Sex Yes, Censorship No

or, Marching in the Streets Revisited, a Personal Observation of Recent Intellectual History from Out of the Ballpark

by Leslie Fish

Abstract

A personal exploration of power-relationships that contribute to censorship in an academic setting through the lived experience of activism and folk music performance.

I. Background

In order to tell you a few short true stories, I have to tell you a long true one to give you the background. In other words, to save everyone’s time and effort, let me get my own personal biases out of the way first – along with the experiences that shaped them.

First, sex.

I was raised in a family of doctors. My father and uncle had a clinic attached to the house, and I grew up sneaking in there whenever I could to read medical texts and medical journals. One article in particular I remember dwelled on what the authors called “general hermaphroditism” of various degrees. The authors claimed that in any given body the genders were not always so sharply and clearly divided as we commonly assumed. They lumped homosexuality, bisexuality, transsexuality, actual physical hermaphroditism, endocrine dysmorphia and everything in between under the same heading, and declared that: ‘hermaphroditism to some degree is much more common than has been previously supposed.’ This made perfectly good sense to me, being a tomboy myself who absolutely despised my mother’s attempts to “make a lady” of me. I’d seen for myself that there was a huge difference between the “tomboy” girls — who were athletic and energetic, and would take every opportunity to run off into the woods behind the school to explore and adventure and play at hunting, and the “fluff” girls – who were vain and lazy, and actually liked dressing up and fussing with hair and nails and makeup, and who spent their time sitting around playing endless games of petty-politics with each other. I noticed that there seemed to be a similar division between the “jock” and “nerd” boys, but I didn’t really pay much attention; boys, after all, were icky creatures who liked to start fights and pick on girls – especially the fluff girls. I noticed that they didn’t pick on the tomboys after being beaten up a few times, which convinced me that it was indeed best to be a tomboy.

At one point I recall asking my mother why she kept trying so hard to make me into a fluff girl – a “lady” – and her answer, “So that you can get married,” made no sense at all. When I asked the question again a few years later, she amended her answer to: “So that you can get a rich husband.” That made more sense; it seemed that rich boys liked “fluff” girls, and if you could charm one of them into marrying you, you could be rich all your life and never have to work. I could see the point of that, but didn’t like it; it stank too much of prostitution. I decided I would rather work for my own living, however poor that might prove to be.

The more Mama touted “femininity” the less I liked it. I also wondered why, if femininity were so “natural,” did I have to learn so many quite unnatural tricks – shaving and plucking, cinching and padding, painting and powdering, walking just so, talking just so, wearing tight dresses and teetering on high heels, and fussing endlessly with my hair and nails – to maintain it. In any case, I learned to look on conventional adult attitudes toward sex and gender with a jaundiced eye.

Then, when I was fourteen, I was sent off to summer camp on a small farm that functioned as a working farm the rest of the year. I recall sitting with a girlfriend on a fence-rail, on a warm and balmy day in late June, watching a pasture full of mixed farm animals going at each other with a merry disregard for sex, species or size. There were two yearling colts giving each other what I later learned to call blow-jobs. There were two steers and a cow lined up taking turns mounting a Percheron mare, and I wondered what pleasure the cow got from rubbing her udder against the mare’s backside. There was a dog mounting a goat mounting a pig, and I couldn’t tell the sex of any of them. There was a lonesome old bull fenced off alone in an adjoining paddock, who managed to cock a leg on a fence-post and beat himself off against the rail. After watching all this for awhile, I turned and asked my girlfriend: “Okay, explain to me: what is an ‘unnatural act’?”

She had no answer.

I never did get one until I took biology in high school, and therefore had excuse to read “adult” studies on animal behavior. The answer I got from all my reading was that a healthy adult animal will do whatever feels good with whatever will stand still for it, and this has little or no relationship to the rest of its natural behavior. Of course I didn’t mention this to the adults around me, especially Mama, who was still desperately trying to make me a “lady.”

Years later, in college, while I minored in studies and majored in grassroots politics, I worked my way from the civil rights movement to anti-war to Women’s Lib to Gay lib to the Radical Labor movement – meeting all sorts of remarkable people on the way. I met men who did their best to behave, talk and dress like caricatures of “fluff”-girls, and other men who were the epitome of “jock boys”, but were only interested in other men. I met women who tried to outdo the “faggy” men at being fluff girls, and other women who cut their hair short and ate themselves into shapelessness and behaved like caricatures of jock boys. I remembered that long-ago medical article and concluded that the authors were definitely on to something. Everywhere in college I met people who were severely dissatisfied with the roles that society had assigned to them because of their gender or color or class. This led me to conclude that the problem is not with anyone’s body or how they choose to enjoy it but with society’s rigid expectations of how Whites, Blacks, Men, Women, Rich, Poor, etc. were supposed to behave. Social roles, I concluded, are all artificial – and, all crap. Individual character is all that counts.

I also came across a rare and remarkable book called The Dominant Sex: A Study in the Sociology of Sex Differentiation by Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting. It was an anthropological study first printed in 1923, whose research had been done in the half-century before, when many of the odd native societies it mentioned were still alive. Its basic theory was that, whenever one sex has social dominance over the other, the dominant sex will always share the same characteristics – regardless of whether that sex is male or female – and the subordinate sex will also share the same characteristics. Thus, in female-dominated societies the women were bigger, stronger, leaner, more muscular, less sedentary and more aggressive than the males, and also worked outside the house while the men stayed home to tend the cooking and cleaning and children – exactly the opposite of the sex-roles in male-dominated societies. The authors concluded that “no civilization can reach its highest form of development under a monosexual government, and… the ideal {society} is one in which both sexes are absolutely equal.” (Vaerting & Vaerting, 1923, back cover blurb). I found this to be a great revelation, and wondered – as I still do – why this book isn’t taught in all the colleges of the world.

Its conclusions also dovetailed remarkably with what I learned in the Radical Labor movement about the largely unrecognized role of class, class culture, and class conflict in America today. More on this later.

Of course, I was able to meet and talk with all these different people because – and I’m probably revealing my age here – in those days colleges were supposed to be places of open inquiry, where one could study anything, explore any idea, and debate any subject with no holds barred. The ripples of the philosophically-explosive ‘60s were still pounding the shores of academia then; both the Free Speech Movement and the abuses that had set it off were fresh in everyone’s minds. Everyone was aware of the injustice of being drafted at age 18 to go fight in a war you couldn’t vote on until age 21. Everyone was outraged at education being treated like an industry, at the direction of Big Government and Big Business to churn out “product” – well-trained obedient taxpayers and employees – who would work, vote, buy, breed, and believe as their rulers wanted them to. Everyone could research and see for themselves the tyranny and stupidity of conventional social roles and the common propaganda that supported them. Students and teachers then demanded freedom of knowledge – the right to learn, study, and know everything, without restraint, no matter how grim or horrible the truth might be. They demanded the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth – even if they had to march in the streets, be clubbed and seriously injured by enthusiastic police, spend time in jail (where other prisoners were often bribed by the guards to add to the assaults), take permanent scars, have their careers and futures severely derailed, and more, to get that truth. Intellectuals then were willing to, literally, pay for truth with their blood – and I too have the scars to prove it.

I was at a Midwestern university, not at the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement, but we were definitely stirred by its effects – and our administration had the sense to comply. My old alma mater made a point of inviting the most controversial speakers it could find to come and propound their ideas to the students, who would then merrily spend the next week analyzing and debating said ideas down to their atoms. We watched knock-down drag-out debates between Communists and Nazis, Black Muslims and Klansmen, et al, as enthusiastically as we watched our college football games, and in much the same spirit. ’Twas all great fun, and great wit-sharpening.

That was also when I began writing protest-songs, one of which – “Live and Let Live” – includes the following verse:

I haven’t any arguments how other people f—k,

Just, if you do it in the road, you’ll get hit by a truck.

Go bounce your buns with anything for which you have the hots,

So long as all are willing and they all have had their shots. (Fish, 1991)

I’ve lived by that theory ever since.

II. The Culture of Class

After college I began on my peripatetic career as a folksinger, based in the Midwest, with grassroots reform-politics on the side. Since folksingers are notorious for not earning a living wage, I lived on a working-class income and therefore in working-class neighborhoods – where I joined that interesting class of Americans with upper-middle-class educations and working-class incomes, and began to see for myself the cultural differences of economic class in America.

Being short of money did indeed affect one’s attitude, and not simply because poor folk couldn’t afford “higher” education; there were (and are) scholarships aplenty for those who want to work for them, and there are community colleges in every state which teach the same basics as any university. The community colleges also teach courses in various medical skills, engineering, and skilled trades – much more cheaply than the universities do. What you won’t see taught there are “liberal arts” that aren’t immediately practical; you can take a class in oil-painting at the average community college, and you’ll finish knowing not only how to paint but how to frame and pack and where the local galleries and art-fairs and sales-agents are. The point of a working-class education is to give the students skills that will win them jobs with incomes that will let them class-climb. It’s immensely practical, with no room for political theorizing.

Beyond that, working-class folk have no pad of money to shield them from the consequences of their mistakes or ill luck. Working-class kids who get in trouble with the law go to jail, period. Working-class kids who get serious illnesses or injuries often put their whole families on Welfare. Working-class teenagers who trash their cars don’t get replacements, and so on. Reality is immediate and unavoidable, and there’s very little room for error.

Finally, working-class folk can rarely afford to hire people to do the work of

survival for them, so they have to learn to do it themselves: buy their own food, cook their own meals, clean their own homes, mend their own clothes, do their own repairs, arrange their own transport, hunt for their own jobs, mind their own money, and – especially – manage their own defense, which sometimes means dispensing their own justice, if only because the police are slow to show up in working-class neighborhoods. At least five times, while living in working-class neighborhoods across America, I was obliged to pick up a weapon (shotgun, pistol, one time a sword) to go repel a would-be burglar or chase off a thug threatening or attacking a neighbor – and of course the neighbors would do the same for me. (The basic rule was: “You wanna have good neighbors, you gotta be good neighbors.”) This explains why working-class folk have little sympathy for gun-control laws. It also explains the premium working-class folk put on self-sufficiency. All this creates a very different culture from that of the standard upper middle class, usually regardless of color or ethnicity.

This cultural difference is noticeable in matters of sex and ethnicity, too. Where social shunning can seriously damage not just your income but your survival chances, people are careful not to offend their neighbors. The Latino family who runs the neighborhood grocery store may despise their gringo customers, but won’t express a whisper of their feelings in front of those customers – and likewise the customers won’t mention their own attitudes toward Latinos, whatever those may be. The same holds true for the Black cook and waitress at the neighborhood diner, or the old White couple who run the local garage, and so on. As for religion, since nobody goes to a particular place of worship who doesn’t want to, unless you make some public display of your beliefs, nobody knows what they are – or cares. I’ve seen this pattern in every neighborhood I’ve lived in from Chicago to Oakland to Phoenix.

It was in the working-class attitude toward sex that I saw striking examples of the Vaertings’ theories (1923, et. al.).

The “fluff women” announced their role in public by displaying the traditional – subordinate – feminine dress and mannerisms, and were treated accordingly; their usual goal was the traditional one of secure marriage to an economically-secure husband, but quite often they would “mark time” by taking what work they could find as economic insurance. A few of them would pursue the riskier road of traditional “bad girls” – hanging around and partying heavily with the “gang-bangers”, bikers, and drug-dealers — which certainly offered more excitement and the chance of better income, but which rarely ended well.

Then there were those women who were called “libbers,” if anything, who took advantage of the social progress of women over the last 50 years. These would downplay their sexuality in dress and manner, worked hard in school and often took part-time jobs outside of it, partied rarely, and were focused on careers, income, and class-climbing – whatever those careers turned out to be. These were the women who worked hard to get into the local community colleges and gain a skilled trade. This path also entailed some risk in that its practitioners could win great respect from their neighbors, but only if they actually did succeed. For those who feared failure, playing the “traditional” game and getting a husband was always a default choice.

In fact, any woman who got the skilled-trade training could switch back and forth between roles. In every neighborhood I lived in after leaving college, there was always at least one woman who’d managed to win a husband, raise children, had a “good” job, and was considered a pillar of the local community. There were also a few (often I was among them) who stayed single but still won respect for their career success. Such “success” was measured not just in money but, interestingly enough, in volume of work. As a folksinger I made about minimum wage, but because I sang everywhere I could find a venue in the neighborhood – could always be counted on for interesting music at everything from parties to funerals – I made up in labor what I lacked in coin. (I also learned how much of the economy, recognized or not, is made up of barter.)

For men, of course, there was no such choice; you either earned a living – at anything not directly harmful to the community – or you were a deadbeat. Displaying sexuality might win you the interest of fluffs, but nobody else. Economics ruled.

For people in the sexual twilight zone, there was likewise a simple standard aside from economic success: Can You Fight? Whatever sexual direction a person wanted to go in, s/he had to prove that s/he was not only not a deadbeat but not a weakling, physically or mentally. I noticed, whenever I sang at the local Gay bars, that men displayed themselves as Leather Boys – at least on the street, though they might put on various levels of feminine drag inside the safety of the bar. Women could likewise display themselves as any degree of masculine or feminine inside the bar, but on the street the masculine-preferring women had to show physical mass – preferably muscle – and some proficiency in using it.

Then again, everyone from children on up had to display some proficiency in personal combat, or at least the guardianship of a competent companion, simply for protection against predators. I never saw a confrontation in a working-class neighborhood that was prevented by the police; it was always the victim him/herself or the neighbors who halted the proceedings, if they were stopped at all. A combat-incompetent neighbor was as despised as a deadbeat, and for much the same reason.

I had been immersed in this culture for a good decade after college when my career began to pick up. That is, I obtained my first serious recording contract and moved to northern California. My income improved a little, but was still definitely working-class; I did, however, gain the advantage of widening my contacts – and venues – in the artistic, literary and Pagan communities. This didn’t restrain me from writing uncensored protest-songs, either; I wrote one denouncing the Dworkin/McKlinnon so-called-“feminist” crowd which is so obscene I can’t record it.

Inevitably, I began obtaining singing gigs on college campuses again – and I began to see what had changed in the years that I’d been gone.

3. How Power Corrupts

I expect that everybody has heard of the famous Peter Principle: “Cream rises to the top, and then sours.” (Peter & Hull, 1969) It originally applied to business-managerial competence, but I noticed that it also applies to ideas and their adherents; an idea rises to prominence, becomes fashionable, then unquestionable. At that point you’ll find people developing ways to make money, power, or at least political influence out of it – and then those people go looking for ways to expand applications of the idea, to the ridiculous point and beyond, for their own profit. That’s when the philosophical movement becomes totalitarian, and starts attacking people en masse. History is thick with examples, such as the careers of Christianity and communism, but I had thought that the concepts of equality and free speech were immune to the process.

I should have remembered Orwell’s famous phrase that “some animals are more equal than others.” Or, to paraphrase Aesop, that greed will take any excuse.

I forget just which campus it was, only that it was somewhere in California – and from the amount they paid me, not to mention the furnishings of the campus and the clothing-styles of the students, I could tell that it was a pricey school with well-to-do students. I had sung my one-hour solo concert and then moved on to the open-ended group sing – where everyone sat in a circle and took turns singing or picking someone else to sing – and a lot of the attendees picked me to sing. I had just finished a classic medieval ballad, Lady Margaret (Child, 74A), when one of the women in the crowd stood up and, striking a declamatory pose, denounced the song as “sexist” and “violent” and “hurtful to people dealing with issues of depression” and that even singing it there was an “invasion of the nurturing safe space” of the school.

I honestly thought she was joking, or playing Sophist and trying to provoke a discussion on the old Romantic-era trope of Dying for Love, so I replied with: “Don’t worry, I never sing it in front of hypersensitive infants, and we’re all legal adults here.” I was expecting a laugh, not the outraged squawks that I got. For at least five minutes this dame and her cronies sounded off about “hurtful/hateful/traumatizing” concepts that had no place in their “safe space.” When I finally managed to make sense out of that, I remembered marching in the streets and getting really clubbed by cops, and I stood up and bellowed: “Are you saying that you have a legal right never to have your pwecious feewings upset?” The whole gang of them stood frozen in open-mouthed shock, as if nobody had ever said such a thing to them before. I took advantage of the silence to pull up my guitar and start playing, and I sang a song I’d written a month before:

God bless hate. There are some things worth hating. Oh,

God bless death. There are some things worth killing.

For a thousand years we’ve argued what they are,

‘Til now, by God, I think we know. (Fish, 1998)

That was all it took. The words “hate,” “death,” and “killing” apparently “traumatized” those dames so much that they literally burst into tears and ran out of the hall. I laughed, finished the song, and then commented to the crowd that if Hurtful Words could make them run, they were an easy army to defeat. There was a storm of explosive snickers from the rest of the audience, but nothing more overt than that. The next singer in the circle hastily took up a harmless song about rambling through the new-mown hay, and the music proceeded as before. I assumed those girls were just a small bunch of local nuts, and soon forgot about the incident.

A few weeks later I got another singing gig at another big (and pricey) college, and during my solo concert I sang my song “Susan B” (1988), which is my commentary on how to deal effectively with rapists. The recurring line in the chorus goes: “They’ll find some rapist slaughtered in the morning,” and it usually provokes a lot of sly laughter. From this crowd it garnered a lot of squeaks and mutters, and I wondered why.

Later, at a big sorority party, I learned the reason. It seems that a few months back a female freshman had gone to a fraternity party and made the classic mistake of drinking too much (apparently she got talked into a chug-a-lug contest), and passed out at the party. Of course some slightly-more-sober frat boys took advantage of her. When she woke up and realized what had happened, the first thing she did was phone her lawyer daddy — who happened to specialize in lawsuits. With daddy’s gleeful guidance, she sued the school, the fraternity nationwide, the local fraternity, and the particular boys that she knew or thought were responsible. The case was still winding its way through the courts, but it looked as if the girl would wind up with enough bucks to pay for her entire education and set her up for life.

My first comment on hearing this was to ask: “Did she sleep through freshman girls’ orientation?” – because I remembered that orientation at my old school, and the clear warnings that it gave us: 1) If you want to keep your virginity, don’t go to any frat parties; 2) If you must go to a frat party, wear a chastity-belt – with a combination lock that you can’t remember when you’re drunk; 3) If you don’t want to wear a chastity belt, then watch your drinks; don’t drink anything that you don’t get from a common source yourself, don’t let it out of your hand until you’ve finished it, and take no more than one drink per hour – chased with water – no matter what anyone says, and you won’t get vulnerable-drunk. Just for back-up, build up your muscles and study martial arts.

When I repeated this to the local college girls, they looked at me as if I’d grown antlers – and then all started talking at once. Yes, there had been a time when freshman orientation had “dealt with such subjects,” but that had been stopped years ago by a complaint from the Psychology department. “Why?” I asked, with a few impolite additions. I got an earful of psychobabble buzz-phrases: “traumatizing,” “stereotyping,” “raising expectations of violence,” “socially paranoid,” “encouraging aggressive attitudes,” and more – all adding up to 1) making the school and fraternities “look bad,” and 2) upsetting the sensibilities of some of the more “delicate” female freshmen who didn’t even want to think about the concept of “rape.”

I’m afraid my response was not at all polite. Once I got past the expletives, what I said was that not giving people information that could protect them was downright criminal, and that anybody too “delicate” to deal with adult reality had no business being in an institute for higher learning – if anything, they should be in a very different sort of “institution.” “I’m all for helping the handicapped,” I wound up, “But this is beyond ridiculous!”

Well, that set off an explosion of arguments, out of which I finally learned that one of the professors had said almost exactly that, in class, and not only some of the students but other professors in the department took offense. In fact, they raised a protest movement against the professor which eventually got him fired, for “insensitivity.”

I sat there with my mouth hanging open, thinking all that over, and – with my old grassroots-politics experience – considering the old question of “who benefits?” Obviously the girl with the lawyer daddy benefited to the tune of serious money, but who else had? Then I thought to ask: who got that fired professor’s job? Why, it was a senior teaching assistant in the same department, of course. One more question: had that TA been part of the protest that got the realist fired? Well, yes: she’d been a major activist in the movement.

“Click!” I yelled, laughing. “Click!” (Ms. Magazine/Martin & Sullivan, 2010) – the old label, used for recognizing a blatant piece of self-serving sexist crap. Back when I was in college, everybody with the least interest in women’s-lib knew what that word meant.

These supposedly-educated supposedly-feminist girls only gave me a blank look.

I was reminded of another old forgotten term, this one invented by Mario Savio back during the Free Speech Movement: “ahistoricism.” It referred to not only being ignorant of history but believing that anything that happened more than five years previous was boring, irrelevant, and not worth the interest of anyone really modern, cool, “with it,” and important. Ah, the irony!

I left that campus hoping that this stupidity was an anomaly, peculiar to that particular college in that particular year, and soon forgot it. I did, after all, have plenty of other gigs – most of them nowadays at science fiction conventions, neo-Pagan ceremonies, and historical-recreation society gatherings. The audiences I ran into there were seriously devoted to things like science, logic, historical accuracy, freedom of intellectual exploration – and martial arts. The very idea of censoring concepts because such might upset somebody’s delicate feelings would have inspired them to thundering laughter, or artful insults. Of course, these were usually adults with day-jobs, who did their studies on their own time and their own dime – intellectuals, but not “academics”. I didn’t think to appreciate the difference at the time.

3. How Far It’s Spread

The first I heard about the Cherry Hill Seminary flap was a passing mention of a name I recognized – Ruth Barrett – on a Pagan music website. I don’t think I ever met Ruth, but I was a fan of her music, starting with her album with Cynthia Smith – called, as I recall, “Songs of the Rolling World.” Modern Pagan music was in its infancy then, any published album was big news in the community, and the Barrett/Smith album was quite professionally done. Other than her music, I knew nothing about her.

Then, all these years later, I heard that she was in the middle of some great flap in the Pagan community in which she was being called the standard Politically-Correct insults – of the newest fashionable sexual rather than racial variety. This amazed me, because I’d never seen Political Correctitude in the Pagan community before, so I went searching to see where this peculiar philosophical contamination had come from.

I eventually came upon a letter on a Pagan blog from someone calling herself ‘Alley Valkyrie’ (2016) denouncing Ruth – primarily as a friend of a Cathy Brennan, who was the main target of the attack – with the characteristic PC logic (or lack thereof) that I’d encountered at those campus gigs years earlier, salted with the latest PC buzzwords – some of them so new that I had to go look them up. Oh yes, this was that same attitude – I hated to call it a “movement” – that I’d encountered a couple of years earlier at those, to be blunt, upper-middle-class colleges, no mistake. What the hell was it doing in the Pagan community?

Then I read further in the ‘Valkyrie’ screed and found the connection: “Cathy Brennan is friends with Ruth Barrett… instructor at Cherry Hill Seminary. Last year, when Ruth made several transphobic comments, many called on CHS to fire her. CHS refused to do so, citing academic freedom as their reason for standing by her.” (Valkyrie, 2016).

Aha! And click!

A little Google searching showed that Cherry Hill Seminary is a tiny religious college, funded entirely by student tuitions, whose sole claim to fame is that it’s the first independent (that is, not the creation of a specific Pagan denomination) generally Neo-Pagan seminary that’s fully accredited by a state board of education. That means academic respectability – and actual paying jobs. That’s the connection.

Sure enough, after the usual wonderfully emotional accusations – “blatantly transphobic,”, “targeted”, “public outcry”, “doxxing”, “violence” (several times), “notoriously rabid” “putting members of our community in danger” – all with no evidence except name-calling itself, ‘Valkyrie’ finally gets down to her real demand: “I am calling on Cherry Hill Seminary to publicly disassociate (sic) with Ruth Barrett immediately. And I am calling on every person that I personally know who is affiliated with CHS to resign from their positions unless CHS publicly disassociates with Ruth. And if CHS refuses to do that and instead hides behind ‘academic freedom’, I am calling for the pagan community as a whole to publicly disassociate with and boycott CHS.” (2016)

Right. She doesn’t go after Cathy Brennan’s job, whatever that is, but insists that Barrett be fired or she’ll get her friends to shut down the school. And if Barrett is fired, just who will get her job?

Excuse my working-class cynicism, but what I see here is a collection of originally-liberal ideals degenerated into a specialized extortion system.

It’s enough to make me remember a line from an old Kathy Mar (1982) song:

“Is this why we all went marching in the streets?”

Now, questions of the place of transsexual folk in Pagan theology could be the subject of lively debate at a Pagan seminary, and I’m sure that Pagan seminary students would be interested in such a discussion, and no doubt people would have strong feelings on either side of the debate – but I don’t see this as an excuse (like that realist’s attitude at the California college) to hound a teacher out of his or her job, no matter who lusted to get the vacated seat. I’m disgusted at seeing the Political Correctitude game extend even to a tiny seminary, but I’m even more annoyed at seeing the standard unreasonable and obviously anti-intellectual tactics (“hides behind ‘academic freedom!’ ”) of upper-middle-class PC students moving in on a subculture which originally had better ideals and better sense.

Well, this particular extortion racket began in the major liberal-arts colleges, and ending it will have to begin there too. One sign for hope is the recent stance of the University of Chicago¹, denouncing the whole adulation of “safe spaces” , “trigger warnings,” supposed student emotional fragility, and above all the censoring of speech or ideas for the sake of Political Correctitude. Given the cheers and support I’ve seen from people who’ve read that U of C statement, there’s reason to hope that other liberal-arts colleges will follow its lead. Hopefully Cherry Hill Seminary will do the same, let Ruth Barrett defend her position in public debate, and stop the infiltration of Political Correctitude into the Pagan community.

In any case, I suspect I need to do what I do best, and write another protest song. The hard part will be putting my observations on upper-middle-class academic extortion into workable scansion and rhyme. All I’ve got so far is:

Evil, hurtful, hateful, sexist, ray-ray-ray – (-cist, -cist, -cist)

Ooh Big Daddy, ooh Big Momma, make it go away.

I’m so pure and sensitive that I can’t stand the stink

Of anything that I don’t like that tries to make me think. (2016)

It isn’t much, but it’s a start.

~ Leslie Fish <;)))><

References

Barrett, R. & Smith, C. The Rolling World. Aeolus Music. (2002/2016).

(2010) Click: When we knew we were feminists. reprint: Click; eds. Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan.

Seal Press: Berkeley, California.

Fish, L. (1988) “Susan B.” Lionslair Lyrics,

Retrieved 10/10/16: http://lionslair.com/Lyrics/Susan_B..html

(1991)“Live and Let Live.” Firebird Arts and Music.

(1998). “God Bless Hate” unrecorded. (2003) The Conchord 12 Songbook. Pasadena, CA.

Mar, K. (1984) “Marching in the Streets,” Firebird Arts and Music

Peter, L.J, & Hull, R. (1969) The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong. HarperCollins: NYC

Valkyrie, A. (2016) Alley Valkyrie’s Facebook Open Letter. Published June 7, 2016.

The Wild Hunt. Eds. Retrieved on September 1, 2016: http://wildhunt.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Alley-Valkyrie-Open-Letter.pdf

Vaerting M., Vaerting, M. (1923/2002). The dominant sex: Study in the sociology of sex differentiation. University

Press of the Pacific: Honolulu, HI.

1 Posted October 5, 2016: Vivanco, L. and Rhodes, D. Chicago (2016).

Tribune. U. of C. tells incoming freshmen it does not support ‘trigger warnings’ or ‘safe spaces’. Chicago Tribune.

Retrieved: 10/10/16 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-university-of-chicago-safe-spaces-letter-met-20160825-story.html