The Ladies Doth Protest
Another ad, another uproar.

By Ben Domenech, NRO
May 18, 2001 11:35 a.m.

he Independent Women's Forum will likely never win a popularity contest within the ranks of academe — any group

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that calls itself a "counter-organization" to NOW is running uphill — but this week marks the first time that the IWF has ever been publicly compared to Nazis.

It all started when the IWF decided to test-run an ad in college newspapers that it had circulated before, debunking the "Ten Most Common Feminist Myths." It's a straightforward list of what the IWF likes to call "Ms. Information," followed by documentation of the factual inaccuracies contained in each sentence.

According to Kate Kennedy, the IWF's head of campus projects, the ad was sent around in full-page format to several student newspapers over the past few months, with mixed results. The Columbia Daily Spectator rejected the ad, citing its policy against publishing "political content" in ad space — even though the paper ran ads promoting Ralph Nader rallies last year. The Harvard Crimson rejected the ad, then accepted it, then charged the IWF without running the ad. The Yale Daily News ran the ad, as did the Dartmouth Review, but both received a muted response from students.

When UCLA's student newspaper, the Daily Bruin, decided to run the ad in its April 18th issue, only two students wrote letters of complaint. This week, though, the Coalition for the Fair Representation of Women and the UCLA Clothesline Project — two student feminist organizations — announced a protest to take place today on campus, demanding that the Daily Bruin apologize for publishing the ad and print a retraction.

Even though the ad ran only once in the Bruin — nearly a month ago — Clothesline executive co-chair Christie Scott believes that its publication was reprehensible enough to merit a campus protest.

"I think it was a violent ad, a very hostile ad," Scott said. "It breeds a very bad attitude toward campus women."

Unfortunately for the protesters, Daily Bruin editor-in-chief Christine Byrd is standing firm: no retraction, no apology.

"When we first heard that people had a problem with the ad, we invited them to write in…to express their opinions," Byrd said. "That's usually the best way to discuss these issues."

Clothesline leaders did meet with Daily Bruin representatives two weeks after the ad had run, but the paper decided against any editorial response, a decision that Scott termed "cowardly." She accused the editors of hiding behind the First Amendment.

Tina Oakland, the director of the UCLA Center for Women and Men, goes even further. "It strikes me as revisionist history. It's the same thing as the people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened," Oakland said. "It's like that white supremacist ad, like the Horowitz ad."

(In March, UC Berkeley's student newspaper, the Daily Californian, issued an apology for publishing David Horowitz's now-infamous advertisement against reparations for slavery. According to Byrd, the editors of the Daily Bruin rejected Horowitz's ad when they received it. Had the Bruin been the first paper to have been offered the ad, however, things might have been different. In a letter to Horowitz at the time, Byrd stated that the ad would not run because the controversy about it was already "quite storied.")

Oakland also takes issue with many of the IWF ad's stated facts. She told Daily Bruin reporter Scott Wong that the first item, which debunks the notion that one in four women in college has been the victim of rape or attempted rape, was part of a "campaign of misinformation." Oakland claimed that the "one-in-four" statistic had been cited on the official websites of the FBI and the American Medical Association.

But the statistic is nowhere to be found on either of these two websites. In fact, according to the FBI, incidents of rape in the United States are the lowest they've been since the early 1980s; they were approximately 64 per 100,000 women in 1999. And according to Department of Education studies of campus police-report data, a total of 1,600 or fewer forcible sex offenses are reported on U.S. campuses annually on average — hardly the epidemic that Oakland's information suggests.

"The statistics don't really matter that much in the big picture," Oakland told NRO when questioned about the subject. "We're just trying to focus on the real issue here, to debate about civil rights, not bicker about numbers."

Oakland also said she believes the ad is a "very political" one.

"Anytime you have an ad this big, a full page, it costs a lot of money," Oakland said. "That entails wealth, the upper class, and that translates to certain political ideas."

According to Byrd, the Daily Bruin doesn't have any policy forbidding ads of a political nature, and she doesn't believe that the Bruin has a responsibility to fact-check the ads which they choose to run.

"It's ridiculous," said one UCLA student who writes for the Bruin. "It'd be as silly as asking Sports Illustrated to, hey, check if this power drink will really make you more attractive, or if this shoe will really make you run faster, before they run the ad."

The creator of the ad, War Against Boys author Christina Hoff Sommers, finds the whole furor more than a little bit amusing.

"This is a common response, hysteria and irrational reactions," Sommers said. "Free and open discussion doesn't exist in most academic forums. Instead of research or debate, they hold rallies and protests — not exactly the most reasonable way to spark discussion."

As for Byrd, while she anticipates a moderate turnout to the protest against the paper today, the Daily Bruin doesn't plan on issuing an editorial retraction any time soon.

"We have our policies laid out, we follow them, and they work," said Byrd. "I think it's important to do this."