"Taking Back the Campus": Right-Wing Feminism as the "Middle Ground"

by Courtney Bailey

Since the late 1990s, the Independent Women's Forum has run two major campaigns on the campuses of American colleges and universities. One, entitled "Free Cupid!," depicts Cupid with a ball and chain around his feet, hauling himself past a theatre filled with people waiting to see Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues. The ad's text urges college students to reject the play's message of "female victimology" and "male-bashing" in favor of traditional forms of dating. Unlike "hooking up," traditional dating involves "mutual respect" and "a dash of romance," demonstrated by "tak[ing] someone out to dinner" or "buy[ing] someone flowers." Although the ad does not specify exactly who should do the taking or the buying, its pairing of "female victimology" and "male-bashing" nonetheless presumes the universality of male-female couples. In this way, it attempts to combine gender egalitarianism with conservative notions of heterosexual romance. Rather than simply rejecting feminism, then, the ad yokes it to conservative values. For instance, the ad's slogan, "take back the date," reworks the phrase, "take back the night." Instead of reclaiming public and private space from patriarchal violence, the ad purports to reclaim idealized heteronormativity from feminism run amok. It does so, not in the name of male dominance and female subordination, but in the name of gender equality.