Richard Dawkins has issued a formal statement via CFI on his disinvitation from NECSS. It is civil, polite, and rational, and concludes this way:
The science and scepticism community is too small and too important to let disagreements divide us and divert us from our mission of promoting a more critical and scientifically literate world.
It misses the point.
Note, though, how well it feeds the sacred cows of the atheist worldview: Science! Skepticism! Scientific literacy! We are all about those. I agree completely that those are important, and we must promote them effectively.
But notice also what has happened to the status of women in this movement: it is a “disagreement”. Nothing but a minor tiff over a small issue, how deplorable that we let something so insignificant affect our pursuit of the One Great Truth, SCIENCE.
He just wishes he’d been given a chance to talk to the NECSS organizers before they made their decision, he could have “allayed the committee members’ concerns” about his dismissive tweet. He shows no comprehension at all over what could possibly be wrong with promoting the idea that “feminists love Islamists”, and even now is still talking about how it makes a legitimate point.
Novella didn't like the joke. I did. Find it funny & deadly accurate satire of those feminists who bend over backwards to appease Islamism.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) January 30, 2016
Novella didn’t like the joke. I did. Find it funny & deadly accurate satire of those feminists who bend over backwards to appease Islamism.
Oh? Who exactly are these “feminists who bend over backwards to appease Islamism”? Can he name a few? Please. This is simply mythologizing and stereotyping. While you might be able to dig deep and find a few women who claim to be feminists and are pro-Islam, they are not representative, and every group of more than a handful of people will contain cranks.
Every feminist I know, and I know quite a few, despises the overtly patriarchal and oppressive culture in most Islamic countries, and similarly despise the overtly patriarchal and oppressive culture of Catholicism, or puritanical Protestantism. Feminists tend to be natural allies of the atheist movement, except as we’ve been seeing lately, when self-proclaimed leaders of that movement use their pulpit to dismiss their concerns as minor disagreements getting in the way of the great cause. I despair over atheism, as I watch it burn away allies and embrace the default attitude of patronizing bro-ness.
Don’t believe me, though, I’m an old white guy. Read actual feminists, and you might discover that they aren’t actually saying what the misogynists and MRAs and conservative assholes claim they’re saying. Amanda Marcotte, for instance, is practically demonized by those people, yet when you actually read her words, you discover she’s not calling for Sharia law and for the widespread adoption of the hijab. Liberals actually aren’t sympathetic to terrorists, which is only a surprise if you’ve been living in an ideologically regressive spider hole.
But she does reveal the reason this myth gets spread around.
What liberals object to is the conservative tendency to erase all distinctions between the relatively few Muslims around the world who have violent views and the majority of Muslims who, whether they are conservative or not, do not agree with ISIS or Al Qaeda’s distortion of Islam.
This is part and parcel with the other deplorable aspect of modern atheism, the co-option of neocon ideology to endorse civilian bombings on the grounds of needing to kill Jihadist leaders. There is a pattern of one side doing their best to make innocent victims invisible and ignorable, while the other side, mine, wants to make those victims visible and important. For that, we’re accused of being on the side of Islamists, jihadists, and terrorists, as part of a naked campaign of vilification intended to silence opponents of oppression.
In that kind of black-and-white mind, anyone who refuses to nuke a Muslim country is “bend[ing] over backwards to appease Islamism”. That’s what Dawkins was saying with his initial tweet, and that is what he is continuing to say now, after the fact, as he tries to extract himself from the hole while digging it even deeper.
In that last tweet, he’s referring to Steve Novella’s explanation for why he was disinvited. It, too, is very courteous and generous, and discusses the concerns calmly and rationally.
I think it also misses the point.
I do wish Dawkins would recognize (perhaps he does) his special place within our community and the power that position holds. When he retweets a link to a video, even with a caveat, that has a tremendous impact. It lends legitimacy to the video and the ideas expressed in it.
That is why Dawkins is so polarizing. In my opinion, someone in his position, with his eloquence, knowledge, and intellect, with his academic background should be doing everything he can to elevate the level of discussion. He has the ability to address legitimate criticisms of feminism, or atheism or skepticism, if he thinks he has them. He could be a force that is helping unite our very small and critically important rationalist movement.
Yes, let us all be rational together. Let us all have a polite discussion about the appropriateness of recognizing the right of women to be angry about a few millennia of second-citizen status. Isn’t this a dreadfully divisive distraction that might interfere with our promotion of science literacy? Shouldn’t we consider anti-feminists as a reasonable part of our eminently reasonable movement?
While I appreciate what Novella is saying, and I think he says it well, I think it also fails to forcefully acknowledge that the atheist/skeptic movements must fully recognize the equality of all men and women, and the reality of the systematic oppression of men and women, or it fails to live up to those rational, reasonable, critical-thinking ideals we supposedly have.
This is not a topic for debate. It’s time to stop pretending that it is.
Here’s reality.
You are not a feminist if you think an anti-feminist working for a far right wing, climate change denying think tank is your ideal feminist.
You are not a feminist if you are judging women by their tone, and whether they agree with you or not. If someone is angry about an injustice, you don’t get to argue that they, and not the injustice, deserves ridicule.
You are not for equality of men and women if you propagate the myth that feminism is a religion, that feminists hate men, that their goal is to exploit men. “Equity feminist” is not a real thing; it’s an imaginary distinction set up to allow anti-feminists to reject activists working to break down discrimination.
If someone pushes that nonsense at me, I’m not going to calmly suggest that maybe they have some valid points that we should discuss in a meeting. I’m going to simply say, “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME“. This is the proper attitude to take. So while I can understand Novella’s efforts to be more diplomatic. I think the better response to Dawkins would have been a one-line post.
GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME.
The reason he should have been disinvited is not that his satire was rude and offensive, as some are saying, or that he’s divisive. It’s because he’s WRONG, and he’s adamantly persistent in promoting anti-woman propaganda.
Furthermore, I have to point out one more thing. The woman targeted in that video Dawkins promoted, the one he claimed not to have known anything at all about, is a popular punching bag in the MRA community. Why?
Because she is loud, aggressive, assertive, even militant. She confronts anti-feminists and religious street preachers (yes, there are videos of her yelling at Jesus-freaks haranguing a pride event), and she’s forceful and fierce and strong in her expression of her views. For this, Richard Dawkins suggests that she deserves mockery. Irony takes another savage beating.
To be a little more on the nose, it’s an accident of nomenclature that Richard Dawkins is called a New Atheist. He could just as well be labeled a Third Wave atheist. How would we react if someone claimed that his forceful stance deserves unending mockery?
I’ll step right up and say it. Dawkins deserves mockery. He has a reputation for intelligence & insight, but every time he opens his mouth lately, he does irreparable damage to that reputation. Mock away, but don;t expect it to sink in. He’ll just take it as a sign to double down, as he has done in the past.
Since Dawkins claims to be a feminist and found the video “funny and deadly accurate,” how would he feel about a video that lampooned evolutionary biologists as “whiny spastics” who condone rape when committed by Muslims? Because I think such a video would be equally hilarious and truthful. Which is to say, not at all.
Another way of saying it:
Yes, atheism is about skepticism and science and seeing reality for what it is. And the reality is that women are the equal of men, and that society has long held them not to me, and that feminism is the push to rectify that mistake, and that feminists are still vilified and mocked for doing so.
That’s the simple, skeptical, scientific, historical truth. I thought you were for those things?
Dawkins, please shut the fuck up about “scepticism” if you keep on repeating the right-wing meme of “feminists are silent about the muslims” which is not founded in reality at all.
Also, please shut the fuck about “division and diversion” when you keep on repeating the new racist buzzword of “regressive left”, which seems to have replaced the old tired cliché of “political correctness”.
They can go right ahead and paint me as a back-bending feminist then. I won’t be changing my mind on the “oh, bomb the fuck out of ’em!” stance.
Afuckingmen.
Right now, I wouldn’t have a problem with that. Dawkins has become a compleat joke, happily leading the howling mob about by its collective nose, and enjoying every moment. He has nothing of relevance to say where I’m concerned.
Heh heh, I was trying to surf to Skepchick last night, and my browser pulled up a suite of blogs with a similar name instead, and I found myself there. Y’all know the place, that begins with the same four letters, where all the MRA and Islamophobe atheist/skeptic bloggers spew their one-note hate-screeds. I stopped reading along time ago, when I got their daily message: Women, Muslims, Liberals, and worst of all, SJWs, are ruining the planet. Got it. No need to ever read their stuff again. I am completely clear as to their daily message. Well, at least the only ones who post regularly.
As sure as a morning fart, they were all up in arms over the cruel jailing and torture and binding and gagging of the poor Oxbridge aristocrat. I made the mistake of inquiring if any of them actually found the video even remotely funny. Or that they take such umbrage at an organization disinviting a speaker who represents the opposite of their stated values. Boy, I awoke to an inbox full of polemically well-constructed but logically vapid arguments as to how a stupid liberal just can’t understand these manly issues, due to my wussification under the yoke of liberalism, plus a few women saying that I’m ignoring all the Real True American Women who abhor both Islam and feminism. And sure as a second morning fart, a few jumped at the chance to pounce on liberalism by way of the complete strawman argument that we’d be up in arms on the reverse side if a private organization refused blacks or Jews, because they represented the opposite of the organization’s mission. Yeah, that had me spewing Bloody Mary out my nose. Totally the same thing, segregation, sundown towns, and the Oxford Don not receiving his speaking fees due to a very insulting public statement he made to increase his fanboy click revenue.
I am quite upset by this post, Professor Myers.
I have almost nothing to add – you’ve said pretty much everything I wanted to say – and I have so many rants in me right now.
Just want to check, this passage:
Was pro-Islam supposed to be pro-Islamism? Because I know a few Muslim feminists who are quite clearly anti-Islamism, but obviously pro-Islam (hence their being Muslim)… and, ok, I kinda think they’re cranks as far as religion goes, but they’ve never seemed particularly crankish on matters of feminism.
Honestly, at this point, if we ever want secularism to grow and achieve anything significant in the world, I think we need to replace Dawkins as the person who comes to mind when people think of atheism and secularism. It seems to me that he, along with the pervasive anti-feminist rhetoric from other quarters of course, are a massive limiting factors for the atheist and secular movements right now. It seems like all the growth we’re seeing at the moment is from attracting reactionaries who want to gloat about how much smarter they are than everyone else, despite not actually bothering to think critically about pretty much anything.
@Caine, 5
Are we completely sure he’s leading them around by the nose? The impression I’ve been getting is that it’s him being lead about by the nose. Maybe it’s a bit of both?
I agree with the decision of the conference organizers to dis-invite Richard Dawkins. He is still still free to express his questionable views about women and Muslims on thousands of platforms (more than most of us have!). However I think it will be good for him to learn that even for him free speech can have consequences.
Athywren @ 8:
Can’t speak for anyone else, but it seems that way to me. Dawkins isn’t stupid, although he likes playing ‘naive old guy’ when he’s called out for anything. People don’t come to repugnant views overnight – I think Dawkins found out that he was free to express his views about various issues and would be solidly applauded for them, no matter how wrong, stupid, or appalling they might be.
Clevehicks @ 9:
Fixed that for you. I’m so fucking sick of the phrase free speech, I’d like to set it on fire every time I see it.
I was reading the comments on Novella’s post. Someone linked to a Breitbart article on this topic and called it “”
That’s who Dawkins has supporting him now. Breitbart fans.
Ugh. First time using that tag. Sorry for the double quotation marks.
It was a much needed pleasure reading this post, thanks PZ.
I have been wondering the same thing since this started. If there are feminist like this, they should be able to name them off of the top of their heads. Most of what I read about feminist issues is on here, so I don’t know if this post on the Neurologica blog is making a legitimate point. http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/necss-and-richard-dawkins/
from metaburbia on Neurologica
Any insights?
I don’t think Dawkins cares who is supporting him as long as they’re supporting him. There probably isn’t a person alive that Dawkins would blanch at being loved by.
Unless it is specifically an All Boys Club, like, say, the Catholic clergy, then feminism applies.
That’s not enough for a Dawkins though, as far as he’s concerned anyone who believes in Islam is an objective terrorist. It’s not enough to merely be “unsympathetic,” you actually have to denigrate the conscience of millions of people, otherwise you’re soft or suspect.
For just plain old conservatives, liberals regard terrorist as human beings and not animals, and for that alone liberals are just as bad as the terrorists (for all terrorists T where T is not a member of the set W: white people).
Richard Dawkins jumped the shark some time ago. He passed the boundary between tone-deafness and autism some time between Dear Muslima and Honeygate. The Strange Case of Professor Dawkins and Mister Dick.
It makes me immensely sad.
dccarbene @ 18:
There’s no need to drag people with autism into this – I know a number of people on the spectrum, and they are not, in any way, close to Dawkins’ assholism.
It was only a few years ago that P Z Myers and Richard Dawkins were devoted allies against the intelligent Design movement, as shown in the incident that Myers was barred from attending a showing of EXPELLED, the ID propaganda movie, but Dawkins was able to watch it. You can bet those two will never work together again, even if creationism makes a comeback. DAMN YOU, Dawkins!
@Caine, 10
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Dawkins is an innocent and befuddled victim in this – after several years, it’s perfectly clear that his feminism is robust, passionate, and stuck in a time loop in 1963, and that he’s perfectly capable of being hostile to the continuing progress of gender equality without outside influences. That said, one thing he isn’t, at least where feminism is concerned, and however smart he is otherwise, is a skeptic, and he’s got a lot of people floating around him who we know are perfectly able and willing to provide him with all the sources he needs to justify his nonsense, safe in the knowledge that he will make no effort to verify them. Obviously if he was a skeptic, none of this would be a problem, but I believe that he genuinely believes he’s a feminist, and I’m suspect he cares about his credibility, even if he doesn’t care that he’s losing it with us, so I don’t understand why he’d knowingly promote lies, half-truths and utter gibberish off his own back.
dccarbene @18:
As someone on the autistic spectrum, I’d just like to say you can fuck off with using my condition as an insult.
I’ve been reading my history of the French Revolution, and this quote from Vadier reminded me of Dawkins.
“To hear Robespierre, he is the only defender of liberty; he is giving it up for lost; he is a man of rare modesty and he has a perpetual refrain ‘I am oppressed; they won’t give me the floor ‘ and he is the only one with anything useful to say, for his will is always done. He says ‘so and so conspires against me, I who am the best friend of the Republic. That is news.”
Novella was very civil. To a fault. He framed the current debate in the atheist community as:
Free speech vs. social justice. Yeah. Reminds me of “pro-choice” vs. “pro-life”.
But this part is where I think he really nails it:
Boom. So much bullshit dealt with so quickly and efficiently. While still holding the obligated diplomatic tone. Really good stuff.
So, if we’re not to let disagreements divide us and divert us, I assume that means Rebecca Watson is no longer blacklisted from events where Dawkins is presenting?
Though there are examples of feminist organizations (and LGBT organizations) standing with Islamists against ex-Muslims and other reformists. E.g., the incident at Goldsmith’s. Ophelia covered that extensively, but since the gibbering horde decided to run her off (speaking of blacklisting…) I guess all that is down the memory hole at FTB.
thght th vd tht Dwkns sw ws prtty fnny. ls, y cn’t rlly gt th pctr frm n ffhndd cmmnt n “Twttr” jst rdng nd pstng n n “ch Chmbr”. ls thnk tht wht h’s rfrrng t, r “SJWs” prdng rnd s “Fmnsts”. thnk t’s ls knd f dd tht th “Fmnsts” syng tht ll wmn n th S r pprssd, nd tht thy nd “Fmnsm” n rdr t b ql t mn, s n my pnn, bt msgynstc.
[Seems a shame to disemvowel this…you miss all the pleasure of the misspellings. And now you’ll never get to read ax2142 again, because he’s banned! –pzm]
I forgot to put “or” between Twitter and just.
parasite boy @14: Read the rest of the comments there by metaburbia. I do not know the circumstances of the Goldsmiths event, but anyone who insists about Dawkins that “nothing he’s said or done contradicts” his self-definition as a “liberal feminist” is — shall we say — unconvincing. For further data, I suggest employing any reasonably reliable search engine.
You are not a feminist is you accept support and do give support to people who openly advocate violence against women, aka A Voice for Men.
Now, since Dawkins is totally skeptical and rational, we must assume that he is completely aware of who they are and what they stand for.
parasiteboy
Bull-fucking-shit
I’m a German feminist and German feminists have been out and loud about the events from the time the news broke. Of course there was never a chance to actually discuss sexual violence and harassment because it quickly came down to “those muslim men are savages that touch our womenfolk”, stereotyping ALL immigrants while at the same time acting as if such behaviour was totally unknown from German men. Stop spreading that lie. There’s no other word for it by now.
+++
Also, what Athywren said: There are muslim feminists and they are kick ass and at the forefront of dismantling patriarchal structures and attitudes within muslim societies. They are the ones who will finally change things. We are just bystanders in their struggle. We can be supportive bystanders or antagonistic bystanders.
The Kurdish women are kicking Daesh’s butt. Nobody can tell me they’re bending over backwards to appease Islamists. It makes shooting much harder I hear.
gmcard @25:
gmcard:
Very constructive and helpful. Not flamebait at all.
In the words of the New Yorker, “Christ, what an asshole”.
ax2142:
What’s with the “Random” insertion of “Quotation” marks?
Also, why did you find it funny? Please, think about it. It has a “message”. Did you think it was funny because of it or despite it? That’s kind of the point of all of this.
Speaking of “Echo Chambers” though: Tossing around the term “SJW” kind of tells us what echo chambers you have been playing around in. Just sayin’.
… an anti-feminist working for a far right wing, climate change denying think tank …
Alas, CHS’s American Enterprise Institute does not qualify as “far right wing” in the age of Ted Cruz, Glenn Beck, & the Bundy Bunch. That particular goal post has moved to somewhere beyond the East Pole.
Whoops, blockquote fail. Everything after “Back when that happened …” is mine.
At what point do we switch from “I am being silenced” to “oh, oops, people don’t like what I am saying”?
Marcus Ranum
While it might be indeed possible to go the other way, I have never yet witnessed one of those perpetually silenced people with open eds and whole organisations at their hands got that way.
@5
I honestly think it’s the other way around at this point.
Let’s get real. Dawkins is the establishment. He still has all the clout and all the prestige. The leaders of most of the atheist/skeptic organizations are going to continue to suck up to him. The anti-feminists are obsessive and underhanded, and will continue to troll and do their best to undermine any effort to change the status quo. I’m already getting the flood of hatred on social media and email for this.
Nothing will change.
Most galling: I’m getting accused of ‘betraying atheism’ for…it’s not clear what for. Money? Glory? Fame? That’s the thing — I could have gotten much more of that by promoting the dudely white version of atheism. Sex? There’s this dumbass myth that guys only support feminism to get laid. It’s absurd. Supporting women’s autonomy is not a recipe for getting sex slaves. I’m also boringly monogamous, so even if it were true, I wouldn’t be taking advantage.
And then there’s the sad truth that victory for my cause of greater diversity in atheism is going to lead to my abandonment, as an obvious member of the privileged group. I’m going to die someday, and there will be raucous cheering by the regressive side, and a sigh of relief at another obstacle gone by the side I’m championing.
And that’s OK, because I’m an atheist, so I won’t care what people say after I’m dead, and what matters is the cause. And that goes on without me.
petesh@28
I am not at all endorsing what metaburbia said throughout the comments on Neurologica, but they do bring up 1 legitimate instance of a feminist society siding with an islamic society trying to intimidate an ex-muslim who is a critic of islam. See Maryam’s blog post for the harassment and the backtracks at the end for what the Goldsmiths Feminist Society said http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2015/12/01/goldsmith-isoc/
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-@29
Thanks for the information that is why I asked to see if anyone here had a better idea about the situation. Though I don’t see that as spreading a lie when I was asking about something that someone else said.
Well, you know … maybe not so much this. Hell, this place is one of the oases.
You must have a less cynical view of the world than I do. Over the years, I’ve generally learned that everything is much, much worse than you imagined it.
Religion is what teaches that women should be unequal to men. Reject religion, you’ve got this “equality” problem to deal with. Social Justice seems to be a pretty good response to that problem.
If you reject creationism as an explanation for life on Earth, then you’ve got this “where did all that stuff come from” problem to deal with. Evolution seems to be a pretty good response to that problem.
Just so you know, DJ Grothe has been defending Dawkins on Facebook while complaining about “radical feminists”. Reminds me why I never liked him in the first place.
There’s this dumbass myth that guys only support feminism to get laid. It’s absurd.
Yup. It’s a lot easier to make money and buy sex than it is to pretend to be a feminist (it’s so complicated!!) just to get laid. And then there’s all that backlash when you inevitably stumble.
Doing the right thing is generally easier than many alternatives because then you don’t have to spend as much time looking over your shoulder and backtracking and backfilling. Think how much time Dawkins is wasting on this stuff; he could be out there whacking away at religionists but instead he’s trying to retcon and spin and adjust and explain and.. uh. So complicated!! It’s just bad strategy; any PUA ought to figure that out right away. (actually being a decent human being is easier than pretending to be a decent human being! then you don’t have to be on the lookout for drunken slips and loose ends, ya know?)
Dawkins:
But… feminism is 100% compatible with promoting a critical and scientifically literate world. How is it a diversion?
Dawkins has long gone full MRA.
It also contradicts the other dumbass myth that feminist women are ugly and undesirable to straight men.
Giliell:
I have never yet witnessed one of those perpetually silenced people with open eds and whole organisations at their hands got that way
Back in the SB days, I got a pretty solid shellacking on this blog, for saying something rather stupid. After a few people piled on, I caught myself thinking, “hey! wait! maybe the problem here is me!”*
It’s not rocket science. I don’t understand why guys like Dawkins can’t make that leap.
(* Please, don’t remind me further. I was wrong, OK. I’d rather nobody go dig up that corpse and wave its embarrassing jawbone at me…)
Spock’s Beard Principle: A civilized man can easily impersonate a barbarian, but a barbarian has a much harder time impersonating a civilized man.
This brings up an interesting point though, has Lalla Ward gone on the record about any of this?
PZ @37 I know you get a lot of harassment and death threats for championing more diversity in atheism. Too often I think that those who are benefiting from the push for diversity are quick to forget that we need all hands on deck, including white male feminists/social justice warriors like yourself, PZ. Thanks so much for all of your hard work! You are appreciated!
sigaba:
Ahem: the only way to truly impersonate a barbarian is to act barbarically; you see the problem with that claim, if one defines a civilised person as someone who does not act barbarically, right?
(People are what they do)
Ah yes – the oft repeated MRA canard that it is simply impossible for a man to be a feminist out of genuine principle and a regard for women as human beings. Supposedly there has to be a hidden agenda, usually some attempt to dupe women into having sex with them. As a feminist man, I can state that if this was the goal of my feminism, then it would have catastrophically failed to a quite hilarious degree for years on end, and yet oddly I remain a feminist, even though this ‘strategy’ so clearly isn’t working. It is almost as if my reasons for being a feminist have nothing to do with trying to seduce women or advantaging myself at all…
And even if women were more inclined to have sexual relationships with feminist men, would it truly be so surprising that straight or bisexual women might be more inclined to be intimate with men who actually see them as fellow human beings rather than merely bedpost notches in waiting? The truly sad part is that MRAs seem incapable of understanding that even if women were beating down the doors of feminist men trying to have sex with them (a phenomenon I have yet to notice), it would still be wholly possible to be a feminist man out of an ethical commitment to equality between men and women. Indeed, such a commitment is the only source of meaningful feminism. Sex is great and all, but it is not the only thing on the mind of a functional, decent human being, whether they happen to be a man or not. That MRAs can’t or won’t see that is a truly damning indictment of them and their entire misbegotten movement.
One additional place where I think anti-feminists (and some Islamophobic & conservative feminists I could name) get confused is regarding hijab/niqab/burqa. I don’t think you’ll find many feminists who disagree that patriarchal religions dictating what women can and cannot wear—often couched in language about female purity or male baseness—is sexist. But there are also feminists who recognize that it’s not feminist (or at least not intersectional, and thus bullshit) for patriarchal secular societies to tell Muslim or ex-Muslim women what they can and cannot wear, as with laws to ban headcoverings. Clueless dudes and White Feminists whose idea of “liberation” is still rooted in imperialistic notions of white saviors teaching benighted brown people the Right Way to do things. Intersectional feminists who stick up for the rights of Muslim women to make their own choices get dismissed by the right as pro-Islam and by non-intersectional feminists as “choicey choice” because the choices women make after a lifetime of being influenced by various systems of patriarchy are only legitimate if those women choose a western way of doing things.
@PZ Myers #37:
But how can you “betray atheism” when so many of the people undoubtedly accusing you of such would vehemently argue that atheism is nothing more than lack of belief in gods?
@John Morales #49:
This outlines the distinction without a difference that a lot of the “for the lulz/it’s just satire” trolls try to draw. Spreading bigotry because you think it’s funny doesn’t actually absolve you of being a bigot, because only bigots find that shit funny in the first place.
You know, it’s kind of strange that “science and skeptic” crowd has simply assumed that they are the unquestioned foot soldiers in the war for critical and science literate world and that is obviously how it should be.
If feminism is a minor disagreement, then so is atheism itself. There are millions of sane and rational people who are passionate about free thought, inquiry, and freedom from authority, superstition and ignorance, and in favor of a sane and reasoned world who for some personal reasons or another haven’t chosen to abandon the comfort of their spirit beliefs [1] (and yet who are deathly opposed to those who would abuse others’ spiritual needs for authoritarian and anti-thought purposes).
I’d far rather have rational humanitarian social passionates in my court if my desire is lessen authority and ignorance, even if science literacy is only a minor side issue to their humanitarian cause. They know ignorance and scientific illiteracy lead to authority and injustice. So they are against it because… well, because the are sane, rational, but most importantly humane. The science, skept cliche just seem to want to sneer at everyone who is so stoopid not to be like them.
@49, John Morales
There is no paradox in what you are responding to.
An imaginative person could even come up with a scenario of a civilized person impersonating a barbarian: perhaps in a desperate situation where they must pretend to be a member of a barbaric group in order to not be killed by that group, and survive long enough to accomplish a greater good.
As for “people are what they do”, this misses the point. People do what they internally desire and evaluate to be good. Is their internal evaluation correct or not? Do they really desire something/evaluate it to be good, or are they pretending to? One can correctly evaluate that pretending to be barbaric is the best option in a desperate situation, and this is different from being a barbarian.
Pretending is also something that people do. Someone who pretends to be a barbarian is not a barbarian. They are what they do, and what they did is pretend.
@54, Brian Pansky
I suppose part of the point, though, is that to the residents of a village being pillaged, there’s not a difference. Or not enough of a difference to care about.
Though I think I agree with you that there’s technically a difference. Depending on perspective.
Brian, you’re funny. Did you miss the entire point of this post, wherein Dawkins is called out as not an actual feminist (other than by his own protestation) on the basis of his actual behaviour?
But fine: Taking you at your word, how exactly would that pretence be sufficiently sustained within the barbaric group, other than by acting as they do?
(Barbaric does not mean stupid!)
Someone needs to do a couple good articles about “Radical feminists” and where all that appears to have come from.
I remember my first encounter with it, was when Dworkin and MacKinnon were working on the anti-pornography legislation in Minnesota. At the time I thought, “HEY! MAI PORNS!” and I had a couple conversations with some friends. My first sallies into the topic were fairly successful – it probably was because I was talking to some of my other porn-consuming guy friends. But that might be coincidence. Then, I made a comment to my long-time friend who was both a marxist and a feminist. She unleashed the doomsday device upon me: she gave me reading assignments. So I wound up reading marxist critiques of the porn industry and that made me really really uncomfortable (I hope someone corrects me if I am wrong when I say that Dworkin’s argument in “men possessing women” had strong elements of a marxist critique running through it, as well) and MacKinnon’s arguments really made a lot of sense. An uncomfortable lot of sense. A “curl your toes in discomfort, guys” lot of sense.
Dworkin and MacKinnon (to a lesser degree) appear to me to be the straw from which the straw-feminist “radical feminist” is mostly made. And, judging from my experience, the reaction they triggered – the intense demonization – was because they went after the porns! OMG! It’s depressingly similar to the reaction that Anita Sarkeesian got when she went after Lara Croft’s butt-polygons in gaming-land. Here’s a simple experiment I recommend: google “Rush Limbaugh Andrea Dworkin” or “Howard Stern Andrea Dworkin” — that will give you a rough outline of the reactionary backlash among the right-wing nascent “men’s movement”. At the time it seemed to me (hey, since we’re stereotyping, it’s my turn!) the battle-lines were drawn across the Howard Stern/Rush Limbaugh axis and a smaller number of confused guys who were reading “Iron John” and trying to figure out how to drum all that toxic masculinity out of their systems around a camp-fire. The straw-feminist wicker-witch icon, though, was constructed by Limbaugh and Stern, out of parts of Dworkin and MacKinnon, because they went after the porns.
I’m sure there’s better analysis out there – probably whole books of it – if someone wants to recommend a book for me to read, I promise I will get a copy and give it a go.
I know there are all the different waves of feminism, and that feminism had its own deep rifts(tm) — but every time I’ve encountered someone talking about “radical feminists” they don’t know anything about first wave or second wave or any of that. They’re hiding behind the evil ogre of Dworkin, who attacked the porns. Sarkeesian attacked Lara Croft’s tush! The screeching outrage against her is coming from the armies that were acculturated by Stern and Limbaugh to react to Dworkin and MacKinnon.
Dawkins just retweeted this.
https://mobile.twitter.com/NorBdelta/status/693573893190242304
Fuck me, Allen West? He’s quoting ALLEN WEST now?
TL;DR – the MRAs who are complaining about “radical feminism” have absorbed right-wing talking points and are not being skeptical at all. They are not being “politically incorrect” either – they are parroting ideologues whole-cloth.
He’s quoting ALLEN WEST now?
I wonder what Taslima Nasreen will have to say to that.
Funny, I just stumbled across the Allen West thing in the other thread. And wasn’t aware of Allen West until I did some digging. Tea Party darling, beloved by the likes of Palin and Ted Nugent, to name a few. Dawkins truly has an impeccable taste in company.
(Please note for those who didn’t look at the tweet: He retweeted some random asshole, who also added in a picture that had a quote from Allen West. He is not directly retweeting Allen West. Yet. Give it at least, say, 8 hours until that happens.)
El Dawko might have been a New Atheist at some point, but virtually since his first Twitter login he’s revealed himself to be an Establishment Atheist™ and as such is entirely uninterested in welcoming to atheism anyone who’s actually got anything “New” to say about it, especially if it highlights the extreme privilege of Il Douche himself. Bunch o’ dudes waxing motivational-poster about the wonder of the universe? Yep. Bunch o’ dudes waxing indignant about church violations of law/children/common decency? Double yep. Anyone waxing egalitarian about male/white/rich privilege or gender/orientation or perhaps promoting actual tolerance or empathy for religionists, esp. *GASP* Those Muslims? Get the fuck out, you’re just promoting some Fembot Sharia. No, don’t point out that feminism (as understood by most everyday “normal” feminists) and fundie Islam (as practiced by a tiny and unhinged minority of Muslims) are diametrically opposed. That’s hate speech! And deplatforming a Known Atheismist because he said something fucking clueless? Hell, you might as well grab the nine-inch nails and a cross – oh, wait, he’s already started self-crucifying. Good luck getting that last nail in!
But seriously, when I think back to 06/07, when I got TGD for Christmas & devoured it over the holiday which ended with me excitedly abandoning my remaining pretenses toward spirituality, then eagerly devouring the other atheoquestrian tomes, I just feel like a naive little fool. That feeling of foolishness was recently reinforced when Noam Chomsky & Sam Harris had that “debate” that Harris, jaw-droppingly, claimed to have “won”. I’d essentially switched my reading list over to bloody atheists and not bothered to keep up with Chomsky, who I’d always respected & enjoyed reading even when I disagreed with him, but reading those exchanges made me wonder what the fuck I’d been smoking a decade ago to make Sam sodding Harris seem so fucking clever. I of course raised a Spockish eyebrow when reading his passages advocating for torture and other violence, but I pressed on, read his two books and kept looking for atheist writing because it was all so new and exciting!
…and now, I don’t want to tell people I’m an atheist. Religious people, though – yeah, I’ll tell ’em. Ironically, thanks in no small part to the arguments of the Three Horses’ Asses (Dennett’s not such a goon, obv.) I can hold my own against just about religionist in an argument, but when it comes to other people I don’t bother. It is the word that best describes my position on the existence of theistic gods, so I of course accept it, but I no longer volunteer it in many of the circles I move in. I don’t want to tell people I’m an atheist because in the last decade “atheist” has come to mean, among other things, “a fan of Richard Fucking Dawkins” and I simply don’t want to get into a conversation about what a complete arseclown he’s turned into (or perhaps has always been, only noone knew because when you write books and do films there are editors and directors and scripts, but when you tweet, there’s noone to save you from yourself).
*exhales
@John Morales
I can’t discern any intelligible point in your reply (nor any in your initial post, beyond pedantics). Dawkins is nothing like what I just said. He isn’t pretending to be an anti-feminist in any desperate situation to achieve a greater good, so I don’t see how he can be relevant to what I said.
I’ve already spelled out why it makes sense to say that someone is not a barbarian, merely a civilized person pretending to be barbaric, even if they must do barbaric things to maintain the pretense.
Hank_Says,
Ripping righteous rant! :)
Reality is just badly written farce. Dawkins has retweeted Mike Cernovich.
Nuff said.
Brian Pansky:
Which utterly ignores the conditional in the claim to which you objected.
(Well, yes, I did murder, pillage and rape with the barbarians, but it was only an impersonation! Why do you judge me uncivilised?)
Richard doth declareth anew, from on high:
It is so amazing during all of this to see that he still has the gall to condescend to people. Lecturing them on failing to stand something that they most likely already do understand, while also blatantly missing the point of the vast majority of the criticism.
Richard Dawkins thinks that he has refuted everyone with the following arguments:
– “Some, not all!”
– “It’s just a joke! Don’t be so offended!”
– “Argh, you are woundin’ mah free speech!”
And with that, he has apparently, in his mind, refuted all of the people who have expressed concern during this. Shows how much he respects the opinions of feminists. He handled refuting blatantly illogical religious apologetics with more seriousness and less handwaving contempt.
Hate, hubris and incompetence are a dangerous mix.
@John Morales
Forgive me for not understanding jargon so well, but are you basically saying:
“you ignored that I only said ‘if’ you define barbaric a certain way”?
Brian Pansky @69, indeed.
I gave up on the Dawk being a progressive voice back during elevatorgate, when he couldn’t seem to wrap his brain around a simple problem involving women, namely inappropriate time/place for propositions.
The Dawk has done nothing since them to indicate my opinion should be reevaluated. In fact, his tweeter use confirms that he is RWA except for his lack of religion. Whoopie shit.
@Giliell #29
Thanks for the post, clear and complete.
Agree with PZ, it’s time to reframe this.
Dawkins in not an asshole.
Dawkins in an irrational, gullible bigot who is willing to believe, without any fact-checking, anything that will pander to his ego.
@John Morales
So do you agree with me on the morality, just not the semantics? You think it is sensible to call a moral action barbaric or uncivilized?
*Perhaps my second question there is not quite what I’m trying to get at. The question should be something more like: you think it is sensible to call someone a barbarian or an uncivilized person if their action was morally justified?
Brian Pansky,
I think that it depends on what one’s definition of each status is, and the soundness of the purported justification. Tell me those, and I can give you a specific answer. ;)
(This disputation does amuse me, since the actual concept is quite applicable when it comes to actual objective attributes (e.g. literacy), but it’s misapplied in this case)
—
To steer this digression towards the topic, the issue at hand is intrinsic vs. extrinsic attributes (or, if you like, essentialism vs. existentialism).
What people claim is evidence of what they are, as is also what people do, but for some of us, one is more informative than the other.
—
Let’s backtrack a bit: Dawkins initially lauded a video which explicitly claimed that “Feminists and Islamists have basically the same ideology, demonstrated through the magic of song by SyeTenAtheist.”, and then proceeded to contend that the claim “Obviously doesn’t apply to vast majority of feminists, among whom I count myself. But the minority are pernicious.”.
Clearly, any unquantified claim about a group is an universal claim, and equally clearly, Dawkins is aware of this, thus his subsequent supposedly exculpatory caveat — the claim that he personally is part of the “vast majority” of feminists — which entails that those who disagree with him perforce are the complementary set of feminists. The claim is evidently contrary to the actuality (does anyone really think that the vast majority of feminists endorse the claim that “Feminists and Islamists have basically the same ideology”?). So, his disingenuousness here is plainly evident.
Now, this is not the first, second, third, fourth, fifth etc. time something like this has happened — the pattern is clear.
So, when you claim that “He [Dawkins] isn’t pretending to be an anti-feminist in any desperate situation to achieve a greater good”, I can’t disagree on the facts, but neither can I disagree in regard to the converse proposition (i.e. that he is pretending to be a feminist, even to himself) on the same basis.
@anteprepro, 68
What is it with him and informing people of the trivially true and irrelevant in order to “correct” them for calling out his entirely fact-free assertions?
I have to admit, though, I do admire how he sometimes manages to take a collection of entirely true and obvious things, and use them to make a nonsense poem in 140 characters. That takes… something….
The biscuit!
I wondered where it went.
Athywren, heh. Since I just saw this after writing my previous, I snarkily write this:
“Scientists are idiots”, and then clarify that statement by then saying “Obviously doesn’t apply to vast majority of scientists”.
(See? There is now no tension between the two claims!)
@78, John Morales
Yep, perfect Dawkins logic there.
There is an absolutely critical issue that I never see anyone here dare touch.
Feminism as struggle for equal rights — I don’t see anyone arguing against that, in fact even the MRAs don’t.
However, feminism also comes with feminist theory. And feminist theory is basically as anti-science as young earth creationism is, because it is tightly coupled with post-modernism in its origin and core ideological tenets. You know, the kind of thinking that gave birth to revelations like $e=mc^2$ being a “sexed equation”, demands for a new feminist epistemology because science was biased by the male perspective of its practitioners, and the king of them all, everything, key well-established scientific theories included, being a social construct. This is an outright denial of the core epistemological foundations of science, just as the YEC crowd does, with the only difference that they start from a biblical perspective.
I cannot understand how you can be fighting creationism and then become allies with people who will tell you that evolutionary theory is a social construct. That makes zero sense.
The only viable approach for a scientist is rigid anti-feminism (which is not at all the same thing as being a misogynist or trying to deny women their equal rights) until feminism clears itself of the postmodernist nonsense and becomes a legitimate intellectual discipline instead of the secular religion it is right now. Then one can ally himself with feminism. But not in its current form, which as not only anti-scientific but is more dangerously so than YEC, because YEC does not control whole departments in every university while the gender and race studies “thinkers” who spew out that sort of woo do.
Citation mother fucking needed. Your word alone won’t make the argument….
@80, Georgi Marinov
Dude, those weird things you object to are very fringe. Mainstream feminist theory isn’t anti science. TCome out of your bubble of distortion and into reality.
Help yourself:
http://fty.sagepub.com/
*come, not “tcome”
OK, who are the representatives of the “mainstream feminist theory”? Because I have done the exercise of taking a look at the journals in the field and what they have to say about science circa 2015 in addition to reading the key books and articles from the “science wars” in the 1990s, you know to make sure I am up to date and I am not attacking a long dead strawman. But I see no real difference — it is still the same nonsense.
@85, Georgi Marinov
If you see no difference, then you should be able talk about what you see wrong with feminist theory circa 2015, right?
Let’s see what they have to say about evolution:
http://fty.sagepub.com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/content/16/2/189.abstract
Or this:
http://fty.sagepub.com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/content/12/2/201.full.pdf+html
Which starts by quoting Latour, you know, the same guy who was claiming there could not have been tuberculosis in ancient Egypt because the bacteria were only identified in the late 19th century, i.e. tuberculosis had not yet been socially constructed in ancient Egypt.
Then I find this:
http://fty.sagepub.com/content/15/3/289.abstract
Abstract:
irigaray is the person ridiculed by Dawkins here:
Show the article, not the journal.
The cite the post-modern article you object to. There is an old adage, “that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”. A reference to a journal from an unknown publisher is hardly considered evidence by this scientist.
I didn’t post sufficient example already?
To be fair, I don’t follow any scholars who have a “PHD in Feminism” or anything. And most feminists are not one of those. Mainstream feminism isn’t an academic thing, it’s an activism thing. Most of it is local groups, online discussion, etc.
Georgi Marinov:
And feminist theory is basically as anti-science as young earth creationism is, because it is tightly coupled with post-modernism in its origin and core ideological tenets.
Which feminist theory are you talking about? I’ve encountered a variety of different feminist theories. You wouldn’t happen to be stereotyping or strawmanning would you?
it is tightly coupled with post-modernism
Um, no.
I mean, you can always find someone that will make fringe arguments, but my personal experience has been more marxism in feminism than post-modernism. But that’s beside the point: you’ve set up a stereotype/assertion that feminist theory is post-modernist. Why don’t you do something like watch Anita Sarkeesian’s “Feminist Frequency” videos and tell us which parts of her argument are rooted in post-modernism? That would be a worthwhile exercise. Or, alternatively, maybe you could tell me about which feminists you are referring to – specifically – that are post-modernists. I’m sure that there are some, but you know what my next question is going to be: how mainstream are they and how representative are they of feminism in general?
You appear to be making some mighty broad claims. It shouldn’t be hard to back them up with a few citations if they are true. I, personally, have encountered one feminist book that I felt was a bit fond of ‘academic’ cant – but it wasn’t postmodernist as much as badly written and obscure. (I refer to “pornography and difference” which purported to be a feminist analysis of fetish, but I had a lot of trouble making any sense of it. But that’s just me.)
demands for a new feminist epistemology because science was biased by the male perspective of its practitioners
[Citation needed]
then become allies with people who will tell you that evolutionary theory is a social construct
I, for one, am not an ally with anyone making any such arguments. Perhaps you can tell us who are a few of the feminists on this blog who reject evolutionary theory as a social construct?
They ought to be easy to find; there will be plenty of postings following their comments, in the form of “Bwaahaaaahaaaa! Uh, no.”
It’s possible you’re not deliberately strawmanning feminism but, instead, deeply miscomprehend the arguments being made. Or, perhaps you’ve stepped out of a time machine from the closet of some east coast ivy league school, circa 1980, and only have input from a single source. Because, you’ll be happy to know, that feminism has expanded into a huge variety of beliefs, which concern a lot of interesting, complicated problems that are vastly more relevant than what you claim.
For example, the last “social constructs” I personally encountered with regards to feminism were “kyriarchy” and “intersectionality.” There are some people on this blog who have taught me some stuff about that; very interesting. It’s all to do with how power dynamics and inequality in society are a result of divide and conquer tactics between different oppressed groups. I suppose you could say that’s a “social construct” because they’re talking about … society. But I’ve never encountered any post-modernists and evolution-deniers here … well, there was that guy in Canada.
The only viable approach for a scientist is rigid anti-feminism
Wow! You examined all the other options and that was the only one?? I’m going to wait for you to call someone on this blog “dogmatic” OK, I need a laugh. It’s been a depressing day.
Oh, wait, let me suggest something: how about rigid anti-post-modernism if you truly think that the problem is post-modernism? That way you can leave the vast majority of feminist thought as something you might be able to learn from, while you are tilting at at those post-modernist windmills. Oh, and if you actually find a real post-modernist, please make sure the specimen is preserved. They’ve gotten almost as rare as marxists; other than Genet they don’t hold up very well in captivity, right?
until feminism clears itself of the postmodernist nonsense and becomes a legitimate intellectual discipline instead of the secular religion it is right now
I love a good argument by vigorous assertion. Secular religion?
Sorry, I’m giggling so hard I spilled tea on my keyboard. BRB.
Georgi Marinov, you’re funny.
The topic here is the contrast between Dawkins’ behaviour and his claims, not feminism per se.
Do tell.
OK.
Really. And your basis for this is…
<snicker>
You seriously imagine that’s the basis for feminist theory?!
I reckon that you could, were you to look at reality, rather than your phantom menace.
Why don’t you tell self-professed feminist Dawkins that? ;)
But seriously, it was you who claimed that nobody argues against “Feminism as struggle for equal rights” — which means that you don’t argue “Feminism as struggle for equal rights”.
So, you seriously contend that feminism is not actually a “struggle for equal rights”, purely on the basis that you imagine its basis is post-modernism.
(heh)
—
PS on refreshing, I note you’ve embedded a link to Dawkins (the self-professed feminist) claiming feminism is poisoning science.
(LOL)
http://fty.sagepub.com/content/15/3/289.abstract
How many evolutionary biologists rejected evolution because of that?
georgi
*yawn* No, you are wrong about everything. Being anti-feminist is a synonym for misogynist, and feminism doesn’t need to do anything to prove itself to bigots like you and dick dawkins. Now go back to your slime pit. (also your links don’t work)
Wouldn’t it be great if he cited Sokal?
Corrected links:
http://fty.sagepub.com/content/16/2/189.abstract
http://fty.sagepub.com/content/12/2/201.full.pdf+html
Because I have done the exercise of taking a look at the journals in the field
Which? I’m sure it’d be good to know.
in addition to reading the key books and articles from the “science wars” in the 1990s
Which would those be?
Georgi Marinov:
No, they really do. They pretend that they support “equal rights” insofar as they will argue that women are either already equal or actually are MORE privileged than men already. You don’t pay much attention to MRAs, do you?
There’s a good discussion of that particular one here: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/23kzyw/for_what_reasom_did_irigaray_regard_emc2_as_a
I would love to see whatever other nuggets you can try to bring back here. There is one in particular that I especially love to see people bring up because it really, truly reveals that they are an unthinking antifeminist.
(And, incidentally, like the above, it is also one that Dawkins has discussed to bash feminists! Before he even became a raving twitter regressive culture warrior)
I’m not sure about “a new feminist epistemology”, but if you are denying that science is not biased, and has not been specifically biased by its dominance by men specifically, then I think you are the real one who is anti-science in this room.
Also: “Everything” being a social construct sounds like blatant straw-manning.
I wish we could make the same demand of anti-feminism. Because, though there may be some feminists or brands of feminism tainted with postmodernism, they are still more rooted in scientific reasoning and logic than any of its critics. Consistently.
How many did because of the AiG website?
There are whole books dedicated to this very important field:
http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781402068348
P.S. I actually went through that one from start to finish and half of it is complaints about feminist epistemology being marginalized….
So much for serious scholarship
Probably the same criticisms of academic philosophy in general could be applied to academic feminist philosophy in particular:
Really? Rooted in proper scientific reasoning the same way the claim that trans women are the same as real women with two X chromosomes is?
[And with that bit of blatant stupidity, you’re gone. –pzm]
Georgi Marinov, Dawkins says he is a feminist.
(So does PZ)
What do you say to that?
Unlike many here, I don’t have idols, I think for myself
Morales@#93
So, you seriously contend that feminism is not actually a “struggle for equal rights”, purely on the basis that you imagine its basis is post-modernism.
To kind of take over where John left off on that — a postmodernist who was saying that there’s a need for a new feminist epistemology because science is male-dominated would be talking about exactly a struggle for equal rights. That’s embedded in the “male dominated” bit, see??
This is a very low-quality strawman you’ve brought us. It’s got all the stuffing up one end.
Good god. More people read this and see if you agree. One of Georgi’s links:
How is any of that a rejection of evolution? Am I missing something?
The best I can think is that Georgi just read the name of the article, “The politics of becoming different: Rethinking evolution through population genetics”, and imagined “rethinking” meant “reconsidering” or “rejecting”. But still, I am not seeing feminist anti-science: I am seeing feminists using science. Putting scientific knowledge through a feminst lens. The exact fucking opposite of what Georgi was claiming.
Am I wrong? Anyone?
@103, Georgi Marinov
Dude, literally no one thinks that cis women and trans women are identical in every way (otherwise there would be no way to label one “cis” and the other “trans”). We only say that they are both women. Just like “black women” and “white women” are obviously not identical in every way, and countless other distinctions that can be made.
Seriously, think about the bubble you are stuck in here. You don’t know something this obvious and basic.
http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781402068348
Nary an evolutionary biologist among the contributors. Lots of philosophers, though.
If you’d been around here for long, you’d have caught the semi-annual “mocking of the philosophers” by the biologists and physicists. Then you’d be a bit forewarned.
That is not at all what they’re talking about — first, they state that sciences has been male-dominated, then they proceed to claim that because the male-perspective has been dominant, the science itself is somehow flawed and does not suit women’s needs. Which is completely insanity and only makes sense within the post-modernist framework of rejection of objective truth. And that is indeed just as bad as YEC, but you seem unable to comprehend it for some unknown to me reason.
Andddd we’re done here.
Fuck off, slimeball.
Read the article itself.
I never said this one was a rejection of evolution, I gave it as an example of feminism being the same kind of postmodernist nonsense that it was 20 years ago when it was fashionable to mock it for being postmodernist nonsense, which means that there should be no reason not to mock it for those same reasons now.
I did say that to the extent that feminism is still wedded to postmodernism, it is just as bad, if not worse, for science than YEC.
Then why did the Germaine Greer kerfuffle happen a few months ago?
first, they state that sciences has been male-dominated
You mean, like it’s an equal rights issue?
then they proceed to claim that because the male-perspective has been dominant
Like, you know, an equal rights issue?
the science itself is somehow flawed and does not suit women’s needs
Is this evolutionary biologists saying that, or a bunch of philosophy department types? I am afraid you’ve been punked. People fall for that stuff all the time. They’ve been falling for it before Sartre.
Your initial sally was based on the premise that feminism as a whole rests on this flawed reasoning and therefore must be rejected. The first part of your premise is not true: the fact that there exist non-post-modernist feminist evolutionary biologists demolishes the foundation of your assertion.
Since xx and xxy are both known possible human configurations, they are equally real. Your choice of terminology is offensive, so fuck you. People are people, regardless of their genetic profiles. Everyone is real.
I gave it as an example of feminism being the same kind of postmodernist nonsense
Even if I granted you that it demonstrates what you claim, the best you can get from that is an example of some postmodernist nonsense. Well, congratulations, you’ve demonstrated that postmodernism exists. Now how are you going to go on to establish that all feminism must be rejected because, uh, well… Yeah, how are you gonna do that?
I’m just laughing at the idea that the dudebro saying feminism is anti-science cannot seem to bring himself to understand science enough to admit that it is, in fact:
1. Not pure, objective truth.
2. Not purely unbiased
3. Has been and still largely is a male dominated.
Sorry, blind science fanboyism isn’t much better than being po-mo. And using that fanboyism to be an anti-feminist transphobe? Well, that is rather something.
There exist people in theology departments who will tell you that they embrace the theory of evolution. Therefore there is no conflict between Christianity and evolution. By your own reasoning.
And, which is more important, the question is not whether there are non-post-modernist feminists, the question is who is dominant in the field. And you can only answer that by reading the feminist literature. But I have hard time finding non-post-modernist feminist literature, which naturally leads me to think it is all post-modernist nonsense. Bloggers and vloggers do not count.
Georgi Marinov: hey here’s an idea. What would you think if someone were to expose you to a feminist thought that wasn’t based on post-modernism??
Would you then admit you kinda didn’t have a point?
Georgi Marinov:
And there exists Dawkins, who has tweeted that he counts himself a feminist — a mainstream one, at that!
(I love it how you so conspicuously and tenaciously ignore this fact)
And I am shaking my head at people’s reading comprehension abilities.
Of course science is not the pure objective truth, and it is not unbiased. It is the process of finding it. But denial of the existence of objective truth means there is no reason to do science. Which is not just a conjecture — cultures that have denied that have indeed promptly gone on to destroy their science.
But to go from that to insisting that the “female perspective” is needed and the well-established theories are flawed is pure nonsense. But feminists have done that (and no, do not come at me with the same “Anita Sarkeesian does not do that” BS).
Bloggers and vloggers do not count.
Why not? Can’t a blogger or a vlogger be a feminist?’ By your argument they ought to all be postmodernists, too, since they must have learned their feminism from … someplace?
And the bonus is that his transphobia displays absolute ignorance into the actual science involved in sex and gender. Because of course.
Paywall. Besides, I am not in the mood to find your evidence for you. The quote you proved here, the abstract you linked to, and the “sexed equation” allusion have all done very well to show that you have no real case. Your casual transphobia have further shown that you are both incompetent and bigoted. So, really, that’s it. You had a chance, and you blew it by showing that you are really just another pseudointellectual douchebro with a serious irrational hatred for feminism. Hardly a surprising development.
Marinov is now banned.
I don’t know many of the names that were thrown about, except one: Susan Oyama. She’s a very good and interesting philosopher, who has written several books on Developmental Systems Theory. I’m a fan of her work, which I suspect Marinov could not comprehend, since he’s too busy wallowing in bigoted stereotypes.
Georgi Marinov
I am feeling charitable and assuming that English is not your primary language.
this kind of shit
could get you banned.
trans and real are not opposites
And now Anita Sarkeesian is dragged into discussion. This must be bingo by now.
shit
my timing has been off for weeks!
The banned one [I was looking this up before I refreshed, not quite on-topic, but what the hey]:
The actual claim is that women are deprecated due to bias, in science amongst other fields (https://richarddawkins.net/2013/10/why-are-there-still-so-few-women-in-science/):
PZ @37:
I’ve often wondered how often the dudebro “leaders” talk among themselves — or even to you — about how you just don’t get it. If only you played your cards right and went along with everyone, you could have all the speaking gigs you want to plug your books and merchandise, your “nonprofit” charity foundation that pays a nice salary to Mrs. Myers as administrator, and of course all the drunk young women you can take advantage of at conferences!
Frankly, even without having to play ball with the establishment, you probably are still leaving a lot of money on the table compared to what you could do if you exploited your opportunities (i.e. us!). You seem to be genuinely happy with where you are in life, which I’m sure irritates your haters even more.
Curse my slow fingers! Ah well…
Georgi Marinov @80:
IIRC, my first feminism class in university was called “Feminist Theorizing.” We were never given a “feminist theory,” because there isn’t one. What we were given was an overview of what feminism has argued for, and argued about. I can’t stress that last one enough, the battles we get into within the skeptic/atheist movement are a mere shadow of the brawls within feminism. This is exactly what you’d expect from a progressive movement; by definition, we’re on new and unexplored territory, which was always there but too subtle for most people to notice. Disagreement is inevitable.
A social construct is any concept that’s shared by more than one person. All scientific theories are social constructs. The letters you’re typing? Social constructs. Country borders? Social constructs.
“Sexed equations” and much of feminist epistemology came from a crackpot that called themselves a feminist, Luce Irigaray. Most feminists disagreed with her, even when her ideas were first proposed, but she was terribly convenient for anti-feminists who presented her as typical.
You haven’t actually taken a feminist course, have you? I recommend signing up for a MOOC or picking up a textbook and learning what feminism is from actual feminists.
To answer that asshat Allen West’s quote that Dawkins retweeted:
They’re in the Islamic world, where their “speaking up” has any chance of actually having an action.
Why does Dawkins never-Muslims sitting thousands of miles away yelling “forced marriage is bad!!” will have any effect whatsoever?
FTFM
@118 find some Simone De Beauvoir.
@126, anteprepro
Actually it was Marcus Ranum who brought up Anita Sarkeesian, no bingo for you!
Georgi Marinov @90:
Two journal articles and a book? That’s a sliver of a fraction of current feminist output. The journal I cite the most is the Psychology of Women Quarterly. Here’s a sample:
Calogero, Rachel M. “A test of objectification theory: The effect of the male gaze on appearance concerns in college women.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 28.1 (2004): 16-21.
You might also want to check out Feminist Economics.
Berik, Günseli, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, and Stephanie Seguino. “Feminist economics of inequality, development, and growth.” Feminist Economics 15.3 (2009): 1-33.
Also, I can’t help but notice the journal you cite is ranked 15th out of 41 in Women’s Studies. You should be looking at higher-ranked journals, like Gender and Society or Men and Masculinities instead. Google Scholar will give you a great sampling of both.
(And yes, I know Georgi Marinov is banned. This is for the lurkers.)
If you’re looking for specific names, I can recommend Janet Shibley Hyde. She’s been doing meta-analyses for three decades now, and is still actively collaborating. Mary Koss has spent about as long studying sexual assault, with a focus on college and university campuses, and become a prime target of MRAs as a result. I also recommend looking up Liz Kelly, Antonia Abby, and R.W. Connell. I’m not too familiar with Martha Nussbaum’s work, save her theorizing on objectification, but she’s frequently mentioned next to John Rawls.
RE: “some” is not “all”
Some people named Richard are full of shit. Now, some might argue that:
1) I am pointedly not specifying which “some ” I mean
2) I make this statement in the context of a thread about Richard Dawkins, and
3) I’ve previously stated that I think Dawkins has gone off the deep end
…so therefore we can reasonably draw the inference that I’m referring to Dawkins in this instance. However, Dawkins himself would presumably disagree.
Parasiteboy
You didn’t ask a question you made a claim. A claim that is demonstrably wrong. A claim that is demonstrably harmful both to feminists AND immigrants. You made this claim after this has been discussed for weeks.
+++
PZ
Lemme guess, by the same people who go for dictionary atheism. How can you betray a negative statement?
1. Projection
2. I must complain about the gender discrimination. Why do none of the ladies ever offer me sex for supporting them?
+++
Marcus Ranum
I guess that most people hanging around here had those moments. But I guess we also don’t have open eds and have never been publicly hailed as infallible and brilliant, so it’S probably easier to say “maybe it’s me”.
+++
I think we need a new Bingo card: conservative reactionaries and misogynists self-declared liberals and feminists side with when criticised
+++
Dawkins has no fucking understanding of linguistics 101, but he thinks that being a pompous native speaker with a prestigious accent makes him qualified
+++
Oh gods, not another guy who has no clue what philosophy is, what feminist theory says and how their actual processes differ from natural science. Seriously, there is good critique of postmodernism, coming from people who actually know what it is, but what these guys usually boil down to is “I don’t like it, it uses big words I don’t understand, therefore it’s wrong!
And as HJ Hornbeck notes Irigaray is hardly mainstream
Yawn.
Science, especially medicine, has a long history of being actually wrong while serving the status quo. Pointing that out is not anti science.
PZ
I guess that’s often at the root of their rejection: To understand those texts, you need to know the prinicples and terminology. If you don’t sentences make no sense or, if you just go by garden variety meanings of words, mean something different, something ridiculous.
Caricaturing feminists and then arguing against the caricature is the definition of a Strawman Argument and it is fallacious. How could a skeptic not know this?
As Alan Sokol said, “I’m a leftist (and a feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it.”
PZed @ 37,
Please don’t.
There are crackpot scientists saying the most utterly ridiculous shite and claiming it to be scientific. We don’t abandon or fight against science because of that. A good scientist is able to recognise what is actual, evidence-based science and what are the mental defecacions of some idiot. Likewise, if you actually are at all familiar with feminism you can tell if the arguments that someone presents are consistent and valid whithin the premises of equality, well-being, etc, or if you are listening to some barking moron who thinks that their claims about how all men are rapists that must be reduced to controllable numbers so that they can be used as sex-slaves in an amazonian utopia, are in any way reasonable or even tangentially related to feminism. Only an irrational anti-feminist would look at the second type and say “There! There’s a feminist!”, just like only a fucking ignorant buffoon would look at the crackpot claiming that arthritic goat milk cures HIV and say “There! There’s a scientist!”.
Then again, irrational anti-feminist have a remarkable ability to grasp firmly at straw. Almost like their irrational prejudices are clouding their minds so strongly that they actually think the scarecrow is alive and it wants their cake.
Sili #140,
not so much seconded as n’thd.
When I was in med school, I recall my Neurology attending say what I feel is most pragmatic, IMO:
“The ideal for human equality has many imperfect voices that often disagree and contradict. There are different feminisms among those voices. And it is up to every flawed individual to navigate that discourse to find his/her voice. And guess what? It all works. Feminisms with warts and all, works”
(paraphrasing of course)
Sadly, I received word that she recently died of ovarian cancer.
What I find so very disappointing with Dawkins is that he acknowledges none of this. He makes the same grotesque equivalence as does Rush Limbaugh with “feminazi”.
Islamism is a collection of theocratic ideologies that often lead to totalitarian societies that disproportionately oppress women. To equate the heterodoxy of feminism with that……shame on you Dawkins! Please grow a brain and read “Handmaid’s Tale”.
So… I get that you’re banned and all that, but…
@Georgi Marinov, 113
What does one have to do with the other? What, do you think the conflict between trans exclusion and trans support are about whether we think trans and cis women are identical? You can’t even find two randomly selected members of either group who’re identical, so why the hell would you expect the entirety of them to be?
Maybe Greer thinks that’s what she’s arguing against, (in which case that’s her own skeptical failure to deal with, and maybe she could stop being so hostile to trans people until she does deal with it) but that’s not the reality. There’s a reason why people get so pissed off about strawmen, when they’re more likely to just be baffled or amused by non sequiturs, and it’s this right here – because you’ve presumably heard Greer’s strawman of trans activism, you’re sat there, comfortably believing that we all think there’s no difference, and that the comment I quoted isn’t a non sequitur.
This is less of an issue among skeptics*, but for people like you it’s a huge problem; your understanding of the issue has been shaped be someone else’s false claims, and you’re using that misunderstanding to shore up your arguement that feminism is anti-science, and other credulous types will come along, read your arguments, assuming you’ve put them up somewhere else where they won’t be challenged, and carry the ignorance along. It’s a huge problem, and nobody who aspires to be known as a skeptic (I personally believe, based on my experience over last few years of interactions with self-described skeptics, that simply calling yourself a skeptic is a particularly dangerous and unskeptical bit of arrogance – much better to try to live the label without claiming it) should be content to allow themselves to fall prey to it.
*It actually isn’t. I’m just being an arsehole.
By the way, I did find some nonsensey feminism recently – I subscribed to a new podcast, and I started listening to it over breakfast on Friday, and my bullshit alarm went off almost instantly – the host was speaking in that reassuring and comforting tone of voice that puts my teeth on edge, and within moments they were talking about wellness and remedies and… ugh.
So, yeah, I spent Friday morning as an anti-feminist, volunteered at my local FTSU association, heard the first speech from the head of the organisation and walked back out of the door as a feminist. It sure is tiring, having to switch sides every time you hear a ridiculous claim from someone on your side.
@144, Athywren
Ya I was scratching my head over that response too. I tried to come up with a response but gave up.
Also, @my previous moral discussion before this because the vagueness was bugging me:
The most credible case of a truly civilized person pretending to be a barbarian would be if the person does not perform acts of violence, but merely deceives barbarians into thinking the person has. Also, perhaps fairly minor acts of roughness.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-@138 said
Stop misrepresenting what I posted at @14, you did the same thing in your @29 post which should have been double blockquoted. Instead you made it seem like you were responding to something that I said, which is incorrect.
I blockquoted what someone wrote on Neurologica and ended the post with Any insights? how is that NOT a question? If it has been discussed here for weeks then say so. Although I am a frequent reader, I do not keep up with all the post and comments.
parasiteboy
I owe you an apology. I mistook those words for yours and you are absolutely right. I’m sorry, this was entirely my mistake.
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-@149
Thanks for the apology and no worries, it happens.
Couldn’t help my inner tweety-bird; Le Dauque’s condescension knows no goddamn bounds.
Honestly, I’m still waiting for a citation on the idea that some feminists think it’s not rape if a Muslim does it. I mean it’s not like there’s a conflict between respecting a Muslim’s right to their religion and practices and pointing out that a rapist is a rapist, even if he believes in Allah.
His failure to usefully specify which particular subset of imaginary feminists he was speaking about is one thing, but I think it’s probably a bigger deal that they’re totally imaginary.
Or that there’s any equivalence between “problematic” and “haram.”
The anti-feminists do surely love to misrepresent feminist lingo like problematic, privilege, patriarchy, and pretty much all others. They do seem to be unable to distinguish between “That’s problematic.” and “That’s haram!”
Athywren, what they have is the continued insistence that feminists have been “silent” about the mob of sexual assaulters on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. Not that, even if it were true, it would prove anything, since it is just one specific story, and lack of discussion doesn’t mean they approve of it or think Muslims are permitted to rape. And of course, they do an incredibly poor job of making the case that feminists haven’t actually talked about it or been concerned about it. They simply presume silence and further beyond that, they presume that silence means condoning it. Which honestly seems like precisely the kind of the attitude, logic, and behavior that most of these assholes would decry as associated with SJWs. Go figure.
Additionally (trigger warning), I found a rather telling a comment on this subject, in the tangle of twitter feeds linked to Dawkins right now. Very roughly, it said something like “feminists are hypocrites, ignoring rapes by Muslims while focusing on imaginary campus rapes”. Yeah. I guess at least Dawkins had the good sense to not re-use or retweet that specific argument. Small miracles.
@63 Hank!!
That was a thing of beauty. Rant in its purest form. Sublime.
@156 too kind.
If I can match the precise combination of antihistamines, caffeine and recreational substances that made it possible, I might have a go at another one.
On topic: it’s curious that Banned Guy #884757 compared feminism to creationism – and by “curious” I mean “bass fucking ackwards”. Why? We all know why, but I’ll spell it out because I like the sound of my own keystrokes.
It’s because creationists mount endless assaults on evolution (& science, more broadly, if it contradicts Scripture) based on a raft of misunderstandings, obtuse critiques, negative stereotypes, generalisations, demonisations, and flat-out goddamned lies. Likewise, many opponents of feminism mount their attacks on strawfeminist Vagylon™ Bralek™ misandrists whose apparent mission (if you’ll permit some rather mild hyperbole) is to transcend the equality – if not dominance – that they already obviously have, remove men from all positions of power, feminise science, teach cross-dressing and The Female Eunuch (aka “Fraulein Kampf”) in kindergartens and turn hapless young boys into betacuckginas by age 5.
In other words, the Establishment/conservatives in each situation adopt a position of dedicated opposition to a declared enemy, not a position of honestly seeking what is most likely true. In such a combative environment, survival of the in-group against the alleged relentless onslaught of the out-group is paramount and any tactic, no matter how underhand, dishonourable or flat-out vile, is permitted. Also common to both situations: the pretense of rationality, intellectualism and emotional detachment. Creationists wear lab coats and invent scientific terminology like “micro/macro-evolution” and “historical/observational science” and insist not just on debating scientists but condescending to them as to their profession; anti-feminists calmly present scientific reasons why women aren’t suited to “men’s work” or produce figures debunking the wage gap or highlighting the prevalence of false rape claims or alleging ideological fraternity with radical Islamists, all the while dismissing any critic who is in the slightest bit emotionally invested (while, obviously, getting up in indignant bloody arms should one of their heroes be denied a platform or de-ticked on Twitter).
But it is of course a pretense: from their rhetoric it is clear that creationists and anti-feminists alike are afraid of losing the culture war that they themselves started as a knee-jerk response to new discoveries and ideas that threatened a primacy they didn’t earn and don’t deserve, but will fight like fucking pissed possums to preserve.
And, of course, to both groups all I can say is: reap what you sow – and eat a bag of boiled arseholes.
I find slightly funny that Dawkins accuses Steven Novella by name of being one of the people who “de-platformed him” (What? Like he does routinely to Rebecca Watson? He has the chance to experience that funny feeling personally now) when the Neurologica article all but says that the decision was not unanimous. In fact, given the apologetic, non-commital and contorted way he wrote the article, I’m convinced that Novella voted in favor of Dawkins. He has, after all, had individuals equally problematic for women happily appear in his podcast (Michael Shermer comes to mind, and he was fast to go to his defense when inquired about the allegations against his guest).
Also, in one of his responses for the NECSS article, he says:
Sadly, I have the distinct impression that by “move forward” he means to stop discussing the topic in any forum in which he’s involved. He says in the post that he doesn’t think that NECSS is the proper forum for those discussions, and I’m sure he thinks the SGU is not a proper forum for them either; the exit of Rebecca Watson, even when very polite and very uncharacteristically devoid of any comment in any forum (like a NDA was signed by all parties) and her replacement by the pointedly non-controversial Cara Santa Maria seems now, to me, a move consistent with his expressed position, or at least with my own interpretation of it.
This is unfortunate phrasing, since it implies that if a feminist is in favor of Islam, she is not representative of feminism. It more or less denies the possible existence of Muslim feminists, of whom there are plenty. As Athywren pointed out, it’s more likely that a pro-Islamist feminist is unrepresentative of feminism generally.
Regarding the femenist philosophy paper about Einstein’s equation, did no one pick up on the fact that it is a translation from French? In the French language gender is assigned to objects. The excerpt appears to be discussing how the language construct of gender should apply to scientific formulas. Being a philosophy paper I would hope the surrounding argument is that gender should not be applied to such things.
That would mean the discussion is little different to our discussion of using he/she pronouns when the gender of the subject is unknown. The reason we have that discussion is because of the psychological impact of always using the male pronouns. An example close to my heart is Dungeons and Dragons that has evolved over the years from pure male to alternating male/female. I like the change as it has a real effect on how I feel and the biases I unconsciously apply.
DanDare @160:
Goddamn it, you’re right. No-one can find a passage in Luce Irigaray’s work where she argues that equations have a sex. Either someone did a poor job of translating her French into English, or the quote was invented whole-cloth. That’s kind of a problem, as Dawkins has repeatedly used it as an example since 1998.
I was curious and tried to find the text with the Irigaray quote. I found three different references:
Luce Irigaray, « L’ordre sexuel du discours », in Langages, le sexe linguistique, 1987, p. 110.
Luce Irigaray, « Sujet de la science, sujet sexué ? » (pp 95-121), in Sens et place des connaissances dans la société, Paris, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, p 110.
Irigaray, Luce. Parler n’est jamais neutre. Éditions de Minuit. 1987. p.110.
The first two are available via JSTOR and do not contain that quote as far as I can tell. I was not able to get hold of the third one but this seems to be usually given as a second hand reference from Sokal and Bricmont’s “Intellectual Impostures”.
A lot of people who get upset about this anti-scientfic quote sure have a hard time to follow good scientific reference practices.
What seems consistent is the page number and the quote. Does someone by chance have “Parler n’est jamais neutre” on their bookshelf?
Zoonpolitikon @162:
I’m afraid not. There’s an English translation kicking around Google, under the name “This Sex Which Is Not One,” which seems to be the work that Sokal/Bricmont are referencing about fluid dynamics. The passage centered around page 110 is a tough read. This implies either a bad translation or that the original French was a tough read, too.
Fortunately, Irigaray provides a summary paragraph at the start of that essay. The English translation:
It seems likely that Irigaray was being poetic, using fluid dynamics as a metaphor for gender, and that translated badly into English. Sokal/Bricmont either missed that she was being metaphoric, or didn’t care. I can easily forgive Dawkins for missing out on this in 1998, but by 2012 it’s almost certain someone tried to point out he was spreading a lie. I also can’t forgive the way he spins this into a conspiracy theory.
His other examples don’t hold up, either. Like you, I can’t find Irigaray’s Einstein passage. But by searching on Google Books and sorting by date, I also wasn’t able to find anyone using that interpretation of Irigaray before Sokal/Bricmont’s book. You’d think a bold claim like that would have generated some controversy, and been remarked on before Sokal/Bricmont got there.
Meanwhile, I did find this description for “Speech Is Never Neutral:”
Huh, so one of Irigaray’s major research areas was on implicit sexing within our speech. Here’s a passage from “Is the Subject of Science Sexed,” an essay she wrote in 1987:
This makes a helluva lot more sense: Irigaray isn’t saying equations are sexed, she’s saying that our discourse is sexed and this has consequences for the way we think. Hence the question mark in the original quote. We can still take her to task for practicing difference feminism, but this is a far cry from wild ravings of someone opposed to science.
It doesn’t help that Dawkins only mentions Luce Irigaray, as some of his other material comes from other authors. Here’s Sandra Harding, in “The Science Question in Feminism:”
It’s pretty clear she’s talking about other people’s rape metaphors here. If mere descriptions of nature can fruitfully be explained by referencing rape, in some instances, shouldn’t that metaphor extend to every discriptor of nature? She’s arguing from absurdity here, pointing out a false analogy.
In sum, Dawkins has been spreading misinformation about feminism for nearly two decades now. I think he deserves the label “anti-feminist,” despite his objections.
@HJ Hornbeck, 163
I’d be willing to bet it was a tough read in French. I looked it up for my original (almost entirely abandoned when I noticed the ban) reply to Georgi Marinov, and I was pretty strongly reminded of the time I read through Dworkin’s Intercourse to find that, “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of contempt for women’s bodies” quote, which just happens to be surrounded by an entire chapter talking about a very specific state of existence. It kind of seems like the second wavers liked to make their prose dense enough to need a mental machete to make it through. Some of them, anyway. I have to admit, I didn’t look far enough into the Irigaray quote to be sure that it was a good point she was making, but it certainly doesn’t seem seem half as ludicrous on a cursory investigation as it does from just seeing the words “sexed equation.” Sometimes I wonder if the density of feminist writing is part of the reason it’s so easy for the more lazy-of-thought among the skeptic communities to buy into the quotemines? Mind you, the only real difference between them and, “to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable [etc]” is that the refutation of the misquote isn’t quite so easily found as just checking the next two sentences, so it’s not like there’s any excuse for it if they want to call themselves skeptics.
Umm… déjà vu….
@PZ are you following this thread? I get a feeling we just flipped a rock with a lot of anti-feminist disinformation underneath it.
HJ Hornbeck, thank you so much for that and for the time and trouble. It’s striking how effectively people like Irigaray and Dworkin have been misrepresented over the years to the point that many feminists assume they were pretty much the caricatures they are painted as (I certainly used to vaguely assume that. I now think I was an idiot to have done so).
Actually it would be really neat to have both the debunking of the straw-Irigaray and of the straw-Dworkin perma-linked because they are used so often as an anti-feminist gotcha (I thought I had saved a copy of the Dworkin one, that I know I read somewhere on Pharyngula, but maybe I didn’t because I can’t find it now).
@gmarinov #167
Thank you so much. Fantastic. I’ll report back here with my thoughts once I read it.
OK. I read the chapter with the infamous Irigaray quote. Here is my report (I hope people are still reading here).
First a word of caution: I have no background in philosophy or linguistics. So it can very well be that I missed out on something or did not get some of the nuances. The text is not always easy to follow, following a proud tradition in French academia of making things difficult to read. I did not read the whole chapter in detail but tried to read enough to get the context.
Although the quote is in the text the way it is most often quoted on the interwebs and it is indeed on page 110, this is not “Parler n’est jamais neutre” as quoted in Sokal’s book. The text appears to be some kind of notes from a workshop. Irigaray contrasts the text to “Parler n’est jamais neutre” and says that this text is work in progress (“plutôt qu’un travail plus achevé et formalisé que vous pouvez trouver dans certains de mes livres notamment dans le dernier”). Either she has copied it from the book (but this seems unlikely as will become clear in a moment) or Sokal and Bricmont do not correctly reference the quote, making it appear to be more formalized and edited (if the reference is indeed given like this in “Intellectual Impostures”).
A lot of the preceding text is about inherent bias science has when it comes to gender. This I hope is not disputed. Irigaray seems to change regularly between some kind of symbolic analysis (the Freudian type) and more practical critique of the practice of science (e.g. female representation). This is probably what bothers me personally most as I think it renders her point fuzzier and it is much more difficult to argue with her statements. But this is certainly also due to me having a different methodological background. It does not help that hers is not really my cup of tea (I do not mean that as a value judgement. It is a matter of preferences).
On page 108 the transcript of the Q&A begins and this is where we find the E = mc^2 quote (page 110). So the quote here is basically an oral reply to a question to a workshop report.
What also seems important is the question to which the quote is part of the answer (ever wondered why she mentions “nucelar weapons” in the quote?). The person asking the question is making good points and Irigaray is actually answering in that quote the kind of critique implicitly leveled at her by quoting this passage.
My quick attempt at a translation:
Irigaray then answers with the famous quote
Here the translation from Reddit
Given all this the charitable interpretation is that she was making a hypothetical about something that is unknown. She is not saying that the equation is wrong or that the equation should use something else than the speed of light. She is saying that the focus was on the speed of light (“what goes fastest”) and that in a hypothetical less biased world Einstein might have focused his research on other variables that might have led to equally important results.
In this reading Irigaray is speculating about something that cannot be known, an alternative less “sexed” world. It is a speculation about an alternate universe without the inherent bias sciences might have because it is dominated by (white) men. She is doing this speculation in an oral answer to a question in a Q&A session. You might disagree with her methods her argument about the equation but it seems unfair to paint her as a anti-science freak that claims the speed of sound should go into the famous Einstein equation because it is more feminine. At least not if you are willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Irigaray also defends herself against the critique of often changing gears between analogies and the real thing (or “extrapolations” as it is called in the discussion). She says that she is making reference to the “historic context” of the concepts. She points at the fact that philosophy and science used to be the same thing and that Descartes, Spinoza and Aristotle basically did also not make the distinction. She says that a problem science has is that it focuses too much on formalism and it is incapable of reflecting “on what it does”.
We might disagree with this and some of her writing might be a little dated but it is in my view certainly not a freakish fringe opinion just to be ridiculed and ignored without addressing the actual content. But perhaps someone who has a better understanding of philosophy has some additional insights.
zoonpolitikon (my emphasis):
That’s only charitable if one grants that she was ignorant about physics — it’s a fundamental physical constant (not a variable!), and to refer to it as “what goes fastest” is a sad misinterpretation of its significance.
(The emphasised part is not just bad science, but bad philosophy — it’s but a groundless supposition)
What?
No, that reading doesn’t in any way justify the claim that it’s either biased or sexed. Fundamental constants are universal, and hardly the unique province of white men.
There’s a reason that what is now called ‘science’ was once called ‘natural philosophy’, and that it prospered once it became empirical.
@John Morales
I only tried to understand what Irigaray was trying to say. My impression was that this was different from what is typically insinuated.
I am very much out of my field when it comes to her writings (and as far as I can judge at least, I am unconvinced by her arguments). However, I also feel that she is often unfairly ridiculed. Seems to me that one can engage her on the basis of her arguments (as bad as they might be).
Gotta love the smell of misogynist (and now transphobic!) screeds in the morning.
Coal mining and other energy extracting jobs are usually paid positions, not volunteer roles. At least, that’s what my oil rig working great aunts and various cousins (male and female) have told me. They’d probably be pretty pissed at anyone who came in and tried to do their respectable and relatively well paid jobs for free. So, no, feminists don’t volunteer to work in coal mines, though those with better physical skills than me might well work there for pay.
If you’ve been banned, asshole, then you’re a dishonest, unethical piece of work coming back here and slipping by the ban, aren’t you?
@gmarinov
*Looks up at people posting actual attempts by themselves and others to find the quote*
Do you know what words mean?
Astronomy derives from astrology.
Do star signs have veracity?
If “yes,” [something about the moon’s house coming into alignment with… blah].
If “no,” then why do we consider astronomy a science?
Or… is it possible for something to derive from something else without being eternally bound by it? (Never mind the fact that post modernism is a phenomenon of the 20th century, while feminism has a history going back centuries.)
(Also, does post modernism actually assert that there is no objective truth, or is it a statement about the extent and fallibility of human knowledge? This isn’t a pointed question – I actually don’t know, having never been particularly interested in post modernism.)
@178
I had a class that touched on it, and while it was awful and I don’t think I have an expert grasp on it, I think it was moreso the latter. My professor summed up Postmodernism as “The categorical rejection of metanarratives.”
So like, things like “Empiricism” or “Interactionism” get discounted because they try and sum up the totality of human experience in a limited way, and can be affected by existing power structures. Under that definition, “Science” counts as a metanarrative.
John Morales
That swooshing noise, it was the point that flew over your head.
The argument as I understand it is not that “E=MC2″is biased (she doesn’t even affirm that it is sexed), but that in our universe science developed in a sexist society which influenced science, how we look at the world and what we look at.
If language is sexist and biased, and language is the tool you have to use to do science, then your science will be tainted by this. Doesn’t mean it’S wrong.
Besides, this is really difficult to discuss unless you’re familiar with Irigaray and her main thesis, which is not that women are the Other, the marked form, but that the female gender/sex is the gender/sex that is not one. This is really complicated and hard to wrap your head around. It is not a widely accepted premise among feminist scholars and philosophers, but unless you actually understand the basis of her argument you cannot truly judge the individual argument.
It is something that is especially annoying among scientists: The blank disregard of terms of art and their usage in the humanities. Just because you understand all the everyday dictionary definitions of a certain term does not mean you actually understand what is meant in the context of a philosophical/ cultural debate. And that’s from the people who complain that people take “theory” to mean “a wild guess”.
I sometimes joke that my safeword is “discursively constructed subject position.” Do you understand what that means?
Why should anybody take you serious when you display your ignorance on what all those terms actually mean as plainly as this?
opposablethumbs @166:
Straw-Dworkin has been around so long that even Dwokin has debunked her.
If you want a one-stop shop for straw-Dworkin, this seems to be an excellent starting point.
Oh yeah, can’t believe I missed the “Male and female are the only biological sex and then there is a bunch of disorders” thing.
I do, in fact, consider my dysphoria a condition I actively attempt to assuage. I do not, however, consider the mere fact that I don’t identify with my assigned gender a condition, or any other kind of word for “thing that is bad and abnormal”
@182
What I think is funny about straw-Dworkin is that I’ve witnessed legitimate “I identify as a radical feminist and really, really hate trans people” people cite Dworkin as one of their inspirations on that viewpoint, despite Dworkins saying that “every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.”
*Dworkin on that last one. My brain was thinking Dworkin but my eyes saw Dawkins up top.
zoonpolitikon @169
Here’s the complete context for their E=MC^2 quote, taken from a 1998 edition of “Fashionable Nonsense” (the American title of the same book).
Note there’s no mention this was part of a Q&A, or a work in progress, or an attempt to look for alternate explanations. While it’s tempting to think this was an honest mistake, here’s how Sokal/Bricmont introduce Irigaray:
So they’re aware she’s studied linguistics, but unaware she studied the gendering of language? Reading through the chapter (complete copies of the book can be found via Google), they never once seem to consider that she could be talking about the gendering of language instead of inanimate objects or mathematical concepts. Either they have fundamentally misunderstood her, even though they quote from five separate works of hers and in at least one case have important context nearby which changes the interpretation, or this was a deliberate cherry-picking to make her look like she was out to lunch.
I hate to say it, but I’m leaning towards the latter.
This reminds me a lot of Einstein. Many people point to “God does not play dice” as evidence he believed in a personal god. But when you look into his private letters and other writings, you find he calls himself an agnostic, “religious nonbeliever,” or a pantheist, and explicitly disavows a personal god. Should we conclude that when he said that one quote he believed in a personal god at the time and later changed his mind, or that he was consistent never believed in a personal god? Surely the latter.
Likewise, we have a lot of evidence that Irigaray studied gendered language and how it effects our thought process. Should we believe that when discussing E=MC^2 she thought the equation itself was sexed, but that it was language which was sexed elsewhere, or that she was merely taking someone’s question and running with the premises like philosophers are trained to do?
Banned troll @172:
Mary Wollstonecraft (27 April 1759 – 10 September 1797) would be rather shocked to discover she invented postmodern philosophy (which is usually dated to the 1940’s). While most people credit Kimberlé Crenshaw for coining the term “intersectionality,” the idea has been present since Sojourner Truth’s 1851 lecture “Ain’t I a Woman?”. The notion that men and women are more similar than different can be dated to at least Helen Thompson Woolley’s dissertation “The Mental Traits of Sex: An Experimental Investigation of the Normal Mind in Men and Women,” published in 1903. Equal pay for equal work? The early 1800’s. Intersex and nonbinary gender? The ancient Greeks may have been aware of it.
Hell, the term “feminism” in the sense of a rights movement itself dates back to 1895 or so, and has existed with other meanings since 1840.
You really know shit-all about feminism. Try cracking open a book sometime, instead of echoing around the echo chamber.
Giliell:
“L’équation E=Mc2 [sic!] est-elle une équation sexuée? Peut-être que oui. Faisons l’hypothèse que oui dans la mesure où elle privilégie la vitesse de la lumière par rapport à d’autres vitesses dont nous avons vitalement besoin. Ce qui me semble une possibilité de la signature sexuée de l’équation, ce n’est pas directement ses utilisations par les armements nucléaires, c’est d’avoir privilégié ce qui va le plus vite et, je crois qu’il y a aujourd’hui pour nous un péril d’excès de vitesse.”
In that quotation, the equation itself is the subject about which she pontificates in relation to its sexed nature. Not the society, not the science — but the equation itself.
Do you seriously consider that it makes sense to imagine that the principle of mass-energy equivalence could only be discovered “in a sexist society which influenced science, how we look at the world and what we look at.”?
John Morales
Do you really think that’s what’s being said?
Giliell, if indeed the principle (and its equation) is sexed because it was discovered “in a sexist society which influenced science, how we look at the world and what we look at.”, then the ineluctable implication is that it would not be sexed were it discovered in a non-sexist society; but that would violate the principle of non-contradiction, since the equation — being a fundamental physical principle — would be the same regardless of which society discovered it, and so the only way to reconcile the contradiction (that the same equation is both sexed and non-sexed depending on its derivation) would be for the non-sexist society not to discover it.
(Surely easier to admit it’s silly to consider the intrinsic sexedness of an equation)
John Morales
That very short quote has a whooping amount of three hedges. Does that sound like “this is sexed and could only have been discovered in a sexist society” to you? Apart from the fact that the privilegisation of the speed of light may of course not be sexed by Irigaray’s definition in a non-sexist society. It can be read a sexed within the context of a sexist society. Living within one and only having sexist language as a tool (remember, Irigaray is a linguist as well) we cannot know . We cannot know what discoveries could have been made by a non-sexist society instead by the virtue that they haven’t been made because we do not live in that society. Maybe there is a multiverse, maybe in some version of it there is that world. We cannot know. You’re arguing windmills while still not getting the point.
gmarinov
Funny, I live with people who grew up in that environment. Strangely enough, there is a lot of sexism here. Where did it come from, if it was so effectively eradicated by the 1980s? Was the Iron Curtain keeping out not just USAmerican propaganda, but sexism, too?
Giliell,
But there is no privileging of c; it is a physical constant — an intrinsic property of our universe. And the claim that it’s a privileged choice is the very basis of the claim.
(There is being metaphorical, there is being oblique, but there is also being nonsensical)
Seems to me it’s the other way around.
@John Morales
Why is it that (almost) everyone knows the speed of light, but (almost) nobody knows Planck’s constant? Both are physical constants, so if there can be no privileging of physical constants, then surely both should be equally regarded?
Athywren, I think the sense of ‘privilege’ which Giliell and Irigaray employ is its sociological (feminist) one.
In that sense, it is just as meaningless to consider h privileged in E=hf as to consider c privileged in E=mc².
John Morales
Words mean different things in different languages and contexts. If you want to know how I am using a word in a certain context you could ask me instead of just assuming
Sigh
It’s not about physics, it’s about how we fucking think. Something I’ve said a couple of times now and which you keep ignoring. Nobody, not me, not Irigaray is saying that the speed of light is inherently male or masculine. It’s about connotations, about associations, it’s about things being male or female coded (but remember that Irigaray denies the possibility of something being female coded).
If you insist on talking about how the laws of physics are just that you can simply shut up. Because that’s not the discussion.
Giliell:
To recapitulate “the discussion” on that particular topic here hitherto, there is a perception that feminism is silly, which is justified by the contention that Irigaray was representative of feminist thought when she claimed that E=mc² is a sexed equation. Specifically, this perception was brought up by someone here, and it was subject to the rebuttal that this claim was misinterpreted. A citation to Irigaray’s actual claim was produced, showing that it was actually (my paraphrase) that inasmuch that the speed of light is privileged over other important speeds, the equation is indeed sexed.
There are two major issues at hand a priori: whether the claim is representative of feminist thought and whether the claim was indeed misinterpreted by critics of feminism; given the actual claim was adduced, there are two minor issues a posteriori: whether the speed of light in that equation is indeed contingently privileged, and whether the inference that any such privilege entails sexedness is merited.
Clearly, my opinion on the two minor issues is that the answer is ‘no’ to each.
John Morales @188:
You haven’t been around many philosophers, have you? The best way I’ve found to get into their head-space is to read the Euthyphro dialog by Plato. It begins with a simple conversation between Socrates/Plato and Euthyphro, where the latter mentions he’s prosecuting his father for murder. Socrates/Plato is flabbergasted he’d do such a thing, which leads to a lecture from Euthyphro on justice and piety. The response?
Socrates/Plato doesn’t call out Euthyphro for being wrong (which, if you read on, is clearly what he thinks), he instead accepts what Euthyphro says, straight-up, and asks what he means of piety. This snowballs, with Socrates/Plato asking follow-up after follow-up and Euthyphro getting increasingly uncomfortable.
This is the favorite technique of philosophers: don’t give a definitive yes or no, but instead accept the premises and run with them, hoping to find a proof by contradiction. Let your questioner do some or even most of the work, because they’ll learn more from the experience.
Right, now back to Irigaray. Emphasis mine:
As Giliell has pointed out, and I emphasized above, Irigaray never outright endorses the statement as true. She instead did exactly what you’d expect a philosopher to do: start by assuming the statement is true, then running forward until she ran into a contradiction. Given this was inside a Q&A, where she’s forced to think in real-time, and in this case juggling three questions, it’s no surprise that she didn’t make it very far.
Give it a rest. Irigaray has her flaws, but sexing E=MC^2 probably isn’t one of them.
Hj Hornbeck:
As I pointed out, she did outright endorse it as conditionally true; specifically, she outright claimed that it was possible that it was true.
But asserting that it was possibly true is evidently one of them.
(Sexed equations!)
—
PS
<snicker>
John Morales @199:
Carl Sagan claimed it was possible there was an invisible dragon in his garage. Are you going to dismiss him as a PoMo pothead?
Hj Hornbeck, actually, he didn’t.
John Morales
Possibility =/= endorsement
If you said it was possible that person X murdered person Y, do you haul off person X to prison or do you investigate and go on trial?
Furthermore, she’s doing exactly what philosophers are supposed to do in relation to science: They look at the whole thing and poke it with a stick. Because believe it or not, many scientists are really bad at understanding this language thing, this social construction of meaning thing.
You’re still trying to argue physics instead of philosophy and linguistics. That’s why you’re unable to understand what is going on.
I’ll try for a last time: Do you think that the world he lived in influenced how Einstein saw and thought about the universe? Do you believe that Einstein was destined to discover E = MC2? Do you believe it possible that in another world Einstein might have viewed the world and the universe differently, thought about different things and made different discoveries in physics*?
*Or maybe never taken up physics at all and instead become a high fashion designer because physics is for girls?
Giliell, I doubt I’m mistaken in regards linguistics (semantics), philosophy or physics, but I grant I have a poor grasp of mythopoeia — and I admit my thinking is more Apollonian than Dionysian. Anyway, I think I can’t really add to what I’ve written.
—
For completeness’ sake:
Do I think that the world he lived in influenced how Einstein saw and thought about the universe?
Yes.
Do I believe that Einstein was destined to discover E = MC2?
No, in the sense in which I think you mean the question.
Do I believe it possible that in another world Einstein might have viewed the world and the universe differently, thought about different things and made different discoveries in physics*?
Yes.
*Or maybe never taken up physics at all and instead become a high fashion designer because physics is for girls?
Yes.
John Morales @201:
*Looks back at the text*
Sagan then spends several paragraphs doing everything he can to convince us his invisible dragon exists. Why would he spend so much time and effort on the project, if he didn’t think it was possible that invisible dragons existed?
Hj Hornbeck, can you really not see the difference between “suppose X” and “perhaps X”?
Sorry, I’m afraid I’m having a tough time seeing a difference between
and
If you can tell me how that one word radically changes the interpretation of that passage, how it is impossible for someone to accidentally say one when they mean the other during a live Q&A, and how that one word flip overrides the evidence we have from Irigaray’s other work, I’d rather appreciate it.
HJ, you want to hold that Irigaray was treating the idea that the equation is sexed as an example of an arbitrary and unfalsifiable and therefore useless proposition, fine by me.
—
PS I am amused how you thought my succinct reference to the difference (between “suppose X” and “perhaps X”) was literally about the use of the word, rather than to the form of the respective proposals.
See, Sagan essentially wrote “suppose I make this claim, and defend it from falsification by repeated ad hoc qualifications”, whilst Irigaray essentially said “perhaps this claim is true; suppose it is true due to a particular factor — what makes me think this claim is possibly true is not another factor, but rather that factor”.
(I think your fear is well-founded)
I was asking for evidence that those sentences indicated that Irigaray thought equations were sexed, to weigh against the evidence that she did not. That’s eminently falsifiable.
That was one way to interpret your writing. Words can be ambiguous, though, so I wasn’t wedded to that interpretation.
Interesting, so if Sagan had instead wrote..
… we’d know he legitimately thought he had a dragon in his garage, but if he instead phrased things this way …
… we’d know he was just playing out a thought experiment. Is that correct?
The text is much longer than the small translation we are given here. It would be nice to find a complete translation of the response, it might help.
She doesn’t seem to be doing what Sagan was doing, that’s for sure. Instead she seems to very seriously consider it, and we are left with the questions raised by what John said:
It seems obvious that Irigaray truly believed that second item (“privilege entails sexedness”, whatever that means. Perhaps it would be tautological in her jargon. This is a Continental Philosopher, after all). Indeed that seems to be the entire point of her reply.
The other point, “whether the speed of light in that equation is indeed contingently privileged” might be less clear. Yet in the quote I think it does look like she actually believes this too (or something like it).
Remember, she is presumably trying to defend herself against the person’s accusation that she is using analogies badly. So I think that means she is trying to show that this is not a bad analogy, that it does make sense to say that it is a sexed equation.
But I think we need the full quote, not this small piece of it.
@Brian Pansky, 210
Considering that she says it privileges “what goes the fastest,” I’m not sure it’s so simple as “privilege entails sexedness” – there could easily be unstated assumptions between a thing being privileged and it being sexed, such as men, in general, privileging speed, and privileging more speed over less speed, more than women do, in general, which would make the privileging sexed in nature, maybe making the thing itself be sexed. I have no idea if that’s what she was thinking, and I’m not convinced that I agree with it, but it makes a lot more sense to me than sexedness simply being an necessary part or result of privileging.
@Athywren
Good point.
Hj Hornbeck, it’s futile to go on about the correspondence between Sagan’s dragon and Irigay’s masculine equation.
—
I have been giving the source issue some thought, and one reasonable justification I can think of is if the territory/map distinction is not being made explicit: specifically, I think that an equation itself can’t be sexed (that’s a category error), but the connotation of its representation within someone’s mental schema may be.
@John Morales
Yeah, no shit. Of course the equation or the phenomenon itself cannot be sexed. Why would you ever imagine that anyone was claiming that?
Ok… I can’t speak for anyone else, and it’s entirely possible that Giliell & HJ Hornbeck actually believe that it’s reasonable to say that a thing with no physical form or any other sign of life can actually be sexed, but everything they’ve written, and even Irigaray’s quote screams “we’re talking about the connotation of its representation within someone’s mental schema” to me.
Ugh… sorry if that’s overly pissy. But seriously….
@Athywren
Yes but it kind of doesn’t matter what Giliell & HJ Hornbeck believe is reasonable to say. What matters is what Irigaray actually said (or meant to say). At least I think that’s what the dispute was over. And no the quote doesn’t seem to “scream” that.
Ok I haven’t found a full translation but here are some other links where people try to interpret the passage:
A philosphy forum place:
http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/24717/is-this-criticism-of-luce-irigarays-statements-on-physics-accurate
That philosophy forum linked to a philosophy reddit:
https://m.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2hu5sb/did_luce_irigaray_ever_actually_say_emc2_is_a/
Here’s some random person on tumblr:
http://encounter75.tumblr.com/post/77363772334/is-e-mc2-a-sexed-equation-perhaps-it-is-let-us
And here’s a fellow Continental Philosopher (well, an amateur enthusiast of Continental Philosophy anyways), so proceed with caution:
https://musteryou.wordpress.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-feminist-richard-dawkins/
I think giving up on any attempt to understand this quote might be a good idea.
Well, there was that whole deal about the gender bias in test subjects, where only male test animals were used in clinical trials, despite the drugs in question reacting differently to various female hormones or sex-limited genes.
Also, you know, the whole “My woman disobeyed me, better give her a lobotomy or rape her to fix her ‘wandering womb” period of history.
In regards to scientific truths having connotations given by society, I’d consider that a fairly trivial fact. See: “Menstruation = Irrationality”
@ banned person 218
Not to defend the incomprehensible quote (or writings) of Irigaray, but for examples of scientific study being biased because of the gender imbalance or sexism biases or stereotypes etc:
Look into the history of the female orgasm being discovered.
Or:
http://skepchick.org/2015/10/science-your-bias-is-showing-autism-and-gender/
I think I recall another medical example as well. If I remember correctly, for a while the official “warning signs for heart attacks” were only based on studies of men, thus they missed the fact that women usually have very different warning signs.
Or some of the weird stuff in Evolutionary Psychology:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/9141
Or just look at all the proof that people often do have biases and stereotypes associated with genders, and then realize that this can easily be a source of bias in scientists that are studying things related to people.
Except that lobotomies on disobedient women, and the treatment of “wandering wombs” by sexual contact were widely practiced and supported by the scientific consensus of the time.
We do this literally all the time. See like, Aoife’s blogpost about transphobic feminists, or how many first wave feminists distanced themselves from abolition to make the message of suffrage easier to accept.
That there is tangible evidence that male bias has led to horrific mistreatment of women and the acceptance of barbaric medical procedures as recently as the early 20th century?
Except, yes it is?
It’s examining the racist and transphobic biases of a movement made in a racist and transphobic society.
Kindly rest your case in the trash. Littering is generally frowned upon by civil society.
I think the entire discussion doesn’t really matter. Just because one feminist say’s something that might not be entirely correct does not cast doubt on the entirety of feminism. Sigmund Freud wrote an entire body of work that has since been proven to be complete sexist bullshit, yet the field of psychiatry and psychology continue.
I don’t believe that an equation can be sexed. I think the point that was being made was that in many different languages one cannot help but use gendered language to say energy equals mass times velocity, and this in turn influences cognition.
source
@ banned person “gmarinov”
Eh? Did you just move the goalposts? Why do we care what areas of study the examples were in? What am I “grasping at straws” for? What is it that you thought I was trying to prove that I failed to prove well enough for you? Bizarre.
The examples were important because real people were harmed because of bias. My post responded to the specific thing that I quoted you saying.
Obviously yes feminist’s ideas can be biased just like any other human thinking. …so? That is trivially obvious, and can be applied to anti-feminism as well as everything else like that. So what point do you think you are making?
You have a serious lack of thinking skills.
For a second I thought maybe you could be reasoned with, but now you seem to have gone a bit ballistic. Not surprising, most anti-feminists seem to be as confused and unreasonable as you.
@230, Tethys
Ya that’s why I dropped that discussion. It was a red herring all along.
@224, gmarinov
So basically feminism must shut up about science unless the menz literally could never ever ever ever realize their error without the feminists? Or something?
Now that’s grasping at straws!
Notice that you could dismiss many other activist groups that way too, such as the autism activist group. Do I have to prove that science done by non-autistic people would never correct itself in order to make autism activists legitimate in your eyes?
No one ever said that science done by men was unable to correct itself! Only that there are things that went wrong due to sexism etc. and did need to be corrected. Feminism (and other areas of philosophy and activism) helps to make sure we don’t have to wait too long before those corrections happen.
I’m glad “real scientists” are astoundingly rare, then. I’ve met none in any field that do not care about people. Most scientists I know do science specifically because of altruism and wanting to better things in some way.
But, then, these aren’t real scientists, I suppose?
@233, gmarinov
I cannot discern any point in your reply. I’m baffled that you think you have any point in your post. You have very poor thinking skills.
(Yes obviously scientists should care about objective truth. That’s another reason those examples were important: they showed a failure to discover the actual truth! Of course, note that the point of medical science is to take care of people’s health. In health science, caring about objective truth is kind of the same as caring about people. That’s what we need the objective truth for.)
Totally bizarre. Go learn some reasoning skills.
@Tethys #230
I think it matters for this particular quote because it seems to pop-up over and over again as straightforward “proof” of how anti-scientific feminist thinking is. However, it seems not to be what people claim. Therefore it is important to take it apart even if it is not representative (or even a fringe opinion). It demonstrates that many of those who use that quote to discredit feminism as a whole understand little of feminist thinking and are lazy they when gathering their “evidence”.
Considering how difficult it was to locate the quote and that it only exists with context in French makes it worth to have a discussion about it here. Before the only place to get some of that context was the Reddit discussion that has been linked here before.
#231
I am pretty sure that is not the point she is making. Nothing in the text points at that interpretation and it does not make much sense for the equation as far as I can see (at least not in the two languages I speak that do use a grammatical gender) .
@Brian Pansky #209
If it is of interest I can translate more but I think I have translated all that is relevant from the answer. She moves on after that to a different topic asked (if lungs or the skin are perceived as more feminine organs…). It is a Q&A and goes off in all directions as these kind of things tend to do.
#210
I think it is pretty clear that she seems to think that the equation is sexed. And the quote seems to be a defense of that argument by speculating at how that could be the case. If she would remain convinced when scrutinizing that idea more thoroughly we cannot find out from the given text.
Oh how did I forget! Here’s something good to link to:
Why Atheism Needs Feminism
zoopolitikon
How language limits cognition is a recurring theme in her work. The context makes it clear that she is pointing that out, and not claiming that it is some source of oppression as the anti-feminists like to claim. That reddit translation suffers the same issue. The original French is littered with gendered nouns which all turn into the in English. My french is not very good, but ” The equation E=MC2, is she a sexed equation.” is a word for word translation. If your language requires you to speak of everything as either male or female how could any language construct not be sexed? She is asking why it is written in this particular form, with the E first, and if putting the E first influences the entire concept. In any case, I still don’t think one quote from one feminist is proof of anything other than how ridiculous the anti-feminists are.
Wow. Marionov is just so full of completely ignorant bullshit…and presents it with such authority and confidence!
“Postmodernists” – since you clearly don’t have the first clue – are a variety of post-structuralist.
The post-structuralists were critiquing the “structuralist” theories (often of linguistics, but also of psychology and some other studies) that all of our thoughts and expressions of thoughts were built from identifiable, atomic (indivisible) constituents. The atomic theory of matter had had great success. The determinism of Newton had had great success. And so at the very birth of psychology you had William James and his contemporaries debating whether there were indivisible basic building blocks of perception and thought.
Needless to say they were roundly ridiculed by the post-structuralists and the feminists. Along the way Anna Freud, amongst others, strongly critiqued unscientific excesses, specifically including lobotomy. She was doing that before 1940.
And who, precisely, had the last laugh? Well, the last lobotomy performed in the USA (at least intentionally and legally and nominally-therapeutically) was no earlier than the mid 1980s, if you believe Wired magazine.
Was 1983 before feminism? Before post-structuralism? Before Derrida? Before post-modernism as a specific, identifiable subset of post-structuralism was given its own name? Before post-modern feminists created Standpoint Theory and used it to critique lobotomy?
Actually, what became known as standpoint theory was used well before that specifically to critique lobotomy and issues surrounding who was chosen, how it was justified, and why doctors proceeded without any scientific evidence of its success, success rates, or predictive reliability of surgical indicators. The feminist branch of it became known under the name Feminist Standpoint Theory in the year 1983 itself.
So, gosh, was lobotomy stopped long before feminists or postmodernists could (or did) critique it?
Not at all. Once again, Marionov repeats untrue things and is so arrogant about his ignorance he feels he can just make that shit up without worry he might, in fact, be wrong.
@Brian Pansky
It does matter to an extent. Part of what made me so irritated by that comment from John Morales is that it breaks down to, “maybe, if this thing that you’ve been saying over and over – and which I’ve been rejecting – is the case, then it might make more sense. Did you consider that?” So what others have been saying does matter on that count.
As for it not screaming, “we’re talking about the connotation of its representation within someone’s mental schema,” for one thing, pretty much the only way she’s not saying that is if she’s granting agency to a concept. Sorry, maybe I’m steelmanning here, maybe, but that’s nonsense and it’s not even worth considering for a second. If that’s what she meant, she’s a joke, but the idea that it is what she meant doesn’t really hold much water for me. Irigaray is a linguist – she talks about language; about outward representations of mental schemata and the connotations thereof. What’s really more likely here? That she’s making assertions about equations actually being fundamentally gendered, regardless of their interactions with language? Or that she, as a linguist, who talks about the ways in which language is gendered, is talking about how language is gendered in a scientific context? I really don’t understand why this is a confusing or controversial issue.
I would generally agree with you and Tethys that the discussion doesn’t actually matter – she’s one person, she don’t actually seem to be mainstream, and it’s entirely possible for a person to be wrong (if she is wrong and not simply a linguist) on an issue without bringing everyone remotely associated with them into disrepute. But, as zoonpolitikon said, when it keeps coming up as a refutation against feminism in general, it kind of does matter that we address it.
Even if we can’t agree that it’s a case of a linguist looking linguistically at a question as a linguist, it’s definitely worth recognising the ways that the people bringing it up as proof of feminism’s anti-science credentials are reacting to it. Take the brothers Marinov – the repeated idea that a thing being gendered means that it’s wrong, the fundamental failure to understand that the scientific process can be influenced by societal norms without automatically being irredeemably flawed. It reminds me of a tv programme I saw a few years ago on evolution that was presented by some apparently famous vicar or bishop – he spoke for about an hour about how evolution was true, beautiful, and didn’t represent a threat to theism, and then, in the closing moments, he railed against the idea of memes, because they meant that Christianity was not true, but that doesn’t follow at all. I mean, I think we probably all agree here that there’s very little relevant truth in Christianity, but that doesn’t follow necessarily from the fact that the propagation of an idea has more to do with it being convincing and repeatable than it being true. That’s just a case of seeing a possible threat revealed, assuming that the threat is not simply possible, but real and active if the source of the revelation is accurate, and so dismissing the thing that revealed the possible threat as false. It’s a possible threat, so it is a threat, so it’s wrong. It’s bullshit logic.
In Marinov’s case, we’ve got seeing the possible threat of science being wrong based on the claim that it is gendered. If science being gendered means it’s wrong, then either science is wrong, or feminism is just anti-science. Science isn’t wrong, so feminism is just anti-science. But being gendered isn’t at all the same as being wrong. Sure, we’ve got those instances of bad practices being promoted by male biases within the scientific community, and we’ve got instances of decent science being limited by male biases in the community, but these don’t make science faulty any more than political or economic biases in other areas of science do. It’s just one more bias that needs to be filtered out by the bias-filtration system that is science. The only thing that makes science faulty is a refusal to recognise the biases that are brought into it by its practitioners… such as by asserting that anyone pointing out a bias is anti-science. This whole thing is essentially just a hysterical reaction based on a lazy and hostile response to a perceived threat.
zoonpolitikon @237:
Bingo, this is the only reason why I’m still hanging around this thread. Let’s look at how far we’ve come:
Sokal and Bricmont were claiming to have reams of evidence of bad ideas coming from post-modernist philosophers. Dawkins, quoted above, was proposing a vast conspiracy of PoMo followers intimidating people into silence so their bad ideas could flourish. Yet in the feminist subset, almost all examples have turned out to be either misunderstandings or quote-mining.
We are down to arguing over whether or not four sentences from a single author are froggy. The post-modernist branch of feminism is on much stronger footing than most people think, and we’re doing a service by educating them.
@Tethys #239
As a German speaker I am familiar with the debates on grammatical gender and how this might influence our thinking. I admit I do not know any of Irigaray’s writing on that topic though. However, the text in question treats more general concepts of scientific discourse, method, theory building, symbolism in science etc. and I did not encounter a single reference to debates about the grammatical gender in the chapter at hand. I might have missed that she hints at it (I have not read the whole chapter word by word) but it is certainly not the main line of argument.
In the case of the equation I do also think it does not make much sense to understand it as part of an argument about grammatical gender. The word “equation” (équation) is feminine as well as “speed” (vitesse) and “light” (lumière) in French (the same is true for German by the way, except for “light” [Licht] that would be neutral). So to make an argument based on grammatical gender would be weird in this instance. You would have to explain why we conceptualize all of this as male although the grammatical gender is the feminine. Which she clearly does not. So irrespective of Irigaray’s body of work I doubt that this particular argument is about grammar. Or am I missing something?
I think we are on agreement on that point.
I don’t mean to scold the horde for deconstructing the claim against Irigaray. I am wondering how many hundreds of comments the banned troll is going to ignore, and why he thinks feminism is a superstitious belief? I just do not understand why gmarinov is so obsessed with this that he keeps morphing to assert compleat bullshit.
I find bullies asserting their misogyny so obnoxious that I prefer to just figuratively set them on fire, rather than validate their complaint by explaining why they are both wrong, and assholes for arguing in the first place. YMMV :)
On a related note, have you seen this video? If Harry Potter was Written From Hermoine Grangers pov.
Tethys, the troll’s point isn’t just resting, it’s resting in peace (RIP).
Obviously, neither Luce Irigaray nor postmodernism nor feminist epistemology are representative of aspirational nor of activist feminism, which is a reaction to the existing asymmetry of political, economic, cultural, personal, and social status with regard to sex (or, more abstractly, gender).
—
As an aside, your earlier comment about grammatical gender influencing perception is pointed and substantive, and brought to my mind the edge cases in grammatically-gendered languages — I grew up as a Spanish speaker, and the sea (‘mar’) is one such oddity; it can be “el mar’ or ‘la mar”, but when the collective is used, it’s typically ‘los mares’.
Brian Pansky @209:
I had a closer look at the passage. Irigaray’s first response back to the “premiere question” complains that philosophy and science are treated as separate domains; back in the day, they were considered the same. This has problems, as many scientists don’t tend to think about what they’re doing, they just accept that what they’re doing is correct. They don’t realize how important analogy and extrapolation are. Next up is the “second point,” that bit on E=MC^2. Irigaray then asks “autre”/another question. I’m having a tough time parsing this, but I think Irigaray’s talking about why parts of the body are sexed. A quick Google shows that heads are feminine in French (“la tête”) but skulls are masculine (“le crâne”). What is “feminine” about a head? Everyone has one, and at any rate other cultures disagree about the sex assigned to these parts. We’re increasingly incorporating diverse practices into medicine, ones which don’t sex various parts of human beings.
Irigaray seems to brush past the E=MC^2 question. It’s only four sentences, sandwiched between portions that are eight sentences apiece. She didn’t take the original question about that question seriously at all, from the looks of it, and just mentioned it to pivot to another point. Since the other points are about how scientists don’t reflect on what they’re doing, and possibly how scientific language is needlessly sexed, I reckon it’s more likely she’s talking about language.
zoonpolitikon @243:
This might explain some of the confusion. Both Irigaray and her questioner would have known that equation was “feminine.” So Irigaray reached for a way to label it as masculine, to reinforce her others point: all this gendering of inanimate objects is ridiculous, and scientists need to think more deeply about the hidden assumptions they’re making.
Or so goes my interpretation. Full disclosure: my French has long since rusted away into nothing, and was never notable in the first place. I’m mostly relying on Google Translate and looking for gross meaning over word nuance.
Dammit. I wasn’t paying attention, and the banned troll Marinov snuck back in. All of his posts have been deleted, and any future attempts to crawl back will be met with similar destruction.
And of course his new alias is also banned.
That’s a pretty solid way to /thread as far as I’m concerned. All this discussion of the merits or downsides of postmodernism is irrelevant, for the reasons you gave.
gmarinov (specimen), again, your point is merely reactionary.
I get you’re upset that the extant order is challenged, so that you indignantly cavil against the reaction against the status quo, and so seek to dismiss it by such means as are at your disposal.
Heh. You’re a person (aintcha?), so you are perforce claiming that you are a sheep and you need a shepherd and a mythology to believe in.
And that is your mythology.
(Let me guess: Dawkins is your shepherd)
Seem? LOL
(Keep telling yourself that you’re not obsessed when making logins to comment where you have been banned under your old IDs — perhaps you yourself might come to believe it!)
[sorry, PZ]
Zoopolitikon
No , her point is that gender bias is embedded within the language itself. The equation itself is just being used as an example of ‘science’. Translating French dialog* to English and eliding all the references to gender ( see Sokal et al…) fundamentally changes what she is communicating.
*It’s also worth noting that spoken dialog in any language often sounds ridiculous when rendered exactly as recorded .
John Morales
Why, thank you. I consider that very high praise.
English is my native language, and I have always found the gendered nouns of other languages weird and very difficult to remember. Are French and Spanish generally in agreement as to which inanimate objects are he, and which are she? That Germanic languages, with their different linguistic roots, have completely different arbitrary gendered nouns, plus a neutral option is another unsurprising example of exactly what Luce Irigaray is speaking about. The bias is inherent in the language itself. Does changing the implied gender of this equation have an effect on the way physicists conceptualize this equation?
Hj Hornbeck
Yes, this is exactly my interpretation. I’m much better at reading French than speaking it, but even with my paltry skills I can see that her words have a far different meaning if the translators don’t remove all the arbitrary references to gender.
@Hj Hornbeck #238
She indeed moves on to the next question there. I might repeat myself but although she might have written a lot about grammatical gender (and I do think this is a perfectly valid point) I really don’t see her making this argument here. She talks how certain body parts/organs are perceived as gendered. Her argument is more symbolic (it is true that “lips” [lèvres] and “skin” [peau] are feminine in French but “lung” [poumon] is masculine). She answers the question why they should be gendered not with grammar but by detailing the symbolism linked to their functions: She says they are perceived more female because they are “termal regulators linked to the economy of the hypothalamus” (régulateurs thermiques liés à l’économie de l’hypothalamus). This is the kind of argument in the text when she typically loses me. She then goes on about the gendered body in the “eastern medical tradition” a tradition we still follow according to her. If she is making primarily an argument about language here, her argument is really obfuscated.
@Tethys #243
My understanding was that your point of departure (#224) is that because a grammatical gender exists, speakers of such languages perceive the world in a gendered way. There is, as you have pointed out, indeed quite some research showing this. Now if the argument is that this is at the root of assigning a gender to things like equations or constants then Irigaray contradicts this hypothesis by using an example for which the grammatical gender does not match the claim of the assigned gender. Considering this obvious contradiction which she does not address at all in the text and the fact that she does not even mention the grammatical gender once as far as I can see, I think it is more plausible to assume that she is putting forward a completely different argument here.
I therefore do not understand what you mean by
if the argument is not about grammatical gender. I understand that if you speak a language that assigns gender to inanimate objects you will have a tendency to think along these lines. I do not understand why this then would be independent from the gender that is assigned grammatically. Wouldn’t that invalidate the premise?
I can see how it would work as an argument independent of grammatical gender, just about perception. But I think it is important to keep the two apart then. Especially if we have to discuss on the basis of translations.
But it is difficult to move forward from here. I cannot ask you to quote where she makes it clear that it is about language as we do only have the text in French. On the other hand I cannot quote the text back at you about something I claim she does not say.
Just to clarify in case this was also part of your answer to me: I base myself on the text in French.
zoopolitik
Not just grammar. She doesn’t need to use any pronouns or adjectives to imply gender. The word equation itself is feminine in French. The question is prefaced by her asking why different body parts also have implicit genders, so I think it is reasonable to extrapolate that she is asking a rhetorical question about WHY these things are given arbitrary genders. La (the) equation, is she a sexed equation? Is she female?
The answer is no, but why then is it referred to as she? Irigaray then proceeds to gender flip and speak about it as if is masculine, which I imagine sounds ridiculous to native French speakers. It also sounds ridiculous to people who speak only English, because they completely miss all the context of implicit gendering.
I will agree with out troll about one thing. I hate reading Post Modernist critiques. I find many of the techniques very useful, but OY, some of those papers are so dense with technical jargon that you can’t decipher what they are trying to communicate.
zoonpolitikon @244:
One of the most potent tools in a logician’s kit is the Proof by Contradiction.
Philosophers know of that but more often deploy a less formal variant, Reductio Ad Absurdum or the Argument from Absurdity.
So how would a philosopher show that sexed language is absurd? One approach is to accept that sexed language makes sense, then come to contradictory conclusions on how to sex it. Show that something like an equation or a body part is both feminine and masculine, using equally valid logic for both. A French speaker would already know that things like equations and light were feminine, so in a room of French speakers there was no need to explicitly make that argument. Notice too how Irigaray numbered her bullet points before mentioning E=MC^2, but referred to the medical thing as “another” point? That’s evidence that the passage on E=MC^2 and body parts were related, or making a similar argument.
By reaching an absurd and contradictory conclusion, she invalidates the original premise that sexed language makes sense. Of course, in order to do that she has to take the premise seriously, and honestly argue an absurdity. This makes it ripe for quote-mining, either deliberately or unintentionally.
Marinov is gone? Sad. I wanted them to read this (via Almost Diamonds). But no, science is all about truth and nothing but the truth, no biases!
I am sorry if it seems as if we get sidetracked here but because of the reasons I have mentioned before I think it is important for posterity to get this right. From the text in question it seems obvious to me that it is not a linguistics argument she is making. We should not cling to explanations for the quote that sound good but are wrong. I am convinced that the quote is used out of context but I am equally sure that it is not about language either.
@Tethys #245
Believe me, the grammatical gender of the word “equation” does not come into play here. It would perhaps if it was a point of discussion before. This was not the case. This is not how we speakers of languages that know a grammatical gender perceive such a conversation (i.e. you are not constantly aware of it, it is much more automated or even subconscious). And she asks why these body parts were “rather on the feminine side” (plutôt du côté féminin). Again, this is not how you would make a point that also relates to the grammatical gender (i.e. as a matter of degrees).
No, what she does, does not sound “ridiculous” if you are fluent in French. It simply does not. This is what I am trying to get across: If you read the text in French there is no indication that it has anything to do with grammatical gender. Really not. You are inferring that from the body of work by Irigaray. If you think this is the better way to understand the text than me actually reading it (who is admittedly not familiar with other books by Irigaray), this is of course your right. However, it will be difficult to reach a common understanding if you decide you cannot trust my reading. I would just like you to keep in mind that you are speculating what the text might say, one step removed from the actual text.
@Hj Hornbeck #246
As I have said above: I do speak French and to say it is not obvious at all, is an understatement. There is simply not the slightest indication, neither implicit or explicit, that this has anything to do with the grammatical gender of these words and plenty that it is about some form of symbolism or representation.
Remember, she is answering question here. There is not the faintest clue that she is making a point that “sexed language is absurd”. Her point is about how what science studies is “sexed” (hence the title of the lecture). She lays out in the beginning of the text seven questions she wants to discuss. None of them is directly related to language. She might have written thousands of pages on that topic. However, it really is not in this text. I am at a loss how I can show you something is not there (except perhaps of hoping for another French speaker to drop by and confirm it).
She refers to the questions asked (“First question…”, “Second point…”) and then she says “other question”. It is simply a set of question she is answering that are linked by the fact that they were asked by the same questioner.
Sorry, I was logged in with the wrong account. The previous comment was by zoonpolitikon.
I also noticed that the link to the Irigaray text became collateral damage to the banhammer. Here is the text again (I hope that is fine PZ, I saw no harm in reposting it).
zoonpolitikon @248:
Are you looking at the introductory questions to this chapter, on page 95? Her first question is about how objective science is. Her second is about the ties between science and the written word (“des relations entre science et littérature“). Her third covers the symptoms she sees within science today, and two examples she explicitly mentions are how discoveries are named (“les intitulés des découvertes”) and the invocation of female-sexed terms in scientific language (“la fonction des termes de sexualité féminine dans le langage scientifique”).
Irigaray makes it pretty clear she’s talking about language.
OK, I feel as if I am trying to explain water to fish. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good analogy for trying to get some people to notice some of the more subtle aspects of sexism.
The original straw Irigaray is way back at #80.
I believe it has been well established that the claim itself is without merit. It is neither a representation of feminist theory, nor is it anti-science to be aware of the effects of gender bias in language. Au contraire! The entire scientific method is to identify and eliminate cognitive bias.
zoopolitikon
I find your insistence that Irigaray is somehow not speaking about implied gender bias with the equation example, even though that is the subject of the dialog, truly bizarre.
The banned troll GM claims he is not anti- feminist, but thinks it’s perfectly logical to dismiss all feminist theory based on a mangled translation of a few sentences of dialog, because Sokal and Dawkins said so, based on their misogynist opinion of a misreading of a feminist scholar. Again, it’s explaining water to fish. Considering the latest development in enormous privilege accorded to fucking Richard D, my interest in convincing fish they are in fact swimming in water is currently somewhere between ” gives literally zero fucks” and “x”.
If RD was not a misogynist hypocrite, he could have asked Luce Irigaray directly, and had a professional, respectful discussion about her area of expertise. He could show her the basic courtesy of respecting her more learned and credentialed opinion on her area of expertise.
She has two master’s degrees (education, psychology), a PhD in linguistics, AND a PhD in Philosophy.
zoopolitikon
I find it truly bizarre for you to insist that Irigaray is somehow not speaking about the broader subject of implied gender bias with the equation example, even though that is the subject of the dialog, and her area of expertise. She is not making a declarative statement. E=MC^2 is a sexed equation! She is asking a rhetorical question which has an entirely different meaning when you have to use a feminine coded noun and it’s attendant la’s and elle’s. She clearly says “let us suppose for a moment that this it true” before she starts illustrating how the implied genders of inanimate objects affect how you conceptualize, and thus order/privilege those inanimate objects..
Argh, my apologies, I accidentally hit post rather than preview. I think my points are clear? In any case, I wanted to add this link to a short, clear, summation of Luce Irigaray and her philosophy of language.
to further clarify
zoonpolitikon
Sorry for the many misspellings of your nym. Only the final paragraph of my #251 is directed to you, and not my ire towards RD and the trolls fallacious argument.
@Tethys
Your link in 252 is broken – just the pretty blue text with no destination.
Equality: Notes on the Thought of Luce Irigaray
zoonpolitik as ali
Do you truly not notice that it is impossible to speak French ( or any other language with gendered nouns) without constantly and explicitly indicating gender? I repeat, neither I or Luce Irigaray are discussing grammar. It takes zero knowledge of French grammar to notice that the actual quote ends in a question mark. That detail alone shows that the troll and Sokal are misrepresenting Irigaray by claiming she said,
“E=MC^ is a sexed equation.”
when she actually asks;
La equation E=MC^2 , is she a sexed equation?
The question is seven words and a math equation. I count four explicit gender references in the original French, not including E=MC^2 or the word sexed. The question itself doesn’t even make sense without the “she” and the “la” to modify the feminine noun “equation”.
She didn’t claim anything. Her question has nothing to do with physics or grammar, it is specifically about gendering and privilege both being arbitrary. Her point is that arbitrary gender bias is embedded in language , to the extant that you have to refer to an equation as a she, and good scientist needs to be aware of such biases.
@232, Crip Dyke 232
Interesting, though if you are saying that such “structuralist” ideas are obviously ridiculous, well they aren’t to me (actually I’m not entirely sure I understand what hypothesis is being described, so it’s difficult to tell whether it is ridiculous or not). Qualia and Memes seem like they can fit those descriptions, can’t they?
@Hj Hornbeck
Yes I am referring to that list. Perhaps we are talking passed each other. I do not deny the role language (in a general sense) can play in gendering concepts. I just think it is important to make a clear distinction if we talk about discourse/representation or if we think it to be based on grammatical specificities of a language (in this case that a gender is assigned randomly to words). Sometimes the two might contradict each other, sometimes they might complement each other and sometimes it is just a separate argument. And I am still convinced that Irigaray does not make an argument about grammar in the text. Perhaps we are on agreement on that anyway and I created confusion because I started to use the term “language” instead of sticking to grammatical gender.
On a side note: Interestingly French makes a distinction between “langage” (the word used by Irigaray in what you quote) and “langue”. I am not sure how to translate this. I would say the former is more about discourse/communication (perhaps “speech” comes close, except that it is not linked to “speaking”) and the latter is more general, abstract concept of a set of such languages [sorry, the spelling is very confusing here but this is the plural of langage].
@Tethys
No problem about the nym. It was always clear who you meant.
I like the fish metaphor. It also explains my point of view quite well. From my perspective it also feels like you are trying to explain water to a fish. Now we need to find out if you do only understand water in an abstract way or if I cannot really understand water because I do swim in it all the time and I lack distance. Both are possibilities we should entertain. We both appear to be equally convinced to recognize water when we see it.
We are in agreement on this point. So perhaps we are talking past each other.
On the other hand when I read
or
I get confused again because grammar seems to be seeping back in.
Let me read the link you have provided (I do not have time right now), smarten up on Irigaray and I come back to you. Perhaps then things will be clearer.
zoonpolitikon
I specifically keep saying language, and gender bias, so I am confused as to why you keep going back to grammar. Luce Irigaray is not discussing grammar. She is using a technique of philosophical discourse, to ask a hypothetical question about implicit gender bias in language. The equation, light, and body parts are all explicitly gendered/sexed. You don’t think of nouns as actually being sexed, even though all French nouns are in fact sexed. The gender bias doesn’t exist in English. The word she can only refer to people or animals that actually possess the quality of sexedness, and not inanimate objects like equations and energy. (exception: vehicles) I cannot write the word equation in English, and also imply a gender. It is a feature of the language, not the grammar,
You will find that as a sociolinguist and psychoanalyst, Irigaray has many cogent thoughts on the unsaid aspects of language.
Tethys, two points about your previous:
1. In your last quotation, I’m pretty sure the word should be ‘listeners’ rather than ‘auditors’ — apparently due to a sloppy translation; and
2. In languages, the grammatical gender is a feature of their grammar, often due to some convention (such as words ending in -o being grammatically masculine and ending in -a being grammatically feminine)
@Tethys
But that “feature of language” is literally called grammatical gender. :P
I don’t feel qualified to edit a wiki, but it would great if someone with a better grasp of linguistics could edit this paragraph of the criticisms portion in the entry for Luce Irigaray
I find it highly offensive that these asses entire critique is based on deliberately misquoting her, omitting her clear hypotheticals and questions (let us suppose this is true. Does implying light has a gender unconsciously affect how you think of light?) and the context, and then declaiming that Irigaray is making daffy, absurd statements/claims/arguments.
Brian Pansky
I’ve been translating French into English all over this thread. Do you think truly think I am unaware of this fact, or are you just particularly unobservant?
John Morales
I just quoted it verbatim. Changing auditors to listeners doesn’t much affect the meaning of the sentence.
chingao. Yes, so translating the Irigaray quote into English completely erases what Irigaray is actually saying. She still isn’t discussing grammar, or physics.
Tethys, there’s quite a potential difference between a colloquial translation and a literal one; in the case at hand, it refers not to some checker, but to some listener.
Regarding grammatical gender, it’s not literally connected to gender, but an artefact of the grammar; the effect on the speaker/listener is subliminal. I agreed that grammatical gender influences perception, but it’s a subtle, non-conscious effect — the language users know damn well it’s not actual sexedness and semantically ignore that aspect.
(e.g. Again from Spanish, the collective/generic noun for dogs is ‘perro’ (masculine), but a particular dog can be a ‘perro’ (male, masculine) or a ‘perra’ (female, feminine). Akin to man/woman in English.)
—
More to the point, you incorrectly objected about zoonpolitikon noting you keep referring to grammar rather than to language — it is a feature of language, but it’s not language.
(It is you who is confused)
@Tethys
Ah sorry I really wasn’t following along with the conversation!
Chingao! I am perfectly capable of reading French ( also Spanish, some German, and a bit of runic, but I digress) which is how I concluded that Sokal’s entire criticism of Irigaray is based on a misquote.
I do not need a lesson in gendered grammar.
Tethys:
Fine. Then you know that gendered grammar and grammatical gender are two distinct things.
(Spanish again: ‘la masculinidad’ is grammatically gendered female, but literally denotes masculinity)
—
I agree with zoonpolitikon that I don’t see her claim as a linguistic one.
John Morales @267:
Tethys and I have put a fair bit of effort into outlining why we think Irigaray was talking about gendered language, as opposed to asserting E=MC^2 itself was gendered. Why don’t you try something similar? Give us the best possible case for your view.
Hj Hornbeck, your proffered explanation seems forced and silly and ad hoc and is therefore unconvincing to me. Or: I find it much easier to believe she meant what actually she said, rather than that she was speaking obliquely and meant something else.
(The equation is sexed masculine to the extent it privileges the fastest speed over other important speeds)
Tethys @262:
I couldn’t substitute a criticism of their criticism, as the best example I can think of is this very comment section, so I had to settle for deleting the Sokal/Bricmont reference and dumping this on the Talk page:
Hopefully it’ll be enough to keep that reference from being reinserted.
John Morales @269:
I take it you’re not interested in making a case for your interpretation. Ah well, I guess we’ll just have to leave it at that.
You employed the imperative mode to tell me:
So that’s what I did.
Curious, since I told you outright that my interpretation is to take her at her word.
(Your interpretation is that she meant the opposite of what she actually wrote!)
@Tethys and @Hj Hornbeck
(I feel like what we argue about has more or less converged so I write only one answer)
Let me start with an apology. I thought that at some point you said you do not read French. I understood only now that you felt like explaining water to a fish, being a fish yourself. Should I have come across as condescending at some point then this was due to me working from wrong assumptions. I am sorry about that.
Back on the topic: I read the text you linked to. I also tried to do some additional reading on Irigaray. However, that did not clarify things. On the contrary, I am even more convinced now that my reading is correct.
I have the impression that the problem might lie with different definitions we give to certain words. When you say
Because you keep on mentioning the grammatical gender as an element to understand what Irigaray is saying (hence me referring to my confusion quoting you in #258). This is what seems like a contradiction to me. I consider grammatical gender to be part of “grammar” and I consider “grammar” to be part of language. Here perhaps we could make us of the French distinction between “langue” and “langage”. If you only talk about the latter how does the grammatical gender come into play (which you referred to several times in your argument e.g. ” you have to refer to an equation as a she“)?
I don’t think that the grammatical gender is relevant here to understanding what she is saying. If you assume for a second that it is not important to what she is saying she still would have to use it. Its presence does not necessarily mean that it is relevant. So if she would make a point about this, I would expect her to say that explicitly or at least make it clear somehow.
If I understand you correctly you are taking the same position as Hj Hornbeck in #270 that she is trying to do a “Proof by Contradiction”. I do not see how this is plausible:
First there is the question she is replying to (“We can very well admit that it leads to nuclear weapons but would you describe it as a masculine equation?”) which either already contains the contradiction (so the thing that Irigaray is allegedly trying to prove in her answer is not really the question) or more plausibly has nothing to do with the grammatical gender of the word equation.
Second she never says remotely anything step 3 and 4. Here is her quote as a reminder:
I find it hard to believe that she leaves half of the steps to be figured out by her listeners (especially if the question does also not contain any explicit mention of what she is allegedly answering). The whole conversation would in that case happen implicitly. Third, she finishes the answer to this particular sub-question with
(The last part I forgot to translate in my original translation.) If she would going for the “Proof by Contradiction” and not arguing on the basis of some kind of analogy it does not make sense to answer and end that part of the question like that.
I wonder if the term “sexuée” is where we have different interpretations (or Irigiray uses it in some very specific way, although from what I read about her use of it does not seem to confirm this). My understanding is that it does not refer specifically to grammatical gender (it apparently originates in biology) and probably is best translated by “gendered”.
If we do not disagree on the definitions I have mentioned I am at loss how you can think your interpretation of Irigaray’s answer is so obvious. To me it seems that if it were true it needs a lot of assumption about the speakers and the audience and it seems just too far-fetched and obscure for what is not a highly edited text but the transcript of a Q&A. So it is certainly far from obvious and a lot of ambiguity and filling in would remain. I have never experienced and cannot imagine a real life Q&A in an academic context with so much subtext and unspoken references (spoken not written). And I do not think (or perhaps hope) this is only because I am not a philosopher.
@HJ you tried to completely delete something this popular from Wikipedia? That’s a bad idea, it was doomed to fail, and it has (someone undid your edit in less than an hour).
What you should always do is simply make wikipedia more neutral and accurate, so that everyone is happy! That’s what I went and did, hopefully it works.
Also, I think zoonpolitikon has some good points.
I have been enjoying the discussion between zoonpolitikon, Hj Hornbeck, and myself. We aren’t having an argument. We are now discussing possible differing interpretations of Irigaray’s meaning, and if these differing interpretations are influenced by, or possibly the result of our different native languages. As I pointed out, the word equation is spelled the same in both languages, but doesn’t imply gender at all in English. I think it is weird and abnormal to refer to an equation ( or anything else that does not in fact have a gender) as a she or he. If your native language is French, all the gendering inherent in French will seem completely normal and unremarkable.
This concept is what I and Hj Hornbeck are discussing, inherent gender bias. It is Irigarays area of scientific expertise. What is inherent? What is unsaid? If your language obliges you to erroneously assign things genders, which creates gender bias, how does one correct the error? The premise is always going to contain gender bias in gendered languages, but we can’t pitch the language which creates the cognitive error. The best we can do is postulate the possible effects and try to mitigate them.
Brian Pansky @274:
Weird, I’m watching that page so I should have gotten a notification. That dang “no original research” rule makes things very awkward, though. Hopefully I can negotiate something.
zoonpolitikon @273:
Three questions: 1. Are French speakers aware that their language is heavily gendered? 2. Would they have memorized the gender of most French words? 3. Would they have memorized the gender of “equation”? If the answer to those three is “yes,” then the fact that she explicitly refers to it as a “she” is just underlining the point.
Is it so difficult to believe that someone who specializes in the implicit use of gender in language would make an implicit argument about gender? The passage on 110 isn’t the only time E=MC^2 comes up, in fact; flip back to page 102, and you’ll see another discussion of it that reveals Irigaray has quite the playful side. She talks about nuclear weapons as the “fallout” of that equation. She has a faux discussion with a pharmacist about how accelerating scientific progress is making us sick, riffing off the invocation of the speed of light, the old belief that human beings would get sick if they moved too fast, and mocking how drugs are the answer to everything.
But then she drops this:
With the help of Google Translate, I’d suggest the following English translation: “We have not it seems yet found the proper cultural terms, enabling our society to balance our reductions or connect with fields of cosmic attractions. In addition, there’s all the pollution within the sciences, including biology, a psychic or mental pollution, which we’re not talking about.” I’m probably mucking it up a bit, but I think that further suggests she’s talking about language and how it alters our thinking, as opposed to assigning a gender to an equation.
Hj: fanwank.
Vendeja. Imagine if you will a slight, blue and purple haired woman yelling the most dirty, filthy string of gutter Mexican expletives at you in a perfect Catalan dialect, while purposely misgendering every word to further illustrate the point. . Would it dent the entitled arrogance?
Your current behavior is not “fine”. You know damn well that you have offended both Hj and I, and you fucking do not get to decide that this is fine.
Tethys, I might not be a proclaimed feminist (I’m not any kind of ideologist) though I am sympathetic to feminism, but there is no perceived entitlement nor any intent to cause offence. Others call it one way, I call it another, readers can make their own determination.
Specifically, I don’t see how I’m any more arrogant than you, inasmuch as the only thing I arrogate is my own honest opinion, as you do.
(BTW, such Spanish as I retain is Castilian, not Mexican — I grew up in Madrid; Or: you’re using words I have to look up)
—
When I used that word, it was intended to indicate that I accept others’ opinions, not that I consider that they are somehow less honest than mine.
(It is acquiescence, not sarcasm… obsequiousness, you won’t get)
What an interesting choice of words. Not only do you refuse to apologize for being rude and disrespectful, you refuse to even acknowledge the fact that you have been rude and disrespectful.
The further fact that you justify your behavior by literally asserting the social privilege of male dominance? I know you aren’t stupid John, but if missing the point was an Olympic sport you would be a spectacular athlete.
Zoonpolitikon #273
You have made many valuable contributions to this thread, and I have enjoyed our discussion very much. No need to apologize, but I do appreciate your consideration.
I cannot assume that it isn’t important or relevant for the same reason. The entire exchange is about implied gender. The original question asks “would you describe it as a masculine equation?” Irigaray doesn’t answer this question. She instead asks a rhetorical question “Is the equation sexed?” which I interpret as referring to the arbitrary gendering of French, and the apparent question.
She then proceeds to create a hypothetical. Let us suppose that the equation is sexed, and that it is masculine. The next sentence is another question. Does light get accorded more privilege than other speeds?
I believe her meaning would be more clear if she had used wavelengths instead of speeds, and I think the misgendering is a very easy way for Irigaray to further illustrate the point about privilege by provoking a reaction to the error.
She doesn’t answer any of the questions, so I think she is trying to get her audience to question their assumptions in general, but also to focus on the specific way implied gender can affect implied value. This technique of tandem exploring similarities in two things that most people would consider completely unrelated is a common theme in Irigarays philosophy. What is not said is just as important as what is said.
Tethys:
What? c is still the relevant constant; for light, λ=c/f.
Dr.x2 Luce Irigaray ~ This Sex Which is Not One (1977)
@283, Tethys
Would you mind explaining?
@Tethys
I’m not surprised, but just to confirm, you are saying she is trolling, right?
I don’t mind explaining, but I don’t have time right now. No, I don’t think she is trolling by misgendering the word. I think that as philosopher, she is both speaking about implied gender, and simultaneously making people react to her referring to an inanimate object using the wrong gender to show them their inherent bias.
Oh I thought you were speaking more broadly about the whole response being disingenuous (and meant to spark outrage) or something. Also I guess maybe you meant your quote in 283 to illustrate your claim about “a common theme in Irigarays philosophy”.
I thought that since we have been discussing Luce Irigaray’s philosophy, it would be nice to have at least one example quote of her actual philosophy. It is not easy reading, and my quote elides all of 70’s style psycho-sexual vocabulary because it distracts from her point IMO. I am also pointedly ignoring John Morales attempt to further engage me in a power struggle, (what is unsaid) while proving him to be a rude, pompous, mansplaining ass in this thread. I can’t make him respect me as an equal, but I can totally dis him in his native language by changing one letter in the male coded word for asshole, to add an entire new layer of sexist, machismo, emasculating meaning. (psycho-linguistics is fun!)
She has a very unique, interesting approach to duality. She is a psychoanalyst in the Freudian tradition, yet she used that framework to discredit Freud’s harmful ideas about female sexuality ie; Penis envy, hysterical females, and the cure by lobotomy. I think she may be a genius.