Confusing Ancient History With Current Events

The Columbia University Institute for Research on Women & Gender, ”the locus of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship and teaching at Columbia University,” offers an undergraduate degree program as well as a graduate “certification” in Feminist Scholarship. There are some tremendous feminist scholars at Columbia, including Katherine Franke, Carol Sanger and Patricia Williams, whose work I very much admire. But judging by the Graduate Reading List ("a guide to reading for the oral examinations offered by IRWaG as one of the requirements for certification in feminist studies"), at least the law part of the graduate certificate program seems stuck in the 1990s. The most recent source on the “law” reading list is from 1997!
Read the quote in context here.

Keep in mind the St. Valentines Day Massacre, Babe Ruth's 500th home run, and (more to the point) the legal recognition of women as legal persons in Canada were more recent events when "scary monster under the bed" Valerie Solanas published SCUM Manifesto than the book's publication is to ours! It came out a *long* time ago and a *lot* has changed in since then... in the world *and* in feminism. And here's my point: While Professor Crawford is concerned that texts even ten years old are out of date many men are still wigging out over an outlook that's now *forty* years in the past!

So I'll ask again, as I did the other day. Sure, some feminists really do still read Solanas but, seriously,

...how many men are castrated by feminists compared to those actually, really, surgically and non-surgically castrated by anti-feminists? And incidentally no, Lorena Bobbit wasn't a feminist. For that matter, how many men are *figuratively* castrated by actual feminists compared to those figuratively castrated by anti-feminism? And no, Wendy Vitter is not a feminist either.

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See also Ann Friedman's snarky rundown of "Ten (Ancient) Feminist Stereotypes" at Feministing.

[Note: Corrected spelling of "Solanas." --fl]