The Faculty Lounge

In re Phyllis Schafly

Amidst all the discussion about Washington University in St. Louis awarding an honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly, I think it's time to dust off a post from back in 2005 at co-op.  I wrote about a visit of Ms. Schlafly to the University of Alabama back in the spring of 2005:

It was the most entertaining evening I’ve spent in years, much better even than the O’Reilly Factor .  And I left with an "I Love Capitali$m" poster, which is one of my prized possessions.

Ms. Schlafly did what I take to be her usual stump speech-–opposing judicial activism and, of course, feminism. She was plugging her new book, The Supremacists (about left-wing judges). She had some amusing lines. Something along the lines of, “Feminists are pushing their way into the military. Forty-five percent of women can't throw a hand grenade far enough to keep from killing themselves. So I guess you can say that feminism leads to death. Ha, ha, ha.” I took the laughter to be a realization that her arguments in this case were laughable–a wonderful self-insight. I have a warm spot in my heart for people who don’t take themselves too seriously. It’s an appealing character trait, to be able to be not too serious. Wish I had more of it.

The highlight of the evening was the question and answer period. It was the usual free-for-all: questions from a women’s studies graduate student on one side and from someone who thought Ms. Schlafly was too soft on liberals (yes, that’s right!). Her face looked like she sort of couldn't believe what he was saying. Most of the rest of us couldn't, either. And then towards the end, there was a most illuminating interchange. A young woman in the audience said something along the lines of:

Ms. Schlafly, I think you’re an antique. You’re turning off a significant part of your conservative base. I am a young conservative woman. And I am in law school to be a good role model for my child and to provide for my family. Telling women not to work is alienating people who agree with a lot of conservative values.

Reminds me how successful the feminist agenda of the 1950s and 1960s has been. Now virtually all young women (or at least many young conservative women) aspire to professional careers.

But here’s the punch line that really cinches this story. I later learned that the law student was, a few years ago, Miss Mississippi. What a great debate, between two conservative women, one an icon of the 1950s and the other an icon of the 2000s. Fifty years from now, some American Studies scholar will be wishing that she had a tape recording of that evening–and particularly that exchange.

Alfred Brophy

Pollard on Intentional Sex Torts: Continuing the Discussion

I told you last week that we haven't heard this last of this.  Here's the latest roundup of the responses to Deana Pollard Sacks' article on "Intentional Sex Torts." 

First, the background.  The whole discussion began with Deana's post at flp last week.  (And remember what Deana's talking about is tort recovery not criminal liability--hence the name sex torts.  That distinction gets lost in a lot of the comments.)  That was picked up by Professor Marc J.  Randazza of Barry University's Law School at The Legal Satyricon, which led in turn to abovethelaw's discussion.  Lots and lots of comments at abovethelaw.

Then there's geeklawyer.  Yikes.  And two posts over at Simple Justice and here.  Bookworm takes it up here  and womensspace takes it up here.  Am I missing anything?  I want to talk a lot more about the substance of this shortly.

Update: A discussion board has now picked this up, too, and there's a brief note about it here.

Another update: Womensspace has extensive coverage and excerpts from the article  here.

Alfred Brophy

Pollard on Intentional Sex Torts

As the Drudge Report would say, this is a developing story.  Yesterday, my friend Deana Pollard Sacks of Texas Southern University blogged at feministlawprofs about her article "Intentional Sex Torts," which is forthcoming in the Fordham Law Review.  (Her earlier article on negligent sex torts appeared in the Minnesota Law Review.)

Deana says of the emerging trend to recognize a tort of misappropriation of sex:

Since 2005, four states have finally recognized that fraudulent inducement of sex is rape. Not just immoral, not just “boys being boys” behavior, but misappropriation of a woman’s personal right to choose who invades her body. Perhaps surprisingly, the first state to recognize fraudulent inducement of sex as a basis for rape was Alabama in 2005. California, Michigan, and Tennessee followed suit the following two years, and Peter Koutoujian of Massachusetts filed a similar bill in February, 2008, which, when passed, will make Massachusetts the fifth state to recognize the crime of “stealing” another’s sexual prerogative.

You can read the full post here, including a revealing quotation from a New York court in 1975.  That led to a post here, which is disturbing for the cavalier way it deals with this important issue, to say the least.  Abovethelaw then picked up the thread. 

I'm pretty sure I'm on safe ground in saying, we haven't heard the last of this.

Essentialist Masculinity And Single Sex Education

Apropos of the Times Magazine article yesterday, Teaching Boys and Girls Separately, my colleague David Cohen has a paper up on SSRN entitled No Boy Left Behind?  Single Sex Education and the Essentialist Myth of Masculinity.  This from his abstract:

The public narrative about the need for single-sex education focused, in substantial part, on what I call the essentialist myth of masculinity. This article catalogs the important components of this myth: heteronormativity, aggression, activity, sports-obsession, competitiveness, stoicism, and not being girls. The article then shows, using education and gender theory, that this conception of masculinity is harmful to both girls and boys. Instead of pushing this form of masculinity, the law and schools should make room for multiple and varied masculinities for boys (and girls).

The article argues that the Title IX regulatory change that allows for the expansion of single-sex schooling can actually work to further empower and entrench the essentialist myth of masculinity, thus violating its own prohibition on sex stereotyping. By adopting strong interpretations of already-existing jurisprudence about gender stereotyping from both constitutional law and Title IX, the article shows how de-essentializing masculinity is possible and preferable in the law. The article concludes that schools that implement single-sex education must do so for reasons other than promoting an essentialized notion of masculinity and that the law must be vigilant in ensuring that schools' implementation not further reify dominant conceptions of what it means to be a boy.