Memo to editors of campus papers: When the next right-wing ideologue shows up with an ad full of nonsense, just take the money and print it. That way, they will not be able to pose as the victim of “political correctness,” they will not get millions of dollars’ worth of free publicity and their ideas will not acquire the glamour of the forbidden. By the same token, you will not look afraid of debate and controversy, nor will you have to explain why you rejected their ad while printing something equally false, offensive or stupid on some previous occasion.

Never mind that the people accusing you of censorship practice it themselves: In an amusing riposte to David Horowitz’s flamethrower ad opposing reparations for slavery, Salon‘s David Mazel proved unable to place an enthusiastically pro-abortion ad in papers on conservative campuses; and as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting points out, the Boston Globe, which editorialized against students who rejected the Horowitz ad, itself rejected an ad criticizing Staples, a major advertiser, for using old-growth forest pulp in its typing paper. So there, and so there! But you’re in a better place to make such arguments stick if you can stand–however cynically and self-servingly–on the high ground of free speech yourself.

Just as Horowitz faded, having shot himself in the foot by refusing to pay the Daily Princetonian after it printed his ad but editorialized against it, up comes the soi-disant Independent Women’s Forum–you know, that intrepid band of far-right free spirits funded by the ultraconservative Sarah Scaife Foundation–with an ad in the UCLA Daily Bruin and Yale Daily News urging students to “Take Back the Campus!” and “Combat the radical feminist assault on Truth.” The IWF charges “campus feminism” with being “a kind of cult” in which “students are inculcated with bizarre conspiracy theories about the ‘capitalist patriarchal hegemony,'” a fount of “Ms./Information,” “male-bashing and victimology.” Brainwashing isn’t exactly what comes to mind when I think of the revolution in scholarship that has produced such celebrated historians as Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Joan Scott, Rickie Solinger, Leslie Reagan and Kathy Peiss. The sweeping, paranoiac language gives it away–this is IWF member Christina Hoff Sommers speaking from her perch at that noted institution of higher learning, the American Enterprise Institute.

The bulk of the ad consists of a list of “the ten most common feminist myths” and the “facts” that supposedly prove them false. Much of this is lifted from Sommers’s Who Stole Feminism?, a book that attempted to deploy a few gotchas against hyperbolic statistics and questionable studies to deny the significance of violence, sexism and discrimination in women’s lives. I mean, how important is it that “rule of thumb” may not derive, as some feminist activists believe and some newspapers have printed, from an old legal rule permitting husbands to beat their wives with a stick no thicker than their thumb (Myth #4)? Feminists did not make this folk etymology up out of nothing–actually, according to Sharon Fenick of the University of Chicago, writing on the Urban Legends website, it probably goes back to the eighteenth century, when the respected English judge, Francis Buller, earned the nickname “Judge Thumb,” for declaring such “correction” permissible. That it was legal for premodern English husbands to beat their wives within limits is not in dispute (in her book, Sommers obscures this fact by omitting the Latin phrases from a passage in Blackstone’s Commentaries); nor is the fact that wife-beating, regardless of the law, was, and sometimes still is, treated lightly by the legal system under the rubric of marital privacy. Thus, in 1910 the Supreme Court, in Thompson v. Thompson, barred wives from suing husbands for “injuries to person or property as though they were strangers.” (I learned this, and much else relating to the history of American marriage, from Yale feminist historian Nancy Cott’s fascinating Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation.)

And what about Myth #2, “Women earn 75 cents for every dollar a man earns.” That doesn’t come from some man-bashing fabulator squirreled away in a women’s studies department. It comes from the US government! The IWF argues that the disparity disappears when you take education, training, occupation, continuity of employment, motherhood and other factors into account–but even if that were true, which it isn’t, to overlook all those things is itself advocacy, a politicized way of defining sex discrimination in order to minimize it.

And then there’s #1, the mother of all myths: “One in four women in college has been the victim of rape or attempted rape.” The IWF debunks this number, which comes from the research of Mary Koss, by citing the low numbers of reported rapes on college campuses, but the one-in-four figure includes off-campus and pre-college rapes and rape attempts. Are Koss’s numbers the last word? Of course not. In 1998 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that among all women, one in five had experienced a rape or attempted rape at some point in her life. In January the Justice Department released a report claiming that 3 percent of college women experience rape or attempted rape per school year, which does add up over four years.

Does irresponsible, lax or even slanted use of facts and figures exist in “campus feminism”? Sure–and out of it, too. (Try economics.) But what does that have to do with women’s studies, a very large, very lively interdisciplinary field of intellectual inquiry, in which many of the supposed verities of contemporary feminism are hotly contested? The real debate isn’t over the merits of this study or that–in social science “results” are always provisional. Now that the IWF has thrown down the gauntlet, feminist scholars should call for that real debate–Resolved: Women’s lives were more seriously studied and accurately understood when almost no tenured professors were female. Or, Resolved: Violence against women is not a major social problem. Or, Resolved: If women aren’t equal, it’s their own darn fault.