It turns out, when gender-neutral rules negatively impact women, some women don’t like it.
At Harvard University, women are protesting the school’s recent move to ban single-sex “final clubs,” because the school didn’t limit the ban to male clubs. Due to the wording of Harvard’s new rule ending the clubs, the school’s five fraternities and four sororities, as well as women-only final clubs, would be disbanded.
It’s kind of a taste of their own medicine, as Ivy League schools like Harvard are at the forefront of using the anti-gender discrimination statute known as Title IX to force schools into punishing men for various offenses in the name of gender equity. Title IX itself is gender-neutral, but we’ve seen the statute — especially in recent years — used to deny men accused of sexual assault or harassment their due process rights or the presumption of innocence.
Further, in the wake of the increased attention to the supposed mistreatment of women on college campuses, laws have been passed in states like California and New York that, though they include gender-neutral language, are being used to brand more men as rapists. The laws enforce affirmative consent, which states that someone can claim they were sexually assaulted if she says she had too much to drink. The problem is the accused student cannot claim he was too drunk, even if under the same law he should have been too drunk to consent as well.
Until now there hasn’t been a campus uproar because only men were receiving the unfair treatment. But now that a gender-neutral rule is affecting women, we see the beginnings of a revolt.
The Harvard women say that women’s groups should be exempted from the new rule, because it was adopted as a response to claims that men-only groups foster rape. Setting aside the obvious negative generalizations and freedom of association arguments, the women insist this is fair.
The idea that these male clubs are hotbeds of sexism comes from a self-reported survey of students claiming so. As I’ve written numerous times before, these surveys are notoriously unreliable. Yet Harvard is using one to accuse many of its male students of sexism and “a strong sense of sexual entitlement.”
The protesting women seem to ignore that this dubious report (which they seem to want to take as gospel, so I’m going to for the these purposes) found that women in final clubs were much more likely to say they had been sexually assaulted. So wouldn’t banning all clubs protect these women?
I don’t like the idea of suggesting women need someone else to protect them, but isn’t that kind of the argument for banning the male-only clubs? These clubs are allegedly groups of rapists, and therefore, to protect women, they should be disbanded. If women in final clubs are more likely to be victims, isn’t banning all the clubs, even women-only ones, another way to protect women?
The women are accusing the men’s groups of misogyny, but, I’m sorry, isn’t labeling an entire group as bad based on the (alleged, not definite) actions of some a form of sexism?
Harvard, for its part, is currently standing by its gender-neutral decision. “As we noted Friday, change is difficult and is often met initially by opposition,” wrote spokeswoman Rachael Dane. “That was certainly true with past steps to remove gender barriers at Harvard, yet few today would reverse those then-controversial decisions.”
I’m sorry, ladies, but if you want equality then you need to accept equal treatment.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
