CAITLIN FLANAGAN engages in stereotyping and collective guilt. Because if you have a few bad anecdotes about a group, it justifies acting against every member of the group. So long as . . . well, you can guess the rest.

UPDATE: From the comments: “I had a bad date in college one time. I think that sororities should be shut down.” Let me just say: Caitlin Flanagan should be ashamed to have put this out under her name. It’s a joke. She’ll never again have the credibility that she had before this sad piece of work was published. Not only is it sexist. It’s dumb.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mr. Bingley emails:

I was a student at UVa during those exact years (82-86). What happened to poor Ms. Securro was disgusting, horrific and inexcusable and I’m glad that there is justice being served, however belatedly and yet I’m fully aware that it can in no way right the wrong that was committed. I also should point out that I did not belong to a fraternity and never attempted to join one; hell, I think that in my 4 years at Virginia I maybe went to three fraternity parties (I hated how they spilled so much beer over the floors of those gorgeous houses they had and they were too noisy and loud for my taste). Also, as only about 1/3 of students belonged to fraternities, one could quite easily have a wonderful and social four years at UVa and basically never step into one.

But this article isn’t at all about Ms. Securro, is it? It’s about the demons that inhabit dear fragile Miss Flanagan’s mind. The key sentences (“They are built of the same Jeffersonian architecture as the rest of the campus. At once august and moldering, they seemed sinister, to stand for male power at its most malevolent and institutionally condoned.”) speak of that same sort of Andrea Dworkin mindset that was all too prevalent in that era: “Every! Telephone! Pole! Is! A! Penis! And! Wants! To! Rape! Me!”

Virginia is currently 56% women and 44% male. If someone is being “robbed” of a chance at an education I would politely suggest it isn’t the young ladies.

I write this as the father of a rising HS senior Daughter who just completed a week of visiting colleges, including Virginia, and I have no out-of-the-ordinary qualms about her attending there or any of the other fine institutions we visited last week (sadly, UT was not on her list).

Yes, the whole piece had a rather musty quality, in addition to its other flaws.

UPDATE: More criticism from Ann Althouse. “Why don’t women claim the power they have instead of running to Daddy (i.e., the government)?”