Higher education redux

I could — as others already have — devote my blog to portraying the insanity that passes for higher education at so many American Universities and Colleges.  I've opted not to, since there are other things I want to maunder on about here.  Nevertheless, occasionally something going on at one of these "education" factories catches my eye, and I simply feel compelled to bring it to your attention.  Although the pickings are slim, the higher education arena is still, in theory, a marketplace and there places you, as a consumer, may wish to avoid. 

Today's example of a college you may want to avoid is Bucknell.  Lee Markison, a freshman there (and how did a freshman get to be so wise), gives us this latest example of your tuition dollars at work:

Nipple tassels, “smut” stories, and strippers.  One would expect the mere mention of these things to cause hordes of feminists to storm the nearest fraternity house complete with burning brassieres and demands that the oppressive men inside respect women.  But we are living in strange times, and at Bucknell nipple tassels, “smut,” and strippers are apparently synonymous with feminism.

In mid-February the Bucknell University Conservatives Club was asked by the Bucknell Feminist Majority to help fund a show to bring sex workers (strippers, prostitutes, phone sex operators, etc.) to campus to celebrate their professions.  “Of course we’ll fund it, we like free speech,” was the expected response.  We respectfully declined, because while we hate the idea of censoring speech, we do not feel a need to support all speech.
However, while the BUCC refused to help cover the $1,920 cost of the Sex Worker’s Art Show, other members of the campus community did.  Groups like the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Center for the Study of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Samek Art Gallery, Office of Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Awareness, and others all cosponsored the event (feel free to ask them why they felt your tuition dollars and alumni contributions ought to be spent in this manner). 

Lee then provides us with a discreetly written, but still shocking, description of the sex show Bucknell got for its money.  I'll leave it out here.  You can go the link above (which takes you to the Independent Women's Forum) to get the details.  I really like Markison's conclusions about this embarrassing, degrading show:

Rather than promoting causes like ending the international sex trade, where countless women’s lives are ruined as they are sold into sexual slavery, Bucknell’s “feminists” made a joke of prostitution.  Actually, what they did was worse; they celebrated it.
The supposed message of this show was that sex workers are people, they could be your neighbor, your sister, your mother (read your, not my) and you should not look down on them.  Unfortunately, this message was lost by a stunning display of nipple tassels, political jabs, stripping, lubing, and overall degradation.  It was in fact nothing short of a carnival promoting sex work and the supposed empowerment that it offers.

The BUCC [Bucknell University Conservatives Club] has always been a proud proponent of free speech.  Our disgust for some types of speech should not be confused with a desire to censor.  To the contrary, this event proved one of the BUCC’s core arguments in favor of unfettered speech: when all are speaking, we are best able to determine which ideas and groups ought to be discarded as irrelevant, mindless, and unworthy of consideration.

We now all know what the Feminist Majority stands for, and now you have a question to ask yourself: “Do I stand for that too?”

How, in the forty odd years of the women's rights movement, did that movement travel from urging equity for all women to celebrating deviance and degradation?  Even more, how did it become a movement that is so fascinated with this morally degrading behavior that it turns its back on the millions of women worldwide whose lives are destroyed because they are forced into the sex trade?  Those are actually rhetorical questions, simply because the answers would fill a book (or several books) not a mere blog entry.  Suffice to say that it's no surprise that most American women, when asked, vigorously deny allegiance to the modern feminist movement.

Talking to Technorati: Bucknell, Feminism, Prostitution