"Beverages, Bitches and Bikinis" doesn't sound like an event you'd expect a state campus to support. Yet that is the title originally proposed for an event sponsored by WXIN, the student radio station at state-supported Rhode Island College.
Station general manager Nick Lima originally claimed the title was, "reflective of pop culture music, including trends in hip-hop, alternative and country, and as a college radio station, WXIN's music events are a reflection of that culture." But last week, when asked if he would have approved something like "Niggers, Kikes and Fags," Lima admitted he had "made an error in judgment," he "regretted it," and had "learned from the experience." The event has been renamed "WXIN's End of Summer Bash."
Lima is an intelligent and thoughtful young man, which makes one wonder why he signed on to "Beverages, Bitches and Bikinis" in the first place. He is a junior, majoring in communications and overseeing an "independent" radio station. (Both Lima and RIC spokeswoman Jane Fusco said no state monies fund the station operations, but, when pressed, Fusco admitted the radio station operates on student activities fees, paid to the state since RIC is a state college.)
It took the threat of a protest by students and outraged members of the community at large to bring WXIN into the 21st century. The (female) college president, Nancy Carriuolo, could have nipped this in the bud: her salary is covered by state dollars. Spokeswoman Fusco, speaking for the president, had plenty to say, none of it about sexism.
In an interview with the Phoenix, Fusco's rant about "freedom of speech" and the "teaching moment" presented by this episode in misogyny sounded like a sophomore oral speech class exercise. While Nick Lima — who isn't getting a paycheck from RIC — had the grace and good sense to say, "I made a mistake, and I regret it," his college's mouthpiece and the president she represents cannot acknowledge that there is no more room for proclaiming "bitches" at RIC than there would be for screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theatre — the Supreme Court's historic measure of where freedom of speech ends.
Nick Lima acknowledges that the majority of RIC's students and staff are female and admits he risked offending a hell of a lot of them. More importantly, he makes you believe he will carry the lesson of this moment going forward in his life. Fusco and Carriuolo, on the other hand, prove that women of ignorance, as well as men, can inhabit the halls of power.
Those of us who have fought for women to rise up as professionals — without prejudice, or at least with recourse in the courts when prejudice reared its ugly head — weren't expecting to be called "bitches." We don't use that epithet, however much it may ring in our heads when women of influence abandon the generations that follow them.
