When women’s experience is made intelligible in the communications of consciousness raising we can recognize that it is in the structures of men’s stories of the world that women don’t make sense — that our own experience, collectively and jointly appreciated, can generate a picture of ourselves and the world within which we are intelligible.
-Women, Knowledge and Reality, Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall
When it comes to language, I am something of a conservative. There is little that annoys me more than the propagation of ugly, obtuse and unintelligible writing. This is one of the reasons I admire Orwell, who vigorously protested the degeneration of the English language in essays and books, most notably 1984.
Feminists, for their part, often appear to have taken it upon themselves to wage war on the English language. The style and language they use, which employs a number of neologisms and, dare I say, “neosemanticisms,” could be described as having some attributes that mimic classical philosophy, but the effect is more what one might expect from a gang of axe-wielding orcs set loose upon an ancient, wooded grove.
Hallowed academe, once the keeper of the classics, has been invaded by a new form of literature; one that has metasticized throughout the stacks of libraries, shoving the beautiful old books full of clear, delightful language to the margins. Here, I’d like to offer a few examples of what kind of text can be found in a typical humanities class in the 21st century, and leave it up to the reader to determine why boys and men are fleeing these institutions:
“The power of the Marxian critique of class domination stands as an implicit suggestion that feminists should consider the advantages of adopting a historical materialist approach to understanding phallocratic domination.”
–Nancy Hartsock in “The Feminist Standpoint”
This is the first sentence of Hartsock’s essay. The term “phallocratic domination” is a euphemism for patriarchal society, i.e. rule by men, which is the norm throughout most of the world. Hartsock reduces this to rule by penis. Both Hartsock and I live in Washington state, which is largely ruled by women. Our governor and two senators are female. How would feminists react if men were to call that a “vaginocracy?” Essentially, Hartsock is reducing men to their genitals, which is a very primitive slur. This is easy to do when one has a guaranteed position at a university, and contradicts her fundamental premise that penises rule.
Nancy Hartsock is a tenured professor of Political Science at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“The relation between ourselves as practicing sociologists and ourselves as working women is continually visible to us, a central feature of experience of the world, so that the bifurcation of consciousness becomes for us a daily chasm which is to be crossed, on the one side of which is this special conceptual activity of thought, research, teaching, administration, and on the other the world of concrete practical activities of keeping things clean, managing somehow the house and household and the children, a world in which the particularities of persons in their full organic immediacy (cleaning up the vomit, changing diapers, as well as feeding) are inescapable. Even if we don’t have that as a direct contingency in our lives, we are aware of that as something that our becoming may be inserted into as a possible predicate.”
–Dorothy E. Smith in “Women’s perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology”
Here, Dorothy Smith, who also published “Feminism and Marxism: a place to begin, a way to go”, expresses in convoluted terms her anger and frustration about how her maternal duties imposed upon the “conceptual activity” that she apparently cherished. In fact, her grief is shared by plenty of women who are not conceptually capable, and she is simply a more verbose (although far from eloquent, as the quote clearly demonstrates) example of the woman who just doesn’t want to be bothered by motherhood. Note how she uses “predicate” where she clearly intends “predicament.”
Dorothy Smith is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
One phenomenon feminist historians have focused on is the rape and torture metaphors in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and others (e.g. Machiavelli) enthusiastic about the new scientific method. Traditional historians and philosophers have said that these metaphors are irrelevant to the real meanings and referents of scientific concepts held by those who used them and by the public for whom they wrote. But when it comes to regarding nature as a machine, they have quite a different analysis: here, we are told, the metaphor provides the interpretations of Newton’s mathematical laws: it directs inquirers to fruitful ways to apply his theory and suggests the appropriate methods of inquiry and the kind of metaphyiscs the new theory supports. But if we are to believe that mechanistic metaphors were a fundamental component of the explanations the new science provided, why should we believe that the gender metaphors were not? A consistent analysis would lead to the conclusion that understanding nature as a woman indifferent to or even welcoming rape was equally fundamental to the interpretations of these new conceptions of nature and inquiry. Presumably these metaphors, too, had fruitful pragmatic, methodological, and metaphysical consequences for science. In that case, why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as “Newton’s rape manual” as it is to call them “Newton’s mechanics”?
–Sandra Harding in “The Science Question in Feminism”
The assault on men in this instance becomes so ridiculous as to accuse Sir Isaac Newton, a lifelong virgin, of surreptitiously writing a rape manual while publishing one of the most influential scientific works of all time. Keep in mind that this woman is a tenured professor at a public university, and actually gets paid taxpayer money to write these kinds of things. “Phallocracy” indeed!
Sandra Harding is currently a professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education at UCLA.
9 responses so far ↓
1 miles // Jun 3, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Welmer,
Have you ever noticed how Women’s Studies and Sociology in particular has developed their own arcane system of nomenclature (naming system)?
Chemistry for example has had to devise a system of nomenclature to describe complex chemical compounds so chemists will understand each other when discussing those compounds in language and in print. If one chemist says to another bicarbontetrahydrochloride, the other chemist will know he is describing a compound that has two carbons, and four hyrochloride groups, and that “hydro-chloride” refers to chlorine molecules with a extra hydrogen atom attached.
There is a reason for the “Big words” with the chemists and physicists.
But for social sciences, its only reasonto “make up big words” is to make the study as esoteric-sounding as possible, and also to make the studies appear “scientific”. Women’s studies classes are not cumulative learning, just as history isn’t. A freshman could pass a graduate-level course in the stuff if he applied himself, and -they know it-. Those esoteric-scholarly-SOUNDING-paragraphs you highlighted were written by women who probably could not change a tire, spark plug, perform advanced algebra or trig, do any accounting, have ever ran any real business, or have much life experience outside of wordy books in any way. Literally ivory-towered-amateurs, but ones who think they are smarter than thousands of generations of accumulated wisdom with their radical “theories”. In a way, their disciplines are just a huge sham.
I also notice one more thing about the overwhelming majority of feminists and that is that they are homely women, despite a few exceptions. Women that men just dont notice and dont want to have sex with. Feminism is their revenge.
My own -true-conviction about feminism is that it was started by Marxists with the implicit aim of hurting the Western birthrate. Betty Friedan and (if I remember correctly) Bella Abzug and Gloria Stienem all had communist party ties back in the day. I think the ideology was “created” like a religion is “created” to control peoples actions long after the creators of the ideology are gone. When one creates an ideology and wins converts, they give birth to a living thing that might live for several centruries or even thousands of years because its practitioners will keep it alive. Ive long thought that Frankfurt School Marxists, or Kremlin Marxists probably devised feminism as early as the 1920′s as a trojan horse for the West to swallow, literally putting emnity between man and woman, and used useful idiots like Friedan, Abzug, and Steinem to get the ball rolling via universities here. New converts become the new priests arguing for “Gender Studies” departments and before you know it the thing has an institutionalized infrastructure. Marx called for a “legalized community of women” in the Communist Manifesto that didn’t marry, but had children that would be raised by the state…………..and utter sexual liberation. He wasn’t kidding. Men of course, the ones who aren’t doing so well in the orgy that follows, will have no reason to be very invested in such a state, and couples that fall in love will not want to share their beloved with everyone else so that was a stillborn idea if there ever was one and Marx knew it. He still wanted to enforce it because he was just that wicked and deranged.
Ive moaned a bit about birthrates, but I think it cannot be too loudly addressed: As Steve Sailer has pointed out, those who will win the future are those who show up for it. Our “SWPLS”, unless they win a mass of converts, simply will have bred themselves into obscurity in 100 years. Christians, Muslims, Observant Jews simply have to breed at the replacement rate, and keep their youth from becoming moonbats (and all of them have began creating social-life-infrastructure for their youth to do just that), and they will be the last one’s standing 150 years out from now. People’s that have birhtrates of 1.3-1.5 children per female are headed for the dustbin of history. Historians 200 years from now might refer to them as our historians refer to 1920′s-era flappers or the Shaker religious movement.
2 whiskey // Jun 3, 2009 at 8:39 pm
More confirmation that the University system is a gay and female ghetto. Worth basically nothing.
3 Lukobe // Jun 3, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I wonder how these departments will do in the face of the budget cuts almost all universities are now facing, including the University of Washington.
4 ray // Jun 3, 2009 at 10:37 pm
I also notice one more thing about the overwhelming majority of feminists and that is that they are homely women, despite a few exceptions. Women that men just dont notice and dont want to have sex with. Feminism is their revenge.
___
i thought that second one there was Dustin Hoffman (without the talent)
5 Welmer // Jun 3, 2009 at 11:47 pm
miles // Jun 3, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Welmer,
Have you ever noticed how Women’s Studies and Sociology in particular has developed their own arcane system of nomenclature (naming system)?
Yes, and I can’t stand it. While studying Chinese culture I had to take some classes from feminist anthropologists, and I was forced to familiarize myself with it. I have since done my best to forget it, but I can still recognize the stuff whenever I see it.
However, their nomenclature doesn’t even really make sense, and they often use words they appear to have pulled out of thin air, or they distort the original meaning of a word to suit their purposes (hence my “neosemanticism” reference).
I also notice one more thing about the overwhelming majority of feminists and that is that they are homely women, despite a few exceptions. Women that men just dont notice and dont want to have sex with. Feminism is their revenge.
Heh. I knew I’d have some fun pulling their pictures up on a Google image search. That old battle axe Dorothy Smith could send a man fleeing in terror with a wink and a smile.
For the truly hard core of feminism, which these “ladies” represent, this may or may not be the case. I think their strongest motivation is sheer power, hence the fascination with Marxism, which seems to draw these types.
Lukobe // Jun 3, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I wonder how these departments will do in the face of the budget cuts almost all universities are now facing, including the University of Washington.
Can one lobby to have a position eliminated?
6 novaseeker // Jun 4, 2009 at 7:20 am
A fun post.
I think that much of academic feminism is a crazy-quilt of semantics, Marxism and misandry, brewed together in different proportions, and then poured over traditional disciplines.
So for example you go to history, and you pull out some of the newfangled words, throw in some Marxist ideology, and get in a few digs at men and … voila, you get “herstory” (yet another example of neosemanticism, ahem).
At the end of the process what you mostly get is a barely intelligible arrangement of gibberish with a few sound-byte type phrases here and there which are intended to be “take-aways” that can be easily trotted out to ridicule and demean men.
Mostly I think the academic feminists are motivated by hate. Much more than power. I think many of them truly hate men, biology, the role that biology and evolution have “assigned” to women, and so on. Hate is the fuel that burns in them and is the core of the ideology that motivates them. We must remember that Marxism had, built into it, class hatred — that’s essentially what Marx was preaching in the Manifesto — to stir up the “class consciousness” of the proletariat to hate the bourgeoisie tosuch a great extent as to wage violent class revolution. Hatred was a key ingredient in that, and it is the key ingredient in feminism, regardless of what is claimed.
The main difference between classical Marxism and feminism is that Marx overestimated the degree to which the working class could develop a cohesive enough level of class identification and solidarity to enable it to band together in revolution. He should have chosen gender as the fulcrum of division rather than class. And this is what the Frankfurt school realized, and corrected. Unlike the proletariat, women already *had* a strong “group consciousness” and a list of grievances about men that probably date back millions of years (as men have a list about women which is likely as old). Picking biological sex as the wedge to divide society and foment revolution was a masterstroke, and has worked brilliantly from the perspective of Marxists who wanted to destroy the civilization and replace it with a Marxist utopia.
We haven’t yet stopped going down that path. As birth rates continue to decline, and OOW births rise as a percentage of births, the marginalization of fathers continues apace — something which will eventually be dealt with by socializing much of parenting and child care, which is the ultimate Marxist dream, because it will allow the state to control the molding of its citizens even more directly. In order to get there, marriage and fatherhood had to be obliterated, and so that is what they have done.
7 joel // Jun 6, 2009 at 4:48 am
Are there any good studies on what happens to womyn who go through school and get a lot of this nonsense? What is the outcome for women who major in women’s studies? What do they do with their professions and their lives?
Such women will be so screwed up, it is hard to imagine them functioning normally. I suppose then they will define single motherhood, childless old age, and lesbian lifestyles as normal, so see, problem solved. It IS all just a matter of sematics.
So there!
8 Lukobe // Jun 7, 2009 at 12:10 am
Joel: perhaps this. http://bit.ly/3tnjrD
9 Justin // Jun 11, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Lord, my eyes glaze over when I try to read that crap.
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