This year’s snowfall has been bountiful and across the nation people are grabbing their snowboards, skis, and sleds and heading for the slopes. Those not ready for these activities, like generations of girls and boys before them, can always roll the white stuff into balls, stack them up, and with a hat, a couple of stones, and maybe a carrot for a nose, create a snowman. But old Frosty is not very jolly these days because, according to Dr. Tricia Cusack of Birmingham University in England, Frosty is an enemy of the people, guilty of violating the laws of political correctness.

Dr. Cusack, a professor of art history, first published her attack on the snowman in New Formations magazine in 1996, releasing it again just in time to bring cheer to children worldwide during this year’s holiday season. Her argument boils down to the idea that the snowman endures because Frosty reaffirms the sexist and racist tendencies of oppressive western culture.

As recently quoted in the Daily Mail (London), the professor of art history reminds us that, “The snowman’s masculinity, and its ritual location in the semi-public space of garden or field, help to substantiate an ideology upholding a gendered spatial/social system, marking women’s proper sphere as the domestic/private, and men’s as the commercial/public.”

To translate from the academic jibberish, Frosty is a man, prima facie evidence against him. He is also to be found outside, which makes sense since snowfall indoors tends to be on the light side. In the congealed mindset of Dr. Cusack, Frosty’s outdoor location reinforces the idea that men should work and that women should stay inside and keep house.

“Is it accidental,” she asks, “in view of the western narrative of active masculine domination of nature/female, that out of virgin snow a male icon is built or erected?” It seems quite likely that yes, it is accidental.

It has been empirically verified that snow falls, and does so without the specific request of the public. The color of snow is white, but it does not follow that those wishing for a white Christmas are referring to a season of Klan rallies. That children choose to make a snowman rather than snow mermaid or frozen statue of Joan of Arc means only that, for most kids, Frosty is rather easy to assemble, a kind of sculpture 101.

To see a racist and sexist conspiracy in a snowman requires considerably more creativity, not to mention paranoia, but Dr. Cusack and many like her are up to the task. Sometimes, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, a snowman is just a snowman. Meanwhile, Dr. Cusack does provide a valuable service.

She confirms that the academy has become a very chilly place, an isolation ward of political correctness. More important, she shows how seeing subconscious symbols in all of our activities paralyzes us in a sort of psychological feedback loop wherein we constantly question even our own best efforts. Why deal with real problems when you can rail at snowmen?

Frosty is doomed to melt away, but as the song says, he’ll be back again some day. Meanwhile, summer may well herald Dr. Cusack’s treatise on the race and gender symbolism of scarecrows.