Still not a fan of debate


But this discussion between Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers is half-entertaining. Sommers is stuttering and stammering and throwing around her usual garbage — there is no pay gap, #metoo has gone too far, constant exaggeration of “hysteria” on college campuses — and Gay is calm and strong and focused. It was worth it for her commentary alone, so the whole thing could have been half as long and ten times better by cutting out the jittery blonde hack.

Comments

  1. Akira MacKenzie says

    …there is no pay gap, #metoo has gone too far, constant exaggeration of “hysteria” on college campuses…

    So her shtick hasn’t changed since the early 90s when I first came across her.

  2. leerudolph says

    So her shtick hasn’t changed since the early 90s when I first came across her.

    I first came across her as a colleague (in, thank goodness, another department) circa 1985. Back then (or soon thereafter; in any case, before she left university life behind for full-time wingnut welfare) one of her several schticks was how the (public) schools were badly failing boys…. I have tried not to keep up with her, so I don’t know if she’s abandoned that, but why would she?

    One of the courses she taught, by the way, was “Personal Values” (for first-year students), particularly congenial to her since her philosophical expertise was ethics (and she could, ethically, assign her and her husband’s ethics textbook).

  3. numerobis says

    leerudolph: it does seem like schools are failing boys. Is a stopped crank right about two issues?

    (And what other issue might she accidentally be right about?)

  4. Ed Peters says

    I did not know anything about Christina Hoff Sommers before. What can I say – I lead a sheltered life. But in these videos she is the most faux feminist I have ever seen. I don’t think she even bothers with reality (“We’ll have to study that more”) very much. It seems keeping up with the memes and jargon is enough for her. The cognitive dissonance between the feminism she (presumably) wants to subscribe to, and the manitized kind her paymasters tell her to propound must be a source of stress in her life, for which I feel sympathy for her. I could watch no more after 40 minutes.