This comment was by Bellanca at Dr Helen’s blog. I’m going to break it down, and comment on it.
From time to time, both as an alumni rep/board person, and as a civilian on the interwebs, I engage in debate with staff, faculty and students at my alma mater. It is a reasonably serious liberal arts college, that has produced more than twice as many eventual Ph.Ds as the second-ranking liberal arts college, which is Amherst.
The notion that there is any merit in “5-10%” of men making noise in defense of themselves is well-meaning, obviously, but ill-considered. Here’s why:
What Bellanca is hinting at here is her credentials. It’s one of those polite things in someone else’s combox: she does not want to (really) say who she is unless she (I assume Bellanca is female) wants to join the League of Unemployable Bloggers. I’m not going to argue with an American academic about the American academy. However, she explains why I’m glad not only to be in STEM but well out of the USA.
a. the leftist agenda empowers the status quo, NOW, with the power of both prosecutor and judge. This is the reality of any totalitarian system, and it is true on the campus today. It is the policy of the USG that any male accused of sexual assault may not defend himself. Attempting to defend himself will only make matters worse, as the leftist orthodoxy can and will mete out any punishment that it wishes, and it will make an example of anyone who stands up for himself. This is the same dynamic that we all know exists on any Terry stop; badger the uneducated cop with queries as to his “reasonable articulable suspicion” for the stop, point out that he is operating outside the law, and one had better take one’s watch off, because the cuffs are going on momentarily. In no environment does action in defense of principle ever work when one’s opponent has the simultaneous power of accusation and conviction.
Actually, this is not totalitarianism: the fascists were subverted by their humanity. It is instead a holy inquisition, Stalinist style.
b. We see this folly of this initiative by reviewing the Grossman op-ed in the WSJ last week. Even a mugged liberal defends the very infrastructure of persecution she helped establish — and proudly, judging for her prose, because she fails to propose any solution, name the cause of her son’s persecution, nor even bother to shame the subject school.
The true believers find it hard to consider that their socialist or feminist nirvana is in reality a tenth circle of hell. They are secure in their credentialism (which means little) and their membership of the liberal elite (which means much, and must be defended at all costs). If you think unorthodoxly, you have to frame it within the modern orthodox paradigms to be accepted.
The best example of this in mental health is psychology. You cannot mention psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic theory: instead, like Marsha Lineham had to, you torture language to bring the ideas of analytic theory into the behavouralist orthodoxy. (Peter Fonaghy, when describing mentalisation as theory, did not need to do this. He’s a psychiatrist, and like most medically based groups, psychiatrists don’t care about theories as much as efficacy).
c) It’s probably hard for people who have not been mugged yet, or are not navigating the thought police in the academy, but white males begin their tenure in college *already on probation*. If they do too well, they may be accused of simple cheating (a friend of my daughter’s, an Ohio blue collar boy who did “too well” on an econ exam and was thrown out of school based solely on the supposition of his professor); if a girlfriend, two years after the fact, says that in the *middle* of their sexual relationship he forcibly raped her, he *will* be brought up on charges, rendered a pariah, and stained for life (UNC, and though the UNC changed it’s mind, there’s no place for that boy to reclaim his reputation); when the second-leading rusher in the Big Ten, Marcus Coker (an astrophysics major, incidentally), was accused and then un-accused of assault by his girlfriend, he was thrown out of Iowa. (The police explicitly stated that there was no complaint and ergo no crime to investigate.) (This is an example of a boy receiving criminal, but not administrative, fairness.)
Which is why I counsel men to get a trade, using a university only if necessary. Which is why I counsel trainees to, when discussing progress with any marginal student, to do it with another in the room. Particularly if the student is female. Because you will get complaints, and the only defense is proactively having a witness with you.
And this is why the term Not Safe For Work was invented (NSFW). NSFW extends beyond p0rn and violence to anything that could be construed as unorthodox or offend the feminist inquisition. This post is NSFW
d) The culture extends now to marriage, divorce, and parenting. Don’t think so? Try explaining to a cop, who was called on a cell phone by an ex- who phoned in an endangerment or abuse complaint, that there actually should be some evidence or testimony on the table before the cops and the child welfare fascists attempt to, or successfully, remove your child from your care.
Therefore, the notion of some small cohort of young men organizing and defending themselves is a notion no responsible parent could possibly recommend. Being stained for life, or being punished excessively for exposing the hypocrisy and bigotry of leftists, is a pointless exercise. It’s no different than the situation one must train one’s children for, in regard to traffic stops. That advice is: turn on the lights, put both hands at the 10/2 position, call the ignorant, uneducated cop with the Glock “Sir”, and suck up to the max. The cop (the school) has ALL the power. So don’t drive while contaminated, don’t drive on lonely roads late at night 10 mph over, and give the thugs the environment they have already won. Simply, this is not a free country.
There is another solution. Mockery. Laughter. Satire. The truth. For the inquisition may suppress the truth in part, but it fears laughter. The true comics of this period are on the right, and they are scathing of the pretensions of the left. Consider Day by Day, where the Obama cabinet is portrayed as the court of Louis Quartose. Given that you can’t really suppress facts any more, and you have never been able to suppress laughter, then the inquisition is left with merely fear.
But when there is nothing left to lose, the correct response is laughter. To call the precious members of the Kangaroo Court that they have no jurisdiction, and to walk out.
The only thing to do is what Twain advised: light out for the territories, in love and work, and let these leftist angry feminists destroy their own nests. Congregate with one’s own, and prosper beyond the reach of the cretinous phonies who have created a broken system, and will defend it to the bitter end. They have already taken over. They will never yield. Men are already disarmed of their liberties; the idea of fairness and law are prima facie evidence, to the left, of the bankrupt strategies of the patriarchy. Anyone who disagrees with them is a corrupt representative of “privilege.” The only people who will defeat them are themselves. Let them do so. Light out, and prosper. Any other approach is to suggest that Hannah Rosin or Katie Bolick or Lena Dunham or Louise Slaughter are going to wake up one day and say, “Oops, I guess I was wrong. Would you like to have drinks this weekend?” Ha-ha.
Well. the other thing that is happening, at least where I work, and at least in my profession, is that the men are basically ignoring the edicts of Human Resources and dealing with things informally. It generally allows for a change in behaviour: it’s much better to teach people how not to get into these situations that reflexly set up a tribunal.
We have learnt that tribunals only destroy. I have seen enquiries exonerate people — who then resign because there is no way in hell they are going through that again. Those of us left in the helping professions have developed armour. That we did not use to need. We have become mistrustful, and assume that any discussion from outside of our fields has a destructive agenda.
Because that is what feminism has taught us.
And on the personal front, we have begun to test people before we date. The stakes are too high otherwise, in this society.
But the society that Bellanca describes is already dying. Spengler’s law applies here: don’t be in a Zombie nation, or a Zombie culture.