Columnists! Augh!

Anyone arguing that all media are part of the liberal elite need to read the opinion section of the BG News on a regular basis. This semester especially, they have a lot of columnists who can tow the Conservative line, but few who can put together a valid argument.

Take everybody's favorite hyperbole artist, D.J. Johnson. He recently begged (his words) readers to avoid this year's BGSU production of The Vagina Monologues. Mein Gott in Himmel, how does this happen? It wouldn't be so bad if he said, "I hate it, it's vulgar." No, he called everybody, including cast, to be absent from it. And he's the Asst. Opinion Editor! He should know better!

Anyway, just in case he's the editor laying out the page (and therefore deletes it), I'll reprint my Guest Column here:

There’s a Denis Leary sketch that I enjoy: it’s just a bunch of people saying a taboo word (penis) over and over.

Crude, but effective. I would say that Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues takes a far more artistic and personal approach to a far more important idea, female sexuality.

Not everyone might agree. Columnist D.J. Johnson hates Ensler’s play so much, he appeals to people like me in his reading audience: “Even if you have disagreed with what I have had to say in the past…”

Ah, yes, the wisdom of this particular columnist’s past. First, liberals are treacherous “by nature” (as though it’s a genetic defect). Then, liberalism is a sin. Heck, such columns display the basic inability to distinguish between “liberal” and “not conservative.” After those gems, I thought the BG News had plumbed the depths of disagreeable, ill-formed arguments.

Then came this one.

Here’s what I mean:

Blaming an annual show for the “degradation” of “this great nation”? By such logic, this nation should already be at the gates of Hell. After all, the Vagina Monologues have been around since 1996, and have been performed annually by campuses nationwide in the decade since. And I’m willing to bet it’ll still be performed at BGSU when everybody reading this has graduated. Apocalypse, here we come.

It’s not in my interest to disparage an opinion different than my own. Back in the hoary days of my youth, when I worked on the Opinion page, it was encouraged that columnists had opposing viewpoints. Of course, we usually asked authors to make some attempt at logical arguments, with at least a hint of evidence.

Such is not the case here. Johnson boldly states that because of this show, “If anything, women are more ashamed and more unwilling to discuss any aspect of their sexuality.” That’s what we would call an unsupported assertion masquerading as a fact. Where’s the evidence for this? Something besides anecdotes, please; I can pull those out of my own nether regions.

And while I’m pulling, the author contradicts himself by saying that women “need to talk about their sexuality more.” The contradiction comes when he implies what talking about sex means: only the “sacred” aspect of it, or about assault. Apparently, confidence and empowerment in one’s own sexuality (through the metaphor of the “unspeakable” vagina) is not considered talking about a woman’s sexuality.

While we’re on the subject, and maybe this is a minor point, but since when is a man the expert on what women’s liberation needs? Not to be essentialist, but this is the same columnist who wrote the following in another section of the same paper: “Men always seem to know where the relationship is heading more than women.” With such a viewpoint, he’s now going to argue what is and is not immature?

Even better, Johnson ends the column with a plea that makes me use the term “insufferable” for the first time in my (short) writing career: he asks everyone to avoid the show like the plague, including the cast, if possible. Apparently, in his worldview, attending the Vagina Monologues will do nothing to help women, despite the tangible result of the show’s proceeds going to the Cocoon shelter and SAAFE.

I could go on about the hyperbole Johnson engages in that no serious columnist should (This script is the single document that has jeopardized American morality? Worse than The Last Temptation of Christ, the existence of a porn industry, the re-emergence of the Gnostic texts, or even Maplethorpe’s art?!). But I’ve already wasted enough ink.

Perhaps I should just leave with a hypothetical: Let’s set the Puritanical views in a Johnson column next to Ensler’s script, and ask women which one is more likely to hinder the progress of female equality.
All I ask (not beg, and not on my knees), is that people see the show once in their lives, especially if the proceeds are being donated. In this case, it is better to form your own opinion, rather than taking the one found in yesterday’s BG News.