Q: What do you get when you combine lawyers, feminists, and university professors with too much time on their hands?
A: People who should be beaten with a stick (but not a stick any bigger than your thumb).
This is idiocy (h/t Red State):
The pink visitors’ locker room at the University of Iowa’s stadium is making some people see red.
Several professors and students joined the call Tuesday for the athletic department to do away with the pink showers, carpeting and lockers, a decades-long Hawkeye football tradition.
Critics say the use of pink demeans women, perpetuates offensive stereotypes about women and homosexuality, and puts the university in the uncomfortable position of tacitly supporting those messages.
”I want the locker room gone,” law school professor Jill Gaulding told a university committee studying the athletic department’s compliance with NCAA standards, including gender equity.
For decades, visiting football teams playing at Kinnick Stadium have dressed and showered in the pink locker room. The tradition was started by former Iowa coach Hayden Fry, a psychology major who said pink had a calming and passive effect on people.
According to these folks, we have prisons, hospitals, child-care centers, and grade schools all across the country that are, through their very existence, offending feminists and homosexuals. I even have a pink polo shirt from the 80’s somewhere that is taking part in this widespread atrocity (although, in my shirt’s defense, it did not know it was homophobic or misogynistic, especially considering many of my friends said ‘that shirt is gay!’ See! Proof of the oppression! My accompanying knit tie is probably proof of my phallo-centric approach to American culture.) When will this oppression stop?
In all seriousness, the stated purpose is clear- pink has a calming effect on people, something you would want to try to instill in your opponents. It has nothing to do with homosexuality or feminism, and everything to do with winning football games.
But that doesn’t matter. Jeff Goldstein has done great work in the past couple of weeks discussing how certain groups are struggling to redefine language and trying to co-opt symbols to mean what they want them to mean, and this is merely more of the same sort of nonsense taken to a new level. Whether it be some fool taking offense at an ice cream cone, or a bunch of people being offended by school mascots, this type of nonsense should not be ignored. As Jeff ably notes:
Words matter. And ceding control over language to special interest groups is a recipe for social disaster—particularly in a society supposedly designed around the rights of the individual. Edward Said and his academic ilk perfected this linguistic hijacking procedure, wherein political groups—under the guise of ethnic authenticity—laid claim to important terms of debate, then wielded control of those terms as a way to delegitimize critics. And the very same thing is happening here—a testament to how deeply rooted Said’s principles have become in the academy and on the policy level, and a running indictment on intellectual bankruptcy of our modern intelligensia.
Time to push back.
This is foolishness, but it has a very serious and potentially very troubling outcome.
*** Update ***
From the comments:
Professor Gaulding’s wildly overblown efforts to eliminate U of I’s pink locker room are simply a leftist equivalent of Brent Bozell lobbying to get TV shows like “Desperate Housewives” purged from our nation’s airwaves. It’s the same damn logic: “This offends, so therefore, it should NOT EXIST.” It’s infuriating to witness my end of the political spectrum once again wallowing in the same repressive muck that the yahoos of the Christian right love to anoint themselves (and everyone else) with.
Heh.