The tide of commentary following September 11 has been massive and relentless. But just when you thought everything had been said about terrorism, along comes the venerable discipline of women’s studies with a bizarre new angle.

The Department of Women’s Studies at California State University, Hayward is offering a course in “The Sexuality of Terrorism.” Most people never imagined that terrorism had anything to do with sexuality, but that’s not what those who study women think. But according to their materials, it would be more accurate to say that terrorism has a nationality, one that sounds a lot like American.

The course is based on two books. The first is The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten: Life Beyond the Cult by Karlene Faith. Van Houten was a member of Charles Manson’s murderous gang, which fit the definition of terrorism as the willingness to kill innocents to advance a political cause. The second book is The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism by Robin Morgan.

A casual look at Morgan’s book reveals a confused gazpacho of jargon, feminist boilerplate, hysteria, polemics, and just plain nonsense. Consider, for example, this sample:

Yes, murder exists. The fear exists. The grief exists. But yes, the terrorist is a figment of our imagination—and more, a figment of our lack of imagination.

The terrorist is the logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world.

The terrorist is the son practicing what the father has practiced, and claiming to have found his own identity in doing so [italics original].

Normally this sort of thing would not merit a response, but September 11 changed everything. In reality, terrorists practice what their fathers did not. But the author believes that terrorism is a “guy thing,” a question of, as Morgan cheekily puts it, cherchez l’homme.

The men, however, turn out to be mostly those practicing the foreign policy of the United States. While she does mention female terrorists such as Fusaka Shigenobu of the Japanese Red Army and Ulrike Meinhof of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the author considers America’s efforts to stem communism as a form of state terrorism, and a variation of “wargasm.”

The Hayward professors also consider “relevant material” for the course to include an article by Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, who calls the Afghanistan campaign “another act of terror against the world” by the United States. Osama Bin Laden, Roy says, is:

“America’s family secret.... He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of ‘full-spectrum dominance,’ its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think.”

All this amounts to more evidence that the feminism practiced by Morgan, Roy, and others is simply the women’s auxiliary of the anti-America left. When you subsidize this shrill and dreary ideology with tax dollars, it becomes women’s studies.

Sally Pipes is the President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, a California-based think tank. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.