The Socialist Spectator / Peep Show
Brock, David
THE SOCIALIST SPECTATOR PEEP SHOW by David Brock y ou can tell a lot about a group by its enemies, and if this year's annual "Socialist Scholars" conference gave an award, it would have gone to...
...Eco-Feminism...
...The choice, she tells them, "is rob or be robbed...
...This is, after all, a family magazine...
...It seems that a group of about 100 "feminist artists" of the lesbian persuasion slink, when the urge moves them, into a Greenwich Village basement to produce and watch their own flagellating fantasies on film...
...This induces many of her more promising employed students to "steal from their employer...
...The chic cause for leafleters this year was "boycott Greyhound and Frank Lorenzo...
...Held at New York's City University the first weekend of April, this year's conference was entitled, "Democratic Upheavals and the End of the Cold War," not an unappropriate theme for the world's remaining socialists to ponder...
...It makes class distinctions visible...
...Some were still too shook to take sides...
...George Vickers of Brooklyn College weighed in, "Somehow, the Sandinistas are out of power...
...I have them count how many public toilets are in each, and bring back samples of the toilet paper...
...Men ejaculate outside the body, eroticizing birth control...
...Debbie Does Dishes is about a Jewish housewife who does it with anybody who comes to the door, with no post-coital regrets...
...where the fur flew over who is to blame for the Sandinista electoral catastrophe: Did the "moderate" comandantes "betray" the Revolution by not adhering to the Leninist line, or did the very "structure set by the market and U.S...
...They show older women getting it...
...Do the Right Thing Revisited...
...I tell them those are their only two choices...
...in fact, at the opening session, a menacing representative of the Greyhound union promised "more violence" if Greyhound management didn't come to the negotiating table...
...David Brock is a John M Olin fellow at the Heritage Foundation...
...The impressive array of workshop offerings was another sign that the left's fingers remain stuck in many pies: Cross National Perspectives on Work, Welfare, and the Poverty of Women...
...into the university...
...THE SOCIALIST SPECTATOR PEEP SHOW by David Brock y ou can tell a lot about a group by its enemies, and if this year's annual "Socialist Scholars" conference gave an award, it would have gone to Francis Fukuyama, the much-derided "philosopher from the RAND Corp...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990...
...Roundtable on Ecology, Economy, and Equality: A Black, Red, and Green Perspective...
...But the people will bring down the wall of capitalist oppression, too, realizing that the Revolution of 1917 was a heroic step in mankind's struggle for control over his own fate...
...As "People's Libido Exhibit A," Ranz introduced Shades of Ecstasy, a "socialist film about a group of women factory workers who have orgies on their lunch break...
...Rothenberg sends her students at the state's William Paterson College into the field to perform "class analysis of shopping malls...
...more women...
...The Devil and Miss Jones stars a flat-chested woman...
...In his spare time, Gold organizes Gestapo-style sexual harassment committees on campus...
...This came as no surprise, given the limits to which the left is pushing the notions of artistic relativism and free expression these days, insisting that the production and exhibition of homoerotic and pedophiliac images be not only constitutionally protected but federally funded...
...The crowd roared its approval, while I looked around in vain for undercover G-men...
...And yet the Orwellian wet dream of the distinguished Daniel Singer of the distinguished Nation magazine still recurs...
...Besides, today it might ultimately be the decent thing to let the left wallow in its own depravity...
...Indeed, despite the "democratic upheavals" of recent months, signs of the socialist left's political relevance were abundant...
...Race and sex are not God-given categories" but configurations of the "white, male, Christian, straight, European" hierarchy: thus the dreary news from Paula Rothenberg's "New Jersey Project on Integrating Scholarship on Gender...
...Bull-dykes look like the girl next door...
...Said the grisly Gilbert: "My own fantasy involves tying up two women and a man . . . " No, I better not go on...
...Milling about were celebs like guerrilla-philosopher Ruben Zamora, an important player in Salvadoran politics, and frumpy feminoid Babs Ehrenreich...
...He promised to bring more blacks...
...Gold hones in on "racism and sexism in business, the pernicious patriarchal system...
...Apparently, it started as a high school nickname, owing to her ample chest size...
...Last year, the pornography panel was dominated by febrile feminist censors...
...The panel far outdrew the others, and with the exception of some nervous snickering, the audience proved quite pro-porn...
...Palestinian Women in the Struggle for Peace and Liberation...
...Pantheon: Publishing and Corporate Censorship...
...Socialism's apologists are still reeling, all the more as Fukuyama's scenario plays out in Eastern Europe...
...Closer to home, the socialist book fair's main feature was Keep Hope Alive: Jesse Jackson's '88 Campaign (a coffee table book...
...In the end, everyone seemed to agree with Jack Hammond of Hunter College: "We'll have a militant form of FSLN opposition, the politics of street battles...
...Gay men are not punished for being gay...
...Stephen Gold teaches a required business ethics course at the University of Connecticut, which means "students must take Marx...
...Claiming to have viewed more than 10,000 flesh-baring films, the aesthete went on to delineate the "liberating" qualities of porn: "You see things Hollywood won't show, like the Lady Godiva position, which has the woman dominant...
...In keeping with the weekend's secular tone, I spent the better part of Palm Sunday at a workshop called Pornography with a Human Face: Toward a Sexual Glasnost...
...Pornography undoes stereotypes...
...CUNY Chancellor Joseph Murphy was also present, a self-described "radical in the real sense of the word...
...They find out their boss is secretly taping them, and they take control of the factory in anger...
...Gay Men's Liberation...
...Panelist Pablo Gonzales Casanova, a Mexican intellectual, stood before the audience, announced his "emotional involvement with Cuba and Nicaragua," and began to cry...
...so she takes it upon herself to get them to "question their allegiance to the rich...
...they're rewarded with orgasms...
...As the hallway chatter indicated, these are the sorts of people who still hold "health care" conferences in places like Mozambique...
...After lunch, I stopped by the workshop on "Teaching Marxism: Activism in the Classroom," where a panel of clever professors explained how they propagate their malignant message to a wholly apathetic or even hostile student audience...
...At New Haven's Albertus Magnus College, 80 percent of Gail Presby's students have the appalling habit of voting Republican...
...After reading a poem about the evils of the male sex organ, (by way of introduction, if you will), Ame Gilbert began to illuminate the world of "alternative porn...
...The methodology is path-breaking: "They go to a boutiquey mall and a mall for the masses...
...who last summer declared that democratic capitalism is the end point of history...
...A pair-of-strokers...
...Adult video consultant" Sheldon Ranz warmed up with a comparison of Gorbachev's economic reform programto the masturbatory act: "What do you call a pair of Soviets watching porn under Gorbachev...
...Professor Presby's integrity extends as well to the realm of intellect: "I give them a text of Marx and a text of an outlandish right-winger like Milton Friedman...
...I skipped all these in favor of a Satur- 1 day morning session on Nicaragua: Whither the Revolution...
...this year it was the socialist pornographers who got their say...
...As he described it at the opening plenary session, "The people were getting rid of one form of tyranny, Stalinism, and exchanging it for the coercion of another, the dazzling tyranny of the market...
...more Hispanics...
...One salutary result of this adolescent trauma is the ease with which she slips into the point of view of "a repressed man with a breast fetish...
...Cocaine, Covert Operations, and the Constitution (conducted by—who else?—the Christic Institute...
...Yet as Singer's contortions suggest, these same socialists are not quite ready to have their political obituaries written...
...foreign policy" preordain defeat...
...Most pick Marx...
...A writer of naughty novels, Forlander reveals the complex intellectual history behind her pen name, Katie Nipps...
...Sharing the dais with Ranz were "feminist-socialist" Vivian Forlander, a kind of bubbly, bosomy Susan Sontag, and Ame Gilbert, of the "Carnival Knowledge Collective...
...more gays...
Vol. 23 • June 1990 • No. 6
