Praise for Kipnis Book Review

(Letter)

6 November 2017

Dear Spartacists:

Kudos for your passionate review of Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (Workers Vanguard, 3 November). Once again, you defend the right of people to engage in consensual sex regardless of age and oppose laws against “crimes without victims” such as prostitution, gambling, drug use, and pornography. Your article echoes a point I too have been making by pointing to the irony of how people of my generation struggled in college against in loco parentis, whereas “students today invite college administration snoops into their bedrooms.” How sad that so-called progressive students and even leftists today would be looking to the state as their protector instead of asserting their own agency.

It is ironic too that it took a right-wing Trump administration and its Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to take the sensible step of reversing Obama’s revision of Title IX guidelines that stripped the accused of any rights. It is sad to see how some leftist groups actually oppose this sensible step. One is tempted to conclude that the antisex feminists Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller have succeeded in the end. Victimology reigns today not only among many feminists, but also among so-called “LGBTers.” What a shame!

Yours,
David Thorstad