strength, you are not strong. You are fooling yourself and others. Sad to say, someone will call your bluff.

Kipnis exposes the flaw in the argument:

Anger has a way of making people righteous while clouding analysis—and undercutting actual clout.

An Alternative System of Justice

Haters promoting hate. Such is the case of today’s social justice warriors.  According to one Aristo Orginos, the groups that are supposedly militating against hate are fomenting hate… and violence.

Orginos writes:

…in attempting to solve pressing and important social issues, millennial social justice advocates are violently sabotaging genuine opportunities for progress by infecting a liberal political narrative with, ironically, hate.

So deeply do these warriors believe in the righteousness of their cause that they have produced an authoritarian movement to impose their views on everyone else:

… this particular brand of millennial social justice advocates have warped an admirable cause for social, economic, and political equality into a socially authoritarian movement that has divided and dehumanized individuals on the basis of an insular ideology guised as academic theory.

In so doing they have created an alternative justice system, produced by a bureaucratic edict from the Obama administration, that forces colleges and universities to deprive anyone accused of sexual assault of all rights to due process.

For an extended study of this problem see Laura Kipnis’s new book: Unwanted Advances.

Social justice warriors are so worried about campus sexual assault that they have overturned the basic principle of our criminal justice system. Orginos explains it:

Sir William Blackstone is famous for what is known as the Blackstone formulation: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This axiom is a foundation of modern justice systems worldwide. It as a formulation that assumes innocence; to condemn on the basis of a certain accusation because of the identity or oppressed status of the accuser is a dangerous road to go down. It erodes the most essential tenet of liberalism: due process.

He continues:

Due process, or the idea that a governing body must respect all legal rights of an individual, is granted to Americans by the 5th and 14th Amendments. To suggest that there is no recourse for the accused — and to ask for it is actually rape apology — is absurd, reactionary, and further highlights the black-and-white nature of this certain brand of millennial social justice advocates. To speak dissent against— or even question at all — the orthodoxy is to have your words twisted into less positive terms: one does not ask for “due process,” one asks to let rapists go, perpetuates rape culture, and favors rape apology. Why, after all, would someone ask for due process when a woman is accusing a man of rape? The millennial social justice advocate views this as an insidious question that results from sexism against women and is corroborated, they feel, by a statistically insignificant rate of false rape accusations.

Social justice warriors would rather convict the innocent than to allow a single guilty male go free. They have tried to overturn the principle that makes a jury the trier of fact.

Remember the hue and cry about how Donald Trump plays fast and loose with the facts. If a woman who accuses a man of rape is taken to be truthful and if we must accept her word at face value, we are living in an alternative criminal justice system, where sexual abuse occurs when a woman feels that it has occurred or when she says it has occurred. The chances for abuse are legion. Which is why we have, criminal investigation, trial by jury and due process of law. Would you rather have lynch mobs and Star Chambers?

Wasn’t Emmett Till murdered because Carolyn Bryant lied about her encounter with him?

The Wellesley Illiterati

Aspiring to be more politically correct than thou, a group of students at Wellesley College has formed a new organization. We shall call it the Wellesley Illiterati. Please do not confuse it with the Illuminati or with the Cambridge Apostles.

The Wellesley Illiterati have recently taken over the student newspaper “The Wellesley News” to print an editorial in defense of their right to try to shut down speech they do not approve of. The speech in question was delivered by the estimable Laura Kipnis, a Northwestern University professor who is currently touring the nation to promote her new book, Unwanted Advances. I have posted about the Kipnis saga on numerous occasions, about her running afoul of the campus thought police and being persecuted for as much.

When Kipnis gave a small speech at Wellesley a group of professors protested by penning a manifesto explaining that she was trafficking in hate speech and that her speech needed to be suppressed. Said professors argued that students would be damaged by listening to the views of a feminist like Kipnis. She has dared to question the current campus orthodoxy on a variety of issues, especially faculty/student amorous relationships.

For today we focus on the editorial published by the student newspaper. Alice Lloyd points out correctly that it is barely literate, and we all understand that the editors, presumably people who have some capacity to write in the English language, are stifling themselves because good writing, correct syntax, and cogent argument would oppress and embarrass those members of the Wellesley community who cannot write or think clearly.

Dumbing yourself down at Wellesley allows the less gifted students to feel like they are not less gifted. Of course, this also deprives them of the chance to improve themselves. Those who dumb themselves down are refusing to give the less giftedan example of good writing, something to emulate and aspire to.

Lloyd points to an egregious example of illiteracy:

But their failed experiments in sentence structure, as well as logical leaps none among the uninitiated could easily follow, backfire: "Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech." The pronoun "it" floats free, unbound by any antecedent, after the semicolon. The editorialists may have meant the second half of the sentence as a coded message to the world outside their coddling cell: Shutting down rhetoric is hate speech, of course it is! Send help!

Amusingly, the “it” after the semicolon must have as its antecedent “shutting down.” Thus the editors manage to say that they themselves, in their ardor for shutting down speech are practicing hate speech. The editors are not only syntactically challenged. They end up arguing against themselves. It reminds one of the ancient image of the ouroborous.

And Lloyd also points to this wondrous sentence:

[I]f people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.

We are obviously in the realm of brainwashing. The writers notion that one speaks hate speech is redundant. Wanting people to be punished for refusing to believe what the thought police want them to believe is anti-democratic and totalitarian. It represents a dictatorship over thought and belief. We will not ask why is to decide whether people believe the right beliefs, but presumably they will be judged by the Wellesley Illiterti, a group that has so many of its own problems that we do not know how it will find the time to judge others.

Being incipient law professors the Wellesley Illiterati understand the original intent of the framers of the Constitution… and also of the First Amendment… so they opine on the topic. Strangely enough, they pretend to be originalists, even though true originalists understand that the purpose of the amendment is to allow for offensive and rude and obnoxious and even stupid speech. In no way are we suggesting that the free speech rights of the Wellesley Illiterati be circumscribed.

Lloyd quotes them and comments:

"The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government," they write. "The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging." The unthinking reflex to stay safe from dissent and foster intellectual sameness at the expense of rigorous debate has no particular precedent in actual history—or really anywhere off campus, or in any prior generation.

To be truthful, no one has ever thought that the marketplace of ideas is a free-for-all. The first lesson in constitutional law explains that libel, slander and defamation are not protected speech. Nor are conspiracies. And yet, attacks on reputation are directed against individuals, not against groups. A group does not, if I understand this correctly, have standing to sue over defamatory speech. One notes that defamation is an act. Hate is an emotion. They are not the same. Expressing hate does not defame anyone.

For the Wellesley Illiterati, like many other purveyors of such nonsense, disagreeing with the prevailing dogmas about climate change, for example, counts as hate speech. Disagreeing with the current dogma about same-sex marriage would count as hate speech. Believing that a man who thinks he is a woman is not a woman would count as hate speech. Pointing out that when admissions criteria are solely based on merit, and on an examination that measures same, Asian students outperform their peers from other cultures… would be hate speech.

The Wellesley Illiterati is promoting thought reform and other forms of totalitarian brainwashing. They are relics from the dead Stalinist and Maoist past, come back from the dead.

Lloyd quotes another egregious piece on illiterate nonsense:

It is vital that we encourage people to correct and learn from their mistakes rather than berate them for a lack of education they could not control.

Should we encourage the Wellesley Illiterati to learn from their own mistakes? Should we believe that they suffer from a lack of education, especially for their failure to understand enough of English grammar to know that their sentence is barely coherent? Obviously, they want to say that people who are as poorly educated as they are did not have any control over their education… even though, come to think of it, they are adults and they ought to take some responsibility for their own education.

By their lights, the words of Laura Kipnis will stifle “productive debate” because Kipnis was “bullying disempowered groups.” Dare we recall that Kipnis was herself bullied for her views, for her ideas and her beliefs?

As for what happened when Kipnis spoke at Wellesley, Kipnis herself explained:

[T]he talk went fine and the students I met were great — tough-minded, super-articulate," Kipnis wrote, referring to the talk that triggered outrage. "It was only later that I heard that other students had made a video denouncing me, ahead of my arrival, for being a white feminist ('white feminism isn't feminism'), among other crimes. Once home, I heard that some of my critics were threatening to file Title IX complaints against the professor who'd invited me and had started a letter-writing campaign to get him fired on account of my visit, or at least deny him a pay raise."

Speaking of bullying, who filed complaints against the professor who had invited Kipnis? The junior Red Guards, with the collusion and connivance of the Obama Education Department, want to attack a tenured professor, to get him fired or to deny him a pay raise.

Let us hope that the Trump education department shuts down this nonsense.

Academic Diversity and Ideological Conformity

Robert Boyers has written an excellent analysis of the power of ideas. In particular, he has explained how ideas are trafficked on college campuses today. He argues that when universities create safe spaces, spaces designed to protect students from dissonant and dissenting ideas, they are stifling intellectual inquiry and damaging students’ abilities to think rationally. 

His idea, dare I say, is unimpeachable. He is also suggesting, without quite using these words, that the thought police that patrol college campuses are really agents of cults. Ideas are one thing. The question is: who is thinking the great ideas when we are not? The answer must be the gods and goddesses who are associated with the ideas. When we bow down to an idea we are joining a cult that worships the god or goddess. Multiculturalism, I have occasionally argued, is a return to pagan idolatry. As you know, Greek gods and goddesses are all associated with big ideas. Apollo with reason; Athena with wisdom or science; Aphrodite with sensuality; Hermes with communication; Dionysius with spring break.

Boyers expresses the notion thusly:

A friend of mine told me, not long ago, that passionate intensity was overrated, and conviction too. I knew what she meant. People with convictions are much of the time tedious. Moreover, they are intent upon achieving a grand consensus and, not incidentally, bringing everyone else to their knees. They want the rest of us to feel free to express ourselves, as they like to say, but only on the condition that we find them and their convictions irresistible and keep our mouths shut when we don’t. No surprise that passionate intensity seems often to belong most insistently to the commissars of correctness and their inflamed camp followers, who have as little use for real argument as they have for genuine difference or diversity.

People with passionate intensity and fervent convictions are cult followers. They want to bring us to our knees, not merely metaphorically and not merely in an attitude of submission. They want us on our knees worshipping the god associated with the idea.

When you worship an idea with passionate intensity and are convinced beyond reason that it represents  a higher truth, you become a member of a cult.  The more intense your conviction the more status you have in the cult. How better to prove your conviction than sacrificing yourself for an idea. That is what we are seeing on campuses today.

To underscore the point: holding the right beliefs does not fill your life with meaning. It makes you a member of a cult where everyone thinks the same way and where you are allowed membership in a space where you are never being forced to listen to any ideas that do not echo your own. Narcissism, anyone?

And yet, Boyers sagely notes, ideas are not fixed entities. They shift over time. His point will be easier to understand if you think in terms of word usage. Words do not have fixed meanings. Their meanings change in the marketplace of language usage.

With ideas or with the words that supposedly convey them, something slightly different happens. Rather than have the meaning of words change with usage, certain words are taken over by ideologues who try to impose one usage on everyone else. We can call it the fetishization of ideas, if you like.

In Boyers’ words:

Though people hold them or dismiss them, promote them or disparage them, ideas often seem unstable. Often we think we are debating an idea only to discover that it no longer means what we thought it meant. We proclaim our affection for equality, autonomy, liberation, authenticity only to find that the meanings of those words and the concepts they name have changed into something unrecognizable. Those of us who have long been wary of big ideas, ideas that mobilize infatuates, find that even modest ideas are routinely appropriated for purposes that can seem astonishing. This is a time when students and their mentors at major universities declare themselves endangered by the "unsafe and hostile" environment created by a professor — call her Laura Kipnis if you like — who had the nerve to publish a so-called offensive essay. Thought you understood terms like "unsafe," "hostile," and "endangered" and knew more or less what diversity of outlook or opinion might entail in an academic environment? Think again.

He continues:

Ideas have always been in flux. The standard, unfavorable sense conveyed by the word "prejudice" was consistently challenged, over centuries, by thinkers like Edmund Burke and, later, T.S. Eliot, who saw in prejudice the goal you hoped to arrive at if you were to have a foundation for your thoughts and any hope of conducting a serious argument. MacIntyre changed the way we think about "identity" by asserting that rebellion against one’s own inherited identity is often a powerful way of expressing it. Herbert Marcuse, by no means alone in this, stirred a generation of radicals to consider whether tolerance might itself be an instrument or symptom of repression, thereby converting the benign idea celebrated by John Stuart Mill and other liberal thinkers into something else.

When ideas have been fetishized you need to take care that you do not misuse an idea. Doing so constitutes a thought crime and opens you to assault. Since no one ever knows with certainty what you really believe, all cult members are especially sensitive to anything that seems to reveal deviant thoughts. When you get it wrong, you have not just offered an opinion. You are threatening someone’s group (or cult) membership:

And yet, in spite of this long history of instability in the domain of ideas, it is now harder than ever to argue about ideas without first ascertaining that you and your antagonist share even rudimentary assumptions about what exactly is intended when a concept is invoked. Is judgment an exercise of discrimination or, as Montaigne had it, "an expression of habit"? Is "the other" to be understood as external to oneself or as a part of oneself? Is perfectibility to be understood as a delusion or, as Rousseau contended, that which principally distinguishes us from animals? 

Once ideas function within a cult, they become dogma. Or, as Boyers says: their status becomes “all but unimpeachable:”

We have long supposed that so-called liberal societies are worth defending precisely because they are committed to pluralism and the clash of ideas. And yet on several fronts our liberal societies are advancing toward what a number of thinkers, from Isaiah Berlin to John Gray, call "missionary regimes" promoting what they take to be "advanced values." These values are informed by ideas whose status is — or is felt to be — all but unimpeachable.

How has it happened? Boyers names the principal culprits:

More and more in such settings, the learning agenda is controlled by cadres of so-called human-relations or human-resources professionals and their academic enablers, who, as the Yale English professor David Bromwich has described them, regard "learning as a form of social adjustment," and believe that it is their business to promote "adherence to accepted community values." Ideas thus are esteemed only insofar as they ordain a safe and accredited direction that we can learn, all of us, to follow. Dialogue is encouraged so long as it is rooted in approved suppositions and clearly headed where we must all want it to go. The atmosphere has about it, as Bromwich sharply observes, the qualities of "a laboratory that knows how to monitor everything, and how to create nothing" and "a church held together by the hunt for heresies."

It is inevitable. If you believe that cults hold together when people all adhere to the same doctrines and believe in the same dogmas, you will need to institute inquisitorial practices to figure out whether people really believe what you want them to believe—that is, whether you have full control of their minds—or whether they are faking it.

Boyers then uncovers the contradiction that underlies the current acadmic mania about safe spaces. An academic culture that proclaims the value of diversity demands ideological conformity:

Bizarre that a culture officially committed to diversity and openness should be essentially conformist, and that the hostility to the clash of incommensurable ideas and even to elementary difference should be promoted with the sort of clear conscience that can belong only to people who don’t know what they’re doing.

Harassing Laura Kipnis

A short time ago Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis wrote an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In it, Kipnis questioned today’s campus orthodoxy about rape culture and trigger warnings.

I dutifully posted on it here.

Now, the campus Brown Shirts and junior Red Guards have chosen to harass Kipniss over her ideas, the better to create a hostile intellectual atmosphere on college campuses. She compares it to being brought before the Inquisition. In that she is largely correct.

According to Kipnis, they have succeeded. The decline and fall of American education proceeds apace.

In a new article from the Chronicle Kipnis recounts her experience:

According to our campus newspaper, the mattress-carriers were marching to the university president’s office with a petition demanding "a swift, official condemnation" of my article. One student said she’d had a "very visceral reaction" to the essay; another called it "terrifying." I’d argued that the new codes infantilized students while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives, and here were students demanding to be protected by university higher-ups from the affront of someone’s ideas, which seemed to prove my point.

Clearly, the tactic is fascistic. Kipnis explains:

Marching against a published article wasn’t a good optic — it smacked of book burning, something Americans generally oppose. 

On what basis is Kipnis being assaulted? On the basis of Title IX and a new policy issued by the Obama Department of Education.

Score one for the zealots become bureaucrats. They have no real interest in the criminal justice system. They want to impose their will on the nation and they have a special animus against free speech.

If you wanted to know where all of that government spending is going, you now know that the Obama administration has hired more bureaucrats and more lawyers to conduct kangaroo courts, administrative trials that circumvent due process and that shut down free inquiry on college campuses.

Kipnis explains:

Things seemed less amusing when I received an email from my university’s Title IX coordinator informing me that two students had filed Title IX complaints against me on the basis of the essay and "subsequent public statements" (which turned out to be a tweet), and that the university would retain an outside investigator to handle the complaints.

I stared at the email, which was under-explanatory in the extreme. I was being charged with retaliation, it said, though it failed to explain how an essay that mentioned no one by name could be construed as retaliatory, or how a publication fell under the province of Title IX, which, as I understood it, dealt with sexual misconduct and gender discrimination.

She continues:

Title IX was enacted by Congress in 1972 to deal with gender discrimination in public education — athletics programs were the initial culprits — and all institutions receiving federal funds were required to be in compliance. Over time, court rulings established sexual harassment and assault as forms of discrimination, and in 2011 the U.S. Department of Education advised colleges to "take immediate and effective steps to end sexual harassment and sexual violence." 

And also:

Apparently the idea was that they’d tell me the charges, and then, while I was collecting my wits, interrogate me about them. The term "kangaroo court" came to mind. I wrote to ask for the charges in writing. The coordinator wrote back thanking me for my thoughtful questions.

It’s big government at its worst:

The Title IX bureaucracy is expanding by the minute. A recent emailed update from my university announced new policies, programs, hires, surveys, procedures, websites, and educational initiatives devoted to sexual misconduct. What wasn’t quantified is how much intellectual real estate is being grabbed in the process. It’s a truism that the mission of bureaucracies is, above all, to perpetuate themselves, but with the extension of Title IX from gender discrimination into sexual misconduct has come a broadening of not just its mandate but even what constitutes sexual assault and rape.

Ambivalent sex becomes coerced sex, with charges brought months or even years after the events in question. Title IX officers now adjudicate an increasing range of murky situations involving mutual drunkenness, conflicting stories, and relationships gone wrong. They pronounce on the thorniest of philosophical and psychological issues: What is consent? What is power? Should power differentials between romantic partners be proscribed? Should eliminating power differences in relationships even be a social goal — wouldn’t that risk eliminating heterosexuality itself?

Stay tuned….

Who's Afraid of Laura Kipnis?

Do you remember Laura Kipnis?

Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern had the temerity to challenge the current campus orthodoxy over rape culture and trigger warnings. She did it in a publication called The Chronical of Higher Education.

Her article was excellent. I posted about it here.

As though to prove her right a battalion of Northwestern students decided to protest. Like the Brown Shirts of yore, they wanted Kipnis to be punished for hurting their feelings… by which I mean, for expressing cultural values that ran counter to theirs.

Michelle Goldberg wrote about these vulnerable darlings in The Nation… of all places:

… including, apparently, their vulnerability to articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education. As the protesters wrote on a Facebook page for their event, they wanted the administration to do something about “the violence expressed by Kipnis’ message.” Their petition called for “swift, official condemnation of the sentiments expressed by Professor Kipnis in her inflammatory article,” and demanded “that in the future, this sort of response comes automatically.” 

Note well that these enemies of the first amendment have decided that Kipnis engaged in violent speech. To their minds, such speech needs to be punished. They are functioning within a crime/guilt/punishment paradigm.

To which Goldberg responded by pointing out the contradiction inherent in the students’ message. Truth be told, she was not the first to do so, but she presented it well:

It’s easy to sympathize with the young feminists’ desire to combine maximal sexual freedom with maximal sexual safety. Yet there are contradictions between a feminism that emphasizes women’s erotic agency and desire to have sex on equal terms with men, and a feminism that stresses their erotic vulnerability and need to be shielded from even the subtlest forms of coercion. The politics of liberation are an uneasy fit with the politics of protection. A rigid new set of taboos has emerged to paper over this tension, often expressed in a therapeutic language of trauma and triggers that everyone is obliged to at least pretend to take seriously.

It says something when The Nation, surely a leftist publication, gets it. My only objection is that I think it's far more dangerous than melodramatic. After all, its the mentality that gave us, not only Ernst Rohm's Brown Shirts but the Red Guards. 

Perhaps it’s time to stop pretending. We do better to denounces and dismiss these assaults against free speech.

The Case of Ellie Clougherty

What does it all mean? What does it tell us about the culture and what does the story tell us about how therapy is practiced?

Emily Bazelon has written a long and thoroughly-researched article about the relationship between Stanford undergraduate Ellie Clougherty and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jon Lonsdale.

We are left to examine, not only Clougherty’s charges of sexual abuse, rape and psychological kidnapping, but also the role that therapists played in allowing her to formulate the narrative that she used to understand her experience.

Clougherty’s therapists-- helped by her mother-- persuaded her that she was the victim of a predatory older man. She was a Catholic virgin before she met Lonsdale, the conservative Jewish libertarian who is now accused of having inflicted severe psychological and physical harm on her.

Bazelon only mentions the political and religious differences in passing, but the story of an evil Jewish conservative preying on an innocent Catholic girl ought to raise a few warning flags.

Clearly, Clougherty was naïve and inexperienced. Just as clearly, she suffered, apparently from the relationship itself, and from the fact that it did not end in marriage.

But, whatever she pain Lonsdale afflicted, Clougherty was also the victim of an ambient culture that imposed a narrative that framed and diminished her experience.

Today, the relationship has entered the world of competing lawsuits, charges and countercharges. Clougherty moved back to Virginia and finished her degree online. While she still wants to work in the tech world, she now sees herself as an advocate for abused women.

Bazelon concludes her article thusly:

He says he’s relieved to finally confront her accusations in open court. She says going public is liberating. “Now I’m free to live my life, knowing I sent this up into the world and more people can respond to it other than just me.” She has no plans to return to Silicon Valley and says she wants to advocate on behalf of abused women. She’s also looking for a path involving brain research and tech that would include social activism. “My only fear now is that people will judge me, and then if I become a neuroscientist, they won’t believe what I have to say,” she said a few days after filing suit. “It’s a risk, but I have to do this.”

Clougherty has abandoned her career plans in order to take up a cause. In effect, she has sacrificed her hopes and dreams to become a martyr for a cause.

One might say that, for her, the gesture is a consolation. She seems to prefer seeing herself as a powerless victim than imagining that she agreed to participate in experiences that she felt were degrading. Apparently, it’s the best that certain therapists can do.

A self-described good Catholic girl, Clougherty had wanted to save her virginity for marriage. So, we are within our rights to ask whether she would have employed the same narrative if she had married Lonsdale.

Were the sex acts she seems to have consented to intrinsically abusive, or did they become so when the couple broke up? Or did they become abusive when she discovered that she, an undergraduate was not being treated as an equal by Lonsdale’s friends?

One hesitates to doubt any woman’s word on so serious a matter, but one recalls Laura Kipnis’s description of Clougherty’s situation. Clearly, Kipnis does not sympathize with Ellie Clougherty:

The New York Times Magazine recently reported on the tangled story of a 21-year-old former Stanford undergraduate suing a 29-year-old tech entrepreneur she’d dated for a year. He’d been a mentor in a business class she was enrolled in, though they’d met long before. They traveled together and spent time with each other’s families. Marriage was discussed. After they broke up, she charged that their consensual relationship had actually been psychological kidnapping, and that she’d been raped every time they’d had sex. She seems to regard herself as a helpless child in a woman’s body. She demanded that Stanford investigate and is bringing a civil suit against the guy—this despite the fact that her own mother had introduced the couple, approved the relationship every step of the way, and been in more or less constant contact with the suitor.

In Bazelon’s account Clougherty lost her virginity to Lonsdale in a hotel room in Rome. Since they had agreed to share the room before their arrival, one imagines that Clougherty had freely decided to consummate her relationship at that time, in that place. There is no suggestion that she changed her mind at any time during the consummation.

Clougherty had very little experience in romantic relationships with men. Tall and beautifully striking, she had been ogled and harassed by men since she was a girl and was very sensitive to unwanted sexual advances.

Before she met Lonsdale she had attended numerous events in the tech world, a world which was mostly male and whose denizens mostly saw her as a prospective love interest. She did not know how to deal with the situation and developed an eating disorder. She had to fly home and seek treatment, finally in a clinic:

At the tech events that Clougherty went to, she was one of few women, and when men pursued her, she often felt overwhelmed and intimidated. She told her mother about it and could feel Anne’s concern radiating through their daily texts and phone calls. In the winter of her sophomore year, Clougherty developed an eating disorder. “I wanted to be invisible,” she told me. Alarmed, Anne flew from Virginia and spent two weeks on campus trying to get her daughter back on track.

But Clougherty was struggling, and she withdrew from her classes and went home for therapy for her eating disorder, including eight days of inpatient treatment.

After whatever happened in Rome, Lonsdale and Clougherty engaged in a relationship. Clougherty’s friend, Rachel described the scene.

Bazelon reports:

Spending evenings with Lonsdale and Clougherty, Rachel felt like a third wheel. She also found Lonsdale condescending. When Lonsdale hosted dinners at his house with other executives, Rachel said, she and Clougherty were sometimes the only women, and Rachel felt they were belittled. Sometimes Clougherty would sit on his lap. “It was like she was the pretty wallpaper,” Rachel said. He talked about marrying Clougherty and made jokes like, “ ‘I have no power with you — I’m a powerful man but I’m at your mercy,’ ” Rachel said. Clougherty told me that she wanted to believe she and Lonsdale could eventually be equals, using their joint influence for good. “I thought it would be so nice to have the chance to have an impact,” she said. “There are respectable women married to respectable guys in the valley. I wanted to think, I could be happy like that, too.”

Note that Clougherty, an undergraduate, sees herself as the equal of a Silican Valley entrepreneur. She is offended that she and her friend are treated like undergraduates by the tech entrepreneurs. Apparently, they believe that their accomplishments are equal to those of the men around them, regardless of what they have accomplished. One does not need to use too many little gray cells to figure out where she learned that.

Note also that Clougherty also saw herself as a respectable woman who could be married to a respectable guy. For many women, being respectable is enormously important. In some cases a woman will believe that there are certain sex acts that a respectable woman does not perform, period. She will not perform them, even for her husband. And some women believe that sex acts that might have signaled a lack of respectability can be redeemed by marriage.

At the very least Cougherty seems to have been of two minds about her sexual activities:

In emails Clougherty wrote at the time, she told Lonsdale that she found him attractive. “Kiss kiss kiss, you are super handsome,” she wrote in June, and later, “You are a sexy man” and “It was so nice sleeping with you.” But around the same time, she also told Rachel that she never wanted to have sex with Lonsdale, beginning in Rome. “She said, ‘I don’t want to be having sex, but he’s not listening to me,’ ” Rachel said.

Lonsdale seemed to be confused:

The first [email from him to Clougherty] read: “Sometimes I feel it’s very clear you are eager to engage sexually, but other times you will talk about me taking advantage of you and forcing myself on you as if there is this dirty old man/young innocent student dynamic, and I should feel badly about it. We will do something and then just a bit later you’ll talk as if ‘how can I stop you from making me do that?’ and yet earlier I honestly thought you wanted to.”

At one juncture in the relationship, Clougherty started feeling that her status was changing. Instead of being a girlfriend and a potential spouse, she started feeling like a booty call. Worse yet, Lonsdale was spending less time with her, something she saw as a bad sign.

If Clougherty was feeling abandoned, she must also have been feeling that she had given up her virginity for nothing.

Later, a therapist would convince her that she had suffered from psychological kidnapping. Perhaps it's too obvious, but feeling that your boyfriend is abandoning you is not the same as feeling psychologically kidnapped. To correct the apparent contradiction you would need to think that the distancing is a manipulative manoeuver designed to make her more dependent.

Bazelon reports the situation:

Lonsdale hit a crucial period of fund-raising for Formation 8, and Clougherty expressed resentment when he would ask her to come over late at night. He responded impatiently. “I don’t know what analogy makes sense to you, and Odysseus is probably not the right one,” he wrote in the fall. “But I am on a really big, difficult, critical mission the next several weeks.” It would be hard for the relationship to work, he warned, “if my darling is actually just sort of annoyed at me and isn’t in a position where of course she is eager to see me anytime I can.”

Perhaps Clougherty was distressed because she was not engaged. Perhaps she was distressed because she saw that she would not be marrying Lonsdale. Perhaps she was distressed because she did not feel like an equal.

As her relationship ended, she fell into despair and anguish, probably for feeling that she had lost her self-respect.

Whatever the reason, Clougherty was clearly in trouble. Her mother flew to California to help her daughter. She brought a book that offered a narrative explanation for Clougherty’s anguish.

In Bazelon’s words:

Clougherty’s fragility reminded Anne of the state her daughter was in when she had to leave school more than a year earlier. She decided to go to California again. On the flight, she read a book suggested by a friend who had been in an abusive relationship called “Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men,” by a domestic-violence counselor, Lundy Bancroft. The book riveted Anne. She saw Lonsdale in the descriptions of an abuser and she saw Clougherty in the role of a victim in denial. Anne got to Stanford bent on an urgent rescue. “I was bringing my daughter home no matter what,” she said.

Clougherty’s despair sounded to one psychologist like a clear case of post-traumatic stress. One hastens to note that this diagnostic category has lately been applied to far too many cases.

The psychologist also believed that the victim narrative made a lot of sense.

Another therapist, Keith Saylor, with whom Clougherty consulted in Virginia taught her how to reconstruct her experience within the bounds of a narrative that made her a helpless and hopeless victim.

Bazelon summarizes the approaches taken by two therapists, one a psychologist at Stanford, another Keith Saylor:

She said that Lonsdale had forced her to have sex when she didn’t want to and also talked about the man who accosted her in the restaurant bathroom when she was 10. The university psychologist noted in a report that she “seems to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from current and past trauma.” Clougherty went home to Virginia and spent days crying and rocking in a corner of her family’s living room. Clougherty embarked on therapy twice a week with Keith Saylor, a clinical psychologist who treated her eating disorder. He used prolonged-exposure therapy, a treatment developed for combat-related disorders, in which a therapist prompts a patient to describe deeply traumatic events. Later, patients listen to tapes of their sessions at home every day in an attempt to drain the memories of their power.

As he typically does when conducting prolonged-exposure therapy, Saylor reflected back Clougherty’s account, saying that she had experienced “multiple traumas over a prolonged period of time that did repeated damage.” In one session, he told Clougherty, repeating her words, that Lonsdale “held you captive,” continuing, “You were essentially brainwashed over a year.”

Bazeon listened to the therapy tapes herself. I quote her description at length:

On the tapes, Clougherty swallows sobs and speaks in a thin, small voice. She described particular sexual acts that she didn’t want to take part in and how Lonsdale cajoled, begged and insisted until she gave in. She also said that during sex he slapped and shoved her and put his hands around her neck. “It was rape in a sadomasochist way nine times a day,” she said. In a later session, Saylor again mirrored what she told him: “You didn’t have personal agency, you didn’t have personal choice, all of those things had been robbed from you.”

Before she went into therapy, Clougherty told me, she didn’t want to admit even to herself that she had been raped. She wanted to believe that the relationship was loving, and she also felt she had a lot to lose. “It was like I could call him a rapist, and I could get judged and get in big trouble and not know how to handle it or I could say, ‘He’s great, look at these emails, I want to date that person,’ ” she said. “Trauma therapy was the first time I felt allowed to talk about how I felt.”

She now calls it a “psychological kidnapping,” a term she came up with after watching a video about domestic abuse on the Internet, and she says she was raped every time she and Lonsdale had sex. Saylor, who agreed to speak with me at Clougherty’s request, said, “People in these kinds of dramatic circumstances sometimes don’t tell anyone.” He also said that prolonged-exposure therapy doesn’t “encourage perspective-taking” and that Lonsdale might have an entirely different view of the relationship. “My role is not to question her veracity but to help her get well.”

Saylor might have believed he was offering a version  of cognitive therapy, his approach had less to with science and more to do with forgiving sins and offering a special kind of absolution, a kind in which the individual does not need to take any responsibility for her actions.

He was absolving Clougherty of all responsibility for anything that happened. The notion that every time she had sex with Lonsdale was a rape seems contradicted by some of the facts we know.

Saylor told Clougherty that she was a mere victim, that she did not exercise free will at any time in the course of the relationship. Might we not recognize that this is wildly judgmental, that it defames and slanders Lonsdale and that it tells Clougherty that she was a mere puppet, manipulated by a brutal male oppressor.

Besides, if she was so easily manipulated by a male oppressor, how can we know whether she was also being manipulated by her therapist?

In essence, Saylor seemed to be saying that Clougherty’s experiences were not hers. Thus, perhaps she can now tell herself that she remains innocent. And yet, once she went public with her allegations, the world would see her within the context of those experiences.

Would it not have been better for Clougherty to take responsibility for some of her decisions? If she bears no responsibility, then she is being diminished and also deprived of the power to do anything more than to make her narrative, with herself in the starring role, part of a larger a cause. 

In other words, she was given no chance of escaping the narrative. Therapy taught her to sacrifice herself for a cause.

She did not do it for herself, but for other women:

Clougherty and her mother were rattled but undeterred about speaking out. “It’s not an easy decision, but I just see it as a moral obligation,” Clougherty said. “I really want to help other women.” In January, Clougherty filed a civil suit against Lonsdale, accusing him of sexual abuse. She called his behavior “violent and deviant,” saying he employed “psychological manipulation and coercion” including “isolation, sleep deprivation, food deprivation.” She also accused him of “strangling her, slapping her, scratching her, yanking her by the hair so hard that he would lift her torso off the bed and slamming her body against the walls and bed boards.” In addition, she sued Formation 8 for being negligent in its supervision during the summer she was doing the project with Rachel. The lawsuit states that she “wrote him numerous emails and love letters to let him know how much she cared about him in the hope that it would end the abuse.”

And yet, what do you think that this level of public exposure will do for her future dating and marital prospects. One needs to understand that making oneself a public spectacle, even for a good cause, even when one is in the right, exacts a heavy price.

Alternately, we might imagine that once her relationship with Lonsdale was over, Clougherty believed that she could never again be a virgin, never again be innocent, and thus that she could never be the respectable wife of another man. If that was her belief, her therapist inadvertently sustained it. 

As for the way therapy changed Clougherty, her friend Jane noted this:

In the months after Jane helped Clougherty break up with Lonsdale, she says that she watched with increasing unease as Clougherty’s accusations mounted, from emotional abuse to rape. “In March 2014, she texted me that she considered herself a ‘sex slave’ during her relationship with Joe,” Jane wrote in her statement. “This is far, far beyond anything that she ever said about the relationship when it was happening or for a long time afterward. It also made no sense in light of her clear enthusiasm about the relationship.”

Laura Kipnis on Rape Culture

Whatever you think of its influence feminism still has the power to drive an idea. Most recently, it has taken up the fight against what it has labelled a rape culture on college campuses.

It is easier to atttack rape culture than it was to defend hookup culture. I suspect that the brouhaha about rape culture is an effort to shut down the hookup culture, culture that was often promoted by sex-positive feminists but that was surely not in the best interest of women.

Given the current mood, it is nearly impossible for anyone of the male persuasion to take a stand against the idea of rape culture. Happily, several high-profile women have done so. They deserve considerable credit for their excellent work on the topic.

Among them Emily Yoffe stands out. Her articles in Slate have exposed the simple fact that the incidence of sexual assault on college campuses has been exaggerated.

And let us not forget that many liberal law professors have spoken out against the new college rules that are designed to deprive accused rapists of due process of law.

In order to increase the incidence of rape, promoters of the idea of rape culture have expanded the definition of the term to the point where almost any unwanted sexual advance can be considered a violation.

Now, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis has written a long and detailed critique of what she calls the “paranoia” about rape on college campuses. She might have used the word “hysteria,” but that would certainly have gotten her expelled from the sisterhood for blatant sexism.

Kipnis begins with the concept of power imbalance, that is, with the idea that when a less powerful woman is seduced by a more powerful man she is being abused and exploited, even if she has nominally consented.

To expose the illogic in this idea, Kipnis notes that no small number of college professors are married to former students. Some are married to students who were in their classes as undergraduates. Some are married to students who were graduate students when they met. Some are even married to students who never attended their classes at all.

The new rules that are currently being proposed by college administrators would condemn all of these marriages.

Kipnis writes:

You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre. I suspect you can barely throw a stone on most campuses around the country without hitting a few of these neo-miscreants. Who knows what coercions they deployed back in the day to corral those students into submission; at least that’s the fear evinced by today’s new campus dating policies. And think how their kids must feel! A friend of mine is the offspring of such a coupling—does she look at her father a little differently now, I wonder.

It’s been barely a year since the Great Prohibition took effect in my own workplace. Before that, students and professors could date whomever we wanted; the next day we were off-limits to one another—verboten, traife, dangerous (and perhaps, therefore, all the more alluring).

Of course, the residues of the wild old days are everywhere. On my campus, several such "mixed" couples leap to mind, including female professors wed to former students. Not to mention the legions who’ve dated a graduate student or two in their day—plenty of female professors in that category, too—in fact, I’m one of them. Don’t ask for details. It’s one of those things it now behooves one to be reticent about, lest you be branded a predator.

She describes the current policies at Northwestern:

According to the latest version of our campus policy, "differences in institutional power and the inherent risk of coercion are so great" between teachers and students that no romance, dating, or sexual relationships will be permitted, even between students and professors from different departments. (Relations between graduate students and professors aren’t outright banned, but are "problematic" and must be reported if you’re in the same department.) Yale and other places had already instituted similar policies; Harvard jumped on board last month, though it’s a sign of the incoherence surrounding these issues that the second sentence of The New York Times story on Harvard reads: "The move comes as the Obama administration investigates the handling of accusations of sexual assault at dozens of colleges, including Harvard." As everyone knows, the accusations in the news have been about students assaulting other students, not students dating professors.

Speaking of predators the most egregious instance of a very powerful male taking sexual advantage of a powerless female occurred when Bill Clinton met Monica Lewinsky.

One notes with chagrin that the champions of the power-imbalance theory of sexual abuse went to the mat to champion Bill Clinton and to destroy Monica Lewinsky. Hillary Clinton herself declared that the story had been ginned up by the vast right-wing conspiracy. Why does this make her the perfect feminist candidate for president?

To keep it fair and balanced, Kipnis notes that some women students took pride in their ability seduce their male professors. One tends to ignore this fact because it does not fit the narrative, but it is worth noting anyway.

She explains:

As Jane Gallop recalls in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997), her own generational cri de coeur, sleeping with professors made her feel cocky, not taken advantage of. She admits to seducing more than one of them as a grad student—she wanted to see them naked, she says, as like other men. Lots of smart, ambitious women were doing the same thing, according to her, because it was a way to experience your own power.

Feminists, Kipnis continues, are selling a fiction. And they are forcing everyone to live as though that fiction were true.

In her words:

It’s the fiction of the all-powerful professor embedded in the new campus codes that appalls me. And the kowtowing to the fiction—kowtowing wrapped in a vaguely feminist air of rectitude. If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama. The melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.

To make college women weaker, schools have more recently discovered the concept of “trigger” words, words that can cause exceptional trauma.

Kipnis says:

Students were being encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was likely to create lasting trauma.

Later, she adds this reflection:

But what do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life? What becomes of students so committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and protected from unequal power arrangements in romantic life? I can’t help asking, because there’s a distressing little fact about the discomfort of vulnerability, which is that it’s pretty much a daily experience in the world, and every sentient being has to learn how to somehow negotiate the consequences and fallout, or go through life flummoxed at every turn.

The irony is rich indeed. For years feminists have insisted that no one should pronounce the word “woman” without adding the qualifier “strong.” They believed that their ideology would “empower” women beyond anything the patriarchy had imagined. Now, feminists are working to enfeeble women, weak, making them feel vulnerable and hypersensitive.

Unwanted fondling and groping have suddenly become rapes. And yet, as Kipnis says, how can a man know whether the touching was or was not wanted if he did not do it.

By these standards Joe Biden should have been indicted for his clearly unwanted manhandling of the wife of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

And yet, a disagreement or a misunderstand might now become a matter, not merely for campus authorities, but for public shaming. A woman feels she was taken advantage of. She denounces the professor who did it. He believes that she was consenting. He fondled her but they did not have carnal relations. He fights back in the courts.

The result: a public brawl that compromises the reputations of both parties.

Clearly, Kipnis notes, the power to shame is an extremely potent weapon, capable of destroying a person’s career and his life… without giving him very much recourse. It is even more powerful than the power imbalance.

For Kipnis, what matters is how well the people who get caught up in the public drama about whether or not an act was a violation play roles in a drama. Her analysis is excellent:

To a cultural critic, the representation of emotion in all these documents plays to the gallery. The student charges that she "suffered and will continue to suffer humiliation, mental and emotional anguish, anxiety, and distress." As I read through the complaint, it struck me that the lawsuit and our new consensual-relations code share a common set of tropes, and a certain narrative inevitability. In both, students and professors are stock characters in a predetermined story. According to the code, students are putty in the hands of all-powerful professors. According to the lawsuit, the student was virtually a rag doll, taken advantage of by a skillful predator who scripted a drunken evening of galleries and bars, all for the opportunity of some groping.

Kipnis, like Emily Yoffe and many others, believes that rapists and molesters should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Those who insist on keeping it all on campus—beginning with the federal government—believe that the court system unfairly protects the guilty at the expense of the innocent.

They protest because they feel that the court verdicts have often been unjust and because women are treated very badly by defense counsel in such cases.

To be continued.