Now, Woolf calls her fictional bastion of male privilege Oxbridge, so I'll call mine Yarvard. Even though she cannot attend Yarvard because she is a woman, Judith cheerfully applies for admission at, let's call it, Smithcliff, a prestigious women's college. She is denied admission on the grounds thatthe dorms and classrooms can'taccommodate wheelchairs, that her speech pattern would interfere with her elocution lessons, and that her presence would upset the other students. There is also the suggestion that she is not good marriage material for the men at the elite college to which Smithcliff is a bride-supplying "sister school." The letter inquires as to why she hasn't been institutionalized.When she goes to the administration building to protest the decision, she can't get up the flight of marble steps on the Greek Revival building. This edifice was designed to evoke a connection to the Classical world, which practiced infanticide of disabled newborns.
The lingerie department is the only one that she can reach in her wheelchair. Nevertheless, she is fired the next day because of complaints that a woman who is so obviously not sexually attractive selling alluring nightgowns makes customers uncomfortable. Daunted by her dismissal, she seeks consolation in the arms of the young manager and soon finds herself pregnant. Upon learningof this news, he leaves her for anondisabled woman with a fullerbustline and better homemaking skills in his inaccessible kitchen.
In late 1985, the Reagan White House blocked the use of CDC money for education, leaving the US behind other Western nations in telling its citizens how to avoid contracting the virus. Many Americans still thought you could get AIDS from a toilet seat or a glass of water. According to one poll, the majority of Americans supported quarantining AIDS patients.This heightened awareness set off waves of anxiety across the country, which was often express through jokes (Q: What do you call Rock Hudson in a wheelchair? A: Roll-AIDS!) and violence. Between the years 1985 and 1986, anti-gay violence increased by 42 percent in the US. Even in San Francisco, where Greyhound buses still dropped off gay men and women taking refuge from the prejudice of their hometowns, carloads of teenagers would drive through the Castro looking for targets.In December 1985, a group of teenagers, shouting “diseased faggot” and “you’re killing us all,” dragged a man named David Johnson from his car in a San Francisco parking lot. While his lover looked on in horror, the teenagers kicked and beat Johnson with their skateboards, breaking three of his ribs, bruising his kidneys, an gashing his face and neck with deep fingernail scratches.
Boys’ aggressiveness is increasingly being treated as a medical problem, particularly in schools, a trend that has led to the diagnosing and medicating of boys whose problem may really be that they have been traumatized and influenced by exposure to violence and abuse at home. Treating these boys as though they have a chemical problem not only overlooks the distress they are in but also reinforces their belief that they are “out of control” or “sick,” rather than helping them to recognize that they are making bad choices based on destructive values. I have sometimes heard adults telling girls that they should be flattered by boys’ invasive or aggressive behavior “because it means they really like you,” an approach that prepares both boys and girls to confuse love with abuse and socializes girls to feel helpless.