Posted on 02/17/2014 7:04:49 AM PST by Morgana
Backdrop on the above (click to enlarge) from the Boston Globe, February 5:
A realistic-looking statue of a man sleepwalking in his underwear near the center of Wellesley College has created a stir among the women on campus, especially as more than 100 students at the all-women’s college signed a petition asking administrators to remove it.
The statue, called Sleepwalker, is part of an art exhibit featuring sculptor Tony Matelli….
“[T]his highly lifelike sculpture has, within just a few hours of its outdoor installation, become a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault for many members of our campus community,” says the petition…. “[I]t has already become a source of undue stress for many Wellesley College students, the majority of whom live, study, and work in this space.”
video-undefined-1B404A0A00000578-751_637x367Surprisingly, notable abortion proponents are defending the statue.
Explained Amanda Marcotte on Slate, “College is a time for taking everything too far.” Certainly Sleepwalker is that.
Added Jill Filipovic at The Guardian:
At the heart of the debate is the question of what a college should be. Is it preparation for the real world? …
College is supposed to be physically safe. But it’s not supposed to be intellectually safe. Shielding students from uncomfortable moments does them no favors.
Sexual assault is a serious offense from which many women suffer major physical and psychological trauma, including post-traumatic stress reactions that may be triggered by particular sights, sounds or events. When Wellesley students say the statue is “triggering,” that’s what they mean. Those feelings are valid and those reactions are real.
But here is the sad truth: the world is not a particularly safe place for women. It should be, but it’s not. Everyone has a right to physical safety. Emotional and psychological safety, though, isn’t quite as simple a calculus…. Do women have the right to live free of the intentional infliction of emotional and psychological violence? Yes. Do we have the right to move through public space without being harassed or assaulted? Yes. Do we have the right to move through public space without having our PTSD triggered by a source with no intention of triggering us? No, we don’t. That’s an impossible standard, and a dangerous one….
Our schools would be poorer if all potentially triggering material – hell, if all offensive, sexist, blatantly feminist unapproved material – were removed from them, and if students could not engage with troubling material.
I wonder when Marcotte and Filipovic will take up the cause of Bama Students for Life regarding what the two would surely consider “blatantly feminist unapproved material” that the University of Alabama recently removed. Click to enlarge…
BamaStudentsForLifeDisplay (1)
School officials deemed the group’s pro-life display, which included pictures of two mothers who died from abortions and two photos of young abortion victims, “offensive” and “graphic,” according to administrator Donna Lake, who added in a secretly recorded video, “We have to keep it happy for everybody.”
ImageUploadedByTapatalk1376425910.416386Happy happy happy? Somebody has been watching too much Duck Dynasty.
The display was removed on February 6, just one day short of its reserved run from January 8 through February 7.
“You guys were lucky to get it up there as long as you did,” said Lake on the video.
Actually, school administrators were unlucky and unsmart not simply to grit their intolerant teeth for just 24 more hours. The information about abortion they intended to suppress has now exploded onto the national public scene and mushroomed into a PR nightmare.
They also picked the wrong group to mess with. Only three weeks ago Bama Students for Life won Students for Life of America’s Group of the Year award, so these kids are not ones to walk away from this injustice.
The group has retained Alliance Defending Freedom as legal counsel, sent the university a formal letter of complaint requesting an apology and another display opportunity, and scheduled two days of public events on February 19 and 20 to spotlight the school’s denial of their First Amendment rights.
They have already won.
The statue should be covered with a burkha
Colleges are openly promoting abortion, free sex, and hatred for Whites.
Miss Jill, I am delighted that you support our uninfringed right to be armed at all times.
What do these idiotic, repressed feminazis know about stress? Next to nothing!
(the rest of the Freepers will get that in a minute...)
I think there is a hidden lesson here.
Stress is a biochemical reaction, the boosting of cortisol and/or epinephrine in the blood. The experience of stress, therefore, is essentially the same for everyone.
The issue here would be, not the experience, but the need for the experience. Most people think they would be happy living without stress, and there evidently is an amount of stress above which life becomes difficult to intolerable. But the truth, I think, is that most people crave some level of stress--to put it another way, we need adventure, something to conquer and be victorious over, whether it's a dragon harboring a princess, a Super Bowl ring, overcoming a disease, earning a doctorate, rebuilding the '68 Stang, exceeding the sales goal...or beating back the Nazis, rebuilding after the earthquake, taking back the neighborhood from crack houses.
The problem with contemporary liberalism is that it is a cause without a crisis. Women are no longer being kept barefoot and pregnant; minorities are no longer being enslaved and lynched; the poor are no longer starving, naked in the cold, stuck in breadlines. The fewer "dragons" to conquer there are, the more effete one becomes, and the more effete one becomes, the reaction to perceived "dragons" exacerbates in order to reach the level of stress necessary to produce the sensation of competition.
Conservatism, however, is a cause with a host of crises, most of which are 'old news' around here: everything from the national debt to the gutting of the military to abortion to the destruction of the nuclear family to unconstitutional exercise of executive authority, among many others. The conservative's problem is not to find a crisis, but to try to choose among numerous crises which one to attempt to conquer. For example, do we concentrate on opposing abortion, knowing that in doing so our nation will go bankrupt, or concentrate on the national debt and government spending, knowing that in doing so another million unborn babies will never see the light of day--or neglect both, and concentrate on ridding the nation of undesirables (i.e., terrorists and foreign gangs)?
The paradox of the country's political movements is that conservatism, which indeed faces many crises, is nevertheless far less stressed and tends towards optimism, while progressivism, which has obtained practically all of its goals, is nevertheless far more stressed and tends towards perpetual pessimism.
“nearly” — that’s a reactionary school </sarc>
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