SPLC Targets Feminist Scholar Christina Hoff Sommers

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard

The group names her in a report on male supremacy for giving 'mainstream and respectable face' to men's rights activists.

Adam Rubenstein

Feb 27, 2018

The Southern Poverty Law Center is at it again. In a report on “Male Supremacy,” an ideology that the group says “advocates for the subjugation of women,” it included American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, calling her someone “who gives mainstream and respectable face to some [Men’s Rights Activist] concerns.” Sommers told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that she finds her inclusion in this report “quite surprising.”

“I completely reject that," Sommers said. "This is a group I used to admire. They once went after Klan members and Nazis and now… [they go after] people like Ben Carson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It’s absurd.” She adds that the SPLC has no evidence for the suggestion that she “gives mainstream and respectable face” to “male supremacy”:. “They’re blacklisting in place of engaging with arguments. They blacklist you, rather than try to refute you.”

Sommers thinks that “they’re talking about … some of the work that I’ve done on ‘boys.’ I wrote an article for the New York Times a few years ago called The Boys at the Back—and it won an award from a feminist organization.”

The AEI scholar finds herself in a precarious position: “There’s a men’s rights activist group, A Voice for Men, and they’ve made videos attacking me, calling me a ‘crypto-misandrist,’ or something of the sort. So I’m attacked by this MRA group for being a female supremacist, and then I’m attacked by the Southern Poverty Law Center for being a Male Supremacist. I don’t take either seriously.”

 

(Snip)