Letters to the Editor

OWL's version of feminism is unpredictable, inconsistent

In her recent letter to the Editor, Jessica Brondo says: "It is upsetting how willing people are to disparage OWL without actually speaking to an officer to learn the exact intentions of our event." What is so distressing about researching the merits of an event by investigating its host organization (i.e. CAKE)? Shouldn't the careful reader be expected to consider the source of his information?

Imagine the following situation: You have a daughter, and she is invited to her classmate's birthday party. The invitation says that an organization with an innocent-sounding alias will be at the party. While you are unsure as to the aims of this organization, you discover that it has a web site. To find out more information, you can either examine the web site or call the parents of your daughter's friend. Would you be more apt to find unbiased information from a secondhand opinion or from the organization itself?

Ms. Brondo also expresses her bewilderment at Ms. Crosby's complaint that the sponsor of the "Pleasure Workshop" advocates self-objectification. One need only take a quick look at the organization's web site — the contents of which are better left unspoken — to realize that its mission is, among other things, to embrace self-objectification: "What CAKE does basically is combine both women's sexual needs: to be subjects and objects at once with neither role privileged by the environment."

Perhaps, as Ms. Brondo assures us, the "Pleasure Workshop" means to address "the misrepresentation and inaccurate portrayal of women in the media and entertainment." Yet, whatever the programmed topic of discussion, the fact remains that its host organization states its agenda unambiguously.

Finally, Ms. Brondo pledges that OWL does "accept all views of feminism." This is an interesting allegation, considering OWL's interest in correcting false depictions of women in the media and in entertainment. Ms. Brondo's claim that women are being "misrepresent[ed]" in the arts supposes that there in fact exists a proper way to represent the female person. Such a view is, of necessity, inconsistent with their mission statement, which promises to "[challenge] the conventions of women's roles in our campus, community, and world."

The unpredictability of OWL's feminism is becoming quite predictable. Elizabeth Valvano '04