The Chauvinist Corner                  

The Chauvinist Shakespeare

At Arizona State University, the theater department fired acting professor Jared Sakren, a graduate of Juilliard's drama division and a former Yale professor whose students included Val Kilmer, Kelly McGillis, Annette Bening, and Oscar award-winner Frances McDormand. Why? Because he was determined to stage plays by Shakespeare.

What, you might ask, is wrong with Shakespeare? Get this:

"As someone who teaches a course in feminism," department chairman Mrs. Lin Wright wrote in 1996, "I have serious reservations about [Mr. Sakren's] view of women." Campus feminists, she said, were "offended by the selections [of] works from a sexist European canon."

Is it getting through to you yet? Courses in college classes on the subject of feminism, where the foremost experts in this area of study, teach women that Shakespeare is a sexist author that should not be studied. The entire history of mankind will soon be placed off limits by these nut cases!

Must we coddle our intellectual positions so completely? Are factual, or fictional dramatic studies of the past so scary to the feminist, that they must be completely sheltered from it? Mrs. Wright says, “Yes!” She says it so strongly so as to cost a man his job!

When is it that an individual must hide from the facts? When the individual knows that his point of view is wrong, and that the fallacy of his beliefs will be demonstrated by the revelation of the facts. The very fear feminists have, of any other point of view being openly expressed, is a clear statement that they know their cause is a sham!

Today I received an email from a woman who proclaimed that I shouldn't even be allowed to display anti-feminist material on the web. The author was terrified that a young person might actually visit my page and be dissuaded from her belief in the propaganda that the feminists are force-feeding the youngest members of society. Imagine that. Here on the web a child can see pictures of adult material, but ideas are too horrible for them to view. The feminists can shove their ideas down the throats of students but the other side of the question must be avoided at all costs.

The feminists’ desperation is quite refreshing, for it is a surrender -- clear, public, and total -- to the fact that their position is indefensible and void of any semblance of validity.

Arizona State story located in:

US News Outlook 3/30/98; ON SOCIETY; BY JOHN LEO