Lefty Academia Invents A Brand New Kind Of "Violence"
Great piece by Liberal Left Behind on Dr. Jade Schiff's po mo word games to shut down speech of those who don't speak in "approved" victim feminist ways. The quotes are from Schiff's letter to the editor about Christina Hoff Sommers' speaking at Oberlin and a colleague who wasn't quite strident enough in equating physical violence with spoken "violence" (and absolutely absurd and dangerous concept):

Dr. Schiff is acknowledging that saying words and raping a man or a woman in the bushes at knifepoint are two different things. But they're not as different as we might think:

While Copeland recognizes violence in the offenses, the letter writers highlight violence in responses to victims. We might call the latter "discursive violence" because it attacks victims' experiences and their descriptions of and reactions to those experiences.

Here's the main thrust of the article. Dr. Schiff accuses Dr. Sommers and people like her of a brand new kind of violence. "Discursive violence." So now there's "domestic violence," "random acts of violence" and "discursive violence." The appropriation of the word "violence" is troubling and she knows that she's performing a rhetorical magic trick. We're all against violence (unless we're Salon writing about the Baltimore riots), so we will distrust Dr. Sommers because, deep down in our minds, we see that she has been accused of violence. Very slick, Dr. Schiff.

We should also be troubled by Dr. Schiff's assertions that "attacking victims' experiences" and "reactions" is a form of violence. What consequences does this have for law enforcement officers who are duty bound to gather facts that will later be considered by a judge or jury? What does this mean for those judges and juries? The authoritarian left keeps pushing for "personal testimony" to be synonymous with "truth" in the same embarrassing manner as someone reporting a Bigfoot sighting.

Without lifting a finger, discursive violence rejects theses experiences as inarticulate, unintelligible and illegitimate in the public sphere.

It's interesting to point out the irony; Dr. Schiff claims that personal experiences should be trusted inviolate...in a letter concerning the personal experiences of Dr. Sommers.

Copeland himself points in this direction (though he likely meant it metaphorically) when he refers to "the unspeakable horror of sexual assault." What makes it unspeakable, in part, is a public sphere that excludes, marginalizes or derides it.

In an entertaining act of either womansplaining or ventriloquism, Dr. Schiff clears up what her colleague was unable to say. Dr. Copeland's opinion, 99.9% in line with hers, was not good enough. It is not enough to point out that sexual assault is an "unspeakable horror"-which it is, of course-but we must also bring the discussion back to the reason Dr. Sommers should not be allowed to speak in the first place: her research and her claims may or may not be correct, but they undermine radical feminism and must therefore be expunged from the public record.

...Yes, my friends, I am a liberal left behind because I want to come into contact with ideas with which I disagree. I want to be offended at times; such emotions protect me from the cognitive dissonance that will cripple many of those Oberlin protesters when they get into the real world. Most of all, I abhor violence-real violence-and believe that rhetoric should be met with more rhetoric, not Orwellian accusations and a chorus of fingers-in-our-ears "la la la I can't hear you." No matter how much privileged academics wish to redefine words, opposing ideas will never be the equivalent of actual violence.