A year later, little impact from ‘Sluts’ controversy
Thirteen months ago, the Yale Women’s Center threatened legal action against members of the Zeta Psi fraternity. Zeta pledges took a photograph outside the center with a sign reading “We Love Yale Sluts” and posted it online. Staff reporter Lawrence Gipson looks back at the photo that divided a campus only to find that little — if anything — has changed at either the center or the University.
On the night of Jan. 18, 2008, the center sent a campuswide e-mail titled “This Time, We Sue” with a picture of 12 pledges from the fraternity Zeta Psi holding the now-infamous sign. In...
The Women's Center is a joke. Everyone knows it.
Women are NOT a joke. Women are beautiful, dignified, strong individuals.
Sadly, the Women's Center has nothing to do with that; instead the WC is content to parrot the usual hyper-feminist tropes that get them marginalized by reasonable people.
The Zeta Psi incident was immature. The response of the Women's Center was even more lacking in emotional and mental maturity.
I would say that the method chosen by the members of Zeta Psi fraternity to express their alleged respect for their female classmates is suspect at best.
I don't understand -- Zeti Psi committed an act of sexual harassment, according to Yale regulations, as they do every year as an initiation rite, and the WC threatened to sue Yale for failing to prevent or respond to systematic sexual harassment.
That's not "hyper-feminist" or a "joke." It's ethically, legal right.
It's sad that this incident and the response to it doesn't seem to have generated anything more than a brief flurry of "dialogue" which mostly consisted of angry, emotional outbursts.
Let's take this as a case study of how NOT to respond to this kind of incident in the future. The WC's threat of legal action was over-the-top and counterproductive: People won't be able to talk openly and honestly about a difficult issue if they think that anything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law. Meanwhile, Zeta Psi seems to have little interest in assuring people that anything they said in their little PR campaign last year was genuine. So both sides have retreated to their respective corners, and we're right back to square one (or worse).
Hopefully next time we can learn from these mistakes and form a response that will bring the campus closer together in true dialogue, not drive it apart with anger and threats. If we've learned that lesson, then maybe there's a silver lining in this sad story after all.
All told, Zeta Psi winds up having served us with a kiddish vignette of male Yale "educator" officials' scandalously scientifically ignorant rejection of Aliza Schvart's senior academic art project. See also recently Nadya Suleman, human fertility and reproductive sciences.
What comes across quite clearly in this is that the people who are in charge of the WC now don't approve of the way the people who were in charge before them handled the situation. So why continue to hold it against the Center?
It may have given the YWC "leverage" but definitely not legitimacy.
"Gipson looks back at the photo that divided a campus only to find that little — if anything — has changed at either the center or the University"... meaining they still love Yale SLUTS??
Does the YDN still need to keep using the word 'sluts' in big, bold writing. We all know what the sign said.
Sadly, most people still don't get what this was even about.