Monday at 12 p.m., PST, controversial author and American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers will give a speech on trigger warnings, safe spaces, and victimhood culture at Portland’s Lewis & Clark Law School. Groups have begun to organize protests, with the Portland-based Twitter account Always Antifascist claiming that Sommers “is basically [a Men’s Rights Activist] and rape apologist/denialist.”
Perhaps more worrisome, though, is the statement put out by the school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, Minority Law Student Association, Women’s Law Caucus, Jewish Law Society, and the school’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter, among others, which claims that the Federalist Society is inviting a “known fascist” to campus in an “act of aggression and violence toward members of our society who experience racial and gendered oppression.” The groups call on the Federalist Society to rescind the speaking invitation and come out in full force to bring signs and peacefully protest the event.
Conservatives are often quick to dismiss such groups as triggered Antifa members who fail to understand the value of speech, who mock “discourse” and assume that at the age of 23 or 24 they have found the sole correct political beliefs that should remain unchallenged and unchanged. But we should keep in mind that even if they fail to robustly articulate why the First Amendment is valuable, they’re turning toward peaceful protest––another right protected by that pesky little Bill of Rights. They’re using the very rights they rail against, and that might plant little seeds in their minds that the First Amendment does much more than just allow pedophilia-endorsing Milo Yiannopoulos-type characters to launch campuses into disarray.
Still, the groups’ hyperbole does them no favors. Sommers is provocative, yes, but she’s no fascist. To use such language makes them look like they’re crying wolf, and we all know how that story goes––you run out of clout before long, and when far worse people come to campus (white supremacists Richard Spencer, Baked Alaska, or Christopher Cantwell would all fit the bill), you’ve wasted all your words on someone much less awful.
Sommers herself claims that she is in favor of traditional feminism, “the sort of feminism that won women the vote, educational opportunity, and many other freedoms.” It’s the “fainting couch feminism” that creates problems, and fixates on victimhood and man-hating above other goals. As she told Vox in 2016, “armies of gender apparatchiks are monitoring and policing speech, ideas, humor, and sexuality.” Sounds reasonable, right?
Sommers has also criticized statistics used in textbooks like Domestic Violence Law and repeatedly drawn the ire of feminists, with prominent journalists like Laura Flanders claiming that Sommers’ own 1994 book, Who Stole Feminism “is filled with the same kind of errors, unsubstantiated charges, and citations of ‘advocacy research’ that she claims to find in the work of the feminists she takes to task.” Many feminists claim that Sommers reduces genuine issues with gender equality in the United States and downplays legitimate campus rape issues. Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on “male supremacy” claims that Sommers gives a “mainstream and respectable face to some MRA concerns.” But it’s worth wondering: perhaps SPLC is becoming overly partisan, and perhaps there’s no way to critique the mainstream feminist take on patriarchy and rape culture without, in a way, giving fodder to MRA groups (whether Sommers likes it or not).
Sommers is absolutely controversial. But she’s not unserious or unworthy of hearing out. And she’s certainly no fascist or MRA, nor has she ever advocated for such odious beliefs. If you twist her words, maybe, but any semi-charitable interpretation would find a feminist of an older generation that’s trying to correct course, while perhaps being a little out of touch to what modern feminists are reacting against. That dynamic, though, is worth paying attention to, and perhaps neither Sommers nor “fainting couch feminists” fully have it right.
A smart and savvy feminist would listen to both sides and form her own conclusions, not decry Sommers a fascist.
Liz Wolfe (@lizzywol) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is managing editor at Young Voices.
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