Too bad ISU didn’t show respect for the artist
Not only was this censorship, it was so useless and inane. These women should be learning nuclear physics or medicine or law or something real. Then they can go out to succeed in the real world. Instead the Women’s Studies Dept. is teaching them to give importance to utter trivia.
Beg to differ, Dad.
Three soldiers carrying a bikini-clad woman and a keg of beer? One vote here for retarded sexist crap, they couldn’t get it off there fast enough for this old lady.
Geez. :rolleyes: This is some kind of record in the “December posts a clueless non-debate again” sweepstakes.
http://www.iastate.edu/news/announce/02/dec/mural.html
There are other lessons to be learned at college besides nuclear phsyics. And this is the kind of retarded sexist crap they’re going to encounter in the Real World–good that they’ve had this opportunity to learn how to deal with it.
I usually oppose censorship in any form, but the fact that this mural is painted on the wall of a dorm that students pay to live in renders that objection moot. It would be different if they wanted to remove a painting from a museum or an art gallery, but this is just an offensive doodle on a kitchen wall.
I had to think about this a little. My initial reaction was to agree with [d]december** just because I despise knee-jerk censorship, but upon further reflection (and after reading DDG’s reaction) I think the location of the mural makes it fair game for removal.
I do understand where december is coming from though.
I concur with DDG.
It is offensive, and the students have the right to rally for its removal. Other students can rally to save it, if it’s at all important to them. It does trouble me slightly that this seems to have been an assignment, rather than a spontaneous action, but that doesn’t make them wrong.
They obviously learned something that many women don’t know: how to grow some balls and make changes in their environments. Maybe if they were learning “something real”, the silly mural would still be up on the wall, making strong women gag over their Cheerios and Top Ramen every day.
You mean, no one would have realized that this mural was offensive or inappropriate unless they’d taken this Women’s Studies class and been assigned to go out and get offended at something? Or that no one would have bothered to do anything about it unless they were getting class credit?
Ahh, Iowa State U, the High School after High School. I wonder if they should have a class sponsored by M.A.D.D. and S.A.D.D. to have the keg removed next.
Having not seen the mural, only it’s description, well, it sounds tacky first, sexist next, and thirdly inappropriate. I think it’s a good thing, I just would’ve hoped that it would have been totally removed and replaced with something else. Maybe the statue that Ashcroft covered with a drape…
Bad art has no inherent right to impose itself, particularly in one’s own kitchen.
Thank goodness Rate My Poo did not exist all those years back, for flushing in the dorm would be censorship.
It’s quite possible that if it hadn’t been for that class, no one would have cared enough to do something (being offended is easy, but doing something takes balls). I could be wrong, of course. That’s why I said “maybe”.
That aspect troubles me, because it’s such a waste of university opportunities. In the 19th century, Jane Austin wrote great novels. In the 20th, Emmy Noether developed a new field of mathematics and Lise Meitner helped invent the atomic bomb. Woman like Ruth Bader Ginsberg became leading lawyers.
Now it’s the 21st century, and young women pay thousands of dollars of tuition to the “Women’s Studies” department, which teaches them to to complain about some mural in their kitchen. They ought to call it the “Women’s Ignorance Department.”
So said the guy who ignored what DDG and even Menocchio concluded.
DDG, thanks for finding Tom Hill’s statement. It has the virtue of providing some factual background. OTOH Hill’s squishy moral reasoning could be used to justify anything.
Did these male students want to expurgate the mural? Was there an election or poll amoung the dorm students? Or, did those who whined the loudest get their way? Hill doesn’t say.
This is a telling commentary on political correctness. Objections from “several female students” apparently created a presumption that the mural ought to have been immediately removed, so that Hill needs to apologize for not moving quickly enough.
Isn’t this part of the learning process in kindergarten?
Sounds like today’s policy would have prohibited painting the mural, but did NOT require destroying it.
DDG, you may be right that the women involved learned a valuable lesson in how to deal with sexism. OTOH they may have learned a method that only works when dealing with a trivial issue in a sympathetic environment.
I think the women who are really leading to women’s equality are those with real accomplishments – architect Julia Morgan, painter Grandma Moses, business executive Carly Fiorina, Senator Margaret Chase Smith. Women like this are the ones who have changed the landscape and made real progress toward eradicating sexism. YMMV.
Crappy argument. If someone put up a swatiska on your kitchen wall, would you have to do a poll to show that it was offensive? But you must have missed this:
So it appears the men and everyone else in the dorm were consulted and allowed to weigh into the discussion.
Obviously it was a lesson that went right over your head.
Your point? The fact that the school wouldn’t have approved it now shows that it violated certain standards, therefore justifying its removal. So one can argue that the women weren’t doing anything more outrageous than highlighting a violation to the school’s sexual harrassment policy. That hardly seems trivial, seeing as how this is a co-ed dorm and considering the implicit theme of the mural.
What method is that? Issuing a complaint to the school’s leadership? What would have been a better method? Ignoring the problem all together?
Why do you think this is a those women versus *those women type of discussion. I’ve met feminist scientists who not only have made “real” accomplishments in their fields, but have also put their energies into fighting injustices of all scales. So where do you get off dictating what people should do to be productive members of society?
And why do you care so much what these young women do with their time? They aren’t doing anything to you. They aren’t taking your money. They aren’t asking you for a job or crowding you out of yours. Women Studies is no more or less useless than most liberal arts fields. And as someone who works with a bunch of mediocre science students, I’d hate to see any more people jumping into a “useful” curriculum just so they won’t be unfairly judged by people like you.
Your opinions reek of a bias against the humanities. What happened? Did you fail English 101 back in college or something?
I think it depends a lot on what period the mural represents.
As modern people, we appreciate access to accurate historical records. If the mural is of WWII soldiers, it is quite likely that they might have carried women in bikinis under their arms and we ought not to pretend any different. But if the mural is of modern soldiers, then it is absurd.
Who the hell are you to tell women what to study? Geez, you’ve got to have figured out that you are simply making women’s studies’ argument for them.
How do you know they’re not?
Women’s studies bashing masquerading as a free speech issue.
In addition, an unverifiable logical statement (or should I call it a fallacy?): If X, not Y — there are women out there creating a new field of mathematics, and these women are protesting and changing (“purging”) a mural. These two are mutually exclusive because these women having wasted (sic), say, a week of their Life can NEVER be succesful in the real world. Worse, it is not just the time spent. Because they have changed a mural that offended them, they will NOT be successful.
In the future, when I see something that offends me, instead of standing up for it (“whining”), I will rush to my office to contribute and be succesful and prove a greater point. I only hope that december on seeing an anti-semitic painting does not start a GD thread but goes to work.
Libertarian
The mural was painted in 1984. We could debate whether the people were justified in taking umbrage but one cannot make out much from the link provided. That could be a somewhat debatable OP.
or I could have been as concise as the previous poster!
The modern two-piece bathing suit known as the bikini was introduced in 1946 (and is named after the atoll where the United States tested its nuclear devices and shrunk its fleet at the same time). The modern pressurized, closed-system, top-valve keg with which ISU students were doubtless familiar in the '80s came to the United States from England in the early '60s.
This General Questions Moment has been brought to you by the Ft. Lauderdale Tourism Bureau.