Reardon has right to rate women

At IU students are railing against the First Amendment.

The Odyssey published an article by Yale Reardon called “Rating Girls” as a piece of humor in its “Laugh Out Loud” section. As you might have guessed from the title, the article limns a numeric system (from one to 10) used to categorize women based on how attractive they are.

Throughout the second half of last week, I read and heard tirades and vitriol lambasting Reardon and his article. Angry readers, including non-greek IU students, wrote to Reardon, The Odyssey and other Web sites, complaining that the article was shallow, mean-spirited and offensive. Because of this backlash, The Odyssey pulled Reardon’s article from its Web site.

Checking online social media networks, such as Facebook, I could see self-adulating, self-styled feminists congratulating themselves on their victory against Reardon. Literally, these women were proud of restricting the free dissemination of information.

The Odyssey serves as the Greek community’s newsletter and therefore appeals to a very specific demographic. This private paper should be allowed to publish whatever its readership wants and appreciates. The First Amendment expressly protects published speech, no matter how offensive, spelling-error filled or sophomoric it may be.  At the end of the day, people must voluntarily choose to read The Odyssey.

Because Reardon is not guilty of libel or plagiarism in his column, The Odyssey should have kept his article online instead of capitulating to incensed readers. As a humorous piece of opinion, the column should have been given more leeway for its envelope-pushing contentions. And because the piece ran in a private publication, the displeased complainers acted excessively in asking for the removal of Reardon’s work.

The pulling of Reardon’s piece is bad for contentious opinion columnists everywhere and the First Amendment in general.

Given that I believe Reardon was unfairly attacked and censored, I asked Reardon to speak to me about how he felt about the entire hullabaloo. He responded comprehensively.

I asked, “How serious were you when you wrote this column?”

Reardon responded, “On a 1-10 scale of seriousness, I was about a 1. If you take that stuff seriously, you really need to re-evaluate your priorities. Obviously, the entire article was all a huge joke, but people acted like it was the end of the world. I’m surprised people can’t tell I’m in character the entire time. Is an article from a greek newspaper at a huge party school really worth all this fuss?”

No, not at all.
 

E-mail: yzchaudh@indiana.edu