December Debates Feminist Academia

Great Debates
1

In the following thread, december takes aim at feminist academic tools.

As you would expect, december “bets” that such tools are inferior based upon an extremely cursory knowledge, which he reveals in the thread I linked above.

I do not wish to set myself up as a defender of the feminist theoretical system: I find it, as well as much Marxist and post-modern/post-structural theory to be intellectual snake oil when swallowed wholesale. However, they can be extremely useful, and they hardly represent “a stap backward.”

I don’t want to dive into the morass until december defines a few of his terms, just so we can have clear criteria for this discussion.

What is an “advanced way of thinking”?

How do you define a “step forward” rather than a “step backward”?

Where exactly do you, december, think we should be “stepping”?

2

Maeglin, did you intend to post this in the Pit?

Sua

3

No, actually, not at all.

4

Prediction: december will locate the five most egregious examples of feminist political thought concerning the phallocentric planet-raping patriarchy, pass them off as encapsulating the whole of feminist criticism, clap his hands together and say, “Well, my work here is done!”

Odds: 3-2

5

Maglin, your post appears paradoxical. If something is “snake oil” when swallowed wholesale, one would expect it to be not useful in small amounts, either. I wish you would point out what you see as the good parts of Feminist Academic Tools and Feminist Thinking.

I, too, think it’s snake oil. I have pointed out an indirect reason, on the other thread. By the time “feminism” began, the good ways of thinking were taken. They wanted to have something unique, they had to make do with snake oil.

Maeglin, all my terms were used with their natural, common meaning. I meant to imply no private definitions. If your point is that feminist thinking represents a certain, special type of advance, please make your case, and I will respond.

I hope somebody will post something here in favor of feminist thinking. Otherwise, this debate will never get off the ground.

pldennison, if nobody has anything to say in favor of feminist thinking, then I will claim victory by default. :stuck_out_tongue:

6

december, call me a raving ignoramus, but what is the natural, common meaning of human advancement? Unless you come clean with your teleology, this debate will never get off the ground.

Only paradoxical if you believe the whole is precisely the sum of its parts. There is a great degree of difference between using feminist critiques and tools to understand a text or an institution as one technique among many, and viewing quite everything through uncompromising feminist-Marxist spectacles.

So come on, december, if we are going to debate this, it must be open and transparent. I am not going to waste my time discussing some aspects of fem critique if your criteria for advancement are going to be so loose and dirty. So I would ask you either to put up or to admit that you really are just wasting my time, for your mind is already made up.

7

Woooow, what in the great blue are you talking about? Are you saying that nothing new will ever appear again? Sorry, you lose the argument with that logic in my book.

Regardless of what your opinion may be about feminist teachings, you are wayyyy off talking about all the “good ways of thinking” being taken. What did the Church have to say to the earlier Philosophers, hmmm? Something like “we already know how to think” wasn’t it?

8

December:

Anything is a poison in adequate doses. Vitamin D is absolutely essential to good health – but eat polar bear liver, and you’ll likely die of Vitamin D poisoning. Cholesterol is essential to human metabolism – it’s just that the modern American diet gives us more than we can use.

Feminist thought, like liberal thought, conservative thought, or anything else, may be good in some moderate amount and bad when carried to extremes.

You’ve been asked to define terms you have used in other threads. I think it would be a mark of courtesy and charity to comply with that request. (Of course, this is just MHO.)

9

Maeglin/december:

Why do I feel like you two are tiptoeing around the definitions here? I get the impression that theres some reluctance to put forth a definition upon which to start a debate since that leaves the creator of the definition open to flaws wherein feminist thought can be shown to correspond (or not to correspond) to be an advancement in human thinking. Why don’t you both post what you think advancements in human thought consist of and what specific feminist tools or modes of thought do and how effective they are. Then after both definitions have been examined there can be some agreement and discussion about what constitutes original, productive, advanced, or otherwise beneficial ways of perceiving/problem solving. THEN we can discuss whether modern day feminism meets the criteria.

Grim

10

Naw…I can’t.

I’m not sure that “teleology” is quite the word you’re looking for.

“Advancement” means, as we all know, progression to a higher stage of development. I think the only way to conduct this debate if for some feminism supporter to explain their conception of how feminism leads to a higher state of academic development. Then we can argue for and against.

The reason you’re trying to put the burden of proof onto me may be that you don’t have a good answer to the OP. Otherwise, this question might not arise.

If you asked me to prove the value of actuarial thinking, I wouldn’t ask you to define “value” or “prove” or what the meaning of “is” is. I’d answer you. You’d get a long, boring essay on why it’s good to be able to predict in advance the cost of uncertain, future contractual benefits.

Ask Sua why the Law is better than no law, and he’ll have an answer ready. Ask my wife about value of bio-statistics, and she’ll bend your ear describing its vital role in medical research.

You say that there can be value in feminist thinking. OK. What is that value?

Fair enough. How about an example or two showing how this works?

Polycarp, “snake-oil” isn’t poison. It’s phony medicine. Synonyms are “poppycock” and “bunkum”. If a medicine were useless at the dosage prescribed, one would expect it to be useless at a lower dosage. For all I know, feminist thinking may be an exception. I am simply asking for someone to show how that is the case.

11

Maeglin: *What is an “advanced way of thinking”?

How do you define a “step forward” rather than a “step backward”?

Where exactly do you, december, think we should be “stepping”?*

december: *“Advancement” means, as we all know, progression to a higher stage of development. I think the only way to conduct this debate if for some feminism supporter to explain their conception of how feminism leads to a higher state of academic development. Then we can argue for and against. *

A feeble attempt at evading Maeglin’s questions. He has asked you to explain what you consider “advancement” in intellectual matters to be, and why IYO women’s studies/feminism don’t produce “advancement.” You respond with a vague tautology about the meaning of “advancement” that tells us nothing about what you think intellectual progress actually consists of, and then demand that supporters of feminism answer the questions for you, in reverse. Nice wriggling, december, but you’re still on the hook.

In fact, this is a typical ploy in your usual “anti-debating” approach: you start off by making, as you did in the thread that spawned this OP, some unsupported criticisms of something you don’t like—in this case, academic “women’s studies”. You provide no evidence to substantiate your criticisms, which you keep repeating despite other posters’ requests for factual backup of them. When finally cornered, you start to protest that it’s other people’s responsibility to demonstrate that your assertions are not true, rather than your responsibility to demonstrate that they are. Unfortunately, this maneuver does not conceal your ignorance of the subject you’re “anti-debating” as well as you seem to think it does.

12

Attention, Straight Dope Shoppers!

The Pit is where you’ll find all the best opportunities for singling out posters whose comments you’ve found objectionable, with or without profanity.

If we’ve reached the stage of duplicating threads on GD merely to take a whack at specific individuals, things are gonna get awfully tedious and repetitious around here.

13

Okay. december, I’ll finally say it. This is bordering on pit stuff, but I think it is germane to the discussion, so I’ll try to leave the insults out.

You don’t bloody understand. Even if it was spelled out for you, you still wouldn’t understand.

This isn’t an insult. I don’t understand most feminist theory either. I don’t have the background for it. Neither do you. I mean, you wholesale reject or avoid understanding the purposes of a modern (decentered) liberal arts education! There are fundamentals that you havn’t wrapped your head around. It’s okay, nobody is asking for you to have a bunch of sudden insight about stuff you havn’t studied, but if you are going to talk about it, you should re-examine some of your thinking.

I don’t walk into a party and say “So, which one of you is going to prove that the study of (insert high level scientific concept I know nothing about) is worthwhile?”. Why don’t I do this? Because I have never taken a science class. I don’t have even the beginnings of the kind of background I’d need to understand the purpose of advanced scientific theory. I don’t even understand the terminology. All they’d be able to do is say a bunch of stuff that has no meaning to me, and then I could point and stick out my tongue and say “Ha! That doesn’t make any sense! Why don’t you guys get a real education! All the scientific thinking that needs to be done was over forty years ago! Are you saying that all these new scientific thinkers are more brilliant than Einstein?”

But see, that’d be ridiculous.

I just don’t think you are ever going to get the answer that you want, because any answer in layman’s terms is going to be unsatisfactory and any other answer is going require a lot of background understanding that you frankly don’t have. People spend years learning this stuff. Now you expect it to be layed bare before your hostile eyes. It’s not going to happen.

BTW, what kind of diciplines do you consider valid?

14

I won’t call Women’s Studies “Snake oil”, but I will stipulate thatI I suspect at very high levels, it’s toxic to free and critical thinking. In lesser doses, I think it’s valuable.

At what point it goes from ‘valuable’ to ‘toxic’, I’m unsure, but I am sure that Women’s Studies have value as long as they are not taken to a ridiculous extreme (I feel the same way about Men’s Studies, but don’t expect to see this as an academic regime anytime soon).

In what way If any) have Women’s Studies provided social value?
In what manner (if any) have Women’s Studies advance the cause of women in our society? (this is different from previous question)
In what way have they been hijacked for political means?
How do you tell the difference between valid studies, junk studies, tripe, and misandry?
In what way (if any) have Women’s Studies been counter-productive to women’s causes in our society?
In what manner (if any) have Women’s Studies been socialy counter-productive? (this encompases not just women, but all of society)

I know none of the answers to these questions.

So, december, care to take a stab at it…? Anyone else…?

15

Don’t make me be the person to come in and use the term “paradigm” in this thread.

Just don’t make me do it.

16

This is nonsense. I am putting no burden of proof on you. The onus is entirely on me to demonstrate how feminist criticism is an “advancement.”

I used to take creative writing classes a lot when I was younger. If I remember one thing my writing teachers always told me, it is that it is far superior to show than to tell.

You are supposed to present your “common sense” idea of human advancement, and I am going to use a pretty standard feminist critique to shake it up, spit it out, and perhaps uncover its geneaology. I don’t have to argue the value of a theoretical approach when I can just do it.

If we are going to have a debate, there must be clear criteria for measuring success. In a policy debate, the criteria is almost inevitably efficiency and cost-effectiveness. In a matter such as this, where we are discussing human intellectual “advancement,” you just can’t measure success or failure without some sort of yardstick.

And if you believe in “advancement,” you must, by definition, believe in a goal. Hence “teleology” was precisely the word I was looking for.

And don’t compare women’s studies to law, actuarial thinking, or medicine. Apples and shotguns. A more valid comparison would be one particular theoretical subset of law, actuarial thinking, or medicine.

december, this is the same old fallacy of composition that you tried to pull off earlier in the thread. I suggest you be a gentleman and yield.

You ask important questions, tranq, and ones I hope we address once december offers up his criteria for dismissing the discipline completely.

And I certainly do not think this thread has come close to Pit levels. And I certainly hope that it won’t.

17

I have been avoiding that one like the plague, Cranky, and I think that with a little care, we can avoid it altogether.

18

december wrote:

I would say a better comparison would be to alchemy or astrology. Both of these pursuits turned out to be the bunk, but we inherited an incredible body of knowledge from them which continues to be valuable far outside of the theoretical frameworks in which its constituents parts were discovered.

Whether you agree with Feminism in the large, or find validity in its methods considered as a cohesive system, the fact is that it is an influential body of thought that you yourself have probably co-opted notions from, and incorporated them seamlessly into your common sense.

The thing about common sense is that it is comprised largely of notions that were contrary to common sense at the time they were thought up by academics. To most people it’s pretty obvious that a woman has the right to refuse to have sex even with her husband. You don’t need a feminist to tell you that. But in fact, people did, not all that long ago.

As for whatever counts as the `tools’ of academic feminism, by which I assume you mean things like deconstructionism, post-structuralism and the likes, whatever is useful out of those will trickle down into common sense and we won’t even remember them not being obvious to begin with, don’t worry.

19

Tranquilis, since I don’t have any experience in the field of women’s studies, I can only hazard guesses.

But I suspect some of the benefits comes from the study of difference and the study of differential effects of things on women. For example, medicine, law, public policy, education. While in many ways the basic study of these subjects yields information on how they effect people, women’s studies may tease out how these things affect men and women differently. If they can make society more efficient and equitable for all genders, I’d say that’s a hell of a contribution.

One fascinating idea (although I don’t know that it can be contributed in any way to women’s studies) is the idea of micro-loans to women for economic development. Instead of going in and building a huge factory, give a woman $100 to buy a loom. That sort of thing. Who knew that such simple, easy solutions could be the ticket out of poverty for so many? I suspect that women’s studies help those kinds of ideas and different ways of thinking to gain credence.

20

Wait jes a second here people. December is claiming that feminist thinking hasn’t been beneficial while Maeglin is claiming the opposite. There’s two sides here. December needs to indicate precisely why and in what way feminisism is currently lacking and Maeglin has to show how modern feminism and feminist thought has proved a benefit.

No fair claiming that December is weaseling (even if he is) if Maeglin isn’t also coming to bat with his position. IMHO neither should wait for the definition of the other. Both should play their “hands” without waiting for the other.

Maeglin, if you don’t feel that Decembers requirement of “advanced way of thinking” is valid or accurate in regards to determining whether or not feminist thought is beneficial then provide your own definition (or requirement) and why and how well feminist provides beneficial results.

Grim