Tuesday, September 16, 2003

I think it's an industry 

The Cavalier Daily last week ran an article about the sexual harassment workshops required of students at the University of Virginia. Much like our own workshops, the workshops at UVa try to enforce an opinion, rather than inform the students of their rights and the procedures for filing harassment complaints.
In a final solicitation fitting to its pattern of hysterical psychobabble, the Women's Center asks that students affirm the following ideological oath: "I understanding [sic] that denying the pervasiveness of sexual harassment only perpetuates the problem." During the McCarthyism of the 1950s, many individuals of good conscience were intimidated into silence by a similar unfalsifiable logic, which argued that the allegedly vast communist conspiracies in America were so well hidden that only truly astute patriots could notice their presence. If you agreed with the claim, you validated it; if you dissented, you simply revealed yourself as either unenlightened or unpatriotic.

When agents of authority mandate standards of "correctness" in feelings and set limits on what should and should not be enjoyed, humanity itself recoils. Subjective preferences and proper senses of normalcy must be left in the realm of individual choice, and administrators should not seek to dominate social interactions through regulations that are prudish and harmful to both men and women.

Instead of bowing to this idiocy and accepting our administrators' casting of us as a lot of oppressive sexist harassers and naive female victims, we should tell them to shut up and leave us alone. We are not infants. We can decide for ourselves when we're being insulted or harassed, and we certainly don't need a bureaucracy of self-righteous old social engineers getting fat off our tax dollars and telling us what we understanding.



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