Monday, April 10, 2000

Dartmouth's Sexual Universe

The rhetoric of the feminist movement, it seems, has been deeply warped: from high-minded talk of political rights to navel-gazing obsessions about personal secretions and loose ruminations about the earth mother and menstrual associations in the changing of tides.

Mammary Obsessions

Breasts: A Documentary begins, not unpredictably, with twenty-two women, ranging from 6 to 84 years old, listing some of the terms used to describe breasts. Then each woman gets to expound on her feelings about the size, shape, and "perkiness" of her breasts, with special attention given to women with breast implants or reductions. The interviewed women included three children, two strippers, several relatively unendowed women, four plus-sized women, two lesbians, and two mother-daughter pairs.

Crying Wolf in the Gender Wars

According to the FBI's "Crime in the United States" survey, the number of reported crimes on college campuses, notably incidents of rape, has dropped significantly over recent years. Other studies show similar findings. There's a problem with the FBI survey, though, as well as most of the others; participation is not only voluntary, but campuses may, through a loophole, omit from their records certain crimes that occur off-campus.

America: A Raw Deal for Men?

Faludi, fortunately, does not belong to this more belligerent breed. She is a feminist in the stricter sense of the term, meaning simply that she studies women. And not exclusively, at that. Her latest book is Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man"assigned reading in Dartmouth's College Course 22: The Masculine Mystique"in which she concerns herself with what's been going on with the other team for the past few generations. The book benefits from Faludi's comparatively open-mind.

Letters to the Editor

Dwyer and his Discontents; Let Me in the Smoke-Filled Room; You Forgot One

Fighting for Dairy Cows

As part of its "Dump Dairy" Campaign to protest how the dairy industry inflicts pain and suffering on cows and calves, PETA recently launched a "Got Beer?" Campaign, aimed primarily at college students. PETA's message is that humans should not drink milk, a drink fortified which calcium, which actually strains calcium from bones; beer is the solution.

CSLI: Student Committees Respond

The Student Assembly, Coed Fraternity Sorority Council, and Interfraternity Council devoted most of the winter term to formulating their responses to the Student Life Initiative. The reports are all very similar, supporting the expansion of social options contained in the Committee on the Student Life Initiative report and new standards for the physical plants of CFS organizations, but rejecting, in many cases, the CSLI's more extreme restrictions of student behavior.

The Rock Writes

For all of you who think that professional wrestlers are just big, dumb animals who can't communicate, The Rock says this: "How many of you jabronis have had New York Times bestselling books?"