Bruce Bawer > Quotes

“Not all gays respond to the same stuff. Would Alexander the Great have loved Auntie Mame?”
― Bruce Bawer

“Straight Americans need an education of the heart and soul. They must understand - to begin with - how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul.”
― Bruce Bawer

“The denunciation and smearing of truly gifted people like Rodriguez—people the Chicano community should be proud of—by the self-appointed gatekeepers of Chicano Studies is, alas, an everyday spectacle. (Did anyone in the Chicano Studies community even take note when Dana Gioia, who is one of the best poets of his generation and happens to be half Mexican American, was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002? No, because he made it on his merits and not by being a victimization hustler.)”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“But Friedan and Greer’s movement had passed them by: rape hysteria became fully integrated into mainstream feminism, resulting in such events as the so-called Take Back the Night rallies at colleges around America, which are premised on the idea that when darkness falls over the quad, male students metamorphose, werewolf-like, into potential rapists.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victim's Revolution

“The point here is that straight men, by definition, have nothing to cry about, ever—since, after all, the hold all the cards in contemporary society. What's bizarre is that the author of these words spent forty years of her life married (happily, by all accounts, including her own) to a straight man. The only way to reconcile such rhetoric with her actual life and feelings is to recognize that Sedgwick truly is engaged in an act of performance here—playing a role, putting one over on us.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“In 1970, Women's Lib preached universal sisterhood and resistance to "patriarchy" anywhere and in any form; today, Women's Studies, like contemporary establishment feminism generally, is meekly multicultural, treating non-Western social practices with deference even when they involve the brutal subjection of females.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“The most remarkable thing in Binder's article may be her reference to a Women's Studies professor at the University of Michigan who, in Binder's words, worries that Fat Studies "may lead to a social proselytizing rather than serious study." In short, identity studies are becoming so far removed from any hint of academic or intellectual legitimacy that even teachers of a more established and only moderately asinine disciplines are reacting to the far more extreme asininity of newer ones.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“Christina Hoff Sommers quotes one professor's compliant about "students who have been trained to take a 'feminist perspective'": "For them reason itself is patriarchal, linear, and oppressive." In other words, Women's Studies agrees with the Victorians that women are the less intellectual sex; the difference is that in the view of Women's Studies this doesn't make them inferior but superior.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“Over and over these organizations tell America that family, above all, is what Christianity is about. Devotion to one's family is, indeed, a wonderful thing. Yet it is hardly something to brag about. For all except the most pathologically self-absorbed, love for one's parents, spouse, and children comes naturally. Jesus did not make it his business to affirm these ties; he didn't have to. Jews feel them, Buddhists feel them, Confucians and Zoroastrians and atheists feel them. Christianity is not about reinforcing such natural bonds and instinctive sentiments. Rather, Christianity is about challenging them and helping us to see all of humankind as our family. It seems clear that if Jesus had wanted to affirm the "traditional family" in the way that Pat Robertson claims, he would not have lived the way he did.”
― Bruce Bawer, Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity

“He talks about the way in which the American academy "assigns an official group identity" to students, eliminating the distinction "between voluntary association and imposed group identity." For example, "a Jewish student who is totally assimilated—whose Jewish identity is totally unimportant to him—goes to college and is assigned a special Jewish advisor." The academy also distinguishes between people who "own" their sexual, racial, or gender identity and those who, in its view, have "internalized their oppression.' For example, Kors says, Walter Olson, a tort reform expert at the Cato Institute who happens to be gay, "is not really gay because he doesn't understand the sources of his oppression." Thomas Sowell, an African American author based at the Hoover Institution, "isn't really black." And "Daphne Patai, a founder of Women's Studies at Amherst, isn't really a woman because she identifies with the oppressive culture around her. So in the humanities, when they speak of diversity, the one kind of diversity they don't mean is individuated intellectual diversity." On the contrary, there's a process of "vetting against individuation. The people who are most discriminated against, then, are not straight white males who just roll over and play along, but rather libertarian and conservative blacks, women who are critics of feminism, and gays and lesbians who are critics of the 'official' gay and lesbian positions on every issue in the world.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.”)”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victim's Revolution

“Though Women's Studies was supposed to give a voice to "silenced" women, all too many women who dissent from its orthodoxy have themselves felt silenced by intolerant professors—and students, too. Indeed, while some (generally tenured) older professors like Willingham do dare to challenge Women's Studies dogma, younger initiates, whether students or greenhorn instructors, often act as fierce enforcers of dogma, reiterating it (as did Tholen and Alder at the Beijing +15 session) with all the zeal of fresh converts to a fundamentalist faith and bristling at any violation of Holy Writ. Patai and Koertge quote professors who complain about students being "zombified" by Women's Studies, turned into "ideologically inflamed Stepford Wives" who "utter…stock phrases" and are plainly "terrified of a thought because if they ever had a serious thought, they might start reflecting on this stuff they're taught to repeat.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“Clearly, Channing had not taught her young charges that the Declaration and Constitution, while two of the noblest documents in the history of humankind, were also, naturally, products of their time that reflected the limitations of their time (which, needless to say, is why the Constitution has been amended so many times since its ratification); no, she had taught them to revile the founding fathers—men whose vision, courage, and sacrifice made possible the freedom these students have known (and taken for granted) all their lives. These young women were incapable of grasping that the very criteria by which they presumed to judge the author of the Declaration and Constitution would not be available to them if not for those men's efforts. To say this, of course, is not to blame these students for their ignorance, but to underscore just how profoundly ill-served they are by courses of this sort.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“The most important of these activists was Jimmy Garrett, a member of both the Black Panthers and SNCC. Garrett led discussion groups at which, as he later explained, "we would talk about ourselves seeking identity, and stuff like that. A lot of folks didn't even know they were black. A lot of people thought they were Americans".”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“Queer Theory, manifestly, exists in a bizarre academic time-warp. Even as homosexuality has grown increasingly accepted in mainstream America, and as the institutions of the closet and the gay ghetto have steadily evaporated, Queer Theorists continue to cling to the old separatist agenda—continue to try to reinforce the idea that gays are strange, marginal, anti-establishment, contrarian, and rebellious—and continue to try to pretend that when they echo the tired twenty-year-old platitudes of Kushner, Goldstein, and Vaid they are saying something new.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“By the end of Barber's talk, this event she's celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury—a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“What is especially ironic about these professors' rhetoric of "otherness" and "queerness" is that they are, in fact, by any real-world measure, extremely conservative, lockstep, institutional, careerist creatures. Their sense of identification with their universities, their departments, and their fields of "study", not to mention the obvious way they size one another up by their titles, academic affiliation, and publications, is stifling. So are their endless pious references to Marx, Foucault, and Derrida, which bring to mind the obligatory nods to the Great Leader at some Communist Party congress.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“Apparently, lesbians and gay men who have no desire "to become queer" have failed at a task that is obligatory for them, whether or not they are aware of it. Halperin, like Foucault, in short, is yet another busybody who has an agenda for other people's lives.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“One cannot discuss "women's ways of knowing" without mentioning écriture féminine, a French school of language theory whose name was coined by Hélène Cixous. Dating back to the early 1970s, it counts among its other leading lights Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, who argue that language is by natural masculinist, and that women, when they use it, are wielding an instrument that is foreign to them and that was invented as a means of suppressing them. Therefore it's the task of women to place their own stamp on language, an act that the "French feminists," as they're commonly called, associate with the female body. (Cixous, for example, compares "the desire to write" to "the gestation drive.") It's fair to say that these women's ideas don't easily translate into clear French, let alone clear English.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“Chesler cites the claim by the Palestinian American writer Suha Sabbagh that Western feminists, simply by writing about Muslim women, exert "a greater degree of domination" over those women "than that actually exercised by men over women within Muslim culture." A brown woman in (say) some Pakistani village, then, is actually more oppressed by some white woman tapping away at a computer at some American university she's never heard of than by a man who's beating and raping her in her home.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“When, over lunch in Philadelphia, I ask the distinguished University of Pennsylvania historian, Alan Charles Kors about Cultural Studies, he shakes his head in dismay. "Cultural Studies," he laments, "is now dominant in all departments of literature and is increasingly big in history, sociology, and cultural anthropology, though less so in political science." His own capsule definition of Cultural Studies? "It sees culture as a means of assigning roles, power, obedience, and resources—and examines the way in which culture accomplishes that.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and which they don't. Jesus' condemnations of wealth and war are generally ignored; so are Levitical prohibitions on eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics and so forth. Though legalistic Christians accuse nonlegalistic Christians of selective interpretation and relativistic morality (of adjusting the Bible, in short, to suit their own lifestyles and prejudices), what is usually happening is that nonlegalists are, as the Baptist tradition puts it, reading the Bible with Jesus as their criterion, while the legalists are, without any philosophical consistency whatsoever, embracing those laws and doctrines that affirm their own predilections and prejudices and ignoring the rest.”
― Bruce Bawer, Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity

“Unsurprisingly, given the eagerness of professors and students of identity studies to claim as many labels for themselves as possible, some individuals have sought to expand the definition of disability to include … well, themselves. At the "Wrong/ed Bodies" session at the Cultural Studies conference, Angela Lea Nemecek complained that when she breastfed in her office at the University of Virginia, she was made to feel as if she had a disability. In short, her breastfeeding was "constructed in the workplace" as a disability. Therefore, she reasoned, breastfeeding is a disability and should be protected under the Americans with Disability Act.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“Back in Clemens's office, he and I talk about the proliferation of disciplines with the word studies in their names. "Anything with studies in it, avoid!" Clemens says. What about Cultural Studies? "That bullshit comes into the classroom in papers." He mentions Monterey's Sign Language Program, which was "founded with the best intentions" but which actually "promotes deafness" in the name of political correctness. "Just think of not healing a child who can't hear because it's an offense against deaf culture!”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind

“Among Frye's assertions are that "[m]any awakening women [that is, women whose consciousness has been raised by people like Frye] become celibate or lesbian," that "[m]ale parasitism means that males must have access to women; it is the Patriarchal Imperative," and that "[t]he woman-only meeting is a fundamental challenge to the structure of power," for "[t]he slave who decides to exclude the master from her hut is declaring herself not a slave." Rather than seek to understand sexual categories, the late University of Arizona professor Monique Wittig declares in her essay, "One Is Not Born a Woman," the need to "destroy… the categories of sex" and maintains that a woman can escape servitude only "by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual. We are escapees from our class in the same way as the American runaway slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free.”
― Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind