Just in time for Women's History Month, here's a report from the Independent Women's Forum on how women's studies textbooks miseducate students. Divided into three sections--"Errors of Fact," "Errors of Interpretation," and "Sins of Omission"--the report shows how core women's studies texts manipulate students by creating and perpetuating a variety of misconceptions about such central women's issues as the wage gap, the frequency of rape and domestic violence, and the much-touted educational bias against women. Explaining that the survival of women's studies as a discipline depends on maintaining the feeling of urgency that originally animated the women's movement, the report documents how, in the name of "transforming knowledge," women's studies essentially sacrifices its educational responsibilites to an ideologically narrow, ethically fraught politics of self interest. (Lest knees begin jerking now in some academic quarters--and I feel sure that they will--I urge those who think this study reeks of anti-feminist misogyny to read the report first and form judgements later.)

The report follows the IWF's publication of an ad in several college newspapers last May. Entitled "Take Back the Campus," the ad attempted to do for feminism what David Horowitz had done for the reparations argument: it sought to demystify the idea of women's oppression by debunking ten commonly held "facts" as feminist mythography. The ad ran at Princeton and Yale without much fuss. But at UCLA all hell broke loose when women students joined in protest, demanding an apology from the Daily Bruin, denouncing the editors' decision to run the ad as cowardly, and denouncing the ad itself as hostile and damaging. The group was led by Christie Scott, a double major in women's studies and American literature and culture, who said that she found the ad "extreme," "hateful," "violent," and full of "vague accusations." "A lot of the facts are slanderous or demeaning," she said. That last one is worth thinking about. Question: How can a fact be slanderous or demeaning? How can the truth be untrue? Answer: When it contradicts your ideology or inconveniences your sense of yourself as a victim. Much of the controversy centered around the ad's dismissal of feminism's favorite trump card: the claim that 1 in 4 women is raped in her lifetime. Tina Oakland, director of the UCLA Center for Women and Men and one of the leaders in the protest, defended the 1 in 4 statistic by claiming that it was cited on the websites of the FBI and AMA. She was wrong. And when confronted with her error, she resorted to the exact sort of fanatical doublespeak that the ad sought to expose. "The statistics don't really matter that much in the big picture," she said. "We're just trying to focus on the real issue here .... not bicker about numbers."