The Dartmouth Review: April 10, 2000

The Dartmouth Review

Dartmouth's Sexual Universe
by Andrew Grossman
Dartmouth College never brought Millicent Fawcett to Hanover; Inga Muscio, however, author of "Cunt: A Declaration of Independence," is an honored guest. On Tuesday, February 8 in 3 Rockefeller Hall, Muscio delivered a lecture entitled “Rule Your Sexual Universe,” which was followed by a reception and a “Torrid Tuesdays Book Club” discussion and reading at the Women’s Resource Center. The rhetoric of the feminist movement, it seems, has been deeply warped: from high-minded talk of political rights to navel-gazing obsessions about personal secretions and loose ruminations about the earth mother and menstrual associations in the changing of tides. Quite a change, admittedly, but one that makes a little more sense if Inga Muscio’s own worldview is brought to the table.

The Sex Series: Mammary Obsessions
by Alexis Jhamb
Twelve people, four of them men, filed nervously into the small lounge of the Women’s Resource Center (WRC) Thursday, February 3 for the viewing of "Breasts: A Documentary." This event marked the beginning of the WRC’s “Sex Series”—a College-funded symposium featuring videos, book club discussions, and guest speakers. The WRC has since publicly proclaimed the Sex Series to be a “resounding success,” even though few of the events drew more than 10 students. Breasts: A Documentary begins, not unpredictably, with twenty-two women, ranging from 6 to 84 years old, listing some of the terms used to describe breasts. Then each woman gets to expound on her feelings about the size, shape, and “perkiness” of her breasts, with special attention given to women with breast implants or reductions.

Crying Wolf in the Gender Wars
by Adam Lusthaus
A false accusation of rape recently shook the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Last November, the university was plunged into an atmosphere of terror due to a string of rapes on campus—perpetrated possibly by the same man throughout the month. The police presence on campus grew as the university expanded its campus escort services, installed additional outdoor emergency phones, and distributed 1,500 hand-held shriek alarms that send out a high-pitched deafening noise in case of attack. Only a couple of months ago, the fourth woman who reported having been assaulted in November admitted to police that she had fabricated her story in order to further campus response to issues of women’s safety. The young woman even cut her own face to make her story more believable. Increasingly, fabricated reports are being uncovered across the country. What’s even more shocking is that school administrations are doing little to stop the hoaxes.

America: A Raw Deal for Men?
by Emmett Hogan
Susan Faludi, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author of "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" is a feminist in the stricter sense of the term, meaning simply that she studies women. And not exclusively, at that. Her latest book is "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man"—assigned reading in Dartmouth’s College Course 22: The Masculine Mystique—in which she concerns herself with what’s been going on with the other team for the past few generations. The book benefits from Faludi’s comparatively open-mind. Whereas a garden-variety feminist, inclined to study the American male, would indict him for his shocking propensity to war, misogyny, or spousal abuse, Faludi pointedly states that “even the most powerful man has had at least as much happen to him as he has made happen.” In Stiffed, the author takes the position that men, contrary to the belief of many, are not the authors of the world, and that they have in fact spent the past few generations grappling with an unrecognized betrayal they have been unable to control and that has been stripping them of their own masculinity.

Letters to the Editor
Fighting for Dairy Cows by Melissa Edelman
CSLI: Student Committees Respond by Noah Hutson-Ellenberg
The Rock Writes by Bradford Stanley
The Week in Review

by Gordon Haff

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win great triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt