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White Guilt and Gynoguilt:
How the Left's Culture of Victimhood Undermines Equality
By Fuzzy Slippers

As we all know, the left and particularly its kudzu-like interweaving into and strangling of all aspects of academia is very fond of its "isms." Feminism, racism, whateverism--all purportedly designed to "call out" the oppressive white male and to tear down sexist walls, crash through glass ceilings, break out of the cycle of oppression. So imagine my surprise when, as a graduate student, I learned that I should not be teaching a particular female author in a Modern Literature class. She's an excellent, if under-read and under-appreciated, modern writer, but the chair of my department explained to me that her work should be taught in "women's literature" classes. It turns out that faux feminists were happy to perpetuate the idea that the term "modern writer" actually means "white male modern writer" and that because of this, a woman cannot be a "modern writer" at all. She's a writer of "women's literature."

"Women's literature" classes are chock-full of readings by people whose only qualification as a "writer" is a vagina. The "literature" is often . . . well, let's just say, not good. This isn't always the case, but often enough that you have to wonder why it's being taught at all (other than to fill in the entire semester's reading list by dredging up every female writer who ever put pen to paper). This gyno-centric reading list and my being told not to teach a truly outstanding female author in a "traditional" lit class initially unnerved and confused me. But the real reason is actually quite clear, if rather sinister: if we started selecting excellent female writers and started teaching them as if they were "real" literature, we'd end the hate-fueled gravy train. Who or what would the leftist intellectual elite write their endless, repetitive, belly-button-gazing critical essays about? What would happen to their careers if they had no one to demonize and no one to treat as a perpetual victim?

How on earth can we achieve any kind of gendered or racial harmony if we continue to perpetuate this bizarre notion that women and minorities must be treated with kid gloves or as strange anomalies to be taught in isolation, put on intellectual display as if they are animals in a zoo? Doesn't gyno-centric or race-based "grouping" serve only to underscore the "difference," to highlight the supposed inadequacies of said group/s? Yet when we on the right want to treat female authors or black authors as the equals of their white, male counterparts (i.e. actually worthy of study on the merits of the text, not because they have a vagina or other-than-white skin), we are not permitted to do so. In the name of equality.

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