The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Sex, Politics, and Operation Dildo Blitz John Michael Greer I planned on posting an essay on a different subject today. In fact, I had another essay all written and revised, waiting for whatever fame and fortune a weekly blog post by a writer well out on the cultural fringes can expect these days. That essay is going to be cooling its heels for another two weeks before it gets its day in the sun, though. A comment I made during a recent speaking gig, which was duly recorded and posted to the internet, sparked quite a little tempest in a couple of minor online teapots. I don’t follow social media, but I have friends who do, and several of them happened to tell me about certain saliva-flecked rants responding to the comment. It’s a normal experience if you’re a blogger who doesn’t just parrot somebody’s party line. If people want to denounce me, of course, I have no problem with that. I’ve criticized various people fairly harshly over the twenty years I’ve been blogging, and it wou...

  How Universities Radicalized Young Women and Launched the Sex Wars From the horses’ mouths Janice Fiamengo Communist propaganda, arguments for lesbianism, accusations of white supremacy, and conspiracy theories about rape culture: perhaps not what the average 19-year-old (or tax-paying parent thereof) was expecting when she registered for  Philosophy of Sexual Politics  at Paterson State University in Wayne, New Jersey c. 1974. But that’s what she got. The class was taught by  Professor Paula Rothenberg , a prominent feminist leader who called for the “ radical transformation of all our institutions .” With Alison Jaggar, Rothenberg would go on to co-author one of the first women’s studies textbooks ( Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men  [1978]). Later, she published  White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism  (2002). Her New Jersey classroom became the laboratory in which...