From: falk@peregrine.Sun.COM (Ed Falk) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: Backlash at Penn State (fwd) Date: 20 Jul 1993 09:08:34 -0400 Organization: Sun Lines: 39 Approved: pw@panix.com Message-ID: References: <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> [Moderator's note: This is drifting rapidly away from relevance -- pw] In article <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> Kristine Johnson writes: > >The women at Penn State need your support. > >Yesterday, criminal charges were filed by PSU against two women >students for their alleged participation in a protest against >sexism at this university.... > >Let me give you some background. For two years a newspaper, >called The Lionhearted has attacked the Women's Studies Program, >the student women's group, Womyn's Concerns, women columnists - >anyone who speaks up for women on campus.... > [More on anti-woman stuff from The Lionhearted] > >The women's community has responded by throwing away The >Lionhearted. (The paper is left in racks on campus and is free.) Even if the paper is free, this is still theft. The police chief of San Francisco recently lost his job because he had his men do this to a gay newspaper that offended him. And whether or not it's theft, it's also censorship. No cause, even feminism, is so holy that it has the right to censor the opposition. I hope the two women who have been charged with theft are not punished unduly, but they shouldn't get away with it either. In the end, you're doing feminism a disservice by advocating censorship. A hundred articles on the net saying that Dworkin and MacKinnon don't represent all feminists are negated by a single example such as this. -- Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu. Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This news group is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your article should be posted within several days. Rejections notified by email. Newsgroups: soc.feminism From: alix Subject: Re: Backlash at Penn State (fwd) Message-ID: <22h0rr$ads@gateway.rosedale.org> Sender: tittle@netcom.com (Cindy Tittle Moore) Reply-To: Organization: right-thinking, charlie martin-adoring female gays-R-us References: <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 04:13:36 GMT Approved: tittle@netcom.com Lines: 95 Kristine Johnson forwarded: >[Moderator's note: exceedingly long headers trimmed. The originator >of this message can be found at the bottom of the text -- pw] >The women at Penn State need your support. >Yesterday, criminal charges were filed by PSU against two women >students for their alleged participation in a protest against >sexism at this university. for alleged theft, criminal conspiracy, and receiving stolen property, to be more exact, as can be derived from the rest of the article. [description of "the lionhearted" and its anti-feminist actions] >For two years the women at PSU have asked for a response and >support from the administration. None has come. (The president >has even granted a two-part interview to The Lionhearted.) Also, >when students went to personally ask for support, president Joab >Thomas said he couldn't speak out against a trustee member. >Therefore, the silence has been deafening. what kind of response and support was asked for? >The women's community has responded by throwing away The >Lionhearted. (The paper is left in racks on campus and is free.) censorship and indeed, theft. how would you feel if anti-abortionists destroyed all family planning liter- ature on campus? and no, don't say "but that's GOOD information, not falsehoods". it doesn't matter in a legal sense. it's still theft. it's still censor- ship. >This spring the viciousness of the men's (and they are all men) >attack became even worse. A woman wrote a column in support of >the annual Take Back the Night March. The Lionhearted reprinted >it (after being denied permission) and wrote an attack against >the columnist, the Take Back the Night March, and women >activists in general. Most disturbing of all, they took the >picture of the woman columnist and placed it on a pornographic >cartoon of a woman in bed. The caption read: Feminist At Work. >This defamation sparked another round of throwing away the >newspaper . this defamation should have, if you really wanted to go thru the trouble (and i see where this would be very upsetting; i find it obscenely so), resulted in legal action, at the very least on the university level. was that approach tried, or did folks just decide to throw the darn thing out because that was the most expedient way? >The local community newspaper responded by offering to reprint >for free all of the "stolen" copies of The Lionhearted. The >women's community held a protest rally. Police were there and >used tactics, such as photographing demonstrators, to intimidate >the women. The police also started calling women and threatening >them with charges for taking The Lionhearted. A local journalist >group offered a reward of $250 for anyone who would provide >evidence against any women who took The Lionhearted. Yesterday, >the PSU police filed charges of theft, receiving stolen property >and criminal conspiracy against two women students. looks like they were warned before the actual charges were filed. i fully understand the upset with this paper, and with all the people who seem to help them out. but you might want to realize that theft is _not_ a socially acceptable method to counteracting prejudice and discrimination. you're not doing the feminist cause any favors by acting that way. start your own paper, in which you take "the lionhearted" to task. inform people. educate them. but don't censor dissenting voices, and don't steal their paper. if anyone did so to you, you'd be justifiedly angry as well. it's in my opinion not a legitimate course of action in this country. -alix >The women at PSU need your support. Write to President Joab >Thomas, 201 Old Main, University Park, PA 16802 or fax to >814-863-8583. Also, you can write to the other board of trustee >members care of the Trustee's Office, 205 Old Main, University >Park, PA 16802 or fax 814-863-4631. Please send copies to me: >Donna Hughes, 13 Sparks Bldg., University Park, PA 16802 or fax >814-692-5514. -- Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu. Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This news group is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your article should be posted within several days. Rejections notified by email. Newsgroups: soc.feminism From: cutchin@cs.purdue.edu (Steve Cutchin) Subject: Re: Backlash at Penn State (fwd) Message-ID: Sender: tittle@netcom.com (Cindy Tittle Moore) Organization: Purdue University Department of Computer Sciences References: <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 04:14:39 GMT Approved: tittle@netcom.com Lines: 76 In article falk@peregrine.Sun.COM (Ed Falk) writes: [Moderator's note: This is drifting rapidly away from relevance -- pw] Huh, why so. Here we have direct, first hand discussion involving actual ongoing sexism and you say its drifting away from relevance? What do you want purely theoretical discussions about a purely theoretical view of sexism in a theoretical world. This IS the thing to discuss, ongoing real sexism and the sexist defense of it. Is this group trying to help people be less sexist or just sort of a parlor discussion? >In article <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> Kristine Johnson writes: >> >>The women at Penn State need your support. >>The women's community has responded by throwing away The >>Lionhearted. (The paper is left in racks on campus and is free.) >Even if the paper is free, this is still theft. The police >chief of San Francisco recently lost his job because he had >his men do this to a gay newspaper that offended him. Bzzzztttt! Wake up, the man lost his job because as a public official he was acting in a way to censor a citizen. This sort of violates the constitution don't you think? The constitution forbids the censoring of the people by the government. If your giving away the papers for FREE and I ask for 150 and you give them to me and then I throw them out, I can not see how this possibly qualifies as theft since YOU gave them to me. What am I required to read all 150 before I throw them out? We have the same thing here at Purdue the Exponent (our paper) dumps tons of these things inside of buildings. SPECIFICALLY for whoever wants them to take as many as they like. NO stipulations, NO requirements. So if I take em all and pitch how is that stealing? Just cause I didn't do with them what they hoped I would doesn't make it stealing. If the women had taking all the papers and put them in the dorms in place of toilet paper would that have been stealing? >And whether or not it's theft, it's also censorship. No cause, even >feminism, is so holy that it has the right to censor the opposition. I >hope the two women who have been charged with theft are not punished >unduly, but they shouldn't get away with it either. Bzzzt! Wrong again. The U.S constitution states that the Government does not have the right to censor the people. It does not say that the people don't have the right to censor each other. Put simply sure you have the right to say what you want but I don't have to provide you with a forum to say it in. Please, censorship takes place everyday, normally we refer to it as economics, supply and demand, If I don't buy Nike's I'm censoring their product. In this case the women involved censored the product for some reason other than money. Namely it was insulting and degrading to women, just as valid a reason to censor something as "I can't afford it". Its very simple, if you were to print up 100 papers saying ALL MEN ARE UGLY dumped them on the street and put up a sign saying FREE EDITORIALS, there is no moral or ethical reason why if I found them offensive I could not take all 100 and use them as fire starter in my fire-place. ---- Steve C. cutchin@cs.purdue.edu -- Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu. Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This news group is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your article should be posted within several days. Rejections notified by email. From: uunet!infmx!philly!muffy@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Muffy Barkocy) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: Backlash at Penn State (fwd) Date: 21 Jul 1993 04:55:14 GMT Organization: Informix Lines: 23 Sender: muffy@mica.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy) Approved: muffy@mica.berkeley.edu Message-ID: <22ii7i$k4m@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu In article falk@peregrine.Sun.COM (Ed Falk) writes: > In the end, you're doing feminism a disservice by advocating > censorship. A hundred articles on the net saying that Dworkin > and MacKinnon don't represent all feminists are negated by > a single example such as this. WHY? Just because some other person, who also calls themselves a feminist, is in favor of censorship does not make the statements of those of us who are against censorship invalid. Muffy -- Muffy Barkocy - muffy@informix.com |~The faceless wonder of integrity/evades OR uunet!infmx!muffy | you now/(to put it nicely)/and if I look "amorous inclinations"? Aha! I'm | like your problem/you look like a/broken not "not straight," I'm *inclined*.| promise to me..." - disappear fear -- Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu. Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This newsgroup is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your article should be posted within several days. Rejections notified by email. From: falk@peregrine.Sun.COM (Ed Falk) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: Backlash at Penn State (fwd) Date: 21 Jul 1993 23:38:36 -0400 Organization: Sun Lines: 69 Approved: pw@panix.com Message-ID: References: <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> [Moderator's note: This discussion is rapidly moving away from relevance to this newsgroup. Further back-and-forth about what constitutes censorship in this context is strongly discouraged -- pw] In article cutchin@cs.purdue.edu (Steve Cutchin) writes: > >>Even if the paper is free, this is still theft. The police >>chief of San Francisco recently lost his job because he had >>his men do this to a gay newspaper that offended him. > > If you're giving away the papers for FREE and I ask for 150 and > you give them to me and then I throw them out, I can not see > how this possibly qualifies as theft since YOU gave them to me. > What am I required to read all 150 before I throw them out? This point was well hashed out at the time of the incident -- it was part of Chief Hongisto's defense. The legal consensus is that it *is* theft; at least in the case of a paper that pays for itself in advertising revenue. The paper isn't really free, it's just that the advertisers have paid for your copy for you. By grabbing 150 copies and throwing them out, you've just reduced my readership by 150, which reduces my advertising revenue just as surely as if you'd stolen them from a pay box. >>And whether or not it's theft, it's also censorship. No cause, even >>feminism, is so holy that it has the right to censor the opposition. > > Bzzzt! Wrong again. The U.S constitution states that the Government > does not have the right to censor the people. It does not say > that the people don't have the right to censor each other. Put > simply sure you have the right to say what you want but I don't > have to provide you with a forum to say it in. You're the second person to tell me that it's not censorship unless the government does it. I don't accept that. It may not be a violation of the constitution unless the government does it, but that doesn't make it OK if someone else does. If you want to invent a new word that means suppression-of-free-expression- by-someone-not-the-government, you're welcome to do so, and I look forward to seeing it added to the dictionary. But whatever you call it, I'm still against it. > Please, censorship takes place everyday, normally we refer to it > as economics, supply and demand, If I don't buy Nike's I'm censoring > their product. Now you're playing word games. (The word in this case is "boycott", not "censor".) A boycott of one person isn't very effective. If you convince a whole lot of people to join your boycott, that's more effective, and a perfectly legitimate way to make your point to Nike. If you forcibly *prevent* other people from buying Nike's, that's another matter. The women in this case didn't just refuse to read the paper; they didn't just convince other people to refuse to read the paper; they physically *prevented* other people from reading the paper. That's censorship, and I oppose it. -ed falk, sun microsystems -- Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu. Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This news group is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your article should be posted within several days. Rejections notified by email. From: falk@peregrine.Sun.COM (Ed Falk) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: Backlash at Penn State (fwd) Date: 22 Jul 1993 03:46:18 GMT Organization: Sun Lines: 31 Sender: muffy@mica.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy) Approved: muffy@mica.berkeley.edu Message-ID: References: <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> <22ii7i$k4m@agate.berkeley.edu> Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu In article <22ii7i$k4m@agate.berkeley.edu> uunet!infmx!philly!muffy@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Muffy Barkocy) writes: >In article falk@peregrine.Sun.COM (Ed Falk) writes: >> In the end, you're doing feminism a disservice by advocating >> censorship. A hundred articles on the net saying that Dworkin >> and MacKinnon don't represent all feminists are negated by >> a single example such as this. > >WHY? Just because some other person, who also calls themselves a >feminist, is in favor of censorship does not make the statements of >those of us who are against censorship invalid. True. Unfortunately, things get blown out of proportion. Andrea Dworkin gets more press than F.A.C.T. The women at Penn State are getting the press now. And people also tend to remember the sensational. So I'm not saying that pro-censorship feminists have points more valid than anti-censorship feminists (obviously not, since I'm anti-censorship myself), but that the pro-censorship factions have a greater impact on the public conciousness of what feminism stands for. -ed falk, sun microsystems sun!falk, falk@sun.com "Towards the end, the smell of their air began to change" -- Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu. Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This newsgroup is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your article should be posted within several days. Rejections notified by email. From: aldis@kralizec.zeta.org.au (Aldis Ozols) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: Backlash at Penn State (fwd) Date: 22 Jul 1993 07:03:42 GMT Organization: Kralizec Dialup Unix Sydney: +61-2-837-1183 V.32bis Lines: 16 Sender: muffy@mica.berkeley.edu (Muffy Barkocy) Approved: muffy@mica.berkeley.edu Message-ID: <22le4e$d3m@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu The kind of censorship which this article seeks to justify is very hazardous to the feminst movement. If it is accepted that a group of women can suppress a publication which criticises feminism, then it can also be accepted that men could suppress feminist publications which denounce men's behaviour. Judge not ... Aldis Ozols Sydney, Australia -- Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu. Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This newsgroup is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your article should be posted within several days. Rejections notified by email. Newsgroups: soc.feminism From: bob@auspex.com (Robert English) Subject: Re: Backlash at Penn State (fwd) Message-ID: <18261@auspex-gw.auspex.com> Sender: tittle@netcom.com (Cindy Tittle Moore) Organization: (not given) References: Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1993 02:27:48 GMT Approved: tittle@netcom.com Lines: 18 falk@peregrine.Sun.COM (Ed Falk) writes: : In the end, you're doing feminism a disservice by advocating : censorship. A hundred articles on the net saying that Dworkin : and MacKinnon don't represent all feminists are negated by : a single example such as this. Would you then agree that a hundred articles on the net saying that all men are not male supremicists are negated by a single example such as Randolph Terry? --bob-- Speaking for myself. -- Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu. Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This news group is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your article should be posted within several days. Rejections notified by email. Newsgroups: soc.feminism From: kelly@panacea.phys.utk.edu (Kelly Dowd) Subject: Re: Backlash at Penn State (fwd) Message-ID: <1993Jul22.171829.18351@martha.utcc.utk.edu> Sender: tittle@netcom.com (Cindy Tittle Moore) Organization: University of Tennessee Computing Center References: <199307152059.AA09003@ucsu.Colorado.EDU> Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1993 04:24:28 GMT Approved: tittle@netcom.com Lines: 29 I guess the question is really how one responds to criticism. There are three ways: a rational discourse disproving the other sides position, psuedo-intellectual name-calling/propoganda (which involves twisting what the opposition says into something they aren't saying then "rejecting" it or just reciting slogans, the last refuge of the intellectually incompetent) and finally the use of physical force to suppress the oppositions ability to express itself (the-slap-the-bitch-until-she-shuts-up-tactic of the patriarchial marriage). The question becomes what is "feminism" (whatever that is)-is it an intellectual school of thought (in which case the first method is appropriate) or is it a fascistic all-inclusive ideology like fascism and "Islamic" government (a la Khomeini or Hitler). In the second case then nazi tactics such as destroying opposition papers is typical and expected (the people need to be protected from blasphemous lies propogating false consciousness, thus, although we hate such acts, only until the world is cleansed of such lies spread by the male dominated media can we truly establish true free speech, speech un-corrupted by the patriarchial institutions. Thus, although feminism feels free speech is a right of all men and women until women are liberated it will be necessary to suppress such lies and distortions.) Perhaps you should attack their printing press and destroy it like the S.S. ?? Or perhaps remove the intellectual straight jacket and use your brain to rationally expound your views and disprove the other side? Or has in-the-name-of-God militancy replaced intellectuality in today's universities? -- Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu. Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu. This news group is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your article should be posted within several days. Rejections notified by email.