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Christina Hoff Sommers Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 29, 2015 26 Comments
As readers know, "microaggression" theory is the rage on campuses. We have covered the phenomenon extensively: At Brandeis University, the Asian American Students Association (BAASA) sought to put the spotlight on and fight microaggressions through an installation on the steps of the Rabb Graduate Center, as announced on Facebook:
We have put up an installation at the Rabb steps to bring attention to microaggressions that are frequently heard in and out of the Brandeis community. These words are microaggressions, targeted towards Asian (American) students drawn from our very own experiences on this campus. Our experiences connect us and create the need for Asian (American) communities and resources.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on April 28, 2015 50 Comments
The delicate flowers at Georgetown who demanded "Trigger Warnings" for Christina Hoff Sommer's talk really should come to California. Here they will experience a political San Andreas fault, where progressive theory collides with daily reality....and Californians are hit with the falling debris. Bruce Jenner's public reveal has brought transgender issues into the national conversation, despite a myriad of urgent matters that could really use more attention. However, California has been enacting gender identification polices for years (to the point we have to have ballot measures demanding bathroom privacy rights). In preparation for life under Obamacare, I want to offer this example of what happens when public health care gets coupled with personal politics. It features a single mom, Cindy K., who recently took her 11-year old son for a simple physical exam required for middle school entry. After taking her son's vitals, she reports the doctor began to ask some really troubling questions about gender and sexual  identity:
...The doctor then proceeded to ask..."do you know what your gender identity is?" I looked at the doctor and said, "What are you asking my son?" She proceeded to explain to me that sometimes kids don't know and they like to help explain it to them. My son asked what the doctor was asking him and I said, "She wants to know if you are a boy or a girl?" My son looked at me funny and said, "I'm a boy", with a look of bewilderment on his face. The doctor then proceeded to ask if my 11 year old son new what his sexual identity is?" At this point I stopped again and said, "Why are you asking these questions?" The doctor's response was that not all parents have these conversations with their kids, so they want to be the one's to explain it to the kids. Again, my son asked me what the doctor was asking him. I said, "Well, the doctor wants to know if you would prefer to kiss boys or girls." My son had a look of disgust on his face and said, "A girl, of course".

Posted by Laurel Conrad on April 27, 2015 33 Comments
When I wrote my previous LI piece about Christina Hoff Sommers lecture at Georgetown, I hoped that the “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” were the end to the attempted censorship of Dr. Sommers’ speech. The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, for which I am the lecture director, sponsored the speech, and recorded it so that others could both hear Dr. Sommers and the people who questioned her. Unfortunately, I was wrong about the controversy being over. [caption id="attachment_125067" align="alignnone" width="556"][Photo Credit: Georgetown U. Republicans] [Image Credit: Georgetown U. Republicans][/caption]Now, Georgetown University itself is putting pressure on the Georgetown College Republicans to make CBLPI edit its video of the lecture. In an email, the assistant director for Georgetown’s Center for Student Engagement told the lecture student organizers that if CBLPI is “unwilling or unresponsive to the request, Georgetown will need to step in.”

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 24, 2015 38 Comments
We've written quite a bit about Trigger Warnings since before it became fashionable:
The fragile college student mind is getting more fragile by the day. As if the normal run of political correctness were not enough, we now have “Trigger Warnings” — the notion that students need to be warned that the material they are about to read in class may “trigger” emotional upset.... Of course, how the trigger is defined says much about the theory behind the movement — it almost always serves left-wing critical race and gender theories .... The Trigger Warning movement is all about enforcing a conformity of thought by forcing faculty and others to identify and warn about politically incorrect ideas.
The Trigger Warning in the Featured Image was displayed at Oberlin when Christina Hoff Sommers spoke: [caption id="attachment_124731" align="alignnone" width="550"]Image credit: Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute Image credit: Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute[/caption] UT-Arlington Philosophy Prof. Keith Burgess-Jackson has come up with a Trigger Warning for his Philosophy of Religion class. He writes:
I've decided to include a trigger warning in each course syllabus, beginning this fall. Here is the trigger warning for my upcoming Philosophy of Religion course. What do you think?
What do I think? I think the precious, fragile souls demanding Trigger Warnings will demand that you put a Trigger Warning on this Trigger Warning. Here we go:

Posted by Laurel Conrad on April 21, 2015 39 Comments
College campuses are meant to be a place where students engage in new perspectives and critical reasoning. Or so they say. But by labeling conservative points of view as “extremist,” “anti-feminist,” and “racist,” feminists are shutting down the dialogue on their college campuses before it even begins. To the leftist student activists, it seemingly doesn't matter whether or not these labels are deserved. They've realized that all they need to do is to stigmatize a talk by a conservative speaker is to condemn the speaker as an oppressing force. For instance, last Thursday, I facilitated a lecture at the Georgetown University on behalf of the conservative organization I work for, the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, and the Georgetown CRs. As soon as the campus feminists caught wind of the event, they immediately began protesting and demanding trigger warnings in order to silence the talk.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on April 20, 2015 40 Comments
As Aleister wrote previously, Christina Hoff Summers received an... interesting response when she spoke at Georgetown Thursday night. Ms. Sommers is the Factual Feminist at the American Enterprise Institute. In the Oberlin Review radical feminists responded to Sommers' upcoming speech with an OpEd, "A Love Letter to Themselves." In this love letter, they accuse Sommers of being a "rape denialist" and proceeded to list her "offenses" to feminism. The letter concluded:
So let’s engage in some radical, beautiful community care, support and love. Let’s make space for everyone to engage at whichever level they want/need. Let’s come through for each other, both now and in the future. Trauma is an experience that threatens a person’s bodily, spiritual and emotional integrity. The psychological, emotional and somatic impacts extend beyond the experience of trauma. Healing is a process that looks different for each person. Let’s make space to care for all experiences of trauma and to respect those we care for. Let’s focus our energy on taking care of each other and ourselves. Let’s make her talk irrelevant in the face of our love, passion and power.

Posted by Mike LaChance on April 18, 2015 24 Comments
New Post - Oberlin Radical Feminists Freak Out at Christina Hoff Sommers. -------------------- You may remember Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute as the Factual Feminist. We've linked her outstanding work at College Insurrection many times. Ms. Sommers spoke at Georgetown on Thursday night and some students took it upon themselves to label the event with trigger warnings. Here are some more tweets via Twitchy:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 17, 2014 30 Comments
I've seen people writing and tweeting about #GamerGate. I have no idea what that is, still. Looks like it has something to do with Gamers and Liberal Feminists (image below of Christina Hoff Sommers, who has confronted liberal feminists herself): I received the email below, which intrigued me. I'm too caught up in #Ebola to research #GamerGate, so I'm issuing a cry for help -- What is #GamerGate?
This might look like another inconsequential Twitter war, but it intersects with issues you find relevant and is gaining traction. Gamergate is a growing movement by (don't laugh) video game enthusiasts who are fed up with: 1) favoritism within the $90 billion gaming industry, namely game journalists who have essentially become king-makers and who use their influence to benefit friends and patrons to the detriment of objectivity in reporting, the financial prospects of respected upstarts, and most of all community trust.

Posted by Amy Miller on September 23, 2014 40 Comments
There's nothing more offensive to me than an article that leaps off the cliff in the first sentence by dropping the "as a woman, I..." bomb. It doesn't matter how the sentence ends; what matters is that the author, whoever she may be, believes that on some level her gender proves her point for her. We're meant to accept everything that follows because to dissent is to deny not only her opinion, but her equal footing in society. Fortunately, conservatives are doing the work to fight back this flawed idea that feminism consists entirely of the full acceptance of womanhood as victimhood:
Women in America are the freest in the world, yet many feminists tell us women are oppressed. They advocate this falsehood through victim mentality propaganda and misleading statistics, such as the gender wage gap myth. In five minutes, American Enterprise Institute's Christina Hoff Sommers tells you the truth about feminism.

Posted by Amy Miller on August 01, 2014 30 Comments
On July 30, 2014, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) helped introduce the "Campus Accountability and Safety Act," a bipartisan initiative aimed at forcing universities to address and curb the problem of sexual assault on college campuses. During a press conference Wednesday, the coalition pushing the Act emphasized problems with existing policies, saying that current federal law actually encourages universities to under report sexual assaults that occur on campus. In a summary distributed to the press and public, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said that "[t]he bipartisan Campus Accountability and Safety Act will create incentives for schools to take proactive steps to protect their students and rid their campuses of sexual predators." The full breakdown of the Act states several key goals:
  1. Establish new campus resources and support services for student survivors
  2. Ensure minimum training standards for on-campus personnel
  3. Create new historic transparency requirements
  4. Increase campus accountability and coordination with law enforcement
  5. Establish enforceable Title IX penalties and stiffer penalties for Clery Act violations

Posted by Prudence Paine on June 30, 2014 29 Comments
Many people hearing talk of America's campus “rape culture” might be tempted to dismiss the overheated rhetoric as harmless. Despite little evidence "rape culture" exists, though, three recent roundtable discussions on campus sexual assault hosted by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) showed that not only do some people absolutely believe a rape culture exists on college campuses, but the federal government is involved in policing the issue on campuses. The Department of Education mandates colleges to handle every single student sexual assault through internal quasi-legal proceedings, in which the school performs all the roles of investigator, prosecutor, judge, executioner and statistics compiler. From the perspective of accusers in campus sexual assault cases, they may very well prefer a quasi-legal adjudication of their complaints because it provides a much broader definition of sexual assault, a much lower burden of proof and an environment in which “student's rights” tend to be accuser's rights, with little emphasis on rights for the accused. For the accuser, it makes the alleged post-assault experience that much less stressful. From the accused's perspective, though, he's not gonna know what hit him.

Schools Play Law and Order: SVU

MSUMikeJunger-CSPAN-SexAssault Speaking amongst friendly colleagues last Monday at the third roundtable, Mike Jungers, the dean of students at Missouri State University, made the surprising statement that new investigation procedures of campus sexual assault were resulting in the alleged perpetrators agreeing to be interrogated without obtaining an attorney. He considered this to be a good thing.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 29, 2013 36 Comments
We have noted here many times the war on little boys in elementary school through the absurd application of "zero tolerance" rules, When do we finally stop the harassment of little boys by school administrators? We also have noted Dr. Helen Smith's book Men on Strike regarding how similar policies through college and beyond have had a negative impact. So this recent interview with Camille Paglia in The Wall Street Journal is familiar territory, A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues:
'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation..... Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters." She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college....
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