Critical Mass

By Dan Gelernter

When Yale’s Tory Party debated “The Yale Man is Dead, and the Yale Woman Killed Him” last year, the resolution failed by a large margin. Some believed the Yale Man was still alive (I was one of them) but a larger group voted no because they agreed that the Yale Man was dead but not that the ‘Yale Woman’ was responsible.

I had asserted in that debate that so long as one man at Yale applauded chivalry, the Yale Man lived. Since then I have changed my mind, because a tiny minority of Yale men who are gentlemen cannot outweigh the large majority who are not.

And so I must report that the Yale Man is dead of assisted suicide -- assisted by the Yale feminist, a special kind of woman-hating pseudo-man.

Feminism has had a remarkable and destructive success at Yale (and in the world at large) because it panders to male greed, and has given men a chance to behave naturally. Since chivalry, the code of male restraint, has been banished and destroyed, and modesty mocked and discarded, the Yale man of today is free to look upon the Yale woman as little more than a sexual object.

This current state of affairs is not immediately apparent to the outside observer, who sees Yale continuing to induct the cream of the academic crop and churn out graduates who trundle off to become lawyers or businessmen (and even a small number who turn to some other profession). But what the outside observer does not know, and may be horrified to learn, is how students live and behave at school.

I wrote a piece for this blog last February about “Sex Week at Yale,” a weeklong celebration of pagan depravity. Yale flies in various dating experts, sex therapists and porn stars, who are sponsored by outside groups advertising vulgar party favors at sex week events, which last year included “Ten Commandments of Pleasure: Sex in Relationships” and “The College Striptease (let’s face it – we all want to learn how to do it).”

Despite the fact that this blight only hits us for one week every other year, feminism has inflicted deeper wounds that have struck to the core of decency. The fact that our tuition money pays for abortions on demand and that every freshman counselor hangs a bag a free condoms on his door may give you an inkling of the situation.

I reported in the same blog piece that the Yale Daily News had taken a poll (believe it or not) and unabashedly reported that a majority of students said they had been “sexually active” within the last week. Only 15% said they do not believe in sex before marriage.

I don’t want to describe explicitly the activities of the other 85% of Yale students. I’ll simply state that one of the many reasons I am grateful for living in a single is that I will never be booted out by a roommate to spend the night in a sleeping bag in our common room so that he can have a little privacy.

As hard as feminism tries, it can’t change human nature (and as far as male human nature is concerned, it doesn’t want to). What feminists care about, of course, is female human nature. When the Yale Daily News published an article that showed where women’s versus men’s academic interests lay, only those with no common sense were suprised:

The ten Yale majors in which women are most “underrepresented” are:

   1. Electrical Engineering
   2. Mechanical Engineering
   3. Chemical Engineering
   4. Mathematics
   5. Physics
   6. Economics
   7. Computer Science
   8. Applied Mathematics
   9. Music
  10. Philosophy

And these are the ten majors in which women are most over-represented:

   1. Women's Studies
   2. Anthropology
   3. Environmental Studies [not Environmental Engineering -- another major]
   4. History of Science, History of Medicine
   5. Cognitive Science
   6. History of Art
   7. Psychology
   8. Spanish and Portuguese
   9. Humanities
  10. Art

Yale’s leftist administration is working furiously, and with remarkably comic futility, to eradicate these differences -- and it is striking that, while they’re trying to talk more women into Physics, they evidently couldn’t care less that so few men want to major in Environmental Studies. Any Yale feminist will tell you that women are underrepresented in “male” majors because they are made to feel uncomfortable there. On the other hand, they can’t explain why men don’t like psychology -- why shouldn’t males suffer in a “matriarchal” environment?

It is true that women at Yale are being pressured -- by feminists, who are outraged that so many women still say they want to take time off from jobs to raise families. Feminists think that the answer is a little bullying, coupled with making stay-at-home moms seem like spineless loafers who are letting their fellow females down.

In September 2005, Yale grad Louise Story ran a piece in the New York Times called “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” which was based on 138 interviews with female Yalies. The article reported that a majority of women interviewed were interested in taking a significant amount of time off from work (or stopping altogether) to raise a family, and mentioned an increasing tendency for young college women to want to be mothers instead of businessmen. A particularly interesting statement in the article comes from a typical Yale feminist, Dr. Laura Wexler, who expresses her horror at the preferences women seem to have: “They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it. Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it. I really believed 25 years ago that this would be solved by now." Dr. Wexler apparently believes that women have a higher duty -- this is no “private issue” after all; they must seize the initiative and act like men.

Although Louise Story stated plainly in her piece that the results were “difficult to quantify,” it was precisely her quantitative claims that came under fiercest attack (particularly at Yale and in the Yale Daily News) while her qualitative findings were mostly ignored. Yale, with its typically dishonest approach, arranged for Miss Story to come to a panel discussion of the subject, where she represented one side of the issue and her five co-panelists represented the other side. The characteristic tone of these five feminist panelists did not go entirely unnoticed by the students who attended the discussion. A student named Eve Fine who attended the panel was quoted by the Yale Daily News: “what I find disturbing is the implication that an educated stay at home mother does not provide the same returns to society as an educated career woman.”

But Yale feminists aim to give men exactly what they want -- permission to send their wives into the workforce to earn more money for a snazzier household.

Men are greedy by nature -- above all for money and sex. Chivalry was invented in part to restrain male greed by establishing a code of acceptable behavior that prevented men from taking advantage of a woman’s body, or forcing a wife to go out and make money when she’d rather be making a home and rearing her children. Yale men are not gentlemen because they are no longer forced to make the effort -- it is far harder to be a gentleman than a libertine. No longer does the Yale woman expect to have doors held for her or books carried for her. She pays for what she eats when a man takes her to dinner. The idea of protecting women from coarse, gross, vulgar language seems incomprehensible. A lady’s unwillingness to sleep with a man on their first date sounds ridiculous; women are expected to act like tramps and be treated like whores. These are the triumphs of feminism. The lady and the gentleman are the casualties.