Dear Editors,

Leah Byland nailed it with clarity and force in last Friday’s op-ed protesting the use of community time to objectify women’s bodies for puerile amusement. I write not as a supposedly humorimpaired thin-skinned feminazi (an abusive term itself coined to humiliate opposition), but as a longtime y-chromosome-carrying member of the Testostero-Americans, a group whose collective level of civilization now and then ascends to the level of a baboon troop. Although I prefer to think the best of youthful intentions and took the speaker’s juvenile yucks simply as an unconsciously desperate revelation of how an otherwise apparently functional guy could be, as he himself took pains to point out, consistently unsuccessful in relationships (gee, I don’t see why reducing women to disembodied secondary sexual characteristics doesn’t just make ‘em swoon), I was instructed by Leah’s inspired outrage.

I found The Record’s using the newspaper privilege of anonymous comment—the editorial “we”—a wee bit cowardly in its attempt to counter one writer’s authentic and persuasive passion with the “lighten-up” defense. In any case, he/she/they/it/you/we failed. It’s not any word HM needs to be spared; it’s that we all, men and women, adults and students, need to get beyond the institutionalization (through language and then through Assembly presentation) of such a demeaning and primitive attitude. As for the “context” The Record claims “we are capable of understanding,” here’s my understanding of that particular Assembly’s context: in fifty minutes, almost all the voices on stage were male, while females were either bellydancing live, or shaking nearly naked booty in rear headless close-up on screen, or reduced to their body parts in a speech. Some of these alone would perhaps be no big deal, but it was The Record that brought up context, and I couldn’t help seeing a pattern. Grawl dogs may not exist, but (it seems increasingly necessary to point out around here) women do, as more than just isolated shots of physiognomy.

Sincerely,

Harry Bauld

English Department