Affirmative Action for Men, Part Deux

By Katha Pollitt

Remember when opponents of affirmative action argued that it hurt blacks' self-esteem because they'd never know if they had succeeded on their merit? According to this theory, first-rate students who would have been accepted anyway are stigmatized by being lumped together in the public mind with students accepted only because of their race, and this is stressful and anxiety-producing all around. Much better not to take race into account, and let excellence be the only criterion.

I wonder how those champions of meritocracy feel about gender- based college preferences for men. Yesterday, Dean of Admissions Jennifer Britz confessed on the New York Times op-ed page that Kenyon College accepts inferior men over better qualified women simply because they are men, raising the obvious question : What about the self-esteem of these poor boys? Surely some of them would have gotten into Kenyon without the genital advantage, but how can a given Kenyon male know it was his brains and not his penis that won him a coveted thick envelope? Thanks to Dean Britz's candor, the value of a woman's Kenyon degree has soared--a girl must be really something to have made the cut--and that of a man's degree has plummeted. He went to that college that takes the dumb guys!

If I was a man at Kenyon, I'd be thinking about transferring. I wouldn't want people to think I needed a boost just because I was male. And I wouldn't want to wonder if maybe I DID need a boost. I might even feel guilty that I had deprived a better candidate--you know, one of those brilliant poetry-writing future-vaccine- discovering change-the-world-for-the better girls Dean Britz describes rejecting. I might have to go to a slightly less-selective college, but that would be okay: I would have my self-esteem!

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March 24, 2006

Affirmative Action for White Men, Chap. 4,651

By Katha Pollitt

It isn't often that someone owns up to flagrant sex discrimination in the op-ed page of the New York Times, so I suppose we should be grateful to Kenyon College dean of admissions Jennifer Britz for her honesty. In "To All the Girls I've Rejected" she admits what many parents of girls suspect: Boys have an edge in college admissions. In order to preserve "gender balance" and avoid the dreaded "tipping point" of 60 percent female enrollment, which supposedly makes a campus less appealing to applicants of both sexes, Kenyon puts the thumb on the scale for boys. The villain? Why feminism, of course: "We have told today's young women that the world is their oyster: the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today's most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How's that for an unintended consequence of the women's liberation movement?" Right: if only more parents had discouraged their daughters' aspirations, Ms Britz wouldn't have to reject them now. Why not: if only more boys worked a little harder in high school they'd deserve a place at Kenyon?

At Kenyon, more girls apply, so more are rejected--not because they aren't brilliant , but because they are girls. Let me put that another way: inferior boys are accepted, because they are boys. "Gender balance" looks a lot like a quota system to me, the sort of extra-credit-for-testicles that the Supreme Court has specifically outlawed for public universities. If Kenyon was a public college, Britz would be on her way to court right now. Anyone for a lawsuit?

Britz asks "What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options?" How about: those young men will do less than ever, because why put down that Game Boy when Kenyon College will take you anyway? then, armed with their not- quite-deserved diplomas, they get jobs they don't quite deserve, and promotions they don't quite deserve either. Exactly the sort of thing that opponents of affirmative action claim happens to blacks who benefit from affirmative action. Except, oh I forgot, the boys of Kenyon (and other colleges that favor males in admissions--and I just hope to God that Wesleyan, where my daughter is a freshman, isn't one of them) aren't black! They haven't been the victims of centuries of discrimination continuing up to the present moment, didn't grow up in segregated neighborhoods, go to overcrowded under- resourced schools without extracurriculars or AP courses or maybe even science labs, and have families who couldn't afford math tutors, SAT Prep classes, and maybe even a hired consultant to help them write a killer application essay. They're middle-class white boys! Whew.

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March 23, 2006

Bad Day in the Bad Lands

By Katha Pollitt

South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds has signed the state abortion ban, which bars all abortions without exception except to preserve the life of the mother. Doctors who violate the law face five years in prison. Although the law will surely be stayed by the courts, this should be a real Aha! moment for the women of South Dakota. Now they know they live in a state that values them only as incubators of fertilized eggs--even when fertilized by rapists. That's valuable information! It's a real Aha! moment for us all, actually--turns out the anti-choice movement really means it when they talk about abortion as murder. While Gov. Rounds and President Bush expressed their preference for the strategy of nibbling away at Roe--a much shrewder political tactic that Democrats are always recommending to Republican strategists--the antis went for the whole pie. Why? Because they're fanatics on a mission from God. They think birth control is abortion too.

If you want to get a sense of what's at stake in the war against legal abortion, take a look at How the Pro-choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex by Cristina Page (Basic Books). It's short and sweet and shrewd and funny, and makes a persuasive case that what is at stake is not just the right of women to terminate pregnancies, but modern sexuality and family life, from the very idea of sex for pleasure not procreation to flexible gender roles in marriage. Page packs in an amazing amount of factual information into 168 pages. Did you know, for example, that one effect of parental notification/consent laws is to push abortions later, as 17 year olds decide to wait till they turn 18 and don't need a permission slip for the doctor? And did you know that not one major pro-life organization has an official policy supporting "artificial" contraception? No wonder those well-meaning attempts to find "common ground" never get anywhere.

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March 6, 2006

Go Christine!

By Katha Pollitt

I was never wild about the Band of Brothers idea, as Ari notes, and not just because it is such a male (and white) bunch of tired and dreary no-idea candidates. It's a gimmick. A militaristic gimmick. It says Daddy's back and he hates those commie pinko peaceniks just as much as you, patriotic red-blooded red-state America! What's next, Band of Preachers?

Tammy Duckworth is a great human-interest story, but that's not a reason to support her candidacy. Running her is an act of considerable cynicism-- but it seems to be working. Ari, I'm guessing you'd barely heard of her before a few weeks ago, and you're practically ready to support her. The centrist mantra is working it's magic: Already you're having trouble telling the difference between the candidate who walks the walk and has grassroots support, and the candidate who is basically a photo-op. Who says Duckworth is the more electable of the two, besides the pols who recruited her to run?

Duckworth wants to stay in Iraq, she's allied with the more conservative wing of the party, and she seems to have very little substantive to say about most issues. She' s trying to push out of the way a candidate who has a lot of support, more local roots, who ran an incredible race last time, and who has much better politics. I would trust Cegelis a thousand times over Duckworth to take progressive stands once elected, including on women's rights and abortion rights. Duckworth told the Washington Post she thinks abortion shouldn't be a federal issue. That's not exactly a ringing defense of abortion rights, since unfortunately it IS a federal issue.

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February 22, 2006

Iranian Teenager to Hang for Self-Defense

By Katha Pollitt

Just relax and take it if a rapist attacks you in Iran. If you fight back, you may find yourself sentenced to death, like 18-year-old Nazanin. Oh, but wait, I forgot, if you do get raped and don't have four male witnesses to the actual physical act, you can be imprisoned, flogged or stoned for having sex outside of marriage. Here's the shocking story, from Iran Focus via Feministing:

Tehran, Iran, Jan. 07 – An Iranian court has sentenced a teenage rape victim to death by hanging after she weepingly confessed that she had unintentionally killed a man who had tried to rape both her and her niece.