"Few would be writing about this handful of single-sex gym hours if the request had come from, say, overweight women or shy women or the club of virgins recently written about in the New York Times Magazine.Some co-ed campuses have single-sex dorms--Cornell has one for women--to say nothing of sororities, fraternities and single-sex societies like Harvard's ghastly final clubs. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Orthodox Jewish women at Queens College of CUNY asked for one hour of women-only swimming, a request seconded by other women; now Queens has a weekly pool hour for women and one for men as well. Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, St. John's College in Santa Fe, and Kalamazoo College have all experimented with women-only gym times or classes. None of this has aroused a lot of interest from the national opinion industry. Maybe the women writers are too busy exercising at Curves, the ubiquitous women-only chain, while the men writers are off at their Elks lodge.
But this situation is different: it involves Islam (violent, oppressive, sexist) and Harvard (multicultural twits). When I put "Harvard Muslim girls gym" into Google I got 151,000 hits, including articles from as far away as Japan, and bloodcurdling references to Sharia and honor killings, horrified descriptions of women using treadmills in veils and chadors ("a black, woolen blob, an anachronism of the first degree"), calls for lawsuits and physical invasions of Muslim-girl gym time. Martin Luther King was invoked, as were Title IX, feminism, slippery slopes, appeasement, Nazis and did I mention Sharia?"
Full: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080428/pollitt
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