Dines' Message Alienates Rather than Convinces Audience

Author: Bryan Goldberg

The idea of taking one month out of each year to recognize a specific group of people or a specific cause is growing in popularity, and this month's decision to reflect upon issues concerning violence against women has been met with great success.
Unfortunately, one of the sponsored events that received the most attention was a speech by media critic Gail Dines, whose problematic rhetoric alienated many of the people she was trying to convince. While Dines' speech was not enough to spoil this successful awareness month, it certainly did nothing to change the minds of future "corporate fat cats."
The core of Dines' presentation revolved around the showing of media images, most of which featured women in either submissive or masochistic poses, followed by witty comments in which she denounced the images as either offensive, absurd or both.
The problem is that images of this nature have been relatively widespread for nearly a century, meaning that her presentation did not touch upon anything new. Many people around the world enjoy bondage or masochistic sexual acts, and this sub-industry generates substantial annual revenue. So Dines' ability to locate two dozen photos hardly qualifies her as a sleuth. Her denunciation of people who enjoy alternative forms of erotica is also questionable in and of itself, since the condemnation of sexuality opens a floodgate of other close-minded forms of hatred.
Dines' presentation was also flawed since she completely ignored the existence of the plethora of pornographic images that feature heterosexual men in bondage or masochistic positions. If it had been her intent to deliver a credible speech, then she should have at least mentioned their existence.
When this point was brought up to her, she tried to explain that men are to blame when women perform submissive sex, and that men are also the guilty party when they themselves engage in submissive sex. She argued that women are forced by men to assume the role of "dominatrix." Close analysis of that last statement illustrates exactly how oxymoronic her arguments were.
One would have thought that a liberal speaker discussing social issues of gender and race would be above the fallacy of broad generalizations. Surprisingly, Dines made many of them. Perhaps the most noteworthy was her comment that business school students are "vile" and "slimy." Generalizing and insulting business students is no worse than dismissing all gender studies students as "man haters" or "femi-nazis."
She also claimed that if we were to have a "heterosexual awareness week" that "Monday would be incest day, Tuesday would be rape day, Wednesday would be pedophilia day, etc." The only reason this statement was not entirely offensive was because it was so outrageous and unsubstantiated that it instantaneously discredited the speaker. Dines claims to be an activist for women and minorities, but she proved to be nothing more than a charlatan. A real activist can achieve his or her goal without childishly insulting the supposed opposition.
Dines' questionable rhetoric would have been more tolerable had she limited her speech to her supposed area of expertise. Unfortunately, she chose to break the single most important rule of argument by broaching topics in which she clearly had very little understanding. During the course of her argument, she lashed out against capitalism, the Academy Awards, corporations and our nation's foreign policy - rarely did she succeed in tying these off-topic ramblings to her ambiguous thesis.
Her hatred of capitalism was tied to the fact that it allows pornography to exist. Perhaps Ms. Dines would have preferred to live in Moscow during the 1950s, or better still, she might have enjoyed Iraq under the leadership of Saddam Hussein considering that she was so fervently anti-war. Both regimes restricted the production of pornography.


Bryan Goldberg is an
economics major from Los Altos, Calif.