September 08, 2015
Source: Shutterstock
As you read this, far too many young Americans are getting ready for their first day (back) at college, the most expensive mistake of their lives (unless they are male, get married, and end up divorced.)
I presume all these students, whatever their major, are forced to take at least one class called something like “Introduction to Feminism.” At least, back in the early 1980s, at my decidedly non-ivy-covered community college, “Women’s Studies” was an elective.
I learned a lot of stuff that wasn”t true, although I didn”t find that out until much later.
Take: “Corsets warped women into painful, unhealthy and unrealistic shapes.” Susan B. Anthony and her comrades campaigned against tightlacing using the science of the day to claim the practice caused gallstones, TB, and cancer. (Hey, it was in the New England, uh, Medical Gazette!)
Turns out the famous illustration of a corset wearer’s warped rib cage and mashed intestines that appeared in my women’s-studies textbook (and who knows how many others) is merely “based on conjecture.” Basically, it’s the “hockey stick“ of gender studies.
And do they still teach the “one in four” rape myth? Ah, I see it’s now “one in five.” Poor Christina Hoff Sommers: She’s been chipping away at that and other feminist crud since this century began. Well, at least she’s moved up to doing it in Time magazine.
Sommers” other pet peeve is the “wage gap.” How galling it must be to hear a statistic you keep trying to flush down the toilet of history bubble back up in a recent presidential speech.
What about Super Bowl Sunday”that it’s “the biggest day of the year for violence against women”? That pernicious rumor began, and was quickly debunked, in 1993. Yet I see snopes.com“hardly a bastion of right-wing lunacy”saw fit to post an admirably thorough “False” entry as late as 2014. So it must still be going around.
Then there’s the less familiar “Women own less than 1% of the world’s property” lie. That one got started by known irritant Robin Morgan”a kind of C-list Gloria Steinem”back in 1984. Almost 30 years later, a writer in The Atlantic felt obligated to tear it to shreds.
In my experience arguing with leftist idiots, they don”t read The Atlantic or Time. They”ve never heard of The Washington Post‘s “Pinocchio rating.” A tiny minority know about Internet institution snopes.com, but they only read the entries that make conservatives look (deservedly) stupid.
Nope, evidently all these twats got their faux history and junk science from their professors” faded photocopied handouts, and they”re sticking to them.
They”re blissfully unaware that scholarship about, say, the Crusades and the Inquisition has advanced since their profs went to school. (These are, of course, precisely the same dorks who”ll tweet “EDUCATE YOURSELF!” at degree-free me with palpable smug satisfaction.)
On the subject of scholarship, a Stanford historian has just discovered that “feminism” was more or less invented by some Italian guy in the 1700s.
And his name was “Macchiavelli.”
Could you make this stuff up?
Well, the latest Stanford Report proudly touts one of its own, historian Paula Findlen, as saying that “falsified medieval history helped create feminism”:
Through a close examination of these texts, Findlen found that these early modern writers were so passionate about medieval women that they sometimes fabricated stories about them….
They were described as having law degrees or professorships, claims that turned out to be fictitious….
“Early modern forgers used stories of women to create precedents in support of things they wanted to see in their own time but needed to justify by invoking the past,” Findlen said….
Alessandro Macchiavelli, an 18th-century lawyer from a Bolognese family…was passionate about finding evidence to support Bologna’s reputation as a “paradise for women.” He created stories and footnotes about learned medieval women from the region….
So what, you ask?
