# Feminist theory is bogus **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 19, 2003, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631 "2003-01-19T13:25:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2003, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/61 "2003-01-21T02:52:56Z")
**december** : > [@](#): > > But, AHunter3 has the burden of proving that > • The reason feminist theory carries weight is because it did and does a damn good job of explaining everyday life to laborers, young housewives, airline flight attendants, senators, bag women, board moderators, grandmas, fishermen, astronauts, and nurses. > • Feminism had its origins and its popularity among everyday people, > • Feminism only made its way into academia as some of those everyday people took it to college with them. 🙂 OK, origins of feminism. Let’s limit this the modern (“second wave”) era of feminism, as it would be rather unfair of me to go back to the Wollstonecraft era when college professors simply were not female… • Gloria Steinem, author of exposé of the Playboy bunny clubs and founder of _Ms. Magazine_ in the early 1970s. Non-academic. A newspaper reporter who got wound up in the lefty politics of the time, then got disenchanged with the male left. • Susan Brownmiller, author of _Against Our Will_ (1975). Nope, non-academic. An SNCC and CORE activist and a staffer for _Newsweek_. • Marilyn French, fiction author, had a major impact with her book _The Women’s Room_ although I suppose you could argue that fiction isn’t theory. In this case it was theory by illustration, though. When was that, 1971? • Elizabeth Janeway, author of _Man’s World, Woman’s Place: A Study in Social Mythology_ 1971. Nope, a staffer with the NY Review of Books and a sort of academic dilettante but no professor, she. • Valerie Solanas, your worst nightmare, _SCUM Manifesto_, 1971. Hanger-on amidst the art groupies gathered around Andy Warhol and totally unconnected with academia. • Dorothy Dinnerstein, _Mermaid and the Minotaur_, 1971. Yep, she was an academic, psychology department. That’s one so far. • Betty Friedan, _The Feminist Mystique_, founder of NOW and its first president. By no means an academic. A housewife who became a theorist. • Germaine Greer, _The Female Eunuch_ 1970. Nope. A grad student and a bohemian who got a lot of media attention for saying women’s orgasms were important. Not a college professor. • Shulamith Firestone, _The Dialectic of Sex_ 1970. Not her. She was a Chicago native who became an activist after the 1968 riots and drifted from Marxism to feminism. • Carol Hanisch, originator of the phrase “The Personal is Political” and co-organizer of the Miss America pageant protest from which came the phrase “bra-burners”. No, she was a ‘Redstocking’, and as a Marxist saw women as one more oppressed group until around 1970 when she was part of a sort of “sea change” in which several lefty women started to see women’s oppression as the fulcrum, not the oppression of the “working class”. At any rate, no college professor here. • Mary Daly, _The Church and the Second Sex_ in 1968. She wanted to study theology and could not enter a single doctoral program in theology in America (none would accept women) and traveled to Europe to complete her education. Soured on Christianity and conventional religion shortly after. She’s an academic of a rather formidable sort at Harvard Divinity nowadays but in 1968 just a grad student, and her theory came from her own experiences. • Kate Millett, _Sexual Politics_, 1970, another grad student. This book was in fact her dissertation. She had an uphill battle getting faculty to server on her committee on this project, if I recall correctly. • Robin Morgan, _Sisterhood is Powerful_ editor, 1970, and inventor of the feminist emblem that shows a clenched fist within a female symbol. A reporter for lefty alternative press who quickly radicalized over women’s issues and how the male left was treating women. They took over some kind of male-run countercultural journal for an issue which set the stage for _Notes from the First Year_. A poet, editor, newspaper person, not an academic. • Sheila Rowbotham, _Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s Place_, 1973. Yes, an academic, this one, I forget which department. Somewhere in Britain I think. • Simone de Beauvoir, _The Second Sex_, 1949, definitely an academic (a professor of philosophy and a contemporary and associate (and girlfriend) of Jean-Paul Sartre. But her writings had very little effect until about 20 years later when the new feminist movement looked backwards and popularized what she had written back then. We’ll count her though. What’s the score? Oh, did you perhaps have a different set of feminist theorists from the early days of feminism in mind? By all means list the ivory-tower faculty members whose theories rocked the world and brought feminism into being!! ---
**Author:** ![december](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/838e76/32.png) [@december](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/december)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2003, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/62 "2003-01-21T03:00:06Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by hansel \* > \*\*I’ll tell you what, December: email me an address where I can mail to you my reader from my Introduction to Feminism class that I took during my philosophy degree. Then come back and argue that feminism is somehow less valid than philosophy, sociology, or psychology as an academic discipline. \*\* Thank you. The e-mail has gone out. Please let me know if it fails to arrive. ---
**Author:** ![hansel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/6bbea6/32.png) [@hansel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hansel)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2003, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/63 "2003-01-21T03:09:08Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by december \* > **This is an ongoing problem for debunkers. There’s no limit to the complexity that can be created by a faker. Fakers can write in ways that are extremely difficult to understand. Then they say, “You can’t refute my claims, because you don’t fully understand them.” But, who wants to spend all that effort to master something that he considers to be balogna? Even if we did, the fakers still wouldn’t accept our criticisms.** Indeed: why would any creationist bother learning about evolution in detail, which is terribly complicated, and something he believes to be fundamentally mistaken? > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by december \* > **1. No part of it has ever been validated AFAIK.** I must have missed those classes in the philosophy of language where Quine’s claims about the two dogmas of empiricism were verified experimentally. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by december \* > **Despite Ahunter3’s claim, it has not been shown to do a good job of explaining everyday life to fishermen and the other groups s/he mentioned.** Do you have anything at all to back this up? > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by december \* > **2. Feminism isn’t even well-defined. There are many strains.** As there are in philosophy, linquistics, psychology, history, and english literature. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by december \* > \*\ ***bifar** mentions “the wide range of different feminism around.” This is not good. It means that “feminism” is whatever a feminist does. \*\* Just as a sociologist is someone who does sociology, no matter what particular school of thought she espouses. What’s your point? > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by december \* > **3. Feminism (or some feminists) have encouraged certain invalid ideas, such as recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.** And some political scientists have argued that communism is a workable form of government on a large-nation scale. Is this another university department that needs its funding yanked? ---
**Author:** ![december](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/838e76/32.png) [@december](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/december)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2003, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/64 "2003-01-21T03:15:30Z")
_AHunter3_ – Thank you for the list. Taking the last one first, I did read _The Second Sex_, and, as you say, it was around 20 years after it was written. IMHO it’s a great book. It obviously had a huge impact in liberating women. She was arguing that women should be treated as equals, which was a radical notion in 1949. Heaven only knows what de Beauvoir would have made of “feminism” as it exists on campuses today. Those you menton who weren’t academics were mostly intellectuals of some sort. There are no fishermen on your list. It’s incomplete to call Betty Friedan just a “housewife.” She was a political activist and professional propagandist for the Communist left for a quarter of a century. [Her version of feminism was an extention of communism](http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/friedan-per-horowitz.html), not an reaction to her experience as a housewife. > [@](#): > > Her famous description of America’s suburban family household as “a comfortable concentration camp” in “The Feminine Mystique” therefore had more to do with her Marxist hatred for America than with any of her actual experience as a housewife or mother. (Her husband, Carl, also a leftist, once complained that his wife “was in the world during the whole marriage,” had a full-time maid and “seldom was a wife and a mother”). ---
**Author:** ![Eva\_Luna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e495f1/32.png) [@Eva\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eva_Luna)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2003, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/65 "2003-01-21T04:10:16Z")
**december,** have you read Betty Friedan, or indeed any of the original works of the specific feminists mentioned in this thread? I’m actually just finishing up _The Feminine Mystique_ now on my vacation, and it’s a mind-boggling read for someone such as myself who was born in 1968 and raised in an egalitarian environment by two working professional parents. I haven’t seen a drop of communist theory anywhere in it; mostly, it’s just ben weird to read about how academics, sociologists, and even ordinary women themselves couldn’t comprehend why intelligent, educated women become deeply depressed when they don’t get to do anything more mentally stimulating than wash dishes and change diapers, and goes into great detail about the coping mechanisms, functional and dysfunctional, that women have used to attempt to adjust to their place in American society over the years. If you think that complaining about how material possessions cannot fill a spiritual void is a sign of devout communism, well, then, I guess I’m a communist, and I’d hate to hang out with anyone who wasn’t. Needless to say, I take great exception to your characterization of the book and its author. It’s not based primarily on her own experiences as a housewife, true enough, but to me, that’s irrelevant. She based the book on years of research and hundreds of interviews with real women. I’ve spent a good chunk of this vacation talking about it with the women in my family, from my 87-year-old grandmother down to my 22-year-old cousin, and they have each had a different and enlightening spin on it. I think it might be enlightening for you to try it yourself, perhaps starting with your wife. And BTW, I’d venture a guess that there aren’t many fishermen writing books of any sort, particularly on scholarly/philosophical topics, so it’s not fair to expect feminist writers to count many fishermen among their ranks. And as for academic feminism not having any light to shed on the real world; well, the same could potentially be said of the literary disciplines and many, many other more traditional academic subjects, particularly in the liberal arts (and this is coming from a diehard liberal arts grad). Should we get rid of comp lit, English, and art history, too? Any subject can be overanalyzed; that doesn’t mean it should be ignored completely, or that it has no light to shed on real-world issues. Universities are not trade schools, nor should they be. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2003, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/66 "2003-01-21T04:27:13Z")
I am sorry to see that this argument has degenerated to the lowest form of communication known to humankind – POETRY!!! Can we just fling poo at one another like civilized human beings? ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2003, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/67 "2003-01-21T04:44:38Z")
**december** , nearly all of the _radical_ feminists that I’ve known or whose work I’ve read are supporters of equality. The difference between them and the so-called _liberal_ feminists (of whom Betty Friedan, interestingly enough, is considered typical) is that that radfems do not wish to have everyone (male and female) simply divvy up the roles that are traditionally sexually apportioned in a more equal manner. They believe that organizing gender, sex, sexual appetite, reproduction, and parenthood as they have been organized for a long time has consequences. Including consequences that suck for male people. Making life better for male people was not their original impetus and still is most certainly not their primary focus, but they’ve noticed that and acknowledged it along the way. Of the feminist theorists that I’d categorize as “radical” (French, Morgan, Fisher, Daly, Rowbotham, Johnson, Jeffries, MacKinnon, Eisenman, Brownmiller, Wolff, Angier, etc), French, Morgan, Johnson, Fisher, Rowbotham, and Jeffries have said that patriarchy is a situation that is worse for men than its absence would be, even if it remains true that it is women who are disproportionately disadvantaged by the system. Quick translation: they are saying that in various ways you’re getting treated like shit for no reason other than your gender. Family court and the draft are often mentioned, along with the ‘characterological’ damage caused by the more coercive and intense masculinization process. Umm…is there some portion of what they have said over the years that you wish to dispute? Your word is as valid as that of anyone else, speaking from your own experience. (That’s the “authority” clause of radical feminist theory. You don’t \* have\* to be an academic with a Feminist Studies degree in order to theorize and make your contribution. Part of the reason that radical feminism is so unpopular with academics – it inherently disrespects their creds!) Oh, and the fisherman 🙂 I knew you would ask about the fisherman! He was not a theorist. He was a guy with a recreational fishing boat business in Florida or somewhere like that. He went from not wanting his daughter to get involved in the business to accepting that she was good at it and could handle herself in charge of a boat full of college guys and beer and fish guts and equipment, and then got mad when the insurance company wouldn’t insure her boat without a male cosigner. He wrote a letter to Ms. Magazine saying he’d started reading this stuff looking for legal help for his daughter and had come to see how the world works, that feminists had explained things to him in a way that things he had always just accepted without understanding now fit together and made sense. Do you wish to deny that patriarchy is an historical fact? Do you believe that it is _not_ true that, all other things being equal, you would usually have had less freedoms and be subjected to considerably more formal restrictions and informal social retaliations if you were female in the last half dozen millennia than if you were male and engaged in (or attempting to engage in) the same behaviors? (Got any holocausts you wanna deny while you’re at it?) Or are you just saying that lots of time men get the shitty end of the stick for no reason other than that they are male? Marilyn French would agree with you… ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2003, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/68 "2003-01-21T04:53:51Z")
Aren’t we doing that already? ---
**Author:** ![Spiritus\_Mundi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c68b51/32.png) [@Spiritus\_Mundi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiritus_Mundi)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2003, 6:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/69 "2003-01-21T06:20:57Z")
> [@](#): > > [the plight of women] sure has [improved significantly]. IMHO the academic feminists deserve no credit at all for these advances. My assertions is meant to be a part of this thread. I invite debate on this point. Okay – I sent my RSVP; now where’s the party? ---
**Author:** ![Eva\_Luna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e495f1/32.png) [@Eva\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eva_Luna)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2003, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/70 "2003-01-23T16:33:39Z")
So \*\*december, \*\* does the fact that you haven’t posted in a day or two mean that you’ve given in to all our refutations? Or does feminism simply not interest you anymore? ---
**Author:** ![december](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/838e76/32.png) [@december](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/december)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2003, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/71 "2003-01-25T22:11:54Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Eva Luna \* > \*\*So \*\*december, \*\* does the fact that you haven’t posted in a day or two mean that you’ve given in to all our refutations? Or does feminism simply not interest you anymore? \*\* I was waiting to receive a feminism book that **hansel** kindly offered to send me. The book just arrived. Thank you very much, **hansel** The book is 245 pages of small print, written by Prof. Deslauriers of McGill University. Of course, McGill is an outstanding institution. The introduction is pretentiosly titled, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness.” It says that “feminist consciousness is the consciousness of _victimization_” (author’s italics). I was surprised to read this. After all, a typical conservative complaint is that the US is moving toward a society of victimization. We think _“playing the victim”_ is a pejorative. So, I didn’t expect the book to admit it right up front. Of course, from the author’s POV, she’s not playing the victim, she _is_ a victim. However, since she got tenure at a top university, while I was forced to leave academia, I don’t see it that way. I have worked with lots of very successful women. Leaders of their professional societies. Company presidents. Some earned millions of dollars. No doubt, some of these women had a difficult challenge in overcoming prejudice. But, I don’t think most of them have come to an “altered perception of themselves” as victims. One who perhaps has done so was my first boss, one the earliest female actuaries. She seems to me to be an unhappy person, despite her considerable professional success. BTW I think timing is a big factor. My wife, who is 60, faced considerable difficulty as a woman at the vey beginning of her career. My sister, who is 57, had a much easier time. It goes without saying, that the book offers no evidence to prove anything alleged in the introduction. It also appears that the author may be a marxist. At least the introduction refers to marxism in a positive way, and it mentions the “contradictions of ‘late’ capitalism” – whatever that’s supposed to mean. Does anyone know? For those on the other side of this debate: Do you view consiousness of victimization as the central aspect of feminism? If so, what does that mean to you? If not, do you see some other center of feminsim. BTW, if one has to have experienced victimization as a woman in order to be a real feminist, then men are excluded from the field. As the Church Lady says, “How con_ven_ient.” ---
**Author:** ![hansel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/6bbea6/32.png) [@hansel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hansel)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2003, 10:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/72 "2003-01-25T22:35:10Z")
First, Prof. Deslauriers didn’t write the book. It’s a collection of essays from the last century that are considered key or a good representation of a particular feminist point of view. The first page is a bibliography of the essays included. The first essay is about the process of change a woman undergoes as she develops a feminist consciousness; which is to say, a consciousness of the ways in which women are victimized (lower pay, lower expectations, patronizing or discriminatory treatment, etc.) She is not proclaiming her victimhood, she is describing the phenomenological change that accompanies an awareness of these (demonstrable) facts, and how a feminist consciousness is ultimately empowering once one sheds a helpless posture and deals with them. Regarding your last comment, there is a school of thought that holds that men cannot be feminists because being a feminist requires the experience of being a woman in a patriarchal society. A man can support the ideological program, but feminism is more than an ideology. Please, December, read the essays at least once for insight into their thinking, rather than ammunition for your arguments. ---
**Author:** ![RexDart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b77776/32.png) [@RexDart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RexDart)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2003, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/73 "2003-01-25T23:06:24Z")
To the extent that feminists have adopted postmodernism, deconstructionism, etc., it _is_ bogus. Adopting those theories does serve to eliminate any sort of objective truth or reality, and as such serves feminist theory by destroying the validity of “male power structures.” However, it gives us men absolutely no reason to desire equality for women. If there are no absolutes in ethics, and everything is just a power struggle between the genders, then shouldn’t we men just play our part and try to oppress the women? There would be no moral imperative to alter our behaviour, and we would simply act in our own interest to maintain our power with no reservations. Men vs. women, no rights or wrongs, just opposing forces. Of course, Simone deBeavoir had a clever answer to that dilemma, one I happen to agree with to some extent. But alas, she had sex with a man, so she’s not really popular with modern feminists 😉 ---
**Author:** ![RexDart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b77776/32.png) [@RexDart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RexDart)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2003, 11:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/74 "2003-01-25T23:17:16Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by december \* > \*\*. Of course, from the author’s POV, she’s not playing the victim, she _is_ a victim. However, since she got tenure at a top university, while I was forced to leave academia, I don’t see it that way. > > \*\* LOL, nice point. I had been interested in becoming a history professor during my undergraduate days. One of my history professors was a feminist and Marxist (surprisingly, we got along great, she even wrote one of my recommendation letters when I applied to law school), and she revealed to me a little knowledge about what it’s like getting a job or getting tenure at a public university these days (in liberal arts field.) She told me straight out that it was much easier for a woman to be hired as an associate professor and eventually gain tenure than it was for a man. The reason appears to have alot to do with departments seeking more “specialized” professors, ones who fit some little niche the university is seeking to fill in creating a diversity of ideas. (Well, the majority of them are postmodernists, so I don’t see the diversity of ideas, but that’s supposedly the guiding force.) Of course, conversely, it was harder for a woman to become department head, possibly due to the very “unorthodox” or radical ideas that got her the job in the first place. So at the lower levels, women actually seem to have an advantage in academia, and eventually should gain an advantage at the top too (you can’t become dept head if you weren’t hired in the first place.) ---
**Author:** ![december](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/838e76/32.png) [@december](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/december)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2003, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/75 "2003-01-26T00:04:52Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by hansel \* > First, Prof. Deslauriers didn’t write the book. It’s a collection of essays from the last century that are considered key or a good representation of a particular feminist point of view. The first page is a bibliography of the essays included. Thanks for the clarification. I can see where someone (you, I suppose) handwrote ‘Bartky’ on top of the first essay, meaning that it was written by Sandra Lee Bartky. > [@](#): > > Please, December, read the essays at least once for insight into their thinking, rather than ammunition for your arguments. I’ll try, but my mind is so made up that this may not be possible. ---
**Author:** ![Eva\_Luna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e495f1/32.png) [@Eva\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eva_Luna)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2003, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/76 "2003-01-26T02:52:37Z")
Well, FWIW I don’t believe that it’s a requirement to have suffered gender discrimination in order to be a feminist; I don’t even believe one needs to be a woman. And I _certainly_ don’t believe one needs to be a lesbian of any sort. Some of the most feminist people I know have been men, in the sense that I believe that the only prerequisite for being a feminist is that one should believe that women and men are equal (different in some important ways, both biological and sociological, but women are certainly not overall inferior to men, nor vice versa). I think that women who see themselves as victims solely **because** they are women, but who would rather sit around and kvetch about it than do anything constructive, are likely to be rather unhappy people in general. Off the top of my head, I can only recall a couple of brief moments in my life where I was treated unequally because of my gender. One was my introductory grad school seminar, which was taught by a professor who had been dragged out of retirement and oddly enough thought he had been discriminated against as a university student because he was _Catholic,_ of all things! Even the more misogynist members of my entering class (including one who used to insist to me that to be a feminist, one has to be a man-hating lesbian) remarked that this professor rarely called on women in class (there were less than a dozen of us, so we shouldn’t have been invisible), and when he did, he would either ignore or discount whatever they said. However, that sure doesn’t mean other women haven’t suffered gender discrimination; my mom was always told she didn’t need to learn math, and was steered away from all careers besides teaching. If it weren’t for feminism, the law firm where I work wouldn’t be the matriarchy that it is; about 80% of all staff, attorneys included, are female. However, both partners are male, in spite of the fact that all the other senior attorneys are female (and they are the ones that run the office on a daily basis),so there is still work to be done! There are many feminists of my sort, but you won’t find them as well-represented in visibly feminist roles, because many of us (especially those of my generation and younger) are reluctant to label ourselves publicly as feminists because of the negative connotations the word has acquired as a result of the more radical and strident folks. My sister, who is only 2 years younger, would never call herself a feminist, even though she agrees with me on essentially all gender-related issues. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2003, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/77 "2003-01-27T01:29:24Z")
**RexDart** > [@](#): > > To the extent that feminists have adopted postmodernism, deconstructionism, etc., it is bogus. Agreed. [http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter/RFvLitCrit/tocandtp.html](http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter/RFvLitCrit/tocandtp.html) ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2003, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/78 "2003-01-27T01:32:06Z")
(If you follow that link, you may wish to skip the section titled “Process” which isn’t relevant to the discussion; the rest is). ---
**Author:** ![CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crankyasanoldman/32/11670_2.png) [@CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrankyAsAnOldMan)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2003, 4:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/79 "2003-01-27T04:38:21Z")
I’m dying to know why/how you’ve concluded that feminists “gained power” in universities. They may have achieved legitimacy (and yet not with everyone) but I really don’t see feminist theorists as having power. ---
**Author:** ![CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crankyasanoldman/32/11670_2.png) [@CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrankyAsAnOldMan)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2003, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631/80 "2003-01-27T04:54:14Z")
Good lord, I’m sorry, I missed the posts that already addressed the “power” thing. I apologize december, you claim some fields are “stable” because they are “grounded in the real world.” Inasmuch as they are concerned with physical phenomenon, yes. It doesn’t mean they are more scholarly or legitimate. It means they have more agreement on methods, inherent worth of certain questions, determination of truth, etc. These characteristics are what sets the “hard” sciences apart from other fields–NOT JUST feminism or area studies. This is all seriously old hat stuff, stuff which has been discussed quite well and in a scholarly manner by Kughn and others, years before I was even born. It’s philosophy of science at its most basic, and frankly it both amuses and offends the bejeezus out of me that you think you can level a serious offensive against a field on the basis of its paradigm–without being conversant in this area. I mean, not only is that argument unoriginal, it’s not even correct. The degree of paradigm development isn’t meant to be normative–it’s a characteristic of an academic field (ANY academic field) and is not a judgment of its quality or worth. These classifications go a long way towards explaining why some people turn their noses up at social sciences, and why some near-sighted and narrowly-educated hard scientists believe their disciplines are more valuable, but it is in no way valid proof that other disciplines and fields aren’t scientific. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/feminist-theory-is-bogus/149631.md?page=5)