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First They Came for the Porkies
Hahvahd’s male-only clubs have forged life-long relationships. And that, of course, is the problem.
“Once a Porcellian always a Porcellian,” read a 1940 Time magazine article about the oldest of Harvard University’s secretive, all-male “final clubs.” “Porkies keep up their Porkie friendships all their lives, go back religiously to the annual Porkie banquet at which new members are initiated. … From the Pore’s clubrooms, non-Porcellians are religiously excluded.”
The Washington Post notes, with the usual thin-lipped expression of disapproval: “For the 225 years that the Porcellian Club has existed, this exclusion has applied to all women — a fact that has increasingly been condemned by the Harvard administration.” See, the relationships forged in this club gave the members privileges at odds with the desires of an egalitarian world, and while that had an effect on every non-Porkie male in the nation, it had a disparate impact on women, since not one could join.
This, of course, must change. But first, great danger must be discovered:
After a university task force found that the Porcellian Club and its ilk (there are eight all-male final clubs, according to the Harvard Crimson) held “deeply misogynistic attitudes” that contribute to an unsafe sexual environment, pressure mounted for the clubs to either admit women or risk sanctions.
All-male clubs lead to rape because they had the wrong attitudes. So now students who join these miserable bastions of hate and violence will be barred from “leadership positions” in approved groups, and athletics, and will not be considered for prestigious scholarships. Not because they did anything, but because they belonged to an organization that made women feel so unsafe the university wants women to go there whenever they want.
Nothing new. But here’s the wrinkle: the new laws also apply to all-women’s clubs.
They don’t like it.
They want an exception to the rule, because unless they get special treatment they will be disenfranchised and disempowered and distressed and all manner of dis-related nightmarish consequences.
“The support systems, safe spaces, and alumnae networks the women’s clubs have been striving to build will disappear,” they wrote. “That strikes us as a tremendous waste, and an ironic one, given Harvard’s stated goals.”
Ariel Stoddard, one of the column’s authors, told The Washington Post in an interview last week: “It’s hard to figure out how this will help women or improve the social experience.”
That’s not the point, Ms. Stoddard, and unless you asked how penalizing the club would help men or improve their social experience, you’ve not a gam to stand on. Yes, yes, I know what you’ll say — when men’s clubs are integrated, the men are helped because they’re not left to marinate in all the sloshing testosterone and have punching contests and make wolf-whistles at Esquire illustrations, and their social experience is improved because the presence of women has a civilizing influence. (Unless it’s a drunken frat party, in which case the opposite happens.) Men cannot be left to their own devices, or they will sit around swirling brandy in snifters and figuring out ways to keep women padlocked to the stove in a state of perpetual pregnancy.
But it’s not your call. It’s not your place to set the rules for a private organization, any more than I have the right to tell the DAR what color napkin they should use for the annual banquet. Use periwinkle or you are invalidating my aesthetics!
Here’s a nice quote from Harvard’s pres:
“A truly inclusive community requires that students have the opportunity to participate in the life of the campus free from exclusion on arbitrary grounds,” Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust wrote in a letter released Friday that endorsed the new policy.
Forming a club that’s male- or female-only is not arbitrary, unless you believe that Harvard students came to campus, flipped a coin to determine their gender, and must now be forced to live with the consequences. Now, within those organizations, there’s all sorts of arbitrary exclusion — you’re not our type, we don’t like you, and so on. Private organizations ought to be able to do this, but nowadays you can sue a bowling team because you wanted to use Nerf pins and tennis balls, and they didn’t let you join.
Here’s what one of the supporting statements says, in the censorious soul-deadening language of the cultural commissar:
Discrimination is pernicious. Stereotypes and biases take hold, normalizing in a community behavior, which should be unacceptable. In this case, the discriminatory membership policies of these organizations have led to the perpetuation of spaces that are rife with power imbalances.
The most entrenched of these spaces send an unambiguous message that they are the exclusive preserves of men.
If that’s all it takes, then the women’s clubs have to go.
Published in Education
What is the substantive difference between an “exclusive preserve” and a “safe space”?
Why does Harvard have a “president” anyway? Shouldn’t that power be more equally distributed along with her $900 K salary?
The only way to have full equality is to forbid “free” association or any form exclusive space. No chair, no room, no bed can be exclusive. Walls are a tool of privilege.
Students must ratify sexual consent on a continuous basis throughout coitus but can we really withhold permission from other students who choose to enter the room and merely watch without creating an exclusionary space?
Unless and until the disempowered have the right to figuratively and literally take a dump on the desks of the powerful at Harvard can they really consider themselves free and equal?
An “Exclusive preserve” is one where you belong and I am not allowed. A “safe space” is one where I belong and you are not allowed.
What’s so hard?
Annnnnd we continue to race to the bottom. Soon, all too soon, this will start to be enforced in the general world under the aegis of evening the playing field against straight white male privilege.
Also, if at Harvard I would immediately attempt to join any RACE or CULTURE based group so I could argue against their exclusivity!
OK, given that EVERYTHING must now be non-exclusionary, I vote for keeping the Royalls wheat sheaves on the Harvard Law School shield, because inclusiveness.
Whites Need Not Apply ! How soon will Whites have reserved seating at lunch counters, drinking fountains and restrooms. Imagine the convenience . Sad pun for sure there –
What does Harvard have against homosexuals?
ouch
I think they need to eliminate majors and classes with prerequisites because everybody isn’t welcome.
I think this situation absolutely requires… a really futile and stupid gesture… be done on somebody’s part.
Oh. Brother.
Can I say that?
I really enjoy the “Revolution Eats It’s Own” phase we have entered .
In this case, the discriminatory membership policies of these organizations have led to the perpetuation of spaces that are rife with power imbalances.
Funny, I thought people went to college to learn something, not to Balance the Power.
My bad. Get on with it then, dolts.
So I presume the Harvard president would oppose any environment in which a Harvard degree were given any preference over a degree from “Podunk State” or even no degree at all.
As someone pointed out here on Ricochet a week or so ago in the context of an all female Uber-like option , all this blather against any type of “discrimination” is arguing against the concept of specialization – the idea that certain businesses or functions work better when they focus on specific types of customers or certain types of transactions.
Breaking down the walls is not enough. These students should be forced into exposure of alternative viewpoints. Syrian refugees should be forcibly integrated into all previously all-women groups to provide such exposure. Diversity is our strength!
Wait a second – I’m missing something. Harvard doesn’t like discrimination, so that means that the administration now admits anyone who decides they’d like to attend the prestigious Ivy League school. Because if Harvard told them they couldn’t be admitted because their grades weren’t good enough (or their test scores weren’t high enough, or they didn’t have enough money, etc.), and at the same time, admitted some students with lower grades, test scores, and finances, then Harvard would be discriminating against those potential students! This would be outrageous!
Those potential students just don’t have the opportunity to become students in the first place because of arbitrary discrimination by Harvard. Way to go Crimson!
Imagine how the people without all the fancy degrees working at the President’s building–the janitors, carpenters, groundskeepers, plumbers, clerks–go home each night and tell their families, “I know I said this last week, but you would not believe the kind of crazy nonsense these people were saying today. The workers at the Aquarium work with smarter animals than we do.”
Porkies and others will go to being Secret Societies, like the Skull and Bones I’ve always heard about. With, like, secret handshakes and rings, and such. And, being conspiracies, some will likely get up to the kind of racist, misogynistic hijinks they’d always been accused of…back in the days when they were out in public and not doing stuff like that.
So, overall, they will meet in secrecy and some will behave worse.
So what, precisely, are these final clubs? Two articles in one day, but no mention of what the club actually is, and neither is it in the WaPo article. Is this some sort of conspiracy? Are they consisting of Illuminati-babbys and reptilioids?