You are the one engaging in mad fantasy.
You can search through my Twitter history and find me arguing with feminists. A few of them, including at least a couple semifamous ones, have me blocked because they can’t handle polite but probing pushback (what they would call “walrusing” :rolleyes:). It reminded me of the women’s studies course I took in college in 1993—I came into the class with no axe to grind, but found myself horrified by some of the content, and my arguments in class were, shall we say, not appreciated by the professor or most of my coursemates.
And as I keep explaining, I have been surrounded by this stuff (albeit a slightly less radical version than in that class) since before I can remember. My mother, the sociology professor, required her students to use “they” in place of “he/she” at least a quarter century ago, way before it was on the mainstream radar screen. She kept her own “maiden name” (not hyphenated) way back in the ‘70s, and gave my sister and me hyphenated names (reversed with each other so neither of us would give either parent precedence). She regularly went to consciousness-raising groups when I was a kid.
I have read extensively in the genre of feminist science fiction, particularly Ursula K LeGuin, whose novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness were required texts in my late father‘s anthropology classes. I recently watched a documentary on her career on PBS. My father was also a big fan of the book Walden Two, which fully embraces this idea (the one that Pinker demolished) that it’s all about the nurture. I loved my late father and I love my mother, but that does not erase my intellectual independence. I think they got this stuff very wrong. (And as my own older children seem in their teenage years to have moved back in their grandparents’ direction, maybe my grandchildren will see things more my way, or maybe I will be a blip in the family lineage.)
And again, my wife was in a sociology Ph.D. program when I met her, doing research on street harassment, but I was able to convince her it was a bad idea—so she took a terminal masters and got another masters in education and went into public school teaching. I can see her feminist theory library from where I sit. She too did not change her name when we got married, and our two biological children together have her last name since my older two children already have mine.
She can regularly be found in her favorite “Notorious RBG” T-shirt, and we recently watched the “RBG” documentary together. She knows about my dissenting views, but is loathe to talk to me about them; and out of respect for her, I don’t say much about any of this on Facebook. (On Twitter, she deals with that by reading my main tweets, which generally steer clear of this kind of content, and stays away from my replies, which do not. And she does not read this board at all, although I think she has a vague sense that this is where I am most unfiltered.)
Why is it so psychologically painful for some of you to imagine that someone could be intimately familiar with these philosophies and still be critical of them? Fascinating.
I mean, if that were really true, it would require my not only constantly having to hit Wikipedia to research the history and theory of feminism (which itself would make me at least somewhat conversant with these topics, even if in a different way than I am maintaining), but my story about my own family would have to be some sort of fictional creation which I would have to keep in outline form to refer to regularly, to avoid contradicting myself—kind of like a “series bible” a script supervisor uses on a TV show.
Stop and think about this for a second. You have just completely thrown away Ockham’s razor. Get a grip.