If you can believe that all sexual intercourse is rape, you can believe anything. It is perfectly possible to hold that the position of women and ethnic minorities has improved within living memory without suggesting that further improvement is unnecessary. In fact, most of the intelligent population off campus probably does take that view, and would not accept that since the time of prehistoric utopia we have lived under conditions in which Western women suffer intolerable oppression at the hands of patriarchal males. Fortunately, it has no victims aside from the occasional unlucky male who speaks his mind. Again and again Ellis convicts the revolutionaries of ignorance and bad faith, the undoing of enlightenment.
H E sees little prospect of early change.
A few years ago I was invited to a conference organized by the graduate society of an American university. The students ran the conference themselves, choosing a visiting speaker and arranging a program of many short papers based on current research by members of their own and neighboring schools. Three years ago most were on identifiably literary topics. There is hardly a trace of anything that promises disinterested critical inquiry. Several of the speakers in this program are known to me as lively and intelligent students whom one would look forward to having as colleagues a few years on.