Postmodern College, Postmodern Love

Posted on | October 24, 2014 | 84 Comments

Otterbein University is a small, private liberal arts college in Westerville, Ohio, near Columbus. Like most such schools in America, it began with an explicitly Christian purpose:

The university was founded in 1847 by the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. . . . The university is named for United Brethren founder the Rev. Philip William Otterbein.

Also, like most other small, private liberal arts colleges, Otterbein is fairly expensive. Annual tuition is $31,624 at Otterbein, more than three times what in-state students pay at Ohio State (annual tuition $10,037). So, what is the value-added for the Otterbein students?

Why are parents willing to pay such a premium to send their children there? Is it the tranquil beauty of the 114-acre campus? Is it the promise of “an inclusive community dedicated to educating the whole person in the context of humane values”? Or, perhaps, do parents feel that Otterbein’s small size, suburban location and Christian history makes it a safe environment where young people will be protected from the stresses and peer pressure of a big urban school like Ohio State, which has more than 40,000 students on its campus near downtown Columbus?

Whatever the reasons, girls (and their parents) are much more likely to prefer the small liberal arts college: 62% of Otterbein’s 2,479 students are female and 38% male. One might speculate that there is a symbiotic relationship between the type of curriculum offered at Otterbein and the disproportionately female students it attracts. But why merely speculate, when Otterbein is so eager to tell us all about it?

The Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Otterbein is committed to a critical and feminist understanding of gender and power across cultural contexts, social locations, and disciplinary boundaries.
Our program underlines two important and interrelated learning goals:
– A deepened understanding of the history, contributions, conditions, and issues affecting women in local, national, and transnational context
– A broad exploration of the multiple systems and social meanings that construct our understandings of gender and sexuality
We are proud of the fact that we think comparatively and collaboratively about feminist politics, gender categories, and sexual identity and practice.
The program also encourages feminist and anti-oppressive pedagogies in the classroom; supports critical research and faculty development in women’s and gender studies; sponsors co-curricular programming that addresses women’s and gender issues; provides outreach opportunities for the campus community; and offers itself as an ally and advocate for women and GLBTQ students, staff, and faculty at the University.

One wonders what the United Brethren — a sect born of the 18th century “Great Awakening” — and the Rev. Otterbein might think about this “gender and sexuality” and GLBTQ advocacy. The faculty of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Otterbein is led by the director Tammy Birk, an associate professor of English whose specialities include “Critical Feminist Theories”:

I like any project that is experimental in form or content. I like projects that are hybrid or interdisciplinary. I like projects that sit at the intersection of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I like any project that creates or critiques graphic narrative. I like projects that foreground critical theory or cultural studies.

As previously explained in the “Sex Trouble” series, Women’s Studies is interdisciplinary, sharing faculty with other departments. At Otterbein, the program’s faculty includes female professors who are listed as chairs of the departments of Psychology (Michelle Acker), English (Suzanne Ashworth) and Sociology (Heidi Ballard). Thus, Women’s Studies serves as a sort of campus center for an activist agenda whereby this kind of “feminist understanding of gender and power,” etc., is diffused across multiple programs. And the number of students who take Women’s Studies classes is much larger than the number who make Women’s Studies their major or minor, as Daphne Patai explained in Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies:

At my own university, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, several hundred students a year enroll in Women’s Studies courses . . . in large part because certain low-level Women’s Studies courses fulfill the university’s general education requirement in the area of “diversity.” The number of majors, however, is small . . . 30 to 35 . . .

So, on the one hand, the interdisciplinary aspect of Women’s Studies makes such programs a means of supporting a feminist agenda across multiple areas of the curriculum and, on the other hand, many students take Women’s Studies courses as electives to fulfill requirements for their degrees in other fields. What sort of agenda is involved in these classes? Again, from Professing Feminism, here is a quote from “Laura,” a bisexual woman who in the 1990s got a minor in Women’s Studies at an unnamed state university:

The classroom gets divided. . . . There’s always a small group of women who speak out. They always have something to say, they always have a comments on something, and you pretty much get the general feel of all their politics within the first week. . . . It comes down to your sexuality and your political views. It’s like, it seems a lot of times if you’re heterosexual, strictly heterosexual, or conservative, you don’t have the right to say much in Women’s Studies. You’re classified with men.
Sexuality comes up all the time in Women’s Studies class. It’s amazing — it just becomes an issue. People are declaring themselves, what their sexual orientation is, right away. I mean, within a week, you know what everybody in your class is. . . .
A lot of people got triggered by “men men men men men.” I remember somebody just going off and saying, “Can’t you blame anything but men?” . . . In one class this girl said, “All you do is blame men. I happen to like men.” . . . She was attacked. There were mainly three people who jumped in, and they just completely cut her to pieces.

That’s how it was in a Women’s Studies program at a state university in the 1990s. Does anyone think the anti-male/anti-heterosexual climate in such programs has changed since then, except to become even more anti-male and anti-heterosexual? Meanwhile . . .

At Otterbein University, the formerly Christian private college in Ohio where tuition is over $30,000 a year and a 62% female student body lives in “an inclusive community . . . of humane values,” they have sororities on campus, one of which is Kappa Phi Omega. In 2005, the president of Kappa Phi Omega was Alanna Fenton, who also played on the Otterbein Cardinals softball team. And guess what?

We fell in love in college at Otterbein — yea a shocker to us too! Felicity was in Nursing School and Alanna studying Organizational Communications. While Alanna was the president of our sorority Kappa Phi Omega and Felicity was a lowly little pledge the love story began!
Since 5/5/05, we have never been able to get rid of each other . . .

In an inclusive community with humane values, of course, the sorority president will become lesbian lovers with a freshman pledge! This is why Felicity’s parents paid $31,624 to send their daughter to that 144-acre campus, so she could study nursing, acquire humane values and have lesbian sex with her softball-playing sorority president. That’s how “the love story began,” and in 2012 . . .

Esquinas (right) wore a strand of pearls given to her by her mother
on her 18th birthday. Fenton wore a diamond necklace of her grandmother’s
given to her by her mother the night before the wedding.

Now, let me point out that I have no idea if either of these students of humane values were ever enrolled in a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies class while at Otterbein. For all I know, Alanna and Felicity were both lifelong lesbians before they ever set foot on the 114-acre campus of that inclusive community. It is entirely possible that these young lesbians chose Otterbein specifically because of the 62% female student body, which offers abundant opportunities for such “love stories” as theirs. Maybe Otterbein has that kind of reputation, sort of Ohio’s equivalent of Bryn Mawr. Maybe Kappa Phi Omega is known around campus as The Lesbian Sorority, so that if a freshman dyke at Otterbein is looking for a place where she will be welcomed into the sapphic sisterhood, Kappa house is it.

Maybe, but probably not. The story Alanna and Felicity tell would lead us to believe that neither of them had any previous inkling of a same-sex orientation until — “shocker”! — they “fell in love” on May 5, 2005. Does that seem plausible? I don’t know. After months of reading feminist books about how sexuality is “socially constructed,” I’m wondering if maybe there’s not some social construction going on at Otterbein and other such inclusive communities, where the one thing definitely not included among the humane values is the kind of Christianity in which the United Brethren fervently believed.

Postmodernism looks suspiciously like paganism, from a biblical perspective, and if Jesus Christ were to show up tommorow on the Otterbein campus, he’d be shunned and denounced as a hatemonger.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . . And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind . . .”

Given over to a reprobate mind, people do all kinds of foolish things, like spend $31,624 a year to send their daughters to Otterbein.

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Category: Education, Feminism, History, Sex Trouble

Comments

84 Responses to “Postmodern College, Postmodern Love”

Adobe_Walls
October 25th, 2014 @ 12:34 am

And yet there is hope.
Adobe_Walls
October 25th, 2014 @ 12:42 am

That is a much greater threat to society than closet escaping super models. Unlike the super model you highlighted recently both of those women look like prime breeding stock.
Zohydro
October 25th, 2014 @ 12:50 am

Keep telling yourself that!
CPAguy
October 25th, 2014 @ 12:55 am

They are pretty hot. Feminism I can believe in!
Zohydro
October 25th, 2014 @ 12:59 am

I wonder how well these two will age…

I knew of two lesbians, (not a couple, different locales) one a corrections officer, the other an RN… Quite attractive when I knew them a decade or so ago, but I’ve looked them up on FB recently and they’ve become quite androgynous—with the accent on the first two syllables there as they got older, mid to late forties now roughly…
robertstacymccain
October 25th, 2014 @ 1:01 am

You idiot, we can’t oppress them just by looking at them! The Male Gaze is not that powerful.
Fail Burton
October 25th, 2014 @ 1:02 am

The idea gender feminists have a true interest in diverse viewpoints is a shill. They are supremacists and like majority Islamic populations, there is no such thing as a principle or fair play in that scenario; there are only first and second class citizens.

It’s hard to say where this will all lead in America but it’s safe to say it won’t be pretty. Arthur Chu, Jessica Valenti and the reviews editor at Publisher’s Weekly get clean away with the most racist and sexist remarks while the president of the PGA gets ousted for using “Lil girl” as an insult. The question isn’t whether he should’ve been ousted but why he doesn’t have more company.

People aren’t going to take this lying down. Right now we have two types of law in America and they are opposed to one another. Careers are being ended in cases the law doesn’t even enter into it. One can see this confusion played out in the Supreme Court as well as the cases of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in Ferguson. NFL players are having their careers ended in life-long punishments for domestic assault as if the NFL is a parallel system of law. Hope Solo meanwhile continues to play for the U.S. Soccer team after assaulting members of her family.

Orwell warned that this type of fascism would emerge from the Left because of the fact the Left successfully wreathes itself in anti-oppression narratives. It’s the same crying towel the Nazis successfully exploited before the swastika became a symbol of evil.

Something is about to become a symbol of evil in the coming decades and it may resemble something like a donkey.

There is little doubt in my mind the great great grandchildren of liberals will be spitting on their graves.
Zohydro
October 25th, 2014 @ 1:06 am

Advertising and recruiting for Team Homo always works better with attractive people…
FenelonSpoke
October 25th, 2014 @ 1:06 am

Otterbein would be appalled as would all the dead white Christians ministers who founded various school. What seems to be missing from the current culture is the idea that you can love someone without having sex with them-that you can be attracted to them without acting on it and that you can love someone of the same sex whom you aren’t related to without it meaning that you are gay.
I expect they’ll be divorced within ten years if their lesbian orientation wasn’t just a fad for one or both of then. “Oh look. I took a women’s study class. Now I know I’m gay.”

And I can’t imagine that someone in their families wasn’t depressed by the whole thing,
FenelonSpoke
October 25th, 2014 @ 1:14 am

However, people can go to single sex institutions (both male and female) without being gay to start with or becoming gay. I did-and I didn’t date much in college and now I’m married with a child. Then again, the cost of tuition was about 4,000 a year including room and board.
concern00
October 25th, 2014 @ 1:26 am

They look kinda cute. How about some empowering lesbian porn?
robertstacymccain
October 25th, 2014 @ 1:37 am

The look-ism is on the one hand understandable and on the other hand, it’s part of the problem. The tendency to view females as commodities in the marketplace, I understand. But the problem is, young guys aren’t closing the sale.At the point when Alanna met Felicity, Alanna was already 20. You’re telling me that, prior to 20, Alanna had no offers? No boyfriends in high school or college? Ah, but the marketplace is (or seems) glutted with sexually available females to the young man nowadays, so no buyer was willing to close the sale. What’s the old saying, women trade sex for love? Then what happens when the guys aren’t willing to provide love? What happens when the guys expect sex with no strings attached, and don’t even try to add any emotional romance to the bargain? THIS is what happens: Even attractive girls get tired of waiting around for love. They get lonely and … well.

COFFEE IS FOR CLOSERS!

Second prize is the steak knives. Third prize is YOUR FIRED!

These young guys got to step up to the plate, find themselves a woman and OPPRESS her! Damn it, we can’t let 5,000 years of patriarchal domination slip out of our grasp because these young idiots are too busy playing XBox to oppress their womenfolks.
Adobe_Walls
October 25th, 2014 @ 2:34 am

Referring to them as prime breeding stock wasn’t meant solely as a sexist joke. Though as usual that is it’s own virtue.

Compare those two quite lovely ladies to the supermodel. When the average guy looks at the supermodel he won’t be saying wow I want her to be the mother of my children. If he can afford it he might contemplate having a fling.

The current problem isn’t just that today’s young men can’t put down the X-Box long enough to close the sale. It’s that the percentages of the market are changing and not in a young mans favor. It’s not just that they don’t have to buy the cow but that the risk/reward equation is becoming increasingly more lopsided. The consequences, responsibilities and liabilities of any relationship outcome less than ”happily ever after” fall on the guy.

If both of those young women were ”born that way lesbians” (not the norm in my opinion) then they were lost from the jump. We can’t know what opportunities were squandered by their male peers. I suspect their choice of where to attend college wasn’t based on a longing for and lack of suitable suitors.

Societies inability to accept that ”boys will be boys” because that is what they are and should be is beating the male out of boys. It’s no wonder they don’t know how to be men. That and the constant cultural messages that love is in fact ”the white stuff that comes out of their penis”, it’s small wonder that they don’t, or even try to commit. Feminism has drummed into males and females for two generations that men are only are interested in women for sexual gratification, that love is sex and sex is oppression. I don’t wonder that many of both sexes believe them.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
October 25th, 2014 @ 3:29 am

All couples start to look alike as the years roll on…
Evi L. Bloggerlady
October 25th, 2014 @ 3:33 am

There are very few gentlemen manly men anymore. There are gangsters and androgynous hipsters, but few normal men (at least as portrayed in the media). What does the media promote: http://www.buzzfeed.com/saeedjones/8-stunningly-beautiful-androgynous-models
Evi L. Bloggerlady
October 25th, 2014 @ 3:35 am

http://comonocreerendios-lem.blogspot.com/2014/10/teenage-girls-are-wests-center-of.html Nature abhors a vacuum
Adobe_Walls
October 25th, 2014 @ 3:46 am

Bob has a great post on this subject at his place. Don’t forget to read the comments.

http://thecampofthesaints.org/2014/10/24/starved-souls-on-western-youth-embracing-jihad/#comments
Phil_McG
October 25th, 2014 @ 3:55 am

And yet people hate on the PUA’s.
Phil_McG
October 25th, 2014 @ 3:58 am

So they’re both “the bride”? This is confusing.

Did they both walk down the aisle? Who threw the bouquet? Who carries who over the threshold? (The softball players does the carrying, I bet)

They’re unusually attractive for lesbians. God bless em, but most dykes don’t have a lot of options. These girls do, so I wouldn’t be surprised if one or both of them ends up with a man.
Fail Burton
October 25th, 2014 @ 4:07 am

The entire graduating class of women should marry each other and then all become gender studies teachers and live in a giant log cabin held together with love and powerful feminist fumes. They can have loudspeakers playing with the sounds of laughing children.
Phil_McG
October 25th, 2014 @ 4:45 am

Feminism has a lot in common with Jonestown.
TroubleAtTheMine
October 25th, 2014 @ 6:41 am

The elite liberals who want and can afford to send their kids to such colleges are probably thrilled to have their daughters do something so politically correct. It’s their life’s dream to have a lesbian or gay marriage in the family, just as in the sixties every liberal wanted their kids to marry interracially so they could be understanding about it.

And if you are worried about the Christian founders, what about the Christian founders of the church that now has transgender priests? Religion just isn’t what it used to be, all the way around.
robertstacymccain
October 25th, 2014 @ 7:36 am

I can’t imagine that someone in their families wasn’t depressed by the whole thing

Perhaps, but this is the problem with political correctness: It becomes impossible to express certain feelings and, once this has been the case for many years, whatever those feelings are — shame, embarrassment, moral disapproval — ceases to have an tangible reality.

If Alanna Fenton was 22 in 2005, she was 15 when Monica Lewinsky became the world’s most famous cocksucker. This was a very shameful and immoral thing, and yet we were told, “It’s just about sex. Everybody lies against sex. Nobody should disapprove of a married executive being fellated by a girl less than half his age.”

OK, if what Clinton and Lewinsky did was acceptable — as all the bien-pensants assured us it was — then what about lesbian sorority girls? Nobody could possibly disapprove of that, by the Clintonian standards of “morality” we were urged to adopt in 1998.

We as a society have lost an entire vocabulary of words — “deviant,” “abnormal,” “weirdo,” etc. — formerly used to describe sexual perversion. Being unable to speak those words, we eventually become unable to think those thoughts. I’m not someone who goes around saying rude things to people. I do not “hate” people and my accustomed vocabulary does not express hateful feelings. However, when I find myself surrounded by mental midgets and moral cowards who either cannot see the truth or who are afraid to speak the truth, I want to SHOUT TRUTH AT THE TOP OF MY LUNGS.

Linking to Romans 1:18-32? That makes me feel slightly better, but only slightly.
FenelonSpoke
October 25th, 2014 @ 7:40 am

No, people don’t dream that their kids be the first person to have a gay or lesbian marriage in the family. I assume they want their kids to be happy and have fulfilling lives. Of course, they may not mind that their kids are gay but I don’t think they dream of a gay wedding.

Stacy’s post was not about transgender priests and dealt with Otterbein being named after a Christian minister, but yes, of course the church is in trouble. All around? I don’t know about that. The church is growing by leaps and bounds in China and in parts of Africa and I don’t think they have transgender priests yet.
robertstacymccain
October 25th, 2014 @ 7:56 am

They’re unusually attractive for lesbians. God bless em, but most dykes don’t have a lot of options.

Hi, Phil, and welcome to 2014, where feminism has gained the political power necessary to control all major institutions of our culture. Normal male sexuality is deliberately stigmatized and punished, abortion is proclaimed the essence of “women’s rights,” the hiring of homosexuals as school teachers is encouraged in the name of “diversity,” and approval of homosexual behavior has become compulsory, so that anyone who fails to “celebrate diversity” is diagnosed as suffering from a psychiatric disorder called homophobia.

When I was in school, I occasionally enjoyed reading science-fiction novels. Now, I find myself living inside a science-fiction novel, which isn’t quite as much fun as I imagined.
McGehee
October 25th, 2014 @ 8:31 am

(Postmodern love)
Walks beside me
(Postmodern love)
Walks on by
(Postmodern love)
Gets me to the Star Chamber hearing on time
Dledhead
October 25th, 2014 @ 8:43 am

114 or 144 acre campus… Which is it? This playing loose with the facts brings this entire piece into questions! ????
RS
October 25th, 2014 @ 9:13 am

In all seriousness, there are younger men who are prepared to commit to relationships for the long term. The problem is not the men. It is the women who view commitment as a betrayal of their, oft ill-conceived, “values” of pursuing a career and being independent. They see a long term relationship as a drag on their aspirations. Toss in the Feminist/Women’s Studies “Down With Patriarchy” nonsense, and you have the perfect storm of a) women bemoaning an inability to find the right person while b) believing that there’s always more time to establish a family and c) being miserable when it doesn’t work out.

Can you blame men for refusing to play that game, when their desire for commitment is either viewed as “evil” or some sort of hindrance to a “complete” life. Helen Smith was spot-on, but alas, she is shouted down by Progressive Elite.
TroubleAtTheMine
October 25th, 2014 @ 10:31 am

Yes they do, I know people like that personally. Of course they do. It’s all part of the radical left mindset, living out their politics vicariously through their kids. It’s a form of abuse.

And yes there are transgender priests already http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2666207/Transgender-priests-gives-sermon-National-Cathedral-celebrate-Episcopal-Churchs-LGBT-Pride-Month.html

Don’t know why you had to contradict everything I said, but if you can’t resist the compulsion at least google first.
CPAguy
October 25th, 2014 @ 11:01 am

We must all strive to do better in our duty as oppressors.
FenelonSpoke
October 25th, 2014 @ 11:04 am

Gee; I’m disagreeing with some of your POV. So sue me. ;^) What I said was that the church in Africa and China is growing by leaps and bounds and they don’t have transgender priests as far as I know because the church in those places is more conservative. I said nothing about the Episcopal church which is a lost cause and which I know about. The Episcopal Church in America is not the same as the Anglican Church in Africa. American is not the be all and end all of the church. It’s a very unfortunate thing here but the center of Christianity has already shifted to other places. The gates of hell will not prevail against the church.
Adobe_Walls
October 25th, 2014 @ 11:06 am

You left off ”depraved”.
That loss of vocabulary is deliberate as any one who read and was disconcerted or inspired by 1984 will recall. Some words are lost others are simply redefined until dead. For instance the “marriage” depicted in your post. ”A rose by any other name may smell just as sweet but if you start calling every stick protruding from the ground a rose that won’t matter either”.
RS
October 25th, 2014 @ 11:56 am

I would note also that conservative Protestant denominations are either holding their own or growing in this country, as well. It is the liberal, progressive denominations, i.e. UCC, Presbyterians, ELCA which are foundering.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
October 25th, 2014 @ 1:20 pm

Bob is a mensch !
Adobe_Walls
October 25th, 2014 @ 3:10 pm

While I’m sure her parents aren’t glad she’s dead, I’ve no doubt that they are proud of everything St. Pancake learned and did that made her death inevitable. I’d go so far as to speculate they have the same pride in her that a military family might have in their noble warriors.
Daniel Freeman
October 25th, 2014 @ 3:40 pm

She is also shouted down by the likes of Tucker Carlson, who thinks that all those “men on strike” should just man up and take a wife already. He’s living in the past. She sat there next to him, telling him how the world had changed, and he couldn’t hear it.
M. Thompson
October 25th, 2014 @ 5:51 pm

Stop objectifying them during their heroic assault on hetropatriarchal fascism!

Off to re-education for you!

(For the humor impaired, that was a joke. Can any of us say that with a straight face?)
M. Thompson
October 25th, 2014 @ 5:54 pm

Yo! I’m oppressing my Crazy Cat Lady girlfriend every day. She loves it.

But I need some help here. I can’t do it to every woman alone.
Fail Burton
October 25th, 2014 @ 6:31 pm

According to your research, radical lesbian feminists actually believe such places act as a lesbian factory. The funny part is that if you say that can be undone – cured – they call you a bigot. A bigot for following their own logic. That tells you what crazy liars these people are. We give magazine columns and teaching gigs to people we used to put in the nut house.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
October 25th, 2014 @ 6:45 pm

The power of Rule 5 compels you! The power of Rule 5 compels you!
Quartermaster
October 25th, 2014 @ 8:24 pm

I’m so sorry I can’t help. I’m willing, but my bride is just too narrow minded and insists that I restrict my oppressionary efforts to her.
Quartermaster
October 25th, 2014 @ 8:28 pm

Romans 1:18-32 is an important passage, but it details symptoms, not a cause. Those would appear because they rejected God.
Quartermaster
October 25th, 2014 @ 8:29 pm

Such an amateurish denunciation.
Quartermaster
October 25th, 2014 @ 8:29 pm

It’s cheaper since they don’t have to mix any koolaid.
Quartermaster
October 25th, 2014 @ 8:32 pm

What has saved The United Methodist Church has been the African mission field. The libtards are actually trying to limit the activities of the African reps at General Conference. UMC Libtards are genuinely running scared.
Quartermaster
October 25th, 2014 @ 8:33 pm

Many conservative churches, however, have begun showing cracks.
Weedlord BonerHitler
October 25th, 2014 @ 9:06 pm

You see this watch? [yeah] This watch costs more than your car.
Weedlord BonerHitler
October 25th, 2014 @ 9:11 pm

If you’re trying to make people dislike lesbianism, those pictures are not the way to go about it. Otter-barn sounds like a shitty overpriced college, sho’, but I can’t blame women for finding other women attractive, because women simply are attractive. If non-humanoid space aliens from Neptune came to earth, I’d expect them to be attracted to women.

Also, knowing what I know of men, being one myself, if I had a daughter, I might feel safer if she decided to lez out instead of getting with a guy.
theoldsargesays
October 25th, 2014 @ 9:36 pm

I went ahead and clicked the link….
Started scrolling….
Got to #4 and quit….

Nobody could ever confuse them with the Patriarchy.
Zohydro
October 25th, 2014 @ 9:53 pm

“…I can’t blame women for finding other women attractive, because women simply are attractive.”

I used to feel that way…