Cathy Young, a columnist for Newsday, is a regular contributor to Real Clear Politics and Reason.
It is not too early to say that Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus by Laura Kipnis, professor of film studies at Northwestern University, will be one of the most important books of 2017. Kipnis gained some notoriety two years ago when she was hauled before her school’s Title IX investigators on a complaint […]
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Earlier this month, The Washington Free Beacon, the conservative online newspaper, reported that the National Science Foundation was spending over half a million federal dollars “to videotape male engineering students while they work in labs” to see if they are committing “microaggressions” against women. The Daily Caller was more openly sarcastic, with a headline that […]
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It was a shocking story that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions about sexism in science: a Nobel laureate asked to speak at a luncheon honoring female scientists announces that he’s a male chauvinist, then tells a stunned audience that “girls” in the lab are trouble because “you fall in love with them, they fall […]
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Despite criticism from all overthe politicalspectrum, so-called “yes means yes” sex rules are on the march. After California, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law on July 7 requiring all of the state’s universities to adopt an affirmative consent policy for sexual assault cases. Similar rules are set to go into effect at the […]
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Culture wars over “social justice” have been wreaking havoc in many communities, including universities and science fiction fandom. The ordeal of Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis, hauled before a campus gender equity tribunal for publishing a critique of academia’s current obsession with sexual misconduct, has brought the backlash against “political correctness” to reliably left-of-center venues such as Vox. But this is […]
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At least for now, Columbia’s mattress saga is over. Emma Sulkowicz, the student who spent her final year on campus toting a mattress to protest the school’s failure to punish her alleged rapist, graduated at the end of May; so did Paul Nungesser, the accused man who says he’s the real victim. There was more […]
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My recent article in The Daily Beast exploring previously unknown details of Columbia’s high-profile “mattress girl” rape case—including the fact that alleged victim Emma Sulkowicz continued to have chatty and playful Facebook exchanges with alleged rapist Paul Nungesser for weeks after she says he brutally violated her and choked her within an inch of her […]
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The recent drama at Brown University over a campus forum debating sexual assault could have been an episode in a sharp and outrageous satire of political correctness gone mad—complete with a “safe space” counseling group for undergraduates traumatized by the presence of heresy on campus and with one of the panelists opening her remarks by […]
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The latest alarming numbers on campus sexual assault come from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology survey which supposedly shows that 17 percent of female undergraduates have been sexually assaulted during their time at the school. Writing in The Washington Post, columnist Catherine Rampell has invoked these findings as a rebuke to those who have criticized […]
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In its response to my column on my relationship with the Federalist Society’s speakers bureau, the Federalist Society claims that it continues to host events on the same topic that got me dropped from their list—challenging hardline feminist doctrines on “rape culture” and rape legislation—and speakers who share the same “basic perspective” as mine. The […]
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George Will’s scheduled October 22 appearance at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio has drawn protests from those angered by his June column questioning the campus culture of victimhood and the anti-rape crusade. Anita Manur, director of the school’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, argued that Will’s commentary could “re-victimize and re-traumatize some of our […]
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In late April, the media were abuzz with the tale of yet another horrific injustice inflicted by a university on a female student who had been a victim of sexual assault on campus. “Brown University lets rapist who choked his victim reenroll after a semester-long suspension,” thunderedthe headline on Salon.com. The reports were based on the account of Brown […]
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A philosophy professor and a journalism student are involved in an unusual he-said she-said sex case at Northwestern. The student filed a federal Title IX lawsuit last month, alleging that professor Peter Ludlow sexually assaulted her two years ago and that the school took no disciplinary action, despite finding that he had engaged in “unwelcome and inappropriate […]
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Twenty years ago, critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, and Karen Lehrman described the bizarre “therapeutic pedagogy” in many women’s studies classrooms, where female students were frequently encouraged to share traumatic or intimate experiences in supportive “safe spaces.” Today, at many colleges, academic therapism has spread to other fields. Welcome to the age of the trigger […]
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The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been under heavy fire for running James Taranto’s February 10 column criticizing the double standard in campus policies that treat the man as a criminal and the woman as a victim when they have drunken sex–widely and egregiously misinterpreted as “if a drunk woman is raped, it’s as […]
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The idea that sexual consent requires an explicit “yes”–one step beyond “no means no”–has long been the dogma of feminist anti-rape activists. In the early 1990s, when Ohio-based Antioch College incorporated this principle into its code of student conduct to mandate verbal consent to each new level of intimacy, it was widely ridiculed as political […]
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As the Obama Administration steps up the federal effort against an alleged epidemic of campus rape, some states are contemplating measures of their own. A recent Newsweek story on a bill pending in the California State Assembly, discussed by K.C. Johnson on Minding the Campus, raises a number of troubling issues: among them, potential spillover from the campus crusade […]
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Wednesday’s announcement of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault is the culmination of the Obama Administration’s years-long efforts in support for the feminist crusade against campus rape. It is too early to tell what new remedies for sexual assault on campus the task force will propose. So far, however, the initiative relies on the […]
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Much has been said about the campus “war on rape” and the way it imperils students’ due process rights, but there is another casualty as well: the free exchange of ideas on college campuses when it comes to the subject of sexual offenses. A particularly revealing recent example comes from the University of Wisconsin at […]
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If a satirist had set out to write a scathing parody of the campus crusade against rape, he could not have come up with anything more bizarre, or more ridiculous, than the real-life comedy-drama that unfolded last month at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. The scandal started, like many scandals do these days, in the social […]
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The downfall of Hugo Schwyzer, gender studies professor and onetime darling of the feminist blogosphere–now revealed as a self-confessed “monstrous hypocrite” and intellectual fraud–has been one of the more bizarre spectacles to unfold recently on the Internet. His strange case offers depressing insights into the sexual politics of the modern academy and the cultural left, […]
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This semester, Harvard Business School marks the 50th anniversary of the arrival of its first female students. Just in time for the occasion, the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page feature on a new experiment at HBS intended to boost the performance of female students, which has tended to lag behind that of the men. The article, by Jodi […]
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The “hookup culture” on college campuses has been a subject of much concern (and, one suspects, prurient interest) in recent years. The first dispatches from this new sexual battlefield, starting with reporter Laura Sessions Stepp’s 2003 article in The Washington Post and her 2007 book Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, treated it as one in which […]
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A few weeks ago, I wrote about my quest to track down a shocking “fact” from an acclaimed gender-studies textbook, The Gendered Society by Stony Brook University sociologist Michael Kimmel–that American teenage boys typically say they’d rather kill themselves than be a girl–and my discovery that not only was this claim based on a misreading […]
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A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults. It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to “recent survey data,” when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what […]
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Earlier this month, shortly after the announcement of a sexual harassment investigation targeting Yale University, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” to colleges on the handling of sexual violence cases. On the same day, April 4, Vice President Joe Biden kicked off a nationwide “awareness campaign” on schools’ […]
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The academic gender wars are back in the news, with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announcing an investigation into a Title IX complaint against Yale University. Sixteen current and former Yale students claim that the university discriminates against women by allowing a sexually hostile environment to flourish. Is there really a problem […]
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Connecticut’s Quinnipiac College, best known for its political polling, is now at the center of the newest round in the controversy over Title IX and women’s sports. In a trial that opened last week, a federal judge must decide whether competitive cheerleading should count as a sport for gender equity purposes. The case illustrates the […]
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During a conversation at an academic conference, a professor from an Ivy League school refers to two female graduate students as “black bitches.” After the students report the incident, the professor apologizes — but it takes another two months, and vociferous protests from the campus black community, for the university officials to acknowledge the issue […]
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The death of feminist philosopher, theologian and former Boston College professor Mary Daly earlier this month at the age of 81 received fairly little notice in the media. What attention Daly did receive, however, was almost entirely of the positive kind. Time magazine ran a short obituary by fellow radical feminist Robin Morgan, who eulogized […]
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