Janice, thanks for another great article! I'm a relatively new subscriber. However, as a fellow Canadian, I want to say that, in my mind, you are a national treasure. Your depth of knowledge regarding the history of feminism is essential to helping us understand the path that led us to where we are today. Hopefully, that understanding will also guide us in shifting course, and give us a chance to move toward a place of relative sanity.
This is not just timely, but important. I knew the trans-madness we are in regarding gender was created by feminists. They fracked gender to liberate themselves from traditional obligations, but fracking is a destructive process that does tremendous damage to the (social) environment. Today, they throw their hands up and wonder how it came to this? They are risible, but it is their very identity as women that protects them from criticism; and like women (by-and-large) refuse to take accountability - because why should they? We have a cultural hangover as a society which means we cannot bear to attack them, even if the old rules no longer apply. And attack them we must. I say "we", but that's really you (and other women) while men like us gratefully cheer you along. You give us hope. Your writing helps us with our grief and sadness. What have we learned from this? Horrible ideas must be not only challenged, they must be mocked as they otherwise lodge, festering in the body - and dislodge, blocking arteries and veins of our society.
I loved a girl once, briefly (draw your own conclusions). It is rare for me to be so enamoured by a young mind so electric and gifted. The next time I saw her was on Twitter, double-mastectomy completed and new name. You see, she's a man now. So I keep the photographs I had of before she engaged in the destruction of her body and remember. This tragedy is permanent and accelerating like a runaway train. Once a bad idea exists in the world, you cannot un-invent it.
Janice, I always appreciate your insight and experience in the area of feminist thought. As an engineer and pragmatist, I am always at a loss when I encounter work by Butler et al. I recall trying to read something from one of the French post-modernists in the early 1990s (t was all the rage) and I couldn't past a few pages and all I could really say was 'what the fuck is this'? It was literal gobbledegook and any of it that was comprehensible (not much) was very obviously sophistry. I still cant get past the fact that anyone at all would consider it anything more than pulp for recycling. Do the people that read it and take it seriously (academics, 'philosophers', intellectuals, etc ) REALLY think that incoherently, and/or get some emotional meaning from gibberish? I can understand why we are where we are today IF people were taking that shit seriously.
I suspect that most people find it what it is: gobbledook. I read the entirety of *Gender Trouble* (Butler's first book) and didn't understand much; or rather, I thought I understood it until I tried to explain to somebody who saw me reading it on the bus one day (very embarrassing). But people take the ideas, in a simplified form, quite seriously: "All gender is performance." "We imitate femininity and masculinity rather than express them." In a way, it's not untrue, but it becomes a dogma that justifies contempt for biology and the conviction that gender can be remade according to our (usually feminist) preferences.
Cool. I think with a lot of this stuff, there are grains of truth in it (as you say), but they are nothing more than semi-obvious observations about life, and then these 'intellectuals' try to turn these basic ideas into something profound. Its seems like its all kind of a make-work project, in academia, for intelligent people who are otherwise unemployable.
As with all good horseshit, there have to be grains of truth in the mix for it to stick; bona fide, 100% made up nonsense is usually harder to sell.
Then again, one could look at the Sokal affair (and the Lindsay one more recently) and conclude that the whole edifice of capital-t Theory has now come completely unmoored from reality and is sailing away to rainbow unicorn land. We can only hope that there are still some Kraken in those waters.
"They muddy their waters to make them seem deep" - Nietzsche on poets, but it applies here.
I work in a university with a variety of faculty from various departments. It's common for faculty in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to write this way. They have to do research to keep their jobs. They have nothing to say, but can't admit to themselves. They have dedicated a lot of time and money to obtaining their degrees. They have built up an identity around it. It would be too painful for them to admit they've been wasting their time. They believe every word they write.
These faculty are also the most difficult to work with. While some are very nice, all the faculty problems I encounter at work come with these departments. They have zero social skills and are the biggest hypocrites among faculty. They are the most vocal about helping those who have less in society, yet they treat staff who make considerably less than them very badly.
There was a conference of private school presidents a few years ago. The speaker complained that the general public was criticizing higher ed. His speech was about how to make the dumb peasants understand how great higher ed. He never once considered the possibility that an ounce of their criticism could be correct. This is actually how many faculty and higher ed administrators think. They really do live in an ivory tower. They hate you.
Thank you, that offers some great insight. I studied at McGill and had the grades to go to graduate school probably anywhere in just about anything, but I didn't really like school all that much. Four years was just right, anymore would have made me very unhappy. I have always related more to pragmatists and empiricists rather than theoreticians or philosophers. I could see the snobbery in academic 'intellectual' circles, and it turned me off. It is obviously alive and well, and even thriving in the modern woke academy.
You are not wrong; it’s basically narcissistic word salad, only with footnotes. People in social sciences nod along as if it meant something because their careers depend on compliance - and if you pretend to believe something for long enough, you will eventually internalise it. Everyone outside of academia just gets fobbed off with “it’s above your pay grade, bud”: deliberate obscurity passed off as depth.
Mar 4, 2023·edited Mar 5, 2023Liked by Janice Fiamengo
Yes, appears to be some what the case. That said, I can think of two other non academic experiences I have had encountering genuine gobbledegook, one was a politician who spoke for 45 minutes about 'innovation' at an engineering conference I attended, and literally said nothing. I was kind of shocked. Another was reading renewable energy 'guru' Amory Lovins, and it was pages and pages of meaningless word salad. I am just amazed that the audiences of these people dont react more.
I'm at a loss also. I attempted to read the given short extract of Butler's work but it didn't make any sense to me either. I don't think that it has to. These academic pieces are written for a tiny 'in crowd' and I'd bet hardly anyone actually reads them.
Very well said Janice. It is amazing how such bizarre statements can now be made and people don't even flinch. I am guessing it is just like a good salesman who knows that the fastest path to a sale is to acquire a series of "yeses." Once that series of yeses takes place the salesman knows he can ask for just about anything. Feminism seems the same. They start with a series of yeses and have now gotten so bizarre that people don't lift an eyebrow! Your call to action is perfect. Stop agreeing with the salesman and kick her out the door! She is nuts.
I love natural women. My wife is one. You go Aretha!
Kudos on your investigation and report regarding males and suicide. Your work is a perfect blend of logic and intuition. I look forward to more from you.
Yet further evidence, if any were needed, about the destructive role that universities now play. The so-called "grievance" subjects of gender, race, sexuality, and religion have taken over the universities, including STEM fields, in their entirety. They are no longer institutes of learning and research, but are now institutionalized grievance political parties and nothing more. Grievance party politics are upheld and enforced by the ever expanding DEI bureaucracies, who now run the universities. Professors of what were once actual fields of study are today no more than servants, very frightened servants. I can't tell you how glad I am to be out of it.
My university's strategic plan literally says "institutionalize diversity, equity, and inclusion." I've also worked in university accreditation, and they required universities to demonstrate our commitment to these values in order to keep their accreditation.
Thank you Janice for re-focusing the gender debate back where it belongs - on biology. There are now several generations (of men and women) that have been wandering around in the wilderness their whole lives after having mistakenly taken the 70s "equal rights" demand at face value.
Mar 4, 2023·edited Mar 4, 2023Liked by Janice Fiamengo
"Until they do, their complaints about the attack on natural women will ring hollow. "
Most women will never do so unless there is a significant social pressure to do so. Wise, masculine men need to have the dominant influence in society. There's a lot that can go wrong with men in charge, but at least society has a fighting chance. With women dominating over men, you are guaranteed this endless nonsense until society breaks down to the point where many people lose their comforts and distractions.
If you try to make men and women equally in charge of all society, it will always tilt toward women because the men will simp.
Traditional gender roles are important, but in a general way. It's not good to be too strict about it, which sometimes happens in fundamentalist religions. But it's not good to be too loose, either. Men and women are like a ying-yang symbol. The man's side is mostly masculine (let's say black) with a small amount of femininity (white). The woman's side is mostly feminine with a small amount of masculinity. The small dots will vary in size among individuals, but if they become too large, the person is disordered.
I was born in the 80's and I never would have said something like this until recent years, seeing all the problems we have. Men need to be the head of house holds and women need to not see this as a problem, but to desire and love it.
The cruelty of women--or at least, their indifference and selfishness generally, along with their misdirected empathy--are among the most worrisome aspects of the present ascent of women. I agree with you that society should not be overly strict. Men should not be shamed for being less masculine; women should not be shamed for having masculine gifts and abilities; both sexes should be able to make choices that suit them. But in general, traditional gender roles should be openly preferred and rewarded, and anti-male bigotry of the sort that is now standard and applauded in our society, should be treated as the equivalent of anti-Semitism or anti-blackness. Any woman who expresses contempt for men or hatred of men should be excoriated and publicly humiliated. Female claims of harassment and victimization should be treated with caution and skepticism; accused men should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Above all, the central role of fathers in their children's lives should be protected and upheld.
Apart from your cavalier disregard for wonton abuse, I couldn't agree more. Feminists just twist the increasingly tortured narrative to justify whatever privilege they are seeking to secure or defend. What is so disappointing is how many women are content to go along with it, provided it benefits them in the short-term.
Thanks, Janice. It is not infrequently the case, when these fits of outrage break loose, with their recriminations, accusations, and yelps of pain, that the participants do not know what they are talking about. The outraged speak, or write, before they think or track down information. In keeping with their astonishing ignorance and superficiality, they have no "oops" moments--no flinching, as Tom says in his comment. They give themselves A for effort, and then it is on to the next one, with high fives all around. Thanks for giving them the grade they earned.
One of the oddities of the older feminists, "terfs" apparently, is that they seem to think that men should join them in their battle. One that is in fact between different forms of feminism. The really odd bit is that the main "terf" problem with trans women appears to be that they are simply the same universally predatory evil bastards they believe all males are. It seems curiously self defeating to seek allies from a group you simultaneously label universally bad and frequently predatory.
As you have chronicled here and elsewhere both the ideology and "alliance" between feminism and LGBTQ (etc.) Has only very recently been broken, ironically when a few men decide to challenge gender and be "women"
It is curious that there is not anything like the hoo ha about the girls and women seeking to pass as men, in fact the larger number here in the UK.
And what are the "sex based" rights? Well thus far they seem to be about toilets and prisons.
I have a friend who has been for decades a writer for TV and Radio. In recent years he always submits scripts in his female "non de plume" (an old device in literature) because otherwise it won't get past the first base. I suppose that sort of discrimination is the more hidden "right" women may need to protect.
It saddens me that so many men ARE willing to join with the TERFs in assuming that every transgender woman using the women's toilet is a male predator who's found a new way to victimize women. Far too many well-intentioned men don't care that after 40 years of being shamed for such things as holding the door open for women ("benevolent sexism"), they are now expected to defend women against a feminist-inspired cohort of trans women.
There is a fair bit of hoo ha about girls and women seeking to pass as men--but it's all sympathetic hoo ha. They are seen as victims of an anti-woman culture who need to be saved from misogynistic pressures. But the boys and men who want to be women are never seen as victims of an anti-male culture. They are always assumed to be predators in waiting whose greatest desire is to "erase" women.
You've got to give it to even the dumbest women's rights activist: no matter the occasion, no matter the logical backflips involved, there will always be a way to blame some man. And an awful lot of men will fall for it.
Mar 4, 2023·edited Mar 5, 2023Liked by Janice Fiamengo
Poe's Law is a force of nature when it comes to pseudointellectual gibberish like academic feminism, gender theory, etc.
'Authors' in these fields are little more than jargonauts on a sea of obfuscation. The operating principle seems to be that a naive reader will assume that, since she can't really make any sense out of what's been written, that the writer must be on a higher plane of intelligence.
Oh yeah, it's back in spades and you ain't seen nothin yet.
I have a happy surprise for you, above you speculate "Perhaps we will soon hear that men’s natural masculine qualities are also to be celebrated, their biological roles defended, and their single-sex spaces restored." And I have the great pleasure of recommending the most recent episode of the "Maiden Mother Matriarch" podcast, hosted by Louise Perry and featuring as guest Helen Joyce. Full scale recognition of 'the reality denying nature' of feminism and yes - a call to recognize male attributes and to establish and defend male spaces.
That podcast makes a similar argument to yours here and not at all in a tentative way, the bell has rung on social construction, even in the darkest pits of feminism, it's dead.
I hope so, my friend. Personally, I have been extremely disappointed in Helen Joyce. Everything I have read by her takes the typical victim line, blaming men for oppressing women through trans. But I hope to be wrong. Maybe she's changed her tune recently; I haven't listened to the podcast yet.
Ya I know, I saw her on Benjamin Boyce when her book Trans came out, and she was explicitly saying "Don't blame the teachers"
But all of this is finally coming to a head, the tide has turned against social construction. A lot of stuff is related in various interesting ways, all the noise in artificial intelligence recently for example. ChatGPT is an LLM, a large language model, so that is an attempt to construct mind out of pure language. It has not worked because it can not work because there is inborn internal structure in the human mind.
So the questions are related philosophically, by which I mean fundamentally, because both are flavors of empiricism, philosophical empiricism, which claims that all knowledge is acquired through the senses. It's really the question of whether an information system, whether it be a brain or a computer, can learn in that way - and it simply can not. There must be internal structure.
I mean this has been the fundamental error of the 20th century. At the end of WWII there was real cryptographical analysis being done on computers, it was all very hush hush, only the cool kids - and the cool kids were blowing smoke up the butts of every general in the world, promising them AI super intelligent machines.
Human level AI has been '20 years away' since 1948. AI has been the real arms race, and the model was Skinnerian, behaviorist, social constructionist - no structure, blank slate, all information to be gained from the training data. Because this is how the mind worked, according to said cool kids.
Well when you have a huge focused effort like that it hogs up all the grant money, everything in every edu department suddenly gets funded IF and in many cases ONLY if it advances social construction, statistics on large datasets, algorithms.
well it's ridiculous and impossible and it just don't work. Intelligence is a property of organic chemistry, there, I said it. And the properties of such an intelligent chemical system are determined by it's structure.
Watch the podcast, or check out the clips Louise Perry posted on twitter, I am not claiming she came to Jesus, just that the two of them recognize, out loud, that social construction is dead.
i mean that's a huge step. The realization is spreading through all of the various feminist subcultures, it simply can not be denied - women are a natural phenomena, 'female' is not a developmental disorder caused by abuse, girls are not girls, nor are women women simply because men told them they were. So this is one foot in the door for acceptance of personal responsibility.
I made up an aphorism the other day 'People are like self pruning Bonsai trees, we make our choices and our choices make us' and that is the new model. We have intrinsic nature, we can train ourselves in many interesting ways, but only within the scope and limits of our biology.
I can understand a desire to cheer on any woman who bravely steps up to speak out against the nonsense that has originated from feminism, but Ms Joyce only wants to push back with her own selfserving motives against the feminism that she bases her own ism on. She tends to talk fast and eloquently which can make it a challenge to catch her most outrageous statements as when in the abovementioned Boyce interview she claimed that unlike in the UK, trans identifying individuals have 'no rights' in the USA. In yet another interview cum book promotion tourstop, she asserted that one injustice of putting transwomen into women's prisons was that women don't belong in prisons because their crimes are less violent and they are usually involved with committing crimes with men who are by default the worse criminals. Such gynocentric statements get interspersed in otherwise sane statements against the excesses of trans activism but she herself is just pushing for her own excesses to retake center stage in the feminist drama that she has linked her career to
this take is backwards, it's not that social construction is some weird thing made up by feminists, rather it's that feminism is some weird thing made up by social constructionists.
I'm not cheering on any woman I am cheering on the advancement of the ideas, even in, as I said somewhere else in this thread 'the darkest pits of feminism'
Oh and I think I may have gotten two podcasts mixed in my memory, a lot has been interesting lately. So the one I mentioned, maiden mother matriarch, Louise Perry and Helen Joyce do confront the 'realty denying nature of feminism' ideas like women being just as good as men at firefighting. But I think the call for male spaces was actually from Mary Harrington on 'Modern Wisdom' with Chris Williamson, another conversation around all the same kind of ideas around this change of paradigm
Janice, thanks for another great article! I'm a relatively new subscriber. However, as a fellow Canadian, I want to say that, in my mind, you are a national treasure. Your depth of knowledge regarding the history of feminism is essential to helping us understand the path that led us to where we are today. Hopefully, that understanding will also guide us in shifting course, and give us a chance to move toward a place of relative sanity.
Too much praise! But I'll take it. Thank you very much.
Entirely deserved praise.
This is not just timely, but important. I knew the trans-madness we are in regarding gender was created by feminists. They fracked gender to liberate themselves from traditional obligations, but fracking is a destructive process that does tremendous damage to the (social) environment. Today, they throw their hands up and wonder how it came to this? They are risible, but it is their very identity as women that protects them from criticism; and like women (by-and-large) refuse to take accountability - because why should they? We have a cultural hangover as a society which means we cannot bear to attack them, even if the old rules no longer apply. And attack them we must. I say "we", but that's really you (and other women) while men like us gratefully cheer you along. You give us hope. Your writing helps us with our grief and sadness. What have we learned from this? Horrible ideas must be not only challenged, they must be mocked as they otherwise lodge, festering in the body - and dislodge, blocking arteries and veins of our society.
I loved a girl once, briefly (draw your own conclusions). It is rare for me to be so enamoured by a young mind so electric and gifted. The next time I saw her was on Twitter, double-mastectomy completed and new name. You see, she's a man now. So I keep the photographs I had of before she engaged in the destruction of her body and remember. This tragedy is permanent and accelerating like a runaway train. Once a bad idea exists in the world, you cannot un-invent it.
Thank you for this.
Your fracking analogy is superb. I'm sorry about the girl you knew.
Janice, I always appreciate your insight and experience in the area of feminist thought. As an engineer and pragmatist, I am always at a loss when I encounter work by Butler et al. I recall trying to read something from one of the French post-modernists in the early 1990s (t was all the rage) and I couldn't past a few pages and all I could really say was 'what the fuck is this'? It was literal gobbledegook and any of it that was comprehensible (not much) was very obviously sophistry. I still cant get past the fact that anyone at all would consider it anything more than pulp for recycling. Do the people that read it and take it seriously (academics, 'philosophers', intellectuals, etc ) REALLY think that incoherently, and/or get some emotional meaning from gibberish? I can understand why we are where we are today IF people were taking that shit seriously.
I suspect that most people find it what it is: gobbledook. I read the entirety of *Gender Trouble* (Butler's first book) and didn't understand much; or rather, I thought I understood it until I tried to explain to somebody who saw me reading it on the bus one day (very embarrassing). But people take the ideas, in a simplified form, quite seriously: "All gender is performance." "We imitate femininity and masculinity rather than express them." In a way, it's not untrue, but it becomes a dogma that justifies contempt for biology and the conviction that gender can be remade according to our (usually feminist) preferences.
Cool. I think with a lot of this stuff, there are grains of truth in it (as you say), but they are nothing more than semi-obvious observations about life, and then these 'intellectuals' try to turn these basic ideas into something profound. Its seems like its all kind of a make-work project, in academia, for intelligent people who are otherwise unemployable.
As with all good horseshit, there have to be grains of truth in the mix for it to stick; bona fide, 100% made up nonsense is usually harder to sell.
Then again, one could look at the Sokal affair (and the Lindsay one more recently) and conclude that the whole edifice of capital-t Theory has now come completely unmoored from reality and is sailing away to rainbow unicorn land. We can only hope that there are still some Kraken in those waters.
Amen to that!
"They muddy their waters to make them seem deep" - Nietzsche on poets, but it applies here.
I work in a university with a variety of faculty from various departments. It's common for faculty in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to write this way. They have to do research to keep their jobs. They have nothing to say, but can't admit to themselves. They have dedicated a lot of time and money to obtaining their degrees. They have built up an identity around it. It would be too painful for them to admit they've been wasting their time. They believe every word they write.
These faculty are also the most difficult to work with. While some are very nice, all the faculty problems I encounter at work come with these departments. They have zero social skills and are the biggest hypocrites among faculty. They are the most vocal about helping those who have less in society, yet they treat staff who make considerably less than them very badly.
There was a conference of private school presidents a few years ago. The speaker complained that the general public was criticizing higher ed. His speech was about how to make the dumb peasants understand how great higher ed. He never once considered the possibility that an ounce of their criticism could be correct. This is actually how many faculty and higher ed administrators think. They really do live in an ivory tower. They hate you.
And yes, they hate you (you meaning not them, that is, ordinary people). Perfect.
Thank you, that offers some great insight. I studied at McGill and had the grades to go to graduate school probably anywhere in just about anything, but I didn't really like school all that much. Four years was just right, anymore would have made me very unhappy. I have always related more to pragmatists and empiricists rather than theoreticians or philosophers. I could see the snobbery in academic 'intellectual' circles, and it turned me off. It is obviously alive and well, and even thriving in the modern woke academy.
You are not wrong; it’s basically narcissistic word salad, only with footnotes. People in social sciences nod along as if it meant something because their careers depend on compliance - and if you pretend to believe something for long enough, you will eventually internalise it. Everyone outside of academia just gets fobbed off with “it’s above your pay grade, bud”: deliberate obscurity passed off as depth.
Yes, appears to be some what the case. That said, I can think of two other non academic experiences I have had encountering genuine gobbledegook, one was a politician who spoke for 45 minutes about 'innovation' at an engineering conference I attended, and literally said nothing. I was kind of shocked. Another was reading renewable energy 'guru' Amory Lovins, and it was pages and pages of meaningless word salad. I am just amazed that the audiences of these people dont react more.
I'm at a loss also. I attempted to read the given short extract of Butler's work but it didn't make any sense to me either. I don't think that it has to. These academic pieces are written for a tiny 'in crowd' and I'd bet hardly anyone actually reads them.
"now-familiar assertions about gender as a social and cultural construct."
And the wheel turns, another circle. They push one concept until it comes back to bite them.
Exactly so!
Very well said Janice. It is amazing how such bizarre statements can now be made and people don't even flinch. I am guessing it is just like a good salesman who knows that the fastest path to a sale is to acquire a series of "yeses." Once that series of yeses takes place the salesman knows he can ask for just about anything. Feminism seems the same. They start with a series of yeses and have now gotten so bizarre that people don't lift an eyebrow! Your call to action is perfect. Stop agreeing with the salesman and kick her out the door! She is nuts.
I love natural women. My wife is one. You go Aretha!
Kudos on your investigation and report regarding males and suicide. Your work is a perfect blend of logic and intuition. I look forward to more from you.
Your brother from another mother, Mic.
Thanks Mic.
Yet further evidence, if any were needed, about the destructive role that universities now play. The so-called "grievance" subjects of gender, race, sexuality, and religion have taken over the universities, including STEM fields, in their entirety. They are no longer institutes of learning and research, but are now institutionalized grievance political parties and nothing more. Grievance party politics are upheld and enforced by the ever expanding DEI bureaucracies, who now run the universities. Professors of what were once actual fields of study are today no more than servants, very frightened servants. I can't tell you how glad I am to be out of it.
I really feel for the few non-woke teachers who have to pretend every day to believe the lunatic dogma.
Hi Philip. Nice to see you commenting here.
My university's strategic plan literally says "institutionalize diversity, equity, and inclusion." I've also worked in university accreditation, and they required universities to demonstrate our commitment to these values in order to keep their accreditation.
Thank you Janice for re-focusing the gender debate back where it belongs - on biology. There are now several generations (of men and women) that have been wandering around in the wilderness their whole lives after having mistakenly taken the 70s "equal rights" demand at face value.
"Until they do, their complaints about the attack on natural women will ring hollow. "
Most women will never do so unless there is a significant social pressure to do so. Wise, masculine men need to have the dominant influence in society. There's a lot that can go wrong with men in charge, but at least society has a fighting chance. With women dominating over men, you are guaranteed this endless nonsense until society breaks down to the point where many people lose their comforts and distractions.
If you try to make men and women equally in charge of all society, it will always tilt toward women because the men will simp.
Traditional gender roles are important, but in a general way. It's not good to be too strict about it, which sometimes happens in fundamentalist religions. But it's not good to be too loose, either. Men and women are like a ying-yang symbol. The man's side is mostly masculine (let's say black) with a small amount of femininity (white). The woman's side is mostly feminine with a small amount of masculinity. The small dots will vary in size among individuals, but if they become too large, the person is disordered.
I was born in the 80's and I never would have said something like this until recent years, seeing all the problems we have. Men need to be the head of house holds and women need to not see this as a problem, but to desire and love it.
The cruelty of women--or at least, their indifference and selfishness generally, along with their misdirected empathy--are among the most worrisome aspects of the present ascent of women. I agree with you that society should not be overly strict. Men should not be shamed for being less masculine; women should not be shamed for having masculine gifts and abilities; both sexes should be able to make choices that suit them. But in general, traditional gender roles should be openly preferred and rewarded, and anti-male bigotry of the sort that is now standard and applauded in our society, should be treated as the equivalent of anti-Semitism or anti-blackness. Any woman who expresses contempt for men or hatred of men should be excoriated and publicly humiliated. Female claims of harassment and victimization should be treated with caution and skepticism; accused men should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Above all, the central role of fathers in their children's lives should be protected and upheld.
I think it's fair to say that academic feminists conserve the post-modernist's tradition of bad writing.
Apart from your cavalier disregard for wonton abuse, I couldn't agree more. Feminists just twist the increasingly tortured narrative to justify whatever privilege they are seeking to secure or defend. What is so disappointing is how many women are content to go along with it, provided it benefits them in the short-term.
Wonton lives matter!
Thanks, Janice. It is not infrequently the case, when these fits of outrage break loose, with their recriminations, accusations, and yelps of pain, that the participants do not know what they are talking about. The outraged speak, or write, before they think or track down information. In keeping with their astonishing ignorance and superficiality, they have no "oops" moments--no flinching, as Tom says in his comment. They give themselves A for effort, and then it is on to the next one, with high fives all around. Thanks for giving them the grade they earned.
One of the oddities of the older feminists, "terfs" apparently, is that they seem to think that men should join them in their battle. One that is in fact between different forms of feminism. The really odd bit is that the main "terf" problem with trans women appears to be that they are simply the same universally predatory evil bastards they believe all males are. It seems curiously self defeating to seek allies from a group you simultaneously label universally bad and frequently predatory.
As you have chronicled here and elsewhere both the ideology and "alliance" between feminism and LGBTQ (etc.) Has only very recently been broken, ironically when a few men decide to challenge gender and be "women"
It is curious that there is not anything like the hoo ha about the girls and women seeking to pass as men, in fact the larger number here in the UK.
And what are the "sex based" rights? Well thus far they seem to be about toilets and prisons.
I have a friend who has been for decades a writer for TV and Radio. In recent years he always submits scripts in his female "non de plume" (an old device in literature) because otherwise it won't get past the first base. I suppose that sort of discrimination is the more hidden "right" women may need to protect.
It saddens me that so many men ARE willing to join with the TERFs in assuming that every transgender woman using the women's toilet is a male predator who's found a new way to victimize women. Far too many well-intentioned men don't care that after 40 years of being shamed for such things as holding the door open for women ("benevolent sexism"), they are now expected to defend women against a feminist-inspired cohort of trans women.
There is a fair bit of hoo ha about girls and women seeking to pass as men--but it's all sympathetic hoo ha. They are seen as victims of an anti-woman culture who need to be saved from misogynistic pressures. But the boys and men who want to be women are never seen as victims of an anti-male culture. They are always assumed to be predators in waiting whose greatest desire is to "erase" women.
You've got to give it to even the dumbest women's rights activist: no matter the occasion, no matter the logical backflips involved, there will always be a way to blame some man. And an awful lot of men will fall for it.
Poe's Law is a force of nature when it comes to pseudointellectual gibberish like academic feminism, gender theory, etc.
'Authors' in these fields are little more than jargonauts on a sea of obfuscation. The operating principle seems to be that a naive reader will assume that, since she can't really make any sense out of what's been written, that the writer must be on a higher plane of intelligence.
Oh yeah, it's back in spades and you ain't seen nothin yet.
I have a happy surprise for you, above you speculate "Perhaps we will soon hear that men’s natural masculine qualities are also to be celebrated, their biological roles defended, and their single-sex spaces restored." And I have the great pleasure of recommending the most recent episode of the "Maiden Mother Matriarch" podcast, hosted by Louise Perry and featuring as guest Helen Joyce. Full scale recognition of 'the reality denying nature' of feminism and yes - a call to recognize male attributes and to establish and defend male spaces.
That podcast makes a similar argument to yours here and not at all in a tentative way, the bell has rung on social construction, even in the darkest pits of feminism, it's dead.
I hope so, my friend. Personally, I have been extremely disappointed in Helen Joyce. Everything I have read by her takes the typical victim line, blaming men for oppressing women through trans. But I hope to be wrong. Maybe she's changed her tune recently; I haven't listened to the podcast yet.
Ya I know, I saw her on Benjamin Boyce when her book Trans came out, and she was explicitly saying "Don't blame the teachers"
But all of this is finally coming to a head, the tide has turned against social construction. A lot of stuff is related in various interesting ways, all the noise in artificial intelligence recently for example. ChatGPT is an LLM, a large language model, so that is an attempt to construct mind out of pure language. It has not worked because it can not work because there is inborn internal structure in the human mind.
So the questions are related philosophically, by which I mean fundamentally, because both are flavors of empiricism, philosophical empiricism, which claims that all knowledge is acquired through the senses. It's really the question of whether an information system, whether it be a brain or a computer, can learn in that way - and it simply can not. There must be internal structure.
I mean this has been the fundamental error of the 20th century. At the end of WWII there was real cryptographical analysis being done on computers, it was all very hush hush, only the cool kids - and the cool kids were blowing smoke up the butts of every general in the world, promising them AI super intelligent machines.
Human level AI has been '20 years away' since 1948. AI has been the real arms race, and the model was Skinnerian, behaviorist, social constructionist - no structure, blank slate, all information to be gained from the training data. Because this is how the mind worked, according to said cool kids.
Well when you have a huge focused effort like that it hogs up all the grant money, everything in every edu department suddenly gets funded IF and in many cases ONLY if it advances social construction, statistics on large datasets, algorithms.
well it's ridiculous and impossible and it just don't work. Intelligence is a property of organic chemistry, there, I said it. And the properties of such an intelligent chemical system are determined by it's structure.
Watch the podcast, or check out the clips Louise Perry posted on twitter, I am not claiming she came to Jesus, just that the two of them recognize, out loud, that social construction is dead.
i mean that's a huge step. The realization is spreading through all of the various feminist subcultures, it simply can not be denied - women are a natural phenomena, 'female' is not a developmental disorder caused by abuse, girls are not girls, nor are women women simply because men told them they were. So this is one foot in the door for acceptance of personal responsibility.
I made up an aphorism the other day 'People are like self pruning Bonsai trees, we make our choices and our choices make us' and that is the new model. We have intrinsic nature, we can train ourselves in many interesting ways, but only within the scope and limits of our biology.
I can understand a desire to cheer on any woman who bravely steps up to speak out against the nonsense that has originated from feminism, but Ms Joyce only wants to push back with her own selfserving motives against the feminism that she bases her own ism on. She tends to talk fast and eloquently which can make it a challenge to catch her most outrageous statements as when in the abovementioned Boyce interview she claimed that unlike in the UK, trans identifying individuals have 'no rights' in the USA. In yet another interview cum book promotion tourstop, she asserted that one injustice of putting transwomen into women's prisons was that women don't belong in prisons because their crimes are less violent and they are usually involved with committing crimes with men who are by default the worse criminals. Such gynocentric statements get interspersed in otherwise sane statements against the excesses of trans activism but she herself is just pushing for her own excesses to retake center stage in the feminist drama that she has linked her career to
this take is backwards, it's not that social construction is some weird thing made up by feminists, rather it's that feminism is some weird thing made up by social constructionists.
I'm not cheering on any woman I am cheering on the advancement of the ideas, even in, as I said somewhere else in this thread 'the darkest pits of feminism'
Oh and I think I may have gotten two podcasts mixed in my memory, a lot has been interesting lately. So the one I mentioned, maiden mother matriarch, Louise Perry and Helen Joyce do confront the 'realty denying nature of feminism' ideas like women being just as good as men at firefighting. But I think the call for male spaces was actually from Mary Harrington on 'Modern Wisdom' with Chris Williamson, another conversation around all the same kind of ideas around this change of paradigm
It May Be Cold Outside, But It's Sure Hot In Here.
https://jcbourque.substack.com/p/it-may-be-cold-outside-but-its-sure
Well done satire.
Thanks! I've been a follower of your work for several years. We need your voice.
I believe Aretha's song should be re-named 'You Make Me Feel Like a Momentary Participation in an Ontological Illusion,' a much catchier title.