Shannon Faulkner & Sex Discrimination at The Citadel
00:00Could it be I have like this face that like through no fault of my own just like permanentlyinquisitive and that's why my life has been this way.Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we distract you from the horrible follies of todayby talking about the horrible follies of yesteryear.Yesteryear follies, those are our favorite.Yeah, yester follies.I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post.I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the satanic panic.
00:43And if you want to support the show, we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong Aboutand there's lots of other ways to support the show. And I'm speeding through this againbecause I want to tell Sarah about Shannon Faulkner.I'm so excited.So I texted you, I think like three weeks ago now, and I was like, Sarah, do you know whoor what Shannon Faulkner is? And you said, absolutely not. And then I basically instructedyou to treat Shannon Faulkner the way I treat John Benet Ramsey.Which is funny because I have never told you my intentions to do a John Benet Ramsey episode.
01:17But you just know that someday I will relent and do it. But yeah, I don't know where this is goingand I know that you're very happy about that. I'm so excited.Okay. So I think it's important to cover Shannon Faulkner becauseshe was sort of one of the canonically maligned women of the 1990s, but she was also doublemaligned because she was almost instantly and completely erased.Yeah, she wasn't on any of the VH1 countdowns.Were you aware of this controversy over whether or not women could attend the Citadel?Yeah, I know that there was, is this a military academy in like upstate New York or something?
01:56South Carolina.South Carolina. All right, those are completely different places. I don't know where I got that.Yeah, I know that that happened in the 90s. And I feel as if the concept of women in militaryacademies and women, just women in the military generally feels to me like one of the issuesthat felt like it was really important and divisive in the 90s. And I feel like I grew uphearing a lot about secondhand. Yes. Oh my god.G.I. Jane, an iconic film.We spent years debating this. This is one of the longest civil rights trials in U.S. history.
02:30It's also one of the most expensive. I mean, this to me is the progression that we're going totrack in this episode. And I think something really important about social change. So ShannonFaulkner tries to get into the Citadel. She can't get in because she's a woman. The case resolvesitself in a very unsatisfying way, which we will get to. And 25 years later, for the first time,the Citadel has a female student body president. It's called something different because there'slike special names for everything there because it's all military-ish. Right.A journalist goes to this female student body president and says, well, you know,what do you think about Shannon Faulkner and this massive nationwide controversy?
03:07And this first female student body president says, who's Shannon Faulkner?Oh my. So there's no Shannon Faulkner plaque and no kind. That suggests that like the school,because schools are so decisive in the lore that their students become adults by believing. Youknow, I mean, the spirit of Thomas Jefferson is like wandering around the grounds of UVA.Right. Probably drunkenly. And there's also something I think about sort of fights forsocial justice where entrenched institutions will fight and fight and fight. And the minutethey lose, they'll say, oh, we always wanted to do this. It's not a big deal. And then of course,we erase the entire fight and people who had their lives ruined. Those are the first people to go.
03:51So that's basically what this episode is about is how all of this happens to Shannon.Well, I'm so excited for this. Feels if I'm about to get on a slow, dreadful roller coaster.It is slow and dreadful, but it does have a happy ending.Oh, wow.So I'll just spoil it for you.Okay. Well, that almost never happens.So we're going to start out with a scene. It is December of 1992.Shannon is in a social studies class. They are discussing a sports illustrated article
04:20that is about hazing practices at this military school called DeCittadel.We don't know a ton about Shannon and her upbringing and what she's like.What we do know is she's popular. She's in the marching band. She plays sports.She's an excellent student. Her mom is a high school teacher. Her dad runs a fence buildingcompany. The author of the book about her called In Glory's Shadow makes a big deal out of thefact that she was born prematurely and she sort of she was a fighter her whole life.Okay.Which honestly feels a little like a little projection to me of like you don't have much
04:56to work with.I would be fine with never hearing another person described as a fighter ever again.This is an excerpt from a Susan Feludi essay in The New Yorker, which isone of the best essays about this case. She says,One could scrounge around in Faulkner's childhood for the key to what made her take on the Citadel.But there's little point in a detailed inspection of family history because there's no real mysteryhere. What is most striking about Shannon herself is that she's not particularly unusual.She reads novels by Tom Clancy and John Grisham has worked at a local daycare center
05:26is partial to places like Benigans. She wants a college education so she can support herselfand have a career as a teacher or a journalist. She hasn't yet decided which.She might do a stint in the military. She might not. She's in many ways representative of theaverage striving lower middle class teenage girl circa 1994 who intends to better herself and isnot intend to achieve that betterment through a man. In fact, she is not for a moment entertainedsuch a possibility. So this is something that comes up in a lot of the accounts of Shannonwhen she's a kid and also later on that she doesn't seem to give a shit what other peoplethink. In contrast to a lot of the people that we've talked about on the show, she's actually
06:00very clear about what she wants and very confident in asking for it. So there's times later whenjournalists will call her and be like, Hey, can I do an interview with you? And she just says like,No, and hangs up the phone. That's great. So as they're having this debate, the class seizeson this weird detail about the Citadel that there's only two all male military schools in Americathat are state funded. These are public institutions that do not allow women. There's one in Virginiaand there's one in South Carolina, the Citadel. And Shannon immediately is like,My tax dollars are going to this school and I cannot attend. This just seems fundamentallylike bullshit to me. Does she live in South Carolina? Oh, yeah, I guess she would because
06:44then that's why she's entitled to an education there. Yeah, she's in powdersville, South Carolina,which is sort of across the state, the Citadel's in Charleston. Okay. And so this is December ofher senior year and she's sort of in the midst of applying for a bunch of colleges for the followingyear. Two weeks later, she goes to the guidance counselor's office and she's applying to fourcolleges. And so they fill out the first three applications. And then Shannon tells the guidancecounselor, I also want to apply to the Citadel and the guidance counselor's like, but that's onlyopen to men. And Shannon's like, here's what I want you to do. She asks the guidance counselorto take all of her transcripts and all of the documents that the school has on her and white
07:22out all references to gender. So instead of being on like the women's volleyball team,they white it out. So it just says volleyball team. I love this. I already love this. I know she'srunning an experiment. She also gets the guidance counselor to write her a recommendation letterwith no pronouns. Nice. So the guidance counselor writes this very carefully. So it's like,anything Shannon puts Shannon's mind to, Shannon can achieve. Do we know very much about thisguidance counselor who has been on this because they seem really cool. I love that all of the adultsaround her are like, this is trolley, but also go for it. This is like tricksterishness motivatedby a sense of injustice. Yes. When her mom hears about this plan, apparently her mom just
08:05says classic Shannon. She does this. It all seems like fun and games until someone ends up in athree year long civil rights lawsuit. And also it turns out that at the Citadel, a couple yearspreviously, there had been a relatively well known football player named Shannon. That's not a superuncommon boy's name. So the people at the Citadel see this application from Shannon Faulkner.They just assume, well, it's obviously a boy because why the hell would a woman ever applyhere? Everybody knows that women aren't allowed in. So on January 22nd of 1993, Shannon Faulknergets an acceptance letter that says, dear Mr. Faulkner, welcome to the Citadel, basically.Nice. And so the high school where her mom teaches, the assistant principal has a son
08:54who attends the Citadel. Shannon's mom starts saying, LOL, my daughter got into the Citadel.Rumor of this goes through the high school. Then the rumor ends up with this whatever sophomoreat the Citadel. And so he is the one that then contacts like the board of the Citadel and islike, do you guys know that you admitted a woman? Oh no. And so two weeks after she gets the acceptanceletter, she gets another letter revoking the acceptance. It's written very dickishly. Theysend her a letter and then they send a separate letter in the same envelope to her mom, basicallyscolding her. Like, why did you let your daughter do this? Oh my god, she's an adult. Yes. And alsoShannon has now been accepted into the other three schools. I have no evidence for this,
09:39but it is very possible that if the school hadn't revoked her admission, Shannon would have justgone to one of these other schools. If I were her, my response would have been like, cool,that's funny. I'll go to wherever else I applied. But then if they revoked it, I'd be like,fuck you guys. Yes. Yeah. So basically, classic Shannon, she goes through the yellow pages,she finds a civil rights lawyer, like this super awesome lady who does like abortion cases andstuff and walks her through the whole thing and says, do I have a case? And the lawyer's like,yeah, I don't see why not. This is also the rare case of a malign 90s woman who wasn't draggedinto the spotlight by her bangs. And so the first thing the lawyer does is she calls a press
10:24conference and that attracts the ACLU because remember how I mentioned there's only one othermilitary institute in the country that is publicly funded that doesn't allow in women?Yes. That school is called the Virginia Military Institute and it's getting sued by the Departmentof Justice for not allowing women in. And one of its main arguments is that there's no demand.All male military institution from women. So the ACLU is fighting back against this idea thatthere's no demand from women to go to military institutions. And here comes Shannon, who isdemanding to attend a military institution. And so the ACLU offers all of their legal servicesfor free. So by the time they actually file the case in March of 1993, she has eight lawyers.
11:11It seems like a lot of big cases happen this way, where it's like, you have a legal conceptthat you need to find a vehicle for. And then the plaintiff is like this person whosort of the luck of the numbers game of American populations like embodies the problems that youwere trying to address. Yes. And we often pretend that it's about this individual when it's veryobviously about this larger issue and the precedent that it's going to set. Right. And where they haveto be like, I volunteer as tribute. Yeah. So what do you know about the Citadel? Have you ever heardof this before this controversy? Yeah, I've heard that word. I know that the Citadel is a schoolthat basically fought to keep women out. That's really all I know. It's also a very weird thing
11:57because people are going to get mad at me for this, but it's sort of army cosplay. I mean,West Point and these other official military institutions that we have in America are,they have official relationships with the military. It's like a pipeline into the military.The Citadel is just its own thing. So only around a third of graduates end up going into the military.Oh. There's all of this sort of pomp and circumstance within the school. Like thestudents have these ranks that are sort of quasi military ranks and there's this vocabulary thatyou have to use and you have to stand at attention and say sir and all this kind of stuff. But thoseare just rules at the Citadel. They're not in any way officially linked up to the military.
12:36So it's interesting that the school is like silly and the lawsuit is kind of revealingtheir silliness in an uncomfortable way perhaps because they're like, we can't allow women inbecause it would interfere with the importance of us pretending to be soldiers.Yes. It's basically theater camp. So I read two histories of the Citadel and most institutionsin America, if you look into them, have pretty rough history. The Citadel maybe has the worsthistory I've ever seen. It's like a fucking SNL sketch of how offensive can history be.So the school was founded in 1822 to respond to a slave uprising. It's actually a bit of ayear wrong about the uprising was organized by a guy named Denmark Vizy. The narrative was always
13:30that this was a sprawling plot of all these people and hundreds were involved and it was thismassive conspiracy. And when historians went back in the 1960s to actually look at the primarydocuments, they found that it was basically just a bunch of rumors. It wasn't planned. They had nodate. It was just something that they talked about as like, wouldn't it be cool if? So academics nowrefer to it as a legal lynching where it was essentially just an excuse to execute DenmarkVizy and his quote unquote co-conspirators. That's awful. So that in itself is a reallygross story. But then what happened right after was there were all these vigilante squads thatwandered around Charleston like burning down churches. And the reason the Citadel was founded
14:15was to train quote unquote citizen soldiers to prevent any future uprisings of enslavedpeoples. Like that was the point. Oh my God. Well, do you see how like letting a female studentinto the school would sully its beautiful history? Oh my God. Oh, you're right. I really was readyto be like, I don't know. But like, yeah, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Eventually it turns intojust a normal military college. And then according to its graduates, people at the Citadel firedthe first shots of the Civil War. I didn't really look into whether that was true or not,just because it's like such a big part of the lore of the school that they're really proud of this,which I feel like is like that in itself is telling whether or not it's true. Right. Like
15:05either it really happened or it didn't happen and they thought it would be cool if it did happen.Yes. Most history is like kind of made up, but then it's more useful in revealing like who thepeople telling it are. Yes. So over time, the Citadel becomes an increasingly closed loop.It becomes more conservative over time because the more it drifts away from the generalprogressiveness of the country, you know, 1960s student protests, etc., it pushes back againstall of these things. And over time, it starts to attract students that are interested in thissort of increasingly archaic lifestyle and mores. It's like 4chan. It is. Like it becomesthis distillation chamber and also the alumni network. They also protect the school. So every
15:57once in a while, an outsider, a sort of reformer will be appointed as the president and will tryto institute reforms. And then the entire alumni network threatens to pull donations.There's also a series of scandals that make it even worse. So I'm going to send you a photo.Okay. We're looking at a photo of, it looks like a high school portrait of a guy who I got to sayhas like young farmer and babe energy. Yes. This looks like it was taken in the 60s or the 70sbecause I'm seeing kind of what looks like a loud patterned tie. And he's got some thickglasses, some sticky out ears. And he looks just like a lovely and ungainly boy in a large man'sbody of like 17 or 18. This is Harry De La Roche. He is 17 when this is taken. He ends up getting
16:58into the Citadel. And the minute he gets into the Citadel, he experiences this absurd system theyhave of hazing cadets. It began as an explicit way to build solidarity and to build school spirit.So it used to be they would give you this history handbook of the school and you had to basicallymemorize it. If you were a freshman, you had to sort of stand at attention. And if an upperclassmancame up to you and was like, who was the president of the school in 1924, you'd have to say likeNorman Poindexter or whatever. And then they would correct you or not correct you.You know what built school spirit? Acapella. Acapella built school spirit. Ty harmonizingwith someone you don't trust. I mean, it ultimately seems very silly to me, but also it was designed
17:43as something that would be sort of shared knowledge between students at the school, like a way ofdeveloping like an inside language for people within this institution. But so what happens isover time, this hazing just becomes more and more brutal. And also because it's a closed loop,whatever you experience as a freshman, you're going to do to the freshman when you're a senior.So the first week of school is known as Hell Week. And by the time Harry De La Roche getsthere in 1976, it's just like beatings and stuff. It's not creative.No. This is the most you criticize them I've ever heard.I love what you're saying, because that obviously it's horrible, but also they're not even doing
18:32what they said they were doing. Right. What happens? What kind of stuff do kids have to endure?One of the things that happens to Harry is they cut his shins with a razor blade.What? And then they pour shoe polish on them.They're like, I can't cut your face because you got to go work the streets tonight.I mean, a big thing is sort of keeping your shoes polished and keeping your uniform crisp and tight.And so this, I believe, is a punishment for having scuffed shoes. Another big thing istechnically upperclassmen have the right to take away food from freshmen. So if an upperclassmandemands food, you have to give it over. No. So for weeks, Harry just isn't eating,
19:16because every time he sits down to eat in the cafeteria, some upperclassman comesand takes away his food. You know what's funny is that when I was a teenager,I think this stuff didn't hit me as hard because I was like, I'm basically an adult.And now that I see teenagers as children, I'm just like, how are adults condoning this?I mean, at various points, the teachers try to push back against this because the teachers arelike, people are coming to class and they haven't eaten and they haven't slept.Yeah. How the hell are people learning anything?Again, closed loop. A lot of the adults that are around, a lot of the adults in the administration,
19:50they went to this school. They think that it builds character and not only is it not seen as aproblem, this is seen as an essential component of masculinity. You have to experience abuse.You know, it builds character working in a waffle house. Do that. Those people can de-escalatelike nobody. I think that the thing that we think of as masculinity is somethingthat you basically need to be abused to become, but that's not actually masculinity.I know. It doesn't relate to being male. It just relates to having been abused.Yes. And we just confuse the two things.Thanksgiving of his first year, Harry, he says that his mom has terminal cancer and he has to go
20:30home for Thanksgiving early. He's lying just to get out of the school. And once he gets home,he's in his head has decided he's not going to go back to the school. He's like, I can't takethis anymore. Because his dad is like this military asshole. He's got a history of abusingHarry. It's really terrible. He's not going to let him quit. And so brace yourself,Harry De La Roche murders his entire family. Oh, wow. Yeah. He kills his mom and his dadand his two brothers. Yeah. Because this is such a huge national story at the time,it contributes to the closed loop nature of the Citadel because who wants to applyto a school where the hazing practices are so severe that they lead to an outcome like this?
21:18It's only going to be people who don't see the hazing as a deal breaker or are specificallyattracted by the hazing. This closed loop thing gets even worse in the 1980s. Like everything.The school started allowing in black students in 1966, but it did so very quietly. The school wasnever more than five or 6% black. What's their student body on the whole? Is this in like thelow thousands? How big is it? 2000 students total. Oh, that's small. So in 1986, there is a studentnamed Kevin Nesmith who is black. And this is super fucked up. A bunch of upperclassmen thinkthat he's like not pulling his weight. So as a quote unquote, galactically large fucking quotemarks, prank. They dress up in clan robes and go into his room at night with a burning cross.
22:12Oh my God. He is okay. Nothing really happens. They sort of go in there and they shout at him.And his roommate who is white wakes up and is like, you've got to be fucking kidding me. Get thefuck out of here. And like it's just chaos. This also becomes a national story becauseit's fucking outrageous. Yeah. Kevin ends up quitting the school pretty soon after becauseyes, of course. Yeah. Meanwhile, all five of the kids who dressed up in clan robes as a quote unquoteprank end up graduating. Right. They're not given any major punishment. This is the kindof wonderful culture that a female student body might challenge. You know, you just can't likegirls and they'll ruin everything. What's so fascinating about this is that this also ends
22:54up reinforcing the closed loop thing because what happens to minority enrollment after this? Yeah.Black people basically stop applying to the school because of course they do. Yeah. If youhave a hundred black students sprinkled into a culturally white institution, the culture canremain fundamentally the same, it seems like. Exactly. And I just think there's this kind ofcultural stereotype that as the country becomes more progressive, all of these conservativeinstitutions will sort of inevitably come along, like, you know, be dragged by the tide of historyor whatever. But what we tend to see is that a lot of these institutions actually become moreconservative because they feel like they're the only ones left. So by the 1990s, by the time
23:39Shannon applies, it's actually like part of the school's identity that we're one of the lastschools to not allow in women. Like, that's actually a huge draw for students and like a bigpart of the way that they think about themselves. It's not a cute look. It's not cute. So nextsection, we're eventually going to talk about the court case. But there's about six monthsbefore the court case really happens. There's all these sort of preliminary hearings and motions,blah, blah, blah. What happens almost immediately after Shannon files the lawsuit is that she becomesa massive celebrity. Oh my. She's on the news. She starts getting recognized at restaurants.Wow. And what's amazing, because I spent a lot of time on LexisNexis, almost all of the attention
24:23is negative. Yeah. I feel like in the 90s, there was what I would almost call a moral panic. It waslike a low grade moral panic about women invading masculine institutions. Yes. And a huge percentageof the pushback came from women. Really? This is a letter to The New York Times that's publishedin 1994. As I read the article, I wondered why any woman would want to spend her college years atan institution like the Citadel. Just to prove a point, come on. Well, she doesn't have to attend.Yeah. But there's, I mean, so much of the discourse is like, why is this pushy womanfaking her way into the Citadel when the Citadel isn't somewhere where women need to be anyway?Well, okay. By that logic, it's a place where no one needs to be and it just shouldn't exist,
25:12because maybe if that's the solution everyone's happiest with, then fine.One of the notes that Shannon gets is, you homely feminist. I'm sorry for you. You haveto force yourself on men to feel important. Women are the cruelest to other women sometimes.It's weird, man. There's a fucking shocking letter to the editor in New York Times by afemale World War II veteran. And she ends the letter with, it's up to you. Men may harass women.They don't harass ladies. Can all of you just fuck off because you're idiots and it's not yourbusiness? Also, men fuck pumpkins. Like the harassment has nothing to do with your qualityof character, Ms. Wack Lady. Shannon also starts to see t-shirts around town. One of them says,
26:01the Citadel, 1952 Bulldogs and One Bitch. There's a billboard in Charleston where somebody writesdie, Shannon, in big red paint and it stays up for a couple days before they manage to take it down.Charleston should stick to ghost tours. This is from the Susan Feludi article aboutthe super fucked up harassment of Shannon and her parents at their house.Unseen hands have drained the swimming pool, delivered death threats, painted epithets andtaunts across the clapboard and turned wheelies through the flower beds. The gas tank on Shannon'smother's car was pried open, someone driving a Ford Bronco mowed down the mailbox. Shannon'smother called the county sheriff's department about the vandalism, but in Anderson County,
26:44which has been home to many Citadel graduates, the deputy who arrived was not particularlyhelpful. Well, if you're going to mess with the Citadel, you're just going to have to expect that.Was it OJ? Yes, twist. A lot of it really feeds into this weird narrative that she's pushyand that also that she's a lesbian. Like it's very interesting to me how quickly people at thetime needed to call her a lesbian. Yeah. Like that's not even relevant. That's just like away to discredit someone, I guess, is to call them gay. Sure. Also, I'm sure a lesbian would loveto go to school with 2000 dicks. Like use your heads, dummies. This is actually, Shannon actuallysays this in an interview later. They're asking her about these rumors that she's a lesbian and
27:30she's like, why would I go to a school full of men? Yeah, for serious. She's actually pretty good atpushing back on this stuff. There's a reporter that's sort of following her around on her dailywhatever and somebody yells at her, you should be ashamed of yourself. And Shannon just immediatelyis like, tell me why the Constitution does not apply to me. And the person just like keeps walkingaway. It's funny because like the response to this is that she's getting hazed by America.That's good, Sarah. Thank you. So basically, I want to go through sort of the court cases.There's a lot of weird back and forth that I'm going to skip. One of her lawyers says theyfought us on every grain of sand. But I want to talk about the arguments why women shouldn't be
28:16allowed into the Citadel. You know, this will be fun because we're having kind of a renaissanceof completely ridiculous legal arguments. So I am excited. So there's basically threearguments. The first, and it sounds like I'm trolling, the first argument is that women areinferior to men. There's some very interesting legal scholarship. One of the people who actuallytestifies on Shannon's behalf has written a bunch of articles on the arguments that the Citadelmakes. His name is Michael Kimmel and he points out that there's a difference in the law betweengender discrimination and race discrimination because race discrimination, the underlyingassumption is that there is no difference between the races. Whereas with gender discrimination,
28:58there is an underlying difference. So it's okay under certain circumstances to treatwomen differently than men. Right. I think you can say in a broad way that on the whole,women are smaller than men. If you pick a random woman and a random man, the woman will tend tobe smaller. But then you get to like, push and push and push that until you've elasticized itinto this thing of like, women are these tiny, weak, little, crunchy core with marshmallowaround it. Right. You know, you just like, you extrapolate a fact that's irrelevant to thething you're trying to talk about to something that is claiming to be relevant. Right. I thinka good contrast is that Hooters has argued successfully in court that they're only going
29:40to hire women because that's a central requirement of the job of working at Hooters. Whereaspolice departments have argued unsuccessfully for this. Yeah. Because a man could have breasts.Yes. But he couldn't flirt with a straight customer in the same way. Exactly. So this wasthe main argument of the Citadel was basically women couldn't hack it and theyaren't able to be cadets at the Citadel. It's funny to me that their argument that they'resaying like, because of our wonderful special school, women can't keep up. And it's like,I got news for you. Your school is defined basically by the amount of abuse that itsstudents are supposed to withstand. And if you're making the argument that women are inferior
30:23at coping with abuse, then like, I don't know. I feel like you could counter that legally, Ethan.Yes. I mean, this is literally their argument. So this is an excerpt from Michael Kimmel's articleon this. The adversarial model, the Citadel argued, is only effective for males. The rat line,the barracks lifestyle, the rigorous honor code, these were simply too much for women'spurportedly fragile constitutions to bear. Women, the school claimed, were not capable of theferocity required to make the program work. They are physically weaker, more emotional,and cannot take stress as well as men. What? The school cited more than 100 physical differencesthat resulted in a natural hierarchy between women and men, with men, of course, at the top.
31:05If admitted, female cadets would break down crying and suffer psychological trauma fromthe rigors of the system. Oh, so they're saying that their male students are untraumatized.They're fine, obviously. Fascinating. I think all these people need to be stopped.I also, I love this, that one of the things that goes around is that the school has strictphysical standards. So you have to be able to do 45 push-ups and 55 sit-ups in two minutes,and you have to be able to run two miles in 16 minutes. But then what's amazing about thesefitness requirements is the school only passed those fitness requirements after Shannon Faulknersued them. They're doing this specifically to keep Shannon out. Come on, you guys. You should
31:50have made your physical requirements like wash his balls once a week and then be like,you have no balls, Shannon. What would he be washing? Bye. This is kind of a tangent,but the literature on women being inferior to men led me to a bunch of old arguments that have beenused throughout time for not allowing women into these educational institutions. Because theiruteruses rove around their bodies and that makes them vulnerable. Literally, listen to this fuckingquote. Oh my god. In what was the best-selling book on higher education of the entire century,Sex and Education from 1873, Edward C. Clarke, Harvard's first professor of education,predicted that if women went to college, their brains would grow heavier and their wombs would
32:31atrophy. Oh, is it because the blood is going to the brain and the womb is naturally the firstthing for the body to undeligate? Is that it? His main evidence for this is the correlationbetween women who have college educations tend to have fewer children. That's because they're olderwhen they start having children and also probably they're more likely to have the means to practicebirth control. And correlation is not causation, my guy. Yeah. So the school's second argument,which is slightly more convincing but still not that convincing, is that women and meneach have a right to go to single-sex educational institutions. And so Shannon, if she attendsthe Citadel, she is depriving men of their right to be educated with other men. So she's closing
33:17all the men's schools by attempting to enroll in this one. She's changing the fundamental natureof the education that is being offered. There's actually, they use the argument that it's adiversity in education argument that you should have the right, you know, you can go to a Catholicschool, you can go to a Quaker school, or you can go to a male-only school. And so to maintain allof these choices, we can't dilute what is being offered. Like that is the central argument.Didn't you go to an all-girl school? Yeah, for five years. Okay, how do you feel about that?Hated it, sucked. Oh, really? I know that people have positive experiences at single-sexschools because I'm not one of them. That's the thing. I don't want to like hurt anybody's
33:55feelings. I did look into the empirical evidence on same-sex education, and there's an extremelyconsistent relationship between attending a single-sex school, especially girls-only schools,and better SAT scores, better grades, better college admissions, etc. But what all of theresearch points out is that it's impossible to disentangle the effect of the single-sexnessfrom the fact that most single-sex schools are private institutions to say that all girls highschool in some posh suburb of Chicago or whatever, it's like 80% of our graduates go to college. It'slike, well, those are a bunch of rich kids. Most of them probably would have gone to college anyway,so you can't really say that it's like the fact that they went to school with a bunch of girls
34:41that made them successful. Yeah, I mean, something that I hear a lot is that girls are more likelyto speak up if there aren't boys in the classroom. I've always spoken up in the classroom when I wasin a girl's school between the ages of 8 and 13, and that might have contributed to it. Who knows?Yeah. I mean, in the literature, they mention that some kids would really benefit from a single-sexenvironment, but also other kids really wouldn't, and we don't have great ways of separating thosekids. And some kids would benefit from Waldorf School, and some kids would benefit from playing alot of hockey, and some kids would benefit from playing no sports, and kids are different.Exactly. So anyway, I mean, I have no interest in trying to change the fact that there are
35:22single-sex schools, but essentially, as a legal argument, we must protect the right of boysto go to same-sex schools. It just doesn't really hold water legally, especially considering it's apublicly funded school, and there aren't any equivalent women's-only military institutions.A lot of it comes down to the fact that if there was a citadel for women,she would just go to that, and it wouldn't really be discrimination.Right. And so they're creating a situation where, for the state of South Carolina,to then have to start a horrible women's military academy.Exactly. So the third and final and kind of hilarious-ist argument for defending the citadel
36:03is allowing women will destroy the citadel.Why ever will it do that?This is for Michael Kimmel's article. One of the citadel's expert witnesses,Major General Josiah Bunting III, suggested that women would be a toxic kind of virusthat would destroy the citadel.Thanks!Adolescent males benefit from being able to focus exclusively on the task at handwithout the intrusion of any sexual tension.
36:28This is an institution for learning racism. If we allow women in, it will turn into a gentlesex comedy like porkies.I also love that sort of central to this argument, and you hear this in all of the discoursearound this, is fucking showers.What?I feel like it can't be a moral panic unless showers are involved.So this is from a 1994 New York Times article.Weighing heaviest on the cadets' minds was the preservation of the all-male communal bathroom.
36:55Uh-huh.The sharing of these stall-less showers and stall-less toilets is at the heart of thecitadel experience, according to more than one cadet.What? It's so weird. Okay, my favorite thing about this is that these people have to, like,in legal language justify the absolutely bizarre and toxic culture that they have createdat the school, and now are defending as if it is, like, the most illustrious of traditions.I mean, the shower thing I think is actually interesting because, to me, it illustratesthe extent to which this isn't working for anyone. A lot of the cadets, when they're
37:28interviewed by journalists, they'll say, like, if women are here, we can't be intimate with eachother, and they're afraid of getting humiliated in front of a girl. If they're getting yelled atby an upperclassmen or forced to do push-ups or whatever, they don't want a girl to see that.I mean, something I wonder about a lot is, like, if you can't have physical affection,like, do you find closeness through fighting and conflict? And, like, this hazing thing,it's like, it's very physical.Yeah. It just feels like at every point, the arguments against letting Shannon in are justan argument against the school and this whole dumb system. It's like, just be intimate with each
38:03other, be friendly and nice, form sustainable, mature relationships. You can just do that.It's the most amazing self-tell that these people are like, listen, I'm fine with being abused.I just don't want to be abused in front of a girl. And it's like, why are you fine with it not infront of a girl? I know. The head of the cadets, he's interviewed by Susan Feluti,and he says that not having women at the school makes them better at respecting women.It sounds like I'm summarizing that unfairly, but his actual quote is,the absence of women makes us understand them better in an aesthetic kind of way.We appreciate them more because they are not here. Okay.
38:49I guess that you can think longingly of the idea of women if you don't see them very much,but they're so hostile to any kind of change that that really is what's wrong with them.So one of my favorite things, Susan Feluti goes to a gay club in Charleston and she asks around,have you guys ever dated cadets in the Citadel? And so this is what she says. She says,in two visits to the treehouse, I could only find two drag queens out of maybe a dozen who did nottell me of dating a cadet. And that was only because those two found the Citadel men too emotional.I bet they are. Oh my God. Because these are the guys who I imagine like five seconds in anysexual encounter, everything they've been repressing just comes spewing out of them.
39:42I know. It's like these closeted little 19-year-olds in these super homophobic environments. I mean,little babies. What if there was a girl there? It would ruin everything. They would just cry wheneverthey saw her. But so it's very, this kind of rhetoric is very interesting. And a lot of peoplehave pointed out that this is another component of sort of reactionary movements or of majoritarianmovements who are afraid of their way of life being threatened. That the Citadel is very traditionaland our way of life is the best. But also, it's so fragile that the existence of one woman wouldcompletely destroy it. This is one of my favorite quotes. It's like tone it fucking down. This isfrom Katherine Mangold's book. She's talking to a cadet just sort of wandering around the campus.
40:31Lingering on the open quad, he fumbled for his words. If Shannon Faulkner came, he said,everything would change. It would be like a world without gardens, he observed dejectedly.And what? If women were cadets, then who would make things beautiful?Okay, you guys, it doesn't mean that every woman in the entire country has to come to your stupidschool if you obviously don't have enough dorms for that. This has to be one of the cadets thatdated a drag queen, but he was too emotional. Anyone can garden. You can garden, sweetie.Everyone who is speaking for this school that you have cited in this story just sounds likethey're just going through it. Is it also like the idea that if she were able to withstand this
41:14world, it would render it unspecial? Ooh, I hadn't thought about that, but yes.If they lose the sense of inherent superiority to most other human beings, then it will just ruintheir lives. Yeah, yeah. Are you ready for Shannon to get to the Citadel? Yes. I have a picturefor you. I assume they're going to give her a cute bob like an officer and a gentleman.It's not clear to me that I know what a bob is. Is that a bob? Yeah, I would describe that as acute bob. Yeah, it's like chin length hair with a big barrette at the back, like a lane. So this isShannon going to her first day of school. I see a young woman if I assume 18. She's 19 by thispoint. 19. She's got a rose pink t-shirt and white shorts, which is like a very Charlestonian look,
42:03very high preppy. Yes. I'm getting like Clarice at Quantico vibes. Yes. And she's being walked into the Citadel. It feels like a prison. It looks like they're going to let Jake Blues out.Oh. Do you like my fresh reference? I mean, it's interesting that you say prison becausethis is like a weird limbo two years for Shannon. Wow. In 1993, so seven months after she appliesto the school originally, the case is winding its way through court. Again, I'm not going to get toall the different details of like the stays that are denied and the denies that are stayed and allthat kind of stuff. A judge says the school has to let her in, but doesn't have to let her in tolike the cadetery. Okay. They only have to let her into classes. They're like, if she doesn't
42:53cadet, she has nothing to shower after, so we're safe. Yes. So Shannon can attend classes, but shecan't do anything else. She can't be on the yearbook. She can't join any sports teams. Shecan't be in any clubs. There's parts of the campus that are only open to cadets, and she cannot gothere. They're basically waiting for the state of South Carolina to propose an equivalent militaryeducation for women. But while that is being set up, there's no justification for keeping her outof the school. And she has to wear a big sign around her neck that says, shun. I mean, basically.Of course, everybody knows who she is. So the first day of school, she sits down in a biologyclass at 8am, and the other students in her row all move their seats. They're like, ick, a girl.
43:43Yeah. There's this super fucked up thing where she gets an A in math, and they have a standing thingat the end of every semester that all of the students who get A's get invited to like a pizzaparty type of thing. And then when Shannon gets an A, they change the rules so that the pizzaparty is only open to people who are majoring in math. You know, a journalist interviews the headof the math department, and he basically says it would just be awkward if she was there.Because we all want to talk about how much we hate her. This is why social change is hard,is because the first person to do anything, like it fucking is awkward to have a woman at a party,but it's also pretty chicken shit to just like, sorry, we have to fuck her over because we don't
44:25want it to be weird for an evening. I don't know, guys. Maybe it's good for you to learn how to behavewhen you're not in an attitude populated entirely by men, because you're going to have to do thatlike right after this. Yeah. It's also a weird year because, you know, her kind of main activity nowis appearing at court stuff. I mean, being the plaintiff in one of these cases is really timeconsuming. She's living with one of her lawyers because he lives in Charleston and her family'sback in Powdersville. And as we've talked about so many times on this show, people do not make moneybeing part of these cases. Like there's no salary associated with spending all of your time in court,and so she works nights as a waitress at like a wings place. The one sort of point of light in
45:10all of this is the first day of school, she gets flowers. From the last surviving garden on her.And there's a note with it that says, Shannon, all good wishes from the mother and sister ofCitadel graduates, exclamation point. Oh, that's nice. I was really thinking that they were fromDolly Parton, but this is actually even better. So finally, in April of 1995, a court rules thatthe Citadel has to admit her as a full cadet. The path is open for her to attend the Citadel thefollowing year, but then it takes a couple months for the Citadel to basically set up the logisticsof having her live on campus because they've never had women living there before. And so they needlike barracks and bathrooms and all this kind of stuff. They originally were going to have her
46:00sleep in the infirmatory, like the sort of like nurse beds, but then there's no lock on the door.And her lawyers have to be like, are you kidding me? Like we're going to need some security precautions.Yeah, seriously. Get that woman behind like at least three dead bolts.So eventually they have to set up like panic buttons and federal marshals and security cameras.And all of that stuff takes time. So she just ends up attending the Citadel as a day studentuntil the end of that school year. And so two things happen during this summer before sheattends the Citadel for real. The first thing is that the media attention on her quadruplesbecause there's this big controversy over whether or not she's going to shave her head.
46:41Okay, I know. Why is this a story? Why is the national media necessary in this? And why doesthis cause an uptick? Like what's what? Tell me about this. My theory is there's a huge appetitefor stories in which sort of social justice crusaders, members of minority groups overreact tosmall slights. The school makes all of the freshmen shave their heads and Shannon wants to go to theschool. Therefore, Shannon should shave her head. Shannon is actually fine with this, but her lawyersthey want to fight this because West Point, all of these other military schoolshave been admitting women since the 70s. They do not require women to shave their heads. Theyrequire women to just have hair that doesn't touch their collar. So her lawyers, I think somewhat
47:27understandably are like you're clearly doing this to humiliate her. You're doing something that istotally out of pattern. So this then becomes this perfect narrative of women are oversensitive.And if you want to go to the school where you shave your head, why are you now complainingthat they're making you shave your head? And so this launches a million articlesthat manage to overlook the sort of underlying issue should women be able to attend all maleinstitutions and skip straight to women are being oversensitive and they're demanding this thing thatis completely ridiculous. That's the way that it gets framed. Of course. But so a judge rulesthat Shannon has to shave her head. Wow. Fucking Janet Reno steps in at one point and writes a
48:09letter and then the judge relents and says, okay, it's up to the school. We're just going to givethe authority to the school. But then there's so much attention on the school at this pointthat they're like, we're not going to do it in the end. So in the end, they let hernot shave her head like they just let her have the cute bob that you saw. They should get a cameraand shave her head while she sings, I dreamed a dream. Yes.She also another reason this summer is so bad is that as she starts showing up in the pressagain and photos is that Shannon has visibly gained weight. She talks about, you know, these twoyears, she's not able to play sports. She's living with her fucking lawyer. Eventually,
48:49it's not going well. And she moves back in with her parents. So she's commuting like these longdistances. She's hella stressed out. She's working. She talks about all the stress eating.I mean, there are a lot of things that you can do as somebody in public life.You cannot be a woman who visibly gains weight. No, you can't.There start to be bumper stickers that say, save the males, shave the whale.What the fuck is wrong with people? Everything. And in the 90s, I think theirguess was very little countervailing cultural voice in mainstream America on the side of like,let's not attack women for weight gain as if they are murderers. I know, you know.
49:26The other thing that happens in this summer that I feel like we have to discuss,she is grocery shopping in Charleston and a man comes up behind her and puts his arm around herchest and his other hand over her mouth. And he whispers in her ear, I can't touch you whileyou're on that campus, but I can get to your parents. I know a place where I can watch them burn.And then he just like, he's gone as quickly as he came. Oh my God. I mean,between the sort of everything else going on and being in the press,I mean, she's just like on edge all the time. And also like, you know, the threat is so muchthat I also want to take a moment to emphasize that what that guy did is assault. Yes. Yeah.
50:10And so on August 12th, 1995, she attends her first day as a cadet at the Citadel.And I'm going to send you a newspaper front page. Oh boy.Okay. So this is the Greenville news, Greenville, South Carolina, I assume. And the headline isshe quits. Yeah. And then the subhead says something concerns cause Shannon Faulkner to leaveCitadel. Yeah. And then the caption for the photo is Citadel cadets celebrate in the quadrangleof low barracks after Shannon Faulkner announced she was something. Yeah. Wow. Oh, and then there'sokay, Simpson. I know. Kitty corner. Yeah. So after all of this, two and a half years long,legal battle, everything that she's been through up to this point, she only lasts one day. The first
51:05day of school, she goes, there's like registration, things that she has to sign, she has to go to thebookstore and get books. There's like various logistical things that she has to do. And it's102 degrees. There's like a lot of people on campus. You know, it's the first day of school,so there's lots of people milling about and you know, there's cameras there, there's press.It's just sort of like a sort of scene of general chaos for the first morning.At some point during this morning, she's in a crowd on this campus and she hears somebodywhispering into her ear, the heat in Charleston makes some folks crazy. It can play tricks on yourmind. And she recognizes the voice. It's the guy from the grocery store.
51:45Yeah. Yeah. So who knows if like that's actually true, right? Like this could be something, youknow, that she's imagining or not? I mean, to me, it's totally plausible that it's the same guy orif it's a different guy that it's like, in a way the same guy, because like any one of these mencould like up and kill her or her parents. It really feels like at this point. Yeah. And I cansee how she's just like fucking sick of this. Yeah. Jesus Christ, you know. And so sort of an hourlater, she tries to have lunch and she ends up puking. She goes straight to the infirmary andshe can't keep any food down for days. Like all she drinks is Gatorade. They have to help herto the bathroom. Like she can't move around on her own. It's sort of a mix of heat exhaustion
52:35and just this explosion of stress. Yeah. It's basically her whole body is just shut down fromeverything building up over the last two years. She stays there, you know, Tuesday, it's Wednesday,it's Thursday. And this is the first week of school. And the whole kind of point of this firstweek is for everybody to bond with each other. There's all these like logistical rules. Andhere is her company that she's in and they're all doing all this stuff without her. And by the timeFriday rolls around, she's just like, fuck it, I'm gonna leave. And she notifies the schoolofficials and the VP of the school says, if you need to, like we know the press is around,there's a back door if you need to go out the back door. And she says, I'm going to walk out the way
53:19I came in with my head held high. What Shannon says later, she's very consistent about this.She says she was becoming increasingly disillusioned with this entire process,but her lawyers needed her to keep going for the court case, right? Because you need the precedent.Right. Like Britney Spears in the 90s. Yes. She talks about the night before her first day ofschool. She gets in this like screaming match with the ACLU because they want to sell bumperstickers. Not necessarily her face on them, but like in some way alluding to her case. And she'slike, you're getting all this fame. And like, what's happened to my life since the beginning ofthis case? Yeah. Her lawyers also understandably are like, this is about something bigger than
54:02Shannon and we need to open the door for all women. And we need to push forward with this case.And so just the incentives of the plaintiffs in these cases and the incentives of the lawyerstrying these cases are just completely out of whack with each other. I think our legal system isreally weird and it really relies on spectacle. And I think that's bad. Yeah. I don't know. I mean,I feel as if she has subjected herself to this hostility for this long to like succeed andlike infiltrating this place. And now she has. And that was the goal. Yeah. And also,it's been two and a half years since she wrote that application. I mean, I keep thinking about,you know, where are you as a junior in college versus where you are as a freshman in college?
54:47And you deserve to have a young adulthood. Yeah. And also,she's been at the school for two years and people have not been particularly welcoming to her.It's like, what is making up for all the awful stuff? Do they have like a really great art galleryor something? Rock climbing wall. You know, she has like a wonderful dance troupe. No.Shannon also says later that just she had no idea what she was getting into.Well, you never imagined too that like this thing is going to keep going for this long.And also that it's going to be this big either. Like when she filled outthat trolley application, even when she filed a lawsuit, she never thought she was going to be
55:20getting recognized at her job and, you know, death threats. This is just a lot to put onone person's shoulders, especially a 20 year old. Yeah. So we're going to watch a clip.Okay. Three, two, one, go. I talked to Shannon about her history making struggle.Do you feel that you were naive in your approach to this whole situation? Do you feel you werenaive? I was very naive when I started this because I grew up in the believing in the Americandream that I could do anything and be anything. And then I discovered this type of discriminationin 1993. And I didn't believe that it still. So you wanted to get in there because you wantedto fight the discrimination against women and wanted a good education for yourself. You knew
56:06that you were being set up, so to speak, as this sort of bastion for women. I didn't realize thatat the time. I do hindsight. But you knew that you fighting to get in, that was going to be astatement for yourself and you would be the first woman and all that comes along with that.Do you want me to say? I don't understand how you can sit there and tell America it neveronce dawned on you that you wouldn't be carrying the weight of what's going to come for every otherwoman after you. I don't, you know, I understand the stress to a degree. I'm a military wife,but I cannot believe in my heart of hearts that you truly wanted this as badly as youportrayed it to the media, that the Citadel was the only place for you when you can after two days
56:47say, I quit. You would not stay and make it in the military is a teacher if you quit so quick easily.I believe that I handled everything to my best ability. The best of your ability at this time?At this time, because it is, it has taken two and a half years of hell of death threats ofpeople vandalizing my parents home of people making threats against my parents about their jobs,about everything. I think I handled it just as good as I could have at this time at this time.What do you think? That was intense, man. Dude, that sucked. I know. I know. Oprah is not a greatlistener. It's not great. You're talking to Oprah and you're like, so this thing and she's like,so I'm going to summarize what you just said to me and then add in a bunch of stuff and act like
57:32you said it. Is that right? You're like, not really. And she's like, no, but it is right, right?You're like, oh, and then someone from the audience insults you. This is like a little slice of whatfucking Lexus Nexus was like, dude. Awful. This is the narrative that forms immediately afterwardsis Shannon let the side down. Shannon is making all women look bad. Oh, fuck off. I know. Shannonis a bad feminist. She's a bad woman. Why couldn't she see it through? So she, so just like men andwomen both hate her. Yes. Women hate her because she's making us look bad in front of the men.Men are going to use this to hate us even more. And it's like, why not be mad at the men then?This is like that thing about like there was so much pressure on Sally Ride when she went into
58:19space because if she didn't do a good job, then it was proof that women couldn't be in space. Andit was like she needed to prove that women could do something. And it's like, I really blame thesociety that creates this false idea that like a woman needs to prove that all women are ableto do this or that. And if she fails or chooses not to or whatever, then that just means that womenare deprived of that right forever. I know. The New York Times publishes this entire articleon basically how feminists feel weird about Shannon Faulkner quitting one of the openingparagraphs. It says in Chicago, Terry Hartfeld, their 24th day manager at Casey's Tavern said,this just leaves the impression of female hysteria of women saying, give me this,
59:06give me this, and they can't take it. I'm tired of women like her representing my gender.She's at no point did she demand the right to represent her gender. Excuse me.Cokie Roberts on ABC says, she has done a great disservice. I mean, if you're going to be a pioneer,you got to get on the covered wagon and go across the country and be a pioneer.A lot of those people died, Cokie. Snake bites, cholera.So right after Shannon leaves the Citadel, one of the main explanations for why she quit was thatshe was too out of shape to do the physical training, which isn't true. There's a studentquoted in Catherine Mangold's book. He says, the truth was right in front of everyone,
59:50but nobody mentioned it because it didn't fit the popular theme. There is no doubt Shannon wasoverweight, but did anyone bother to investigate how many other knobs came to the Citadel overweightas well in that class? Yeah. Did anyone bother to find out that you can graduate from the Citadeland never meet those requirements? Did anyone bother to take notice that all she did thatmorning was just knob stuff at the bookstore? Certainly not. The truth would have detractedfrom the clarity of the story being put forth. Yeah. Somehow Shannon is the villain of all thisrather than like the school being terrible and not allowing in women in the first place.Well, she's like she's she's leaving this place and is this really wounded animal. Yes.
01:00:27And then, you know, to prove that they're still above her on this imaginary and sexist hierarchy,all these women who are trying to be not like other women are like... I know. It's not clear tome why it's so rare to find basic statements of solidarity from anybody. Yeah. Well, this is kindof a theme of the 90s, you know, and I think like one of the themes of Tanya Harding's life is thateverything happened for her at exactly the wrong time. Like it was late enough that therewas this mass media apparatus that could make absolute mincemeat of her entire life,but it was too early for there to be kind of voices questioning these mainstream assessments.Yeah. And also she wasn't really defended by mainstream feminism at the time because they're
01:01:11what we were living in this time of backlash where I think you did see a lot of really horribletakes by women about maligned women in the news that were like, well, she just like,I'm not like her. We're not like her. Don't judge us based on her. Yeah. Yeah. I also think thatthere's something in the media too where I think men were also very terrible to her,but like that's not as interesting of a story for the media. That's true. Yeah.If you read the letters to the editor that were published in various newspapers that you comeacross in LexisNexis, it feels like 75 to 80% of them are from women. And it does feel like there'sthis sort of man bites dog element to like, look, how mean the women are to her. Well,
01:01:48but maybe it also feels like less cruel in a way because like it feels like you're not showingsomeone punching down. Yeah. Yeah. This is a long quote, but I think very good. This is the end ofSusan Feluti's article. This is the paradox that Shannon Faulkner was trying in her way to counter.Women are only allowed the solidarity and spree decor of the women's movement when they aredefeated. A constant refrain of Ms. Faulkner's opponents was that she was a stalking horse forfeminism. Each of these women was accused of being a pawn in some grand and malevolent conspiracy.They weren't. They fought alone, but let them fail or prove to be only human and the women'smovement must take the hit. But as Shannon Faulkner stood before the press last week,
01:02:26she shared with us her feminist epiphany, one that generally doesn't dawn on most women untilmuch later in life. Making a lone woman a star is not the same as advancing women's equality. Infact, it is counterproductive. Faulkner said, I really hope that next year a whole group of womenwill be going in because maybe it would have been different if there had been other women with me.As I heard that remark, it occurred to me that she had received a citadel education after all.She had grasped the only aspect of the citadel teaching that really matters.There is strength in numbers. Solidarity counts. This is so important for the structure of socialmovements, right? Is that when somebody becomes a symbol of something, everything lives or dies
01:03:06on the strength of that one symbol. It's like, well, you know, we thought women having equalityto men was cool, but it turns out Shannon Faulkner got heatstroke.But this one lady fucked it up for everybody forever, so bye. Love it. And well, I feel likeit's a story that allows you to respond to it and be like, I'm not a sexist, but this is going toofar. Totally. And then to get your sexist yai-yas out without feeling like you are being sexist,which a lot of people need to do, apparently. Yes. And so I told you the story has a happy ending.You did. Almost exactly a year after Shannon drops out of the citadel, the Supreme Courtstrikes down sex discrimination. Ah. It's called United States versus Virginia,
01:03:51and they talk about it as basically brown v. Board of Education for gender. So like, she won.Wow. Like the newsies. And yet she's still remembered as like pushy. Do not read thecomments on the fucking clip that I sent you, by the way. Well, fuck everyone, honestly.The following year, there's four female cadets are admitted to the citadel. Two of them eventuallydrop out and sue the school for sexual harassment because of like the fucked up shit that happenedto them. I'll bet they do. And this is dark. The first female graduate of the citadel,her name is Nancy Mace, and she's a Republican congresswoman now. And she like ran Donald Trump'scampaign in South Carolina. There's a thing in 2018 where Shannon is invited to the citadels
01:04:37campus to give a talk, and she refers to herself. She says like, in my heart, I will always considermyself a citadel alumni. Cool. Yes. And like, of course she does whatever. And then Nancy Macewrites on Facebook, like we don't valorize failure. Like I don't have anything to do with her. Sheshouldn't be talking like that. She didn't get the ring. And it's like Nancy, just be nice.I don't know. It bummed me out. You're like a man can using Facebook as a forum for pettiness.I can't. The citadel now has around 10% of admissions are women.Do they still have Hell Week?They do, but they call it challenge week now. They've like, they've softened everything.
01:05:25They also, apparently there's a citadel float at the Charleston Gay Pride Parade every year.Like the school is sort of starting to thaw out.But in a way that's fostering Salmonella.Well, they're just doing this thing that institutions always do where they're like,well, obviously it's good to have women here, obviously. And it's like, this is what you foughtagainst for three years and $20 million. Indifference to history means indifference to whose faultthings are. I know. Also, like people's agency is really often conflated with their lawyers.And that's a real highlight of these media fracasi also. I know. It's like these debates
01:06:04leave this residue. We remember Shannon Faulkner as pushy and oversensitive and shedidn't want to shave her head. We remember all this stuff, but then we forget the factthat she was fucking correct. And the school is now saying that that was the right decision.And history and the law have proven her right and yet robbed her of credit for any of it.Right. And so another happy ending to the story is like Shannon is fine. Soshe ended up transferring to other colleges and graduating on time. There's an author named PatConroy who wrote a bunch of really famous novels, including The Prince of Tides,who is a Citadel graduate and he quietly paid for Shannon's education.
01:06:45Send people flowers and pay for their college. This is like true allyship.Yeah. And she's now a seventh grade English teacher at a middle school in Greenville,South Carolina. Cool. She seems happy. She does these sort of where they now interviews.She talked to Oprah again a couple years later and she talks about how it's frustrating how she'sbeen erased because people only remember the one week that she was at the Citadel. They don'tremember the two and a half years of her life that she spent at the Citadel and in court.And so I want to end with a Shannon quote. This is from an interview that she gives to the AP in2018. They're asking her about sort of her legacy and how she feels about the fact that the Citadel
01:07:19now has women going there. Shannon says, every girl who walks in there, whether she stays forone day or all four years, she has won. I love Shannon. I know. I'm happy that I learned aboutthis just for the sake of learning about it. And I also feel like it's a great object lesson in like,if you're forcing someone to do something for the first time all by themselves, then like,think about why perhaps you might be attempting to doom her to failure through the circumstancesyou're asking her to succeed under. Yes. And we don't like people that are seen to be pushing.So the nineties were bad and people who pay for other people's college are dope.Yeah. That's the moral. Pay for some college. Just a little slice of college debt, perhaps,
01:08:09if you can. Any woman who has been made fun of on a bumper sticker, those are the people who pay forthe college.
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