Feminism Silencing Women on Campus

The State of the Campus and Women’s Self-Censorship

"The principles underlying the calls for censorship by the student activists are very specific. They are based on a conception of society dominated by group identity and work on an understanding of systems of privilege and marginalization affecting those groups. They call upon the values of “intersectionality”...

Due to the belief that language constructs social reality, ideas and speech which are perceived as detrimental to this cause of increasing representation of marginalized groups or disparaging of any of these identities are considered highly dangerous and may even be referred to as “violent.” Censorship of or punishment for the expression of such ideas, therefore becomes a necessary part of activism...

I was called “conservative” for saying that evolutionary psychology was valuable and “Dawkinsesque” for my criticism of religion. (I was delighted by this). I was accused of destining women to an awful beauty myth for saying that sexual selection was real and asked how black communities in the US would feel about my argument that race can be forgotten when common goals are employed... My attempt to write a criticism of postmodernism at undergraduate and do an evolutionary psychological reading at postgraduate were received badly. If I had persisted with this, I would have failed. Instead, I needed to produce very orthodox work to recover. I did recover. I won the Dean’s Outstanding Dissertation Award for use of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray in relation to Jacobean poetry. It tells us almost nothing about Jacobean poetry...

Everything tends to be a discussion about why (insert any media text) is racist and/or sexist. Everything is a tool of “the patriarchy.” Often gender theory and queer theory is pushed onto historical texts which take them out of their original contexts. I do archival work and am guided by the evidence in the sources. I do not write in jargon and want to reach a wider audience with my work. I am aware this is deeply unfashionable in my field. There’s hardly any British conferences I can attend to present my work as they are always about race or gender theory...

I don’t put anything political at all on Facebook for fear of retaliation...

There’s a lack of impartiality and clarity in most arguments, as well as a general unwillingness to discuss ideas without making use of confusing, ambiguous concepts. I met colleagues that refused to quote an author they dislike for personal reasons (such as the author being openly sexist) regardless of the quality of the paper. One time a colleague told me they received a paper to review (they worked at the time for a journal) and since the title featured “an important LGBT issue,” they thought it should be published. They said that before actually reading the paper...

If a client does not consider their race to be significantly impacting their life, we are encouraged to get them to think and talk about it—in effect, to suggest that it is more significant than they believe...

The fluidity of gender was a core belief which needed to be adhered to but the use of factual, medical data was discouraged. The purpose of seminars was to over-complicate this one perception of gender, indulge the idea, marvel at its ambiguity, break it down in many ways and then do it all over again. My attempts to bring studies in endocrinology into a discussion of testosterone levels in athletes was received badly and I was told to go away and reconsider the complexity of gender and see why categories were unfair. My argument that the consequences of hormone treatments needed to be evaluated was simply dismissed. The fear of upsetting the gender studies students was a strong influence on this...

I am a female university administrator in the UK and have been observing with concern a growing obsession with labels which is shifting the responsibility for academic success from the student to the teaching and administration faculty. This is most evident on the grounds of mental health where increasing student complaints (most notably from women) accuse the university of failing to support them emotionally...

No longer is the stress of assessment simply a reaction to the pressure of performing to the best of your ability. That stress is being labelled as depression and anxiety disorder... resources are being over-stretched and not reaching the people who really need it because as a society, we have become obsessed with labels...

Aggressive or abusive behavior towards people considered to have normative or dominant “identities” is being accepted as appropriate when in reality it is normalizing prejudice on the grounds of race, sex or sexuality...

One male senior professor once heard me criticizing aggressive feminism and hauled me into his office for an hour long “telling off,” saying that no-one would want to work with me if I didn’t identify as a feminist and I might lose my job as a result...

The greatest irony here is that the individuals who expend great energy ensuring that women on campuses are heard and that they have the ability to express themselves freely are the same individuals who have made me feel more oppressed than I have ever felt in my entire life...

The truth is that I’m terrified to submit it. Please understand: I’m far from a coward, and I’m no stranger to standing up for what is right. In my life, I’ve dealt with bullies, hostile colleagues, and a stalker. I pursued a domestic violence case through the courts and took my employer to human rights tribunal. A few people of my (real life) acquaintance have called me fearless (I think ‘stubbornly indignant with zero tolerance for bullshit’ seems more accurate) … but I’m not fearless about this. What’s unfolding in the humanities, in North America — perhaps in the anglosphere more broadly — is tribal, retaliatory McCarthyism, and it’s a battle too far for me."