Controversy at a women's college

Through Alt Weeklies, I found this interesting article from East Bay Express about a fight between Oakland Mills College and Hustler Magazine. It's a kind of confusing article--the writer is more interesting in heaping disdain on feminists than explaining the situation--but from what I gather, a male grad student at Mills crashed something called the Fetish Ball and wrote about the experience for Hustler, whose editors then tweaked it to resemble the "all the lesbians and feminists need is some good dick" viewpoint, which the original writer claims was not his intention. Indeed, the writer should be offended if it was the editors and not himself who introduced the phrase "hairy dykes" into the article.

This is one of those articles that makes feel hopelessly out of it. I went to a nice little Catholic university, and while shenaningans were part of college life, anything remotely resembling a Fetish Ball is way out of my experience. Not that I have a problem with it, of course, but I just can't imagine using school avenues to create a party like this. What I found interesting was that this whole uproar has caused the organizers to consider banning men from the ball in the future.

In a letter to the Mills College Weekly, the school newspaper, Fetish Ball organizers Lauren White and Tiffany Bennett considered the possibility of banning men from future balls. "We firmly believe that women, not men, own our sexuality, and that it is our right to identify and express ourselves as we choose," they wrote.

I find that to be a puzzling way of dealing with the situation. Men in general are not the problem, it seems to me. And banning them sends the wrong message, I would think. The mere presence of a man doesn't mean that he automatically "owns" the situation. This is not a small thing to a straight woman like me who has to navigate a world where it's assumed in many circumstances that heterosexual sex is performed by women for men.

I have sat here and tried to figure out exactly how a straight woman "expresses" her sexuality without including members of the sex she is oriented towards. A straight woman expressing her sexuality with other women seems to me to be the sort of thing that would be insulting to lesbians, because it's borderline Lesbian Until Graduation behavior. I guarantee that if they ban men from this event, the straight women will end up treating it, whether they mean to or not, as a playtime event before returning to their "real" relationships with men.

This article is trying to belittle feminists, but I sure wish they wouldn't play into the writer's hands. By banning men from a sexualized event because men don't "own" women's sexuality, you're implying that men as a rule can't tell the difference between enjoying women's company and possessing women. That's not true and insults straight women and men who have sexual relationships that aren't about possession and dominance.

Of course, Hustler is making things worse all around with this stupid knee-jerk anti-feminism that led the editors to go in and make changes to make the students of the university seem both man-hungry and man-hating, a peculiar stereotype of feminists that just won't die. In doing so, they only bolster the stereotype that porn is automatically sexist and homophobic. I guess flare-ups like this are upsetting to me because it not only aggravates stereotyping within the communities involved but it also gives each side a chance to build up the stereotypes of the other to uninvolved people.