July 09, 2014
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Arizona State University, perennial favorite for “nation’s least prestigious school,” is showing America why: students can now earn extra credit in a Women and Gender Studies class for being female and not shaving their armpits. One student”whose parents no doubt consider this either $6,000 (in-state tuition) or $10,000 (if she’s out of state) a year well spent”called her 10 weeks of stubble cultivation a “life-changing experience.”
Don”t worry, MRAs, guys were allowed to get in on the action, too”by shaving their bodies from the neck down. At least one male student chose to do so, shaving with a buck knife, which I suppose is kind of braggable. How professors checked this is anyone’s guess.
Still another student stated that the experiment”again, allowing hair to grow in a place where it grows naturally but whence good sense and hygiene have frequently throughout history inspired its removal“put her on a path of activism. “I was no longer an armchair activist,” she said, adding something about “pedagogy,” a word she has no doubt been dying to pepper her conversation with since that Intro to Sociology class dumped it into her vocabulary during freshperson year.
Women in the less-civilized parts of the world who are forbidden to learn to read or visit the doctor are no doubt emboldened by this simple act of solidarity.
The instructor, Professor Breanne Fahs, doubles as the director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group, or FROGS, an act of not-so-subtle irony or a total inability to sense such. She’s currently hard at work promoting her biography of Valerie Solanas, the insane woman who wrote a book called the S.C.U.M. Manifesto (S.C.U.M. stands for “Society for Cutting Up Men”) and later shot Andy Warhol, causing injuries that almost killed him and would haunt him for life. And don”t forget to check out the FROGS website for a link to an Etsy store selling vulgar apparel promoting something called “menstrual activism,” which apparently involves wearing the crimson curse as lipstick.
I think college is a good thing. I also think it’s good whether or not you “do” something with the information. As my old Anglo-Saxon professor (what, you don”t have one?) put it, the value of reading “The Dream of the Rood” isn”t that you”ll craft better advertising with your enhanced social context. To paraphrase Heinlein, poetry, like butterflies, needs no excuse. There’s a value to knowing things for the sake of knowing things.
At the beginning of the last century, it wasn”t uncommon for learned men, such as my beloved H.L. Mencken, to have little or no formal schooling past the eighth-grade level. Paradoxically, anecdotal evidence, such as the popularity of things like the Everyman’s Library (my grandfather, a dairy farmer with almost no formal education, had one of these), suggests that self-directed education regarding the finer points of science, history, and the arts used to be popular with America’s hoi polloi.
And now? Now we”re propping up the wheezing American economy with a massive student loan debt bubble. “We” in this case does mean you and I, unless you”re a foreign reader or one of those guys driving around with a license you made using Photoshop.
The wisdom of such an investment in education might be debatable; however, “education” is not what’s being invested in. Instead, what you and I are underwriting with our tax dollars is the indoctrination of impressionable (read: “stupid”) young people into an ideology that spits on the very foundations of Western civilization, which actively tries to burn to the ground what your ancestors fought, sweated, and bled to build.
