When they’re not looking, set the parental controls on the TVs of your family members to block Fox News. 

Quick quiz. Pretentious teenager or sociology professor?

A student group at a California university is hosting a month-long “Body Love” celebration, which includes events about how “menstruation and environmentalism go hand in hand.”

Not, I think, an entirely happy image. But apparently, students will be “empowered” and “feel more comfort” by exploring the “intersection” – because you knew there was going to be an intersection somewhere – of “body love and Earth love.”

Students could also attend a “Self-Care for Body Hair” event that offered answers to questions such as: “What do you do with your body hair? Does your relationship with your body change when you’ve shaved recently? Do you shave at all?”

Because when you call yourselves The Student Assembly for Gender Empowerment at the University of Southern California, and proudly declare a mission to fight for those “oppressed by the patriarchy,” while “working towards intersectional, collective liberation,” then obviously you’re going to focus on the big, meaty issues of the day. And so,

At the group’s “signature event,” a “body love fair,” students were treated to “crafts, donuts, boba, music, and self-lovin’ vibes!” At that event, attendees were also invited to “release your anger at our Scale Smashing!”

Yes, students with weight issues – issues of such magnitude that they have anger to release – will be encouraged to gorge on doughnuts and thick sugary drinks containing various types of pudding and requiring an extra-wide straw, before hating themselves all over again, while pretending to be empowered and totally okay with it. You see, the way to help overweight people is to encourage the kind of high-sugar consumption that results in weight gain, and inviting them to smash objects that remind them of how unhappy they are about being fat. A situation that they’ve just made slightly worse.

It’s intersectional science, people.

Contrasting invitations, spotted in the central lobby at Evergreen State College:

The college in question has of course been mentioned here before.

Men, listen up… Join me, with due diligence and civic duty, and publicly claim: I am sexist!

In the pages of the New York Times, a philosophy professor named George Yancy is gushing his little heart out: 

It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist. 

Upon which revelation, I suppose we could all just stop and go home. But no, let’s press on.

More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the loss of my own entitlement as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.

The word toxic, by the way, is deployed no fewer than nine times, excluding various synonyms, as if it were an incantation. Now brace yourselves for some full-on testosterone-jacked beastliness.

For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name… While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence. 

To reiterate. Asking a fiancée if she’ll change her surname upon marriage, as is still the custom, perhaps to avoid confusing people as to whether you’re actually married or not, and possibly to avoid imposing on any children lengthy hyphenated surnames… this is not sexual assault. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

However,  

Janice Fiamengo on inclusive, decolonised, anti-rational academia:  

This is probably now the top hot-button issue at Canadian universities – the move to replace ‘European-based knowledge’ as exclusionary, inadequate and subjective, and to replace it in some cases with “indigenous knowledge,” and even something called “indigenous science”… what some might say is superstition or magical beliefs… The idea that “indigenous knowledge” is not to be questioned, that it has value equal to supposedly ‘European’ science… is an incredibly worrisome and strange idea.

Do watch in full for the anecdotes about the realities of so-called “affirmative action,” and the faculty lounge response to hearing of the 9/11 atrocities. If you’re new here and unfamiliar with Professor Fiamengo’s observations on campus culture, I recommend watching this. 

Somewhat related, scenes from Cape Town’s decolonised academia, where “science people” are scolded for “disrespecting progressive space” – specifically, for doubting the claim that Africans can throw lightning at their enemies.

Lia Eustachewich on Harvard’s woke racism: 

A Harvard University dean testified that the school has different SAT score standards for prospective students based on factors such as race and sex — but insisted that the practice isn’t discriminatory… [Dean of admissions, William Fitzsimmons] said Harvard sends recruitment letters to African-American, Native American and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores, around 1100 on math and verbal combined out of a possible 1600… Asian-Americans only receive a recruitment letter if they score at least 250 points higher — 1350 for women, and 1380 for men.

The words that come to mind are systemic and institutional. See also this and this.