Social justice is a growing part of campus culture. Gender Studies is a huge, popular major. Movements like BLM and progressivism focus on economic and social inequality, and a massive field of study has emerged that has fueled many of the grievances and causes these groups have adopted. Topics like the wage gap between men and women, the unfair treatment of black Americans by law enforcement, the inherent racism of border control, the amount of women assaulted on college campuses, the misappropriation of culture, and countless other points of discussion in the social justice movement are bolstered by, and sometimes based around, studies and ideas that have emerged mainly from subsections of sociology, like gender studies. These theories and ideas have become a major part of campus culture in universities across the US, particularly, which is why I find them so prudent to address.
While this kind of research is obviously crucial and entirely necessary to the development of our understanding of society, the inherent nature of the topics at hand has created a problem; one that most people, especially the people who study and contribute to these philosophies, either seem not to notice or willfully ignore. When fields of scientific study and philosophy grow into large fields with many practicing scholars, that science or philosophy, in order to maintain validity, is always, always subject to strict review and harsh scrutiny. Bad studies, misinformation and fallacies of logic have to be pointed out for the sake of that field’s healthy development. Certainly, this is something on which everyone can agree.
The unforeseen problem that emerges from the nature of a topic like gender studies is that any and all criticism is, by default, considered or assumed to come from a place of bigotry. For instance, If you disagree with the rhetoric, for instance, that 1 in every 5 women attending a university is sexually assaulted, most folks who believe that statistic are going to call your dissenting opinion sexism, because it’s seen as criticism that detracts from the struggle of women who face the constant fear of sexual assault.
In taking the "wrong" stance, You might very well put yourself at risk of being called a “rape apologist” or a misogynist, or a promoter of rape culture. This isn’t uncommon. I’ve witnessed this scenario unfold, both in real life and in online discussion, so many times that it’s practically become a cliché.Despite the personal attacks that may result, I firmly believe that any and all areas of study must undergo fact checking and scrutiny, particularly when much of the rhetoric is both inflammatory, and blatantly false.
The 1 in 5 Statistic
Even to an objective and completely unbiased observer who studies the issue, the study that led to this conclusion (that one in every five college attending women is sexually assaulted) would appear, at best, very unlikely to be accurate. Without getting too deeply immersed in this particular trope, it’s worth pointing out that the study this comes from, conducted by the National Institute of Justice, was an online survey with not only a very low response rate, but a sample size of just two universities.
This alone is a huge red flag to anyone who has taken a basic statistics course. In addition, things like “unwanted touching” and "rubbing up against you in a sexual way” were included in the definition of sexual assault, which would mean that anyone who had experienced an unsolicited dance partner at a night club or house party would have included themselves in this number.
While we can all agree that everyone needs to keep their hands to themselves, and most of us would acknowledge that unwanted touching, grabbing or fondling is probably for some people pretty distressing, I also think it’s extremely reasonable to question the validity of removing any separation between “unwanted touching” and full-blown, violent sexual attacks on women. To draw no distinction at all is, at the very least, disingenuous, and some would even consider it a trivialization of the plights of rape survivors.
In fact, the oft-touted epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses is simply not reflected in real data. According to the most recent FBI report on the subject, there were less than 150 reported cases of sexual assault for every California University combined; a total of just over 935,000 students, of which about 55% are female. With about 515,000 female students, and adding another 50 cases to account for unreported sexual assaults, the actual number is probably closer to about 38.8/100,000 women. It's also worth noting that any of those assaults (11) took place on a single campus.
While 38.8/100,000 is still not a good number, and does reflect a much higher rate than the national estimated average of 25.2/100,000 women (FBI Sexual Assault Statistics, 2013), the idea that women are being assaulted on US college campuses in numbers that rival the war-torn areas in the least developed parts of Africa, or the most oppressive parts of the Middle East, is simply untrue. Even if we multiplied the number by 10, it still wouldn't even come close to 1 in 5 women. Why does this matter? Because for one thing, when things like “one in every five women on campus has been sexually assaulted” are presented in classrooms, the news, and mainstream literature as genuine statistics and irrefutable facts, it creates a culture of fear and resentment in our universities.
The fact is that this overused 1-in-5 statistic is incredibly incendiary and, incidentally, totally false. It seeks only to infuriate or terrify young women into activism, which personally, I think is a terrible, amoral way to gather support for a cause, no matter how noble you may believe it to be. The fact that California college incidents of rape could be as much as 13.6/100,000 higher than the national average is a real, genuine concern, but these kind of statistics that represent our available data on sexual assault *honestly* should be the focus of discussion, not inflammatory and clearly overblown statistics with no basis in reality.
The Wage Gap
There is a common, mainstream idea that women are actively receiving less payment (an average of 78 cents on the dollar) for the same exact work and the same exact hours. This figure is touted by major public figures like Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ivanka Trump, Sarah Silverman, and a host of other extremely influential and generally well-informed individuals. But, as Harvard Economics professor Claudia Goldin points out, this idea is based solely on a Bureau of Labor Statistics figure, which simply says that the overall, total amount of money that all women in the country combined made in a single year, was about 78% of what men, overall, made in that same year. It didn’t say, by any contortion of the data, that women and men are systematically being payed such drastically different amounts of money for the same hours and the same exact jobs.
In fact, Goldin persists on this myth by pointing out that if we control for the different choices that men and women make in terms of profession, hours worked, and time taken off (women take more time off for various reasons, a large on being child care), the gap disappears almost completely in nearly every profession. As ‘Factual Feminist’ creator and popular internet-based thinker Christina Hoff-Sommers points out, even in professions like Law and Medicine, the gap in pay can be explained fairly innocently. Women, statistically, simply seem to choose jobs with generally lower pay or more flexible schedules, which, more often than not, don’t pay as much as rigorous around-the-clock jobs, which men tend to gravitate toward more frequently than women. Men also occupy the vast majority of dangerous jobs, which tend to pay well, and as a result constitute the vast majority of on-the-job deaths.
Countless economists and renowned economic professors have shown time and time again that the common representation of the wage gap is incorrect, that the data is being twisted and reformed to implicate a blatant kind of work force sexism still in place today. Yet Despite the statistical acrobatics being used to perpetuate the myth that women are systematically being cheated out of a fair wage by men in power, it remains a common idea; one cited by popular feminist scholars, as well as the aforementioned big-name political figures, including President Obama, and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, as recently as earlier this week. It begs the question, “how could these major political figures *possibly* not know, by now, that this is based on a study that says something completely different than what they’re claiming it says?”
I believe that much of the perpetuation is the result of the total inability to criticize these kind of statistics without earning yourself a damning label, like “misogynist” or “bigot.” It would be nearly impossible for a figure like Bernie Sanders, who relied on progressives and third wave feminism-inclined voters, to criticize the wage gap myth, the same way that I just have, without jeopardizing his entire political career. It would be even harder still for Hillary to do so safely. And that, in a nutshell, perfectly sums up the problem; even if an idea is completely inaccurate, it is protected from criticism because of it’s importance to the narrative; that is, riling up groups of people (in this case, women) who feel they have been wronged.
It instills a feeling of contempt and loathing towards not only the systems which are perceived to be responsible, like patriarchy, republicans, or the media, but It creates the kind of anger, the kind of fire, that leads to activism. It’s the use of misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric to rile up support for the cause that I believe is toxic, not the inherent ideals of equality that feminism was originally based upon.
If this kind of shoddy data-gathering and blatant distortion of figures were the basis of mainstream, university-level teaching in other scientific fields (like biology or psychology,) it would have been subject to intense scrutiny and discarded from credible scientific analyses, for the same reason that anti-vaccination and anti-climate action sentiments are treated as absurd. These ideas can be presented, as they should be, but not taught as objective fact, and certainly not taught in a way that paints people who don’t believe in it as amoral or bigoted people.
General Absurdity
There is a general theme of inflammatory and absurd rhetoric that has taken hold on campuses, and much of it is rooted in new feminist/sociological ideas. An official report released at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign proclaimed that a minority student walking into a classroom full of white students was, in and of itself, a “micro aggression.” North Carolina State University defended a teacher’s right to dock students points for using “gendered pronouns” like “him” or “her” in their own work, because it was deemed a micro aggression which could be “triggering” to students who didn’t identify as a “him” or a “her”.
At the University of Minnesota, a resolution to add a moment of recognition on the anniversaries of 9/11 was voted down because, as the director of Diversity and Inclusion on the campus put it, “The passing of this resolution might make a space that is unsafe for students on campus even more unsafe.” He went on to say, “When will we start having moments of silence for all of the times white folks have done something terrible?” At DePaul University, which I will mention again shortly, students proclaimed it a “hate crime” when “Trump 2016” was written in chalk on the campus
The University of Ottawa in Canada cancelled a Yoga class because Yoga was considered by some at the school to be “cultural appropriation”. At Oberlin, students called a meeting to discuss the addition of sushi to the college meal plan, labeling it “culturally appropriative” and therefore apparently inappropriate for consumption. A women’s studies professor at UCSB assaulted an underage pro-life activist protesting on campus, after calling them “terrorists” and destroying the signs they had brought with them. UC Irvine literally banned their conservative club from campus, and were forced to restore it after facing massive backlash and scathing coverage from conservative thinkers around the country.
The University of Michigan literally requires a diversity class focused on “racial and ethnic intolerance” to graduate. According to students who took the class, it focused primarily on how racist and divided the United States actually is, and taught feminist and sociological theories of race and gender discrimination as objective fact. Again, this was a required course for students to be eligible to graduate.
Back at DuPaul University, feminist activists literally assaulted alt-right Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulus, who showed up as part of his campus tour to speak to the campus conservative club. He was assaulted again, this time with spit, at UCLA. Not only that, but they on both occasions shut down the entire event because they disapproved of his message, which tends toward mocking the more outlandish ideas of feminist theory. Granted, Milo is a provocateur by nature and much of his own rhetoric is meant to be inflammatory. The difference is that he doesn’t shy away from debate with dissenters, nor does he try to silence, intimidate or physically attack people he disagrees with. These are just a few examples of literally *hundreds* of available examples of absurdity fueled by modern-day feminist theory and general political correctness culture.
Because of the sensitive nature of the subject, it’s become practically impossible to criticize all of this absurdity and misinformation; things like the myth regarding the wage gap, or the statistic touted that says sexual assault on campuses is at the same level as sexual assault statistics in war-torn, third-world countries where women have no rights or legal protection. It’s not just the few pieces of rhetoric I mentioned, either.
There are a plethora of problems with things like the idea that culture can be “appropriated,” and to do so is somehow inherently racist. There are serious concerns with the idea of demanding safe spaces on campus to retreat to when you feel “triggered” by a dissenting opinion. There are genuine issues with shutting down any and every argument you think might disrupt your world view or damage your internal narrative.
Simply put, if an area of study is to be taken seriously, both by the scientific community and the general public as a whole, then that area of study must be willing to not only accept harsh criticism of it’s theories, but defend those theories on the merits of the statistics and ideas that are being criticized, instead of focusing on character assassination and tantrum-throwing as a means of quelling philosophical or scientific dissent.
In essence, scholars of social justice theories must be willing to submit themselves and their work to the fact-checking process just like any other area of scientific study, and focus on substantiating their viewpoints and ideas in a respectable, mature way. They must be open to debate and to ideas that might conflict with their own, even if the subject material can sometimes be sensitive in nature. If we continue down the path we’re on, the gap between the general public and the ideology of modern social justice will grow larger, and progress toward genuine equality will become mired in childish arguments and emotional, sensational, and inflammatory rhetoric.
