By SAMANTHA K. CHU ’11
News Staff
Right-wing blogger, author and columnist Michelle Malkin came to Wellesley on Monday. Originally slated to discuss “Standing up to the Girls Gone Wild Culture,” Malkin switched topics to what she called “standing up to misogyny on the left.”
“I think it’s important particularly for students at a women’s college to think about,” Malkin said. “I’ve experienced in my own career as a professional journalist and as someone who has identified as a conservative...a particular kind of treatment that I’ve also seen prominent conservative women experience. I diagnosed it last year: conservative female abuse.”
“We know that Malkin is a controversial figure and a political figure,” Jillian Cunningham ’10 of the Wellesley College Republicans (WCR) said before the lecture. Jodi Beyer ’11, also of the WCR, agreed, “Our club does not agree with her on all her opinions and views. There are many opinions and ideas that make up any political party or group and it is important to hear views that differ from your own and the ones you are surrounded by.”
Beyer continued to voice her concern that some people in the Wellesley community were not too supportive of the event. “We are a minority on this campus and are constantly berated by many of the members of this community. We stood by the right of the people at this school to air their opinions and bring speakers we disagree with. But many do not think we afford the same treatment…I hope many Wellesley students and faculty…realize that they are not as tolerant as they believe they are.”
Nonetheless, Cunningham said WCR highly anticipated the event because, “We want to get our name out on campus. We are a strong, active club, but people assume that we don’t exist.”
Mixed reactions greeted Malkin’s talk before she even reached the podium. Attendees to the lecture were greeted by a leaflets objecting to her visit. The leaflets read: “Michelle Malkin states that Japanese American internment was ‘not unpleasant’ and that the barbed wire surrounding the camps was only ‘symbolic.” They also included excerpts from Malkin’s book, “In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror,” and stated, “Wellesley College Paid $10,000 to hear Michelle Malkin’s ‘words of wisdom’ and ‘build community’ on campus.”
The conservative author and commentator spoke to a jam-packed Pendleton Atrium about the stages of misogyny against conservative women, which she termed, “infantilization,” “sexualization,” “demonizaion” and “dehumanization.” Controversial beauty pageant contestant Carrie Prejean, former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, former First Lady Laura Bush, and herself were among her most prominent examples of targets of this “peculiar pathology.”
“I think there’s something particular about conservative women, particularly minority women…that brings the worse kinds of liberal racism,” Malkin, who is Filipino-American, said. “I had Gawker [a blog] make jokes about ping pong balls, and I won’t get any further than that. And this is considered acceptable discourse, apparently on the left.”
Hillary Clinton, one of Wellesley’s most famous alumna, also did not escape Malkin’s notice. “Reflecting on all this treatment reminds me of a pledge she had concocted after the infamous Rutgers incident with Don Imus,” Malkin said. She quoted Clinton when describing a pledge that Clinton had challenged women to take after the Rutgers University women’s basketball team controversy: “Will you be willing to speak up and say, enough is enough, when women or minorities or the innocent or powerless are marginalized…will you say there is no place, or ever was, or certainly isn’t now, for disrespect or bigotry to be seen as funny?”
Malkin went on to declare that “this pledge seems to have been forgotten…or certainly not applied, to those on the right side of the aisle,” citing Clinton’s association with a blog called Fire Dog Lake. This blog, Malkin said, had attacked Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher as a “prostitute and a bribe-taking corporate whore,” as well as referred to conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham as “the b-word and the c-word.”
The talk ended with Malkin calling “for the conservative women in this room [to have] no fear for calling these people out…for calling them out for the lip service they pay to fight racism or sexism compared to their actions.” She had words as well for the liberals in the room: “A reckoning and an acknowledgement between rhetoric and reality is definitely required. I make no bones about the fact that many people on the right who have engaged in vile rhetoric against women in the left. But there I think this is a difference in degree and depth particularly against women on the right.”
The audience was respectful and attentive through Malkin’s discourse; questions were fielded and read out afterward by former Committee for Legislative and Political Action chair Rose-Ellen El Khoury.
A salient point of discussion after all the final applause died out was Malkin’s discussion of partisanship and misogyny. Many students who identified themselves as liberals expressed the sentiment that the controversial blogger did not directly answer one of the questions asked, “Why must misogyny be partisan, instead of just what it is?”
“There was a decidedly partisan slant to her talk,” one student said, who requested to remain anonymous. “She used examples mostly from the extreme left and hardly any from the right…Even if didn’t admit it, the implication was there.”