Columns With Sexual Slurs Don't Belong on Edit Page

Catherine Vieweg

Cavalier Daily

Cavalier Daily

1986-04-16

Columns With Sexual Slurs Don't Belong on Edit Page
On April 14, The Cavalier Daily printed an article by Edgar Berman entitled “Feminists just can’t change females.” This article was under the section quite correctly headed, “Opinion.” The plethora of myths, fabrications and fallacies contained in that article were self-evident and thus I will not waste my time with superfluous refutation.
I will, however, point out the hypocrisy The Cavalier Daily expressed by publishing that article. In every issue of this newspaper the letters policy clearly states that “letters or columns containing…racial slurs…will not be printed.” Yet the policy says nothing of sexual slurs.
Is it any less demeaning and degrading to The Cavalier Daily to publish skewed facts, misrepresentations and half-truths about women than it is about minorities? This newspaper will not print racist columns and rightly so, but, as clearly seen in the aforementioned article, it does not grant the same restraint to sexist columns.
Why is this? If that article was instead titled “The NAACP just can’t change blacks,” it would not have been printed. If it had been, the retribution administered by the Black Student Alliance would be amazingly swift.
But the article wasn’t about blacks – it was just about women, so there probably won’t be a retribution. After all, why should there be? On these hallowed Jeffersonian Grounds, issues concerning women aren’t credited with nearly the same respect as other issues. When is the last time you saw a shantytown erected on the Lawn protesting the University’s investment in companies that oppress women? When is the last time you read an article about the lack of female professors here at the University?
When the Cavalier Daily prints articles such as this, it merely proliferates the chauvinist attitude that it’s OK to humiliate women because, after all, they’re just women.
Catherine Vieweg
CLAS I