My life as an anti-feminist

By Phil Milner

This is a small town, and St. Francis Xavier is a small university. Little that I write is so bland that someone doesn't stop speaking about it. I knew, or should have known, what I was getting myself into when I wrote an essay about campus feminism that was published in The Daily News Dec. 5.

Since then, debatable versions of my motives, professionalism, pedagogy, and intelligence have been circulating. People who had given me reason to consider them friends stopped speaking.

I found it wise to skip President Riley's annual Christmas party for faculty rather than let my wife watch me silence, then empty a room of people, by stepping into it. Students dropped a course I was teaching (poorly, sad to say), apparently because of my sexism.

Your enemies remain your enemies, your friends your friends. The other 95% don’t have the energy for sustained anger at someone they bump into every day, and who, like everyone else in the ‘Nish, is not without redeeming virtues. The statute of limitations for my past writing sins expired after about 60 days. By mid-January my Nicholson Hall colleagues seemed ready to tolerate my 10:00 a.m. appearance at the 6th floor coffee urns.

Then the Xaverian Weekly started publishing letters and editorials about my essay. The Weekly rejected angrier letters than the ones it published, and angrier letters still arrived at my campus mailbox. All these letters were anonymous, though a group called the SAAX ("Sexual Assault Awareness at X") put their name to the longest.

The statute of limitations went into meltdown. And what letters they were. I blamed the victims, embarrassed those who wear the x-ring, abetted sexual assault on campus, discriminated against feminist students in marking. I was guilty of poor judgement, tactlessness, unclear writing, trivializing the Montreal Massacre (I was at least three years to late for that).

After another month of hiding out in my office, I ventured a conciliatory letter to the Xaverian Weekly. Though I'm happier when people like me, enduring the cutting looks, smashing words, and biting silences of the Righteous hardly puts me in the company of Father Brebeuf or Copernicus.

My letter-to-the-editor praised "(name withheld)" and the "SAAX"’s for their letters. They challenged ideas that moved and troubled them. That is what we are supposed to do in university, I pointed out. To their credit, they chose a public forum where the source of those offending ideas could respond (I was wrong on that one).

Their biggest mistake, apart from the quality of their writing and thinking, was their failure to perform one essential act of intellectual courage. They didn’t put their names to their ideas.

The SAAXs and "(name withheld)" are students. If they’d have signed their letter, I could have tried to convince them that the December 6th ceremony might not be the fine thing our community agrees it is, that campus feminism is a white, middle-class movement with blind spots over gender, race, and class you can drive a pulp truck through, that there are professors not doing the research they spent a lifetime preparing themselves to do because nobody will support work that doesn’t fit feminist ideas that have hardened into dogma, that the university Senate has no business sending me letters telling me what to teach on December 6th, that Group-think is always a menace, that the work of university professors when it is self-serving should always be suspect.

I’d have liked a chance, I continued, to explain why "no," outside Movement sloganeering, almost never means "no." Otherwise, why would we find ourselves saying "No, and this time I mean it." "No, a hundred times no!" Or, "No new taxes. Read my lips."

If no meant no, "no means no" couldn’t serve as a slogan. One reason the responses to my essay were so ferocious is that the letter writers didn’t know there are many legitimate ways of looking at divisive issues. They didn’t know that in university, everyone is supposed to question things, especially self-serving assumptions.

The ferocious letters didn’t accuse me of being wrong (though I don’t think their authors knew that); they accused me of setting the Movement back.

Those anonymous blasts should make thoughtful instructors question what they are teaching. Intelligent women ["SAAX" #1 and "SAAX" #2 and "(name withheld)" are probably more intelligent that their letters indicated] – women blessed with the best their parents, teachers, the Canadian economic, religious, and systems have to give – have been convinced they are an oppressed minority. Believing their own propaganda, they glow with purpose. Walk-home programs, putting "no means no" signs on every flat surfaces, phones in every dark corner, marginalizing those who question their agenda, they have urgent answers for every question.

The Xaverian Weekly chose not to publish my letter-to-the-editor. After printing what it considered too many long and boring assaults on me, the Weekly adapted a new policy of printing only letters of 400 words or less. My letter was the first (and only) beneficiary of the new policy. I was shocked and appalled.

Faithful Reader, you are reading a revised version of that unpublished letter, though I would have preferred responding to my campus critics in the campus news medium.

Those who spout empty rhetoric often have empty minds. Much of the world's mischief has been done by righteous groups in the grips of their own propaganda. Political correctness has always been with us, and it has usually been wrong.

Those who teach privileged women that they are an abused minority, that men are thwarting their advancement at StFX, should try to take another look at the world they actually live in. StFX men are brothers in this movement. A huge change has taken place in the workplace and the home. Housewives will soon be all gone. We’re all individual economic modules. The system has changed, and must keep changing to reflect the paradigm shift. The Movement, as far as I can tell in one university at least, has no enemies (except me on December 5th). It can get on fine without the victim and abuser role assignments, the over-heated rhetoric, the suppression of dissent.

Power politics corrupts whatever it touches. Government and the media can hardly express an idea that doesn’t contain a self-righteous posture. Universities aren’t supposed to work that way. Universities encourage open discussion, tolerate minority opinion, and insist students question ideas, beginning with self-serving ones.

I’ll end with my own self-serving statement. It is not in the best interests of students, especially those who disagree with me, to drop or boycott my classes. The best students will seek an open forum in which ideas can thrive, evolve, or be discarded. Before I wrote my December 5th essay, the StFX community gave me credit for encouraging discussion, tolerating disagreement, conveying the nobility of the intellectual process, and not punishing students for disagreeing with whatever position I happened to take. The trouble I am in owes nothing to anything I said or did in the classroom or with my mark sheets. It has to do with my efforts, as a writer and professor, to tell the truth about the community I live in.

I’ve thought about this. I’ve nothing to apologize for. I invite the critics who attack me in rooms I don’t go in to think about it, too.