Harmless Old Joke Brings Fascistic Response at International Studies Association

You may have heard the old joke while riding an office building elevator. Someone standing near the buttons asks, “What floor?” and a wise guy says, “Hardware” or “Women’s Lingerie.” It wasn’t that funny, until it was discovered at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA) that this innocuous gag can cause feminazis’ hollow heads to explode:

Richard Ned Lebow, a professor of political theory at King’s College London, and Simona Sharoni, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Merrimack College, ended up in the same crowded elevator during a conference at a Hilton in San Francisco last month.

Lebow used the “Women’s Lingerie” version of the joke when another guy asked what floor, causing Sharoni to join in the #MeToo Reign of Terror with maximum vindictiveness. She promptly denounced him to the ISA, proclaiming that she was shaken by the incident.

Sordid people who get off by grinding their heel into other people’s faces need only snivel that they are upset over some trivial incident and too neurotic to deal with it. That gives them the whip hand. Whimpering victims devoid of self-respect are the Master Race in a world run by moonbats.

Educrats within the ISA determined Lebow had violated the conduct code.

Lebow wrote to Sharoni, assuring her that it was just an old joke and not patriarchal oppression.

“Like you, I am strongly opposed to the exploitation, coercion, or humiliation of women,” Lebow wrote. “As such evils continue, it seems to me to make sense to direct our attention to real offenses, not those that are imagined or marginal. By making a complaint to ISA that I consider frivolous — and I expect, will be judged this way by the ethics committee — you may be directing time and effort away from the real offenses that trouble us both.”

Sorry, Lebow; embracing moonbattery does not protect you from 2018’s answer to the Salem Witch Trials.

Lebow had now compounded his first crime by mansplaining. Dismissing Sharoni’s frivolous complaint as frivolous was deemed by the ISA to be a “more serious violation” even than the elevator joke.

Lebow was told to write an “unequivocal apology” to Sharoni and submit a written copy by May 15 to the association’s executive committee. The apology should focus on Lebow’s actions, rather than Sharoni’s perceptions of them, it said, adding that if he failed to comply, the executive committee would consider appropriate sanctions.

Finally, a ray of sunshine penetrates the miserable gloom; Lebow refused to do it.

He also sent an email to colleagues calling his treatment “a horrifying and chilling example of political correctness” that “encourages others to censor their remarks for fear of retribution.”

Now he’s in for it. Naturally, Sharoni et al. will want his head, as an example to others who might rebel.

“For decades, women and other marginalized groups in the academy had to put up with white men who decided what counts as a violation and what is ‘frivolous,’” she wrote in an email. “As someone who has dedicated her life to confronting sexism (and other forms of discrimination and oppression) in academic spaces, I cannot and will not remain silent when misogyny is at play.”

Bursting into guffaws at this absurd, malign, and utterly useless creature would no doubt constitute more misogyny.

Kudos to Lebow for holding his ground; hopefully his career will not be destroyed as a result. Totalitarian systems take root because people find it safer not to stand up to bullies like Simona Sharoni. Before you know it, anyone who deviates in the slightest way from orthodoxy is immediately set upon and destroyed. Academia may have already reached this point in the descent into mindless tyranny.

On a tip from Guy B.

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