Reading about an exhibition that’s about to open at the Milwaukee Art Museum—“Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair”—took me back to the night long ago in Cincinnati when my teenage daughter and I saw this African-American extravaganza live.
Here are hot tips to help (1) libertarian and conservative students, (2) idealistic liberal female students, and (3) idealistic liberal male students navigate the bizarre world of safe spaces, othering, microaggressions, trigger warnings, alarming victimization statistics, and all the other…
The Factual Feminist exposes the fallacy at the heart of the claim that female athletes face a “grass ceiling.”
The term “illiberal left” is one of the useful contributions of this book. Liberals, as Kirsten Powers grew up believing, are committed to tolerance, pluralism, and reasoned debate. Freedom of speech is, to them, a cherished principle. By contrast, she insists, “authoritarian demands for…
Hear the Factual Feminist at her most eloquent, calling on Western women to demonstrate solidarity with women around the world who are struggling for basic rights we take for granted.
Christina Sommers says it’s time to pull the trigger on trigger warnings and treat even the once-traumatized as adults.
A hundred years ago, the ADL was founded to combat the defamation of the Jewish people. The Factual Feminist wonders why it’s spreading gender propaganda in high schools.
The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is out. The gender police are not amused. The Factual Feminist explains the theory of the “male gaze.”
After the Factual Feminist spoke at Yale last month, the Yale Women’s Center pronounced her views “potentially dangerous” and “xenophobic.” Yikes! See if you agree:
THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with Claudia Anderson reading her casual essay "Say Yes to the Dress."
When to mention race and when not? My fellow journalists who covered the funeral of the woman who died in the D.C. Metro last week chose not to mention it. Perhaps they deemed it a distraction, too fraught a subject to bring up at a solemn, family time. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that…
To see how NPR, activist scholars, and the Justice Department set the stage for the latest eruption of hysteria over alleged campus rape, watch here:
Watch Christina Hoff Sommers puncture the balloon of some seeking to enlist the police to root out “street harassment.”
The Factual Feminist warns that a “little army of junior assistant deans and harassment apparatchiks are quietly repealing the free speech protections of the First Amendment.”
Christina Hoff Sommers, of Factual Feminist fame, continues to expose the feminist establishment’s war on truth. This jaunty five-minute video takes on the endlessly recycled pseudo-fact of the 23-cent wage gap between men and women. Watch it below:
In her last video of the season, the Factual Feminist exposes the flimsy thinking behind a Verizon ad. Watch the video below:
This week, Christina Sommers answers questions from her mailbag about workplace discrimination and discrimination in the sciences and responds to a critic of her employer, the American Enterprise Institute. See for yourselves:
This week the fabulous Factual Feminist answers some listeners’ questions — starting with why she calls herself a feminist at all. Watch her here:
Why would the leading textbook on domestic violence law persist in publishing a fantasy? Watch the Factual Feminist debunk the sinister legend of the “rule of thumb” -- the claim that English common law countenanced wife-beating as long as the stick a husband used was no thicker than his thumb.
This week the Factual Feminist takes on the “rape culture” panic that is riling college campuses with help from the media, radical feminists, and too many politicians. Just as in the shameful panic over alleged child abuse at day care centers that sent innocent people to prison in the 1980s, false…
Boys are languishing in school--but "gender equity" in education means programs for girls. The Factual Feminist is concerned about all our children, boys as well as girls. Watch here:
This week the Factual Feminist takes on the new program in feminist biology at the University of Wisconsin, striking another blow for sanity and against agenda-driven, politicized science!
No one has done more than American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers to watchdog the perennially unreliable claims of activist feminism. Ever since her Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women (1994), Sommers, a former professor of philosophy, has been performing the…
My earliest memory of being spellbound by a piece of writing is of being read to as a small child from a book of Georgian (as in Caucasian) folk tales, the Yes and No Stories. For a time, I used to ask for “The Fox, the Bear and the Butter Jar” every night.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD Casual Podcast, with managing editor Claudia Anderson, reading her recent casual essay, "The Tale and the Teller."
Garden City (“What a misnomer!” said cousin Betty, who’d been there) is the seat of Glasscock County, a rectangular piece of flat, dry West Texas with a population density of two per square mile. The population of the “city” fell as low as 100 early in the last century, but the 2010 census put it…
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution gave its name to the protection against self-incrimination, and it also contains three other famous (and these days somewhat battered) guarantees—against double jeopardy; against deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; and of…
There’s a collision brewing between Indiana and Washington over health care: whether our system will be a top-down affair of central planning, or whether it will leave any room for bottom-up arrangements that rely on dispersed, individual decision-making and resource-allocation by self-correcting…
For decades now, media marketers and content producers have been milking the Jane Austen craze, first with fine dramatizations of the novels themselves for small and large screen, then with a vast bazaar of knockoffs—sequels by the score (Letters from Pemberley: The First Year, Captain Wentworth’s…
For friends and admirers of Marilyn Hagerty, the North Dakota columnist whose straightforward review of the new Olive Garden in Grand Forks recently went viral, it’s been exhilarating to watch the blogosphere move in to mock her and come away humbled by the strength and charm of this seasoned…
Last winter, I was in Paris for a few days and stayed at the epicenter of the old city, right next to Notre Dame, in a place called the Hôtel-Dieu, a large working hospital. Some years back a decision was made to provide rooms on the top floor for patients’ visitors to stay overnight. Then, finding…
A cruise ship sank in the Volga River in heavy weather a few weeks back, with more than 100 lives lost. On the radio I heard President Medvedev vow to banish the antiquated boats that ply Russia’s waterways. A commentator called them “rust buckets,” and a shiver went down my spine.
Professor John Michael Bailey’s course on human sexuality has been dropped from Northwestern University’s offerings in psychology for next year. The publicity surrounding an optional after-class live demonstration of a motorized sex toy apparently had a sobering effect in the hallowed halls.
David Blankenhorn, a valued contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, has embarked on a doubtless quixotic quest for fair treatment at the hands of the New York Times. His letter to the paper’s “public editor” details, with characteristic clarity and courtesy, his thuggish treatment at the hands of…
Whenever conversation turns to dog stories, especially tales of dogs' misdeeds, my husband bides his time, hanging back while others spin their various yarns.
Golden Legacy
In 1975, I moved back to Washington after several years away and started working as a freelance editor from home. It was lonely work, and sometimes I'd go stir crazy.
The Radical and the Republican
Seeing Europe for the first time, a young Somali woman was dazzled by its order and cleanliness and its ingenious efficiency. It was "like a movie." Düsseldorf "looked like geometry class, or physics, where everything was in straight lines and had to be perfect and precise."
The Blue Angels--the Navy's demonstration team, the guys behind those six shiny blue fighter jets that fly in formation at air shows and do heart-stopping loop-de-loops at 500 miles an hour--have a peculiar shape to their year.
Marriage and Caste in America
In 1982, Jeane Kirkpatrick brought out a collection of her essays under the title of the best known of them, "Dictatorships and Double Standards." The book is dedicated to "Douglas, John, Stuart, and Ricardo."
NEWSWEEK some weeks back had an arresting picture on its cover. The famous photographer Annie Leibovitz--tall, blonde, and 57, dressed in black trousers and a black V-neck top--stands with her three young daughters: a radiant, curly haired 5-year-old and adorable blonde toddler twins. Leibovitz is…
THE WORST THING about public life in the United States is the harsh, ugly, barking, bad-faith-assuming, accusatory tone" of most discussion of important matters on which people disagree. So says David Blankenhorn, the unassuming and resourceful founding president of the Institute for American…
BACK IN THE STONE AGE, before the vast right-wing conspiracy and even the Reagan Revolution, there was a conservative Washington (just barely), and one of its fixtures was a handsome, smiling, slightly angular blonde woman named Anne Brunsdale.
WHO KNEW THAT THE NATIONAL Gallery of Art possessed one of only two complete, never-bound, original sets of John James Audubon's Birds of America? The other such set reportedly is in Moscow.