The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

Their ideological children in identity politics and intersectionality seem content to inhabit an ideological space littered with contradiction, absurdity and hypocrisy. For example, one of the foundational notions of women’s studies and feminist studies was that victims of sexual abuse should be believed. Discussion of rape, abuse, domestic violence and inappropriately wielded power relations lay at the basis of all women’s and feminist studies. Yet when a student of Avital Ronell of New York University filed a Title IX complaint against her in 2017, accusing her of sexual harassment, the alleged harasser found Ronell’s academic colleagues coming out in support for her. Along with Slavoj Žižek and others, Judith Butler was among the signatories to a letter condemning the investigation of Ronell, testifying to her own character (‘the grace, the keen wit’) and attempting the equivalent of a drive-by shooting against the reputation of her male accuser. Specifically they demanded that Ronell ‘be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation’.10 All of which suggested that allegations of abuse are indeed always to be taken seriously, unless the victim is a man or the accused is a professor of feminist literary theory.