OWL's incoherent view of campus feminism

The Organization of Women Leaders (OWL), according to its mission statement, is "dedicated to embracing the diversity, transforming the perceptions, and challenging the conventions of woman's role in our campus, community, and world." Behind such innocuous cliches, however, lies a reductive and incoherent understanding of the female human person.

Perhaps it is too much to expect consistency from a "feminist" organization that in the past has sold tight "Hooters" T-shirts and put up posters with pictures of skinny, airbrushed models wearing tiny dresses and thigh-high boots. All this, we are told, affirms women's sexual liberation and "reclaims" traditional symbols of oppression, thereby empowering women. Many of us instinctively recoil at OWL's crass brand of feminism but find it difficult to articulate why their approach is so wrongheaded. OWL offers no substantive vision of womanhood; in "rewriting the definition of feminism" OWL has defined feminism away into pure subjective choice.

What is feminism? The individual woman, OWL says, ought to define it for herself. For the Organization of Women Leaders, and its $50,000 annual budget, the current cast of officers decides what being a woman means. In an October 2002 letter to the editor of The Daily Princetonian, OWL officers quickly dismissed an alternate vision of feminism, not because the argument was unsound but because its proponents had not taken steps toward organizing events from within OWL. Said the officers: "until then, their critique of 'OWL-style feminism' is merely words." The letter proved that OWL's version of feminism is not grounded in reason, but in power. Hence, they dismissed one vision for feminism — very different from their own — because its supporters had not organized OWL events.

Recent events have confirmed the incoherence of OWL's position. During bicker week, OWL battled the objectification of women and social pressure in the eating clubs by posting fliers and circulating a bill of rights that denounced nude pictionary, lap dances, and the orgasm game. Yet, the day before bicker ended OWL decided to advocate the very objectification of women which they had previously opposed: the organization began to advertise the "Pleasure Workshop," which instructs women on giving themselves orgasms. The workshop is run by an organization that explicitly advocates self-objectification and throws "Porn Parties," encouraging women to give and receive lap dances and to participate freely in strip teases.

While they purport to "embrace the diversity . . . of woman's role[s]," OWL in fact adheres to one point of view: moral relativism. In doing so, they exclude the point of view upon which the feminist movement was founded, departing from the ideals of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the first women leaders of the American feminist movement. Unlike the sponsors of the "Pleasure Workshop," Cady Stanton believed in objective truth, as she wrote in the Seneca Falls Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." Unlike OWL, she embraced a single vision of the female human person.

Since OWL's mission is not founded upon any abiding principle, we as woman leaders at Princeton cannot depend upon them to offer a consistent vision of what a woman leader ought to be. Their fad of this week has been to advocate the self-objectification of women through the "Pleasure Workshop." An integrated and healthy womanhood incorporates sexuality as an important element of a person who is also intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and moral. The dissociation of any one aspect of a woman, sexual or otherwise, from the whole reduces her to only a part of who she truly is. A comprehensive picture of an authentic feminism cannot be worked out in the space of a newspaper column. But I can suggest a new direction: women must be valued by themselves and by others as whole persons and not as instruments. The faults of OWL's program are clear.

Cason Crosby is a Wilson school major from Magnolia Springs, Al.