America has shown itself capable of electing a president who’s black—but not yet capable, even eight years later, of electing a president who’s a woman. Of course, Hillary Clinton wasn’t running against a mere John McCain or Mitt Romney; her bad luck was facing an opponent with the rare gift of reminding the electorate by word and deed, and on virtually a daily basis, that women have no more worth than men allow them.
It’s obvious now that this attitude is still widely shared. An interesting story broke earlier this month in Saint Louis, my hometown: Washington University suspended its men’s soccer team. Details have been sketchy since then, but we know the university judged comments the men’s team made last year in an “online document” about members of the women’s soccer team to be “degrading and sexually explicit.” Last Wednesday night the women brought these comments to the university’s attention; the men’s team was promptly suspended pending an investigation.
Wash U., as it’s called, is a research university that U.S. News ranks as 19th best in the country, with many of its graduate schools rated much higher than that. A member of the NCAA’s Division III, Wash U. competes against the University of Chicago and similar schools. And while the university takes its varsity athletics seriously, as it happens most of the athletic glory Wash U. has enjoyed was garnered by its women: its volleyball and basketball teams have won numerous national championships, and early this month its soccer team won its first.
I wonder if it took that national championship to persuade the women that if they raised a complaint someone would take it seriously?
Luckily, the university administration did. “Let me be clear,” said the statement from the vice chancellor of student affairs: “There is absolutely no place at Washington University for sexism, discrimination or harassment of any kind. This alleged behavior flies in the face of the university’s core values.”
The public, however, was less supportive. Here’s the first comment posted online in response to the coverage by the student newspaper, Student Life.
Yeah, tell me again how women don’t discuss the . . . dimensions . . . of male athletes. How women jocks are in the locker room reading Emily Dickinson to each other and parsing Susan Sontag. How women soccer players don’t rank the sexual attractiveness of male athletes. Do tell.
There’s no reason any longer to send a boy to college. Neo-marxist feminist psychos have tasked themselves with the reprogramming of half the population.
On the bright side, boys can use the women’s locker room if they call themselves girls. Yay.
Snarky back-and-forth followed, some on the Student Life site, some on Twitter (“typical women whining and complaining because men are mean. Pathetic. Go find your safe space and grow up”). But far more comments came in response to reporter Ashley Jost’s story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
They roughly break down into men sneering and despairing and occasional women giving it right back. A lively conversation if you enjoy this kind of thing, not so much if you hoped we’d outgrown it. (But who thinks that anymore?)
Perhaps, Ms. Jost, you can share a link to the offensive online document so that we can judge for ourselves whether this is another case of political correctness gone amok or not? And has the investigation clarified that the document was not another case of “fake news” alleged to have the entire men’s team as the source?Education disappeared from our universities long ago. What we have now are Snowflake Indoctrination, Victimhood Advanced Studies, and Socialist Propaganda courses.
The school already declared “Guilty as charged!” but the investigation hasn’t even started. Facts are no longer relevant.
The document was from 2015? Was the whole team involved or are you punishing the whole team because you hate men?
This is the epitomy [sic] of snowflake central and the cultivation of pajama boys and girls with safe spaces.
Hey, you got to be a victim of something or you’re just not cool.
If you read all 100 or so comments, you’ll find some thoughtfulness and balance, and lots of certainty. Certainty welcomes a wide range of opinions, so long as they’re stated with absolute conviction. And so we find here the certainty that the generation of men now in college is being castrated by the women in college and their collaborators in Administration Hall. We also find certainty that the future lies ahead. “This crappy PC culture was not made overnight and its end will not be overnight either, however it is NOT sustainable. I may not see its end, but lets be clear about this, it will end.”
Our children, or grandchildren, will live in a better world. It’s a thought that always inspires, though sometimes more than others.