Doug Lief Lief is a third-year English
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An ideologically-conservative group known as the Independent
Women’s Forum purchased an expensive full-page ad in the
Daily Bruin to espouse controversial anti-feminist views. The ad
was filled with vitriol aimed at debunking the traditional Gloria
Steinem party line. I come today to praise the ad, not for its
shameful content, but for its courage to challenge
complacency.
Some of the more controversial parts of the ad accused rape
statistics of being inflated because, to paraphrase loosely, rape
by a boyfriend doesn’t count. Another part of the ad claimed
that the disparity in income between men and women was a
fallacy.
The May 18 rally protesting the ad was an appropriate response,
being both relevant to the UCLA populace and aimed at the on-campus
organization responsible for publishing the ad. I do not, however,
share the sentiment of the protesters that the Daily Bruin
overstepped its own guidelines. After all, it’s their policy.
It therefore have the freedom to their own interpretation of those
rules.
I feel for the Daily Bruin. Their readers have put them in a
Catch-22. People complain that they don’t publish challenging
enough material, but as soon as they do, they are flooded with
letters demanding retractions and apologies. As Abraham Lincoln
once said, “You can’t please all of the people all of
the time, but you can please some of the people some of the
time.”
The more we try to do the former, the more we fail at the
latter. The fear of objectionable ideas has pervaded the national
conscience to a cancerous level. We have been fully indoctrinated
against so-called offensive material, so much so that the mere
appearance of a generalization produces an immediate gut reaction.
I do not suggest that we embrace racism or ignorance for the sake
of shock value. The prison of political correctness, however,
continues to draw in countless new inmates.
We live in a harsh world full of violence and inequality.
Instead of choosing to face that reality head on, we choose to
drown everything in euphemisms. As we progressively childproof the
world we infantilize ourselves.
 Illustration by CASEY CROWE/Daily Bruin As fine
upstanding college students we like to think of ourselves as
intelligent and open minded. Who wouldn’t want to apply such
adjectives to themselves? The fact remains that those monikers must
be earned.
Censoring ourselves means admitting an inability to process
threatening information. The truth is that most of us are deaf
toward hearing intelligent and open-minded ideas, rather than
actually being intelligent and open minded.
As soon as we recognize a statement that appears neither
intelligent nor open minded, we stomp on it like we would daddy
longlegs. Even if political correctness is a righteous 400-pound
gorilla, we must be mindful that it is still a 400-pound
gorilla.
People seem to prefer that the Daily Bruin refrain from
publishing ads like the IWF one or the infamous Horowitz ad (which
the Daily Bruin chose not to run) because should such ideas spread,
they could have undue influence. This is similar to the asinine
argument that children learn violence from television. Children do
not learn violence from anywhere, rather, they (like most other
members of the animal kingdom) have the mental capacity to
calculate pain and opportunism and arrive at violence as a
potential tool for satisfying their needs.
Similarly, people who are predisposed toward the content of the
IWF ad almost certainly hold qualitatively identical beliefs about
women to begin with. If the reader is receptive, they will receive.
Most ignorant ideas are independently arrived at because they are
easy leaps of logic (albeit flawed logic) to make, or they are
inherited from ignorant parents. The percentage of people who read
pamphlets and subsequently alter their worldview is
infinitesimal.
The fight for women’s 14th and 19th Amendment rights
cannot be severed from the fight for all civil rights, for in
defending one particular liberty, one must acknowledge the presence
and validity of rights as a principle in general. Defending
women’s rights invokes and demands the sanctity of the
fundamental First Amendment right to unfettered belief and speech.
In short, we must take the good with the bad.
Too often liberalism is used as a reason not to offend anyone
because they don’t want to expose the public to anything not
nice. As a liberal, I find this perversion of the liberal doctrine
unacceptable.
Liberalism is about the defense of personal liberty, freedom
from persecution, but not freedom from uneasiness. Any political
ideology that claims to offer such a cure is hocking snake oil.
Since when have we been so afraid to be offended? As an
intelligent adult I am capable of distinguishing between harmful
stereotype and useful archetype, between outright opinion and
layered satire. I expect the same of my readers. We have been so
heavily indoctrinated against stereotypes and flippancy that the
mere appearance of it triggers an immediate gut reaction.
It’s high time we become unbrainwashed. The best example
of this comes in the form of the smash musical “The
Producers,” which has been nominated for more Tony awards
than any musical in history.
Written by Mel Brooks and based on his Oscar-winning movie of
the same name, “The Producers” is the story of two
financially scheming Jews who hire a Swedish sexpot and the most
flaming drama-queens available to put on a musical comedy about
Adolf Hitler.
So why is it being lauded as the greatest musical of all time
instead of being picketed as an assault on civilized society?
Because it’s all in good fun, something we’ve forgotten
about.
Is there a way for us to eliminate the horrors of society
without having to silence them? I have no doubt that education and
reason are capable of curing even the most entrenched cancerous
creed.
Just as there are laws of nature that can be arrived at through
experimentation, I believe there are at least a few ethical
absolutes that cannot be disputed, despite what some relativists
might think. “All men are created equal (under the
law)” springs to mind. As long as we are cognizant of the
line between fact and fiction, where is the harm in stepping over
it?
The IWF ad demonstrates one of our most sacred rights, one that
so rarely gets defended. I refer not to civil rights, nor free
speech, but the right to be wrong. I want to discredit dogma. I
want to stare you down. I want to make you squirm. If you
don’t, God help you.