What has their teats in a wringer down on the UNLV campus this week?

Oh, to be so young and so righteous, so willing to tell everyone else how to behave, so quick to leap to high dudgeon, so confident, so silly.

In case you missed it while engaged in the debates over cap and trade, Afghanistan policy, health care reform and baseball’s ump slump, the umbrage being taken down on Maryland Parkway at UNLV is over … a hamburger joint ad.

The campus paper Rebel Yell ran an ad for a place called the Burger Grind Bar & Lounge, whose logo features a cartoon of a kneeling naked lady with body by butcher, the standard market tattoo of a cow’s various cuts of beef — rib, loin, rump, etc.

This prompted graduate student Anthony Guy Patricia to pen an op-ed in the Yell calling the ad a “masterpiece of capitalistic garbage.” (Since when is capitalism a slur?) The online version has attracted, as of this writing, 163 comments. The Yell responded with an editorial explaining the separation of editorial and advertising, sort of like church and state. And a law professor weighed in with an op-ed extolling the virtue of self-censorship.

After calling the advertisement offensive and bemoaning the fact women in Las Vegas “are exploited in all sorts of ways for the amusement, titillation and the kicks of men in our patriarchal and misogynistic society,” this is how Patricia ends his opening fusillade:

“As a doctoral student and a two-time alumnus of UNLV, I want answers: Who approved the acceptance and publication of such a reprehensible advertisement? Why was it accepted and published? And what are The Rebel Yell and The Burger Grind Bar & Lounge going to do to compensate those they have offended in the university community for their complete lack of judgment on this matter?”

Compensation? Show trials?

If the people at the Rebel Yell truly had a sense of justice and equanimity, they’d’ve made him buy an ad.

Sylvia Lazos, the law prof, I assume, though she is not identified as such, scolded the Yell, “Cultural historians argue that it is such commercial images that reinforce discriminatory stereotypes, such as that women can only be taken seriously as objects of desire. ...

"The best way to avoid heavy-handed campus speech codes is for all key actors in the campus community to exercise their free speech rights responsibly."

No need for speech codes if everyone knows their place and never steps over the line. The PC police will never have to blow their whistles. 

Oh, the power of newspaper advertising to alter the course of the planets and the relationship between the sexes.