Gender Tyranny at Swedish Universities

It started with an October 29 blog entry by Erik Ringmar, a 56-year-old political scientist at Lund University in Sweden. Ringmar had a problem. At Lund, he explained, it’s strongly recommended that 40% of the readings for every course be written by women. There’s a certain flexibility, but if your reading list contains no women at all, your chance of approval is near zero.

Ringmar had wanted to teach a course on “the rise of right-wing ideas, and eventually fascism, at the turn of the twentieth century.” Ringmar is a man of the left. He wanted to teach about a phenomenon he deplores and considers relevant to life in Europe today. (He’s one of many European intellectuals who has convinced themselves that the major reactionary threat to Europe today isn’t Islam but resurgent European-style fascism.)

In Search of Female Fascists

Ringmar wanted his students to read original texts by fascists themselves. The problem was that during the period in question, there were virtually no female fascist writers of consequence. Ringmar did manage to find one woman who, with a bit of a stretch, could be included on the course list, but that was it.

It wasn’t enough. His department head told him so. Accordingly, Ringmar expanded his course topic to include anarchists as well as fascists. Fortunately for his purposes, there’d been plenty of female anarchist authors back in the day. With this change, Ringmar’s course plan was approved – but just barely, and only on the condition that he also adds Judith Butler.

Judith Butler, of course, was not a pre-World War I fascist or anarchist. Born in 1956, she’s a founder of Queer Studies and a propagator of the notion that gender is a social construction. By conventional standards, there was no sensible rationale for putting Butler on Ringmar’s reading list. But Ringmar agreed.

Even with Butler on his list, however, he got in trouble. His course started a week before he posted his blog entry, and on the very first day, some of his students started asking him about women. The questions had no relevance to the material. Two days later, some of his students complained about him to his department head. He later learned why these things were happening: student leaders on campus had targeted him for harassment, not only because of his “insufficient focus on gender” but also because of his suspicious interest in “old reactionaries.”

Ringmar could have fought back. Instead, he threw in the towel: he’s “decided not to give the course again. I don’t want to be bullied by students and I don’t want weird rumors to spread about me.” Shame. The bullies won – and without much of a fight, either.

Here Comes Gender Mainstreaming

But the public discussion of gender ideology on Swedish campuses was only beginning. Ringmar’s blog entry was noticed by the Swedish media. This was a surprise: Swedish journalists usually ignore challenges to political correctness. But a couple of them paid attention. On November 14, Ivar Arpi, an editor at Svenska Dagbladet, published a long pro-Ringmar essay. He also explained, by way of background, that last year the Swedish government ordered universities to put together plans for “gender mainstreaming” under the direction of the National Secretariat for Gender Research.

What’s “gender mainstreaming”? Its Wikipedia page defines it as “the public policy concept of assessing the different implications for women and men of any planned policy action.” In Swedish universities, it seems to mean turning the notion of gender as a social construct from a questionable hypothesis into an unquestioned orthodoxy.

In his essay on Ringmar, Arpi quoted a statement in which the Secretariat’s deputy director, Fredrik Bondestam, depicted himself and his colleagues as struggling against a “privileged elite” of Swedes who refuse to face up to “their own structural violence,” of which women, among others, are the helpless victims. In reality, Bondestam is himself part of that privileged (and, in fact, extremely pro-feminist) elite, which loves to talk about the “structural violence” purportedly ingrained in Swedish society as a way of avoiding the real-life Islamic violence – much of it directed at women, Muslim and otherwise – that increasingly dominates Swedish life.

When the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten picked up the Ringmar story on November 10, the most illuminating parts of its article were the quotes from Ringmar’s boss, Jakob Gustavsson. The quotes revealed just what Ringmar is up against: Gustavsson came off as the ultimate good soldier, so thoroughly a creature of his institution that he’s become blind and deaf to basic matters of principle.

For example, here was Gustavsson’s defense of Lund’s 40% gender guideline: “After ten years, this is the first time that the guideline…has been viewed as controversial.” Asked if this guideline conflicted with the idea of academic freedom, he replied that the “equality plan has been decided upon by the board, which is a collegial organization.” In other words, the plan had been “voted for by Erik’s colleagues. For ten years, the great majority has been in agreement that this is right.”

Indeed. And what else could matter in a country run by cozy establishment consensus?

A Witch Hunt for Gender Warriors?

So deep-rooted has the tyranny of gender ideology become in the Swedish academy that when Ringmar (and Arpi) posed a challenge to it – however modest – some of its more prominent champions screamed bloody murder. In a passionate November 18 op-ed in the Swedish daily Aftonbladet, five professors from four of the country’s major universities cast themselves as victims of a witch hunt. Their account of the situation was a total reversal of the facts. Presenting the truth claims of gender ideology as self-evident – and as obviously virtuous – they charged that gender ideology was under “threat” from “unscientific” critics.

So it goes. But it won’t last for long. While the feminist bullies on Sweden’s campuses are busy enforcing their quotas, their country is being overrun by a religion with its own centuries-old – and brutally patriarchal – “gender guidelines.” Instead of imposing a 40% quota for females on reading lists, they command women to lead lives of utter obedience and permit men to beat, rape and even kill those who don’t obey. When it comes to gender, this is the danger Swedes should be dealing with. But an honest discussion of this peril is utterly off-limits in the Swedish academy. Instead, the gender warriors are counting names in syllabi.

Photo: Tomb Raider