21st Century Feminists Suck

Maybe, just maybe, in rights, but not in pay.

This thread is a dud.

Well you shouldn't have started the thread then.

ps I love feminists b/c I love my mom and sister

Nothing at all, Dan. I was making a point about the "women are equal to men" fallacy.

Feminazis to thread??

I'm not so sure this can be blamed on feminism anyhow. That example's more like naive Freudianism with a dollop of feminism as a garnish.

Did she ever get her Annie soundtrack back?

I wonder how many men would be fine with having their salaries reduced to match their female contemporaries if it meant that it was no longer socially acceptable for someone to punch them in the face in the course of a heated argument.

hstencil, what you've posted is exactly what I was trying to avoid. Of course we all know the world is not a perfect place, and we don't need to argue about it because we all agree that women = men in rights, even if it doesn't pan out that way in the "real world".

Aaaaaaanyway, does anyone else have some tales of academic idiocy?

Hmm, well I dunno, I haven't been punched in an argument since I was at least a teenager. Also, if you think it's not "socially acceptable" in some sense to hit a women, I'd like to reintroduce you to the term "domestic violence."

Hstencil: The fact that men hit women (and children) does not mean it's socially acceptable. Is murder socially acceptable? How about car theft? Crime happens, ergo it is socially acceptable.

(and I'm not being sarcastic, either! (yes, I shock even myself))

Andrew I don't think it's necessarily a given that everyone here thinks the same way, even on something that you and I might agree as a pretty basic given.

just a tidbit of info

I'm tired of Freud being appropriated as a punching bag by undereducated knee-jerk feminists (not necessarily by you Amateurist).

Actually, "gender studies" classes are often this lame. At Berkeley the real deal gender studies were in the rhetoric department.

>Spencer, I agree, that's why I added the word "naive" (not that Freud didn't write his share of loopy, totally-bogus nonsense). <

These are the type of people who would say Dr. Strangelove is a porno.

Not only "relatively easy to get away with," but also "incredibly common and not second-guessed by the perpetrator." I would assume that one of the reasons I've see anti-domestic violence ads in public transit are because some men might not know it's a crime. I.e. it's "acceptible" to them.

Were the Enron-style shenaningans socially acceptable?

I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't return Ken Lay's phone calls, but I haven't seen a society-wide change because of any of this. Aside from the market being down, but that happened before Enron anyway.

If so, why are they being prosecuted?

Uh, well has anyone even brought charges yet against Ken Lay or Bernie Ebbers? Definitely those are two people involved in corporate scandals who are prolly not "socially acceptible" in the business world these days, but as of yet neither has been charged with anything.

< /sarcasm >

I ask because I am a walker. I'm male, but of fairly slight proportions, but when I'm walking at night and happen to find myself behind a woman, or even two women, they usually turn back every so often or pick up their pace or turn off (the worst is when my path is coincidentally the same as theirs), but I get the very clear impression that my presence, as unintimidating as I may be to folks who know, makes them nervous.

What I find amusing in Andrew’s examples, is that the phallic nature of the symbols are valid only for the primary observer.

The professor in the first example is in the practice of looking for phallic symbols and their symbolic oppression (to her) of her Sex— both personal and gender. Taken in the context of a course in studying self-oppression, one would be likely to see offences where none exist— or in this case seeing penises merely by opening one’s eyes.

For “Retard Girl,” the thought of being penetrated would have to be forefront in her conscious for her to take offense, which would be a knee-jerk response to cover the guilt of having naughty thoughts.

I find it likely that any course studying self-oppression would cause the student (and teacher) to invent slights where none exist.

The argument that says "It is socially acceptable to beat women because the men doing the beating don't realize it isn't socially acceptable" is really, really, really stupid. Given the media saturation of the past two decades of the problems of domestic abuse and heightened availability/awareness of options for getting out of abusive relationships, you would have to believe that every man who beats a woman is living under a rock if he realizes he's doing something wrong, let alone the whole manipulative "It's your fault, why do you make me do this to you?" tactic of keeping the victim from seeking help basically screaming that the abuser knows he's doing wrong.

how many women in here feel safe walking down a city street alone at night?

I ask because I am a walker. I'm male, but of fairly slight proportions,
but when I'm walking at night and happen to find myself behind a woman, or
even two women, they usually turn back every so often or pick up their pace
or turn off (the worst is when my path is coincidentally the same as
theirs), but I get the very clear impression that my presence, as
unintimidating as I may be to folks who know, makes them nervous.

I've noticed this too and I realized that I usually end up slowing my pace or crossing the street so I won't be perceived as a threat.

Perhaps there should be a separate thread for this issue, though.

I did not and have never said that domestic abuse wasn't a widespread problem. I said that domestic abuse is not socially acceptable. You say it is, largely because it exists. For evidence of this, you are offering the words of people who have committed domestic abuse as proof that people find it to be socially acceptable. I'm sorry, that's fucking stupid. Are you expecting these guys to break down and admit that they are wrong so that they can open themselves up to full prosecution? Surely I'm not the only one who thinks that is a dangerously naive view of how people who contravene socially accepted norms behave?

Painting aggressors as victims: Classic or Idiotic?

(I'm in London and you're in Boston: maybe the situation is better there.)(Also, however nasty and ignored domestic violence is, those quotes at the start of all this are funny and stupid, and not to do with domestic violence at all. Had the title not tried to turn this into a general dismissal of modern feminists, I'd have been quite happy with the thread maintaining that tone.)

Who's putting words in your mouth?

I did not and have never said that domestic abuse wasn't a widespread problem. I said that domestic abuse is not socially acceptable. You say it is, largely because it exists. For evidence of this, you are offering the words of people who have committed domestic abuse as proof that people find it to be socially acceptable. I'm sorry, that's fucking stupid. Are you expecting these guys to break down and admit that they are wrong so that they can open themselves up to full prosecution? Surely I'm not the only one who thinks that is a dangerously naive view of how people who contravene socially accepted norms behave?

That is so not what I've been writing, at all. Martin's posts are pretty close to the point that I thought I was making. I certainly wasn't "offering the words of people who have committed domestic abuse" in anything I wrote, and to state that is just as much "putting words in my mouth" as you claim has happened to you.

Painting aggressors as victims: Classic or Idiotic?

Uh, that's not what I did, at all.

oh yeah a cursory glance at any cultural artifact SCREAMS that, right. excuse me while i go fix my bikini and get into a mud-wrestling match, gotta prove my worth somehow!

You could make the case that men don't have the right to dress up in a bikini and mud wrestle...at least not if the want the right to not get the shit kicked out of them.

I, for one, thought that the "we" Andrew was referring to was the ILX community, not the entire global society, so I didn't have a problem with his statement because I don't think anyone who regularly posts to this board thinks that women are inferior to men.

And moreover that overreacting to academic feminist rhetoric is the biggest most boring DUD of all time with the possible exception of the songtitle "Don't Bomb When You Are the Bomb" which exists on its own rarefied cloud of dudness

Dan I never made this claim. I claimed that it's socially acceptible because it exists, not because of anything its perpetrators or victims claim.

What about "it's all about oil"?

"I would assume that one of the reasons I've see anti-domestic violence ads in public transit are because some men might not know it's a crime. I.e. it's 'acceptible' to them."

I'm not certain that "socially acceptable" is neccesarily the correct term (if only because it is loaded with all sorts of nasty moral connotations), but there certainly is a wide-spread societal acceptance of the idea that domestic violence or rape is a male crime perpetrated against female victims, despite the fact that this is empirically false. I'm not sure if that's what you meant though.

I agree. This is the same question that is at stake when people bring up the issue of censorship and so-called hate speech legislation.

And moreover that overreacting to academic feminist rhetoric is the biggest most boring DUD of all time with the possible exception of the songtitle "Don't Bomb When You Are the Bomb" which exists on its own rarefied cloud of dudness

Nooooo!!!!!! Don't you dare diss Blur!!! :)

Martin is totally OTM- this thread wouldn't have been so bad if Andrew had just titled it "the gender studies class my gf's attending sucks" (not that everyone would have agreed with him, mind you, but the examples he quotes in that first post are worthy of dissertation, at least.)

You've not been on ILM much, have you? :)

Q1: Would someone go around bragging about beating their wife?
Q2: Would someone go around bragging about beating someone in a fight?

But do they swallow?

*runs away to bed*

No, that's an urban legend.

> RESUME SANCTIMONIOUS_GRANDSTANDING.BAS
> OK

Horace Mann, slim-built walker of the empty nighttime streets: you now have one more common experience to discuss with black people.

Hey, can we devote this thread to making a ranked list of which academic disciplines are most- through least-likely to include flights of fancy that would seem ridiculous or even abhorrent to anyone outside of the discipline? Gender studies is a field just out of diapers whose primary current mission is to figure out what its primary mission can or should be, so yeah, it might rank a little bit on the more-likely side. But based on something I read today that I wish I could share -- something I totally wish I could share except I really, legally, can't -- I'm thinking economists would be worse. Economists doing the everyday average thinking of economists wind up stumbling onto some thoughts that are, well, totally right and relevant to the field and yet horrifying to any individual with a single non-economic thought in his/her mind.

Tell her to transfer to Rutgers!!!

Penetrate, thrust, and invade are not words specific to sex or sexual imagery though. They get that way with exposure and innuendo, but in most contexts are NOT meant sexually. I don't understand why they would be offensive.

Evidently one of the women's studies classes at PSU is tought by this guy who basically shows them porn web sites in class! Then he tells them to write papers about how it makes them feel! All the women I know who've taken it couldn't believe how porn-obsessed this guy was. Though it actually fit with my personal observation that any time I took a class that was largely women the professor, if male, felt some strange obligation to discuss sex and show pictures of naked women.

There. Aren't perverted psuedo-flasher professors a lot more fun then thoughtless feminism.

Do you have any specific examples other than in the context of non-western university courses?

Most language examples that I’ve seen from western history texts are religious or Darwinian in nature (e.g. civilizing, taming, pagans, savages, etc.), animalizing those being subjegated. While ‘conquering’ and the like are reserved for more military peers.

No. And I say that having spent the first few days of 2003 at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, selling a striking amount of George Lakoff's books. Including the forthcoming Metaphors We Live By, with Mark Johnson, which makes exactly the same unconscious-metaphors-shape-thought argument John is making.

(Paper $14.00 0-226-46837-2 Spring 2003 Available 03/03 "[T]he most original and valuable thing I've seen on the much-discussed topic of metaphor." -- James D. McCawley [/marketing])

Maybe, maybe not -- the question might be put better as not "is that the most useful route to understanding...colonization" but "might this route yield interesting or productive ways to thinking about colonization," in which case I'd say that the answer is a definite yes -- language w/r/t colonization is an almost endlessly interesting subject

"is it the most useful route" rockism SHOCKAH!

Every time you use language in a way that's oppositional to the person you're using it on, it's all about giving that other person/institution *very little leeway* other than directing them to points you'd like to make and things you'd like them to do. If you're really good at it, the letter you write to the bank telling them how they've fucked up, how they're going to fix it, and what compensation you must receive in return for their incopetence will be *watertight*.

I'm sorry. I did give this thread a shitty title. Let us from hereon in rename it to "Stupid Academic Foibles".

Also, someone upthread made reference to "bad words" (and presumably the existence of "good words" too). What the fuck is a "bad word"? Anyone who is offended by a word is a dick. Just because a word can have a sexual (and unpleasant for some) connotation, does not mean that it can/should not be used in other contexts.

> No. And I say that having spent the first few days of 2003
> at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America,
> selling a striking amount of George Lakoff's books. Including
> the forthcoming Metaphors We Live By, with Mark Johnson,
> which makes exactly the same unconscious-metaphors-shape-thought
> argument John is making.

and the reason it's neither hoary nor old is that it is a lively area of research with a lot of excellent empirical evidence to suggest it is a fruitful theory. The "Metaphors we Live by" is a re-issue of book published in the 80s, but the recently published.

I am currently reading the very absorbing, and slightly more recent (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh.

Alright cuntface, you're a dick.
The point of offensive words is that people are offended by them. However the fact that people can be offended by words that you consider to be non-offensive does not make them a dick. It just marks out a potential difference in background, language usage, sensitivity.

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i heart dave q, thought of you yesterday when I bought the reissue of Zep's "Presence" instead of whatever else it was I was almost gonna buy

I've had your back earlier in the discussion, Andrew, but this is just not right (or are you intimating that all of the black people who don't want to be called "nigger" are dicks?).

I do take issue with the concept of classifying the word "penetrate" as negative; free from sexual connotations it's completely neutral and even with sexual connotations I think anyone who automatically classifies sexual penetration as "bad" is bringing a large amount of their own baggage to the word.

Dave Q's posting springs from the Zodiac Killer's claim that each person he killed would become his slave in the afterlife and he used the slaves/paradise acrostic in one of his letters to the cops

Dan - can any word ever exist free of connotations? I can't imagine so: the whole purpose of words is to connote, right?

'Of' connotes...er. Margaret Atwood to thread?

Also, removing one set of connotations from a word is not the same thing as removing ALL connotations from a word.

...people using the word "phallogocentric" as if its use in an essay meant that it was now fair game...people describing disagreement as "resistance"...widespread acceptance of fairly suspect anthropological claims & wild spins on said claims...people who've never read Freud arguing about Freud and missing every last bit of Luce Irigaray's point...

*music shifts to minor key & increases suddenly in volume/tempo, cut to: John in Macauley Culkin in Home Alone-stylee scream*

Repeat repeat! There is no "...and that's bad!" here! It just raises some interesting questions: might these various uses inform the speaker's understanding of the acts he's describing? If one sees a pattern of words being borrowed from military vocabulary to describe sexual activity, what might that mean? Questions like these. They're good questions to ask because they might lead to people wondering how language does what it does and to richer understandings of the things people say.

Considering the origin of the word 'fuck' back in Olde Englishe and beyond apparently meant 'to strike' and 'to copulate with' in equal measure...

I am not "hung up". I was discussing the word "penetrate" in the context of how the "retard girl" reacted to it (where it was viewed as being inherently negative) and the fucking patronizing and insulting way that Mark dismissed my argument against her (which seemed to have no point and added nothing to the discussion).

Beyond that, I'm glad that we agree that "penetrate" is not an inherently negative word. (I would also argue that it is not an inherently violent word, either, but that's a different discussion.)

Mark, are you seriously trying to tell me that (for example) in current society the word "gay" still has all of the connotations of being happy and carefree? I don't buy that at all.

...but since I'm not going to do that: Beyond that, I'm glad that we agree that "penetrate" is not an inherently negative word. (I would also argue that it is not an inherently violent word, either, but that's a different discussion.) Right. Feminists on language mainly want to argue that 1) the discussion is worth having and 2) it's interesting, and potentially meaningful, how worked up people get over the whole question -- certainly GWB's understanding of the word "freedom" does more violence to that word's ability to carry meaning than Irigaray does to the word "sex" in obscure French essays, but nobody seems to really mind that much -- and why is that? And so on.

words gather meanings, they never lose them: they continue to contain absolutely the whole of their history — every usage, right or wrong — and if you only knew the right way to say them (the correct spell, if you like) and you could revivify any one of these meanings, momentarily or (after a more elaborate, probably much-repeated spell) for longer times in more widespread ways

isn't the question, though: "does Wittgenstein know that yet & he's fucking with us, or has he not yet figured out which way the devices are pointing"

granted this is the big question with lots of theory as far as I'm concerned -- big ups to you for being able to read while drunk, the best I can do is watch cop shows and/or infomercials

they don't broadcast cop shows or inforercials on london buses

i think if i had had something else to read that wasn't notes for something i wz writing, i wd have gone with that

162. When we say we perfectly understand this sentence when drunk, do we mean (blah blah)... ?

nabisco, thanks for the tip. My information was based on reading a recent article (the name and source escape me and thus make it exactly the sort of evidence I detest), which was why I posed it as a question.

We've been around on this nabisco and you're fundamentally misreading Lakoff. His argument is more that "metaphors" (he'd probably prefer "representations of embodied experience" as a more nuanced term at this point) are the form of thought and generative root of language -- i.e. not that language shapes thought so much as metaphors are the basis thought AND language. Lakoff agrees with Vygotsky about pre-linguistic thought but not pre-social language for a start.

what's his position on love potions?

This is exactly the gist of what I recently read. For example, in 1984 the idea that the populace could be controlled via limiting language to a minimum of newspeak, thereby shaping their view of the world to how the party wanted them to see it. This is what I termed a hoary theory.

But I am not a linguist.

the situation may change unexpectedly

king tut, a murdered eyptian boy-pharoah viciously expunged from his own history let alone ours, is dug up in 1921 and creates a massive cultural hoo-hah: the curse of the tomb is that stuff long buried lives again

=> the word "tutankhamun" still carries all of its freight, and some of — on contact with the modern air — had tremendous potency: it helps forge the link between the bingo hall in essex road with the music of sun ra, for example: the syllable TUT, on many many 20th-century lips, forged that link (and others)

Lakoff doesn't argue that language "influences" thought so much as language is an expression of the thought process (as opposed to chomsky who thinks it is possible to view it as a self-contained meaning system) and that the thought process itself operates by "metaphors". I quote the word "metaphors" because it's a very inexact term -- what he's really doing there is looking for the biological roots of abstract thought in what he terms "embodied representation": the frontal cortex is actually a very dense layering of maps of the body -- he argues that at a basic level our conception of events requires "modeling" them in our heads though "story" systems already in place, which are built at root from the development and control of our motor and sense functions.

Also the directionality of it is in question, even in Lakoff's own stuff (whether he notices it or not) -- in some of the in-house stuff of his I've read, he talks about he puts time into how variations of metaphor and category across cultures can represent different ways of thinking. Unless he (or you) are making some claim that thought processes are passed along genetically, it can only be metaphor and the language used to express it that transmits a given culture's conceptual set from one generation to the next.

His level of argument is that, for example viewing direction in absolutes (east, west, etc.) rather than relatives (left, right, etc.) as some indigenous folx in Australia do will necessarily affect the other ways in which they construct thought processes.

The difference between unconscious-metaphors-shape-thought and metaphors-as-mode-of-thought is that the former implies making these metaphors conscious changes thought and even that we should strive to change these metaphors, while the latter makes no such claim.

The reason I'm so strident here is yr. presentation of Lakoff is fairly common and one reason that so many people are unjustly wary of him.

My argument, if I had one, would be a 'pragmatic' one: something like 'people tend to mean what they want to mean, and when they want to mean something else they'll do that'.

Hm - I'm not sure even Dick Rorty could stoop to theorizing as banally as that.

Possibly I am suggesting that 'meanings' are whatever are 'in use', not what is 'out there somewhere'. Possibly that implies that things can, in principle, come back into use at any time, though they may well not do so. 'It all depends' - that would be among the prime principles.

Anyway. I'm not sure how my wording there implies what you say it does, but as someone who has never actually studied linguistics I am willing to take your word that it's important. (Lakoff himself has thus far been fine with my summaries of that book.)

mainly certain academic types -- chomskyians still dominate the academy and the more his arguments are seen as making possible sweeping and dodgy claims (i.e. the orwell analogy above) the more what he & other non-chomskyian linguists are about can get dismissed as unserious.

lots of words contain contradictory meanings simultaneously: this isn't remotely a problem — the difft meanings merely emerge when the word is deployed in different contexts (this is a crappy and lame way of saying it: the 'spell' way is much more vivid and clearer)

pf's point — what if everyone forgets? how is it recoverable then? — seems strong enough, but the point is that the right language act (= the correct spell) can bring the meaning alive again

you *could* re-animate the elements of "nice" that link it closely with "wanton" and "dissolute", and make that usage "valid" ("valid" just means "does it work?"): in the right time and place you could do it with a single sentence on yr part (i give you "grebt"), though i think this is unusual (and what it actually means is that w.you sentence you cause countless others to repeat either yr spell — think of python fans saying "albatross" — or related variants)

old connotations may sleep, they don't begone-as-if-they-never-were

I have no bone to pick on this subject, though, as far as I can tell; and my 'forgetting' point was (meant to be) less central than my 'pragmatic' point.

Also what about the issue of cultural differentiation: isn't it precisely language that transfers those conceptual sets from one generation to the next? Your example of using cardinal directions, for instance ... well, it doesn't actually fit well with what I'm about to say. Aren't there examples of conceptual issues like that that get formed into rigid categories slowly -- where the conceptual stuff is eventually subsumed into language itself, meaning that acquiring the language involves picking up the conceptual sets as well? I've always interpreted this as part of what Lakoff is getting at (and maybe part of what Mark is saying here, too!). For instance, we talk a lot about distinctions that have been developed in issues of, say, race, or conceptualizing different types of "love," or things like that. A child acquiring the English language doesn't have to re-make these distinctions, because they're passed on not in some artificial practice but in distinct categories of language. These are social distinctions and not conceptual ones, I suppose, but I (and some possibly misreading reviewers) connect Lakoff's arguments with the idea of language as not just reinforcing such concepts but also actively transmitting them.

The point is that Lakoff doesn't deal with that stuff -- he recognizes that linguistics can only play a subordinate role to other disciplines in that sort of study and thus he avoids going there. He doesn't oppose it per se, but he also makes clear that his research need not have such implications -- of course I've yet to read his new one on philosophy so maybe I've just got a one sided view from having studied under him briefly.

I mean of course marketeers are going to play that stuff up too, because readers outside the discipline don't just want to know "Here are some interesting things" but "how can I use this?" except in many ways, they can't.

Is it taken as a given that no one in the linguistics world misinterprets him in the way you're saying simplified summaries tend to?

The problem I think is that there are distinct schools of linguistics -- chomskyian and less-so (and the less-so school is more dispersed but Lakoff is a recognized figure there). The less-so school is making inroads on questioning some long held comskyian assumptions, but it faces significant obstacles and I think that's more where these misreadings come in -- not from careful academic appraisals of these sorts of things, but off-the-cuff dismissals by exponants of a different school.

& I think Lakoff lends himself to these misreadings himself -- for example with his book "Moral Politics" on the structure of conservative thought. He's obviously thinking in a way conditioned by his academic work, but there's no actual connection to be drawn between his scientific work and a book like this. The implication of doing such a work in such a way can tend to undermine acceptance of his research sometimes, I think.

(I think another factor in interpreting Lakoff's less academic books is that they're, well, seriously far-reaching, with Moral Politics as the absolute pinnacle of that: a large proportion of this book's reviews say something like "well, this is certainly an interesting way of thinking about things, but I'm just not so sure it works that way..." Same for Metaphor We Live By, actually, in non-specialist review. But I'm not sure it's possible to comment on the basic concepts people use to view the world without people, umm, vigorously denying that their worldviews are definable enough to be discussed.)

Are professors in other disciplines inclined to dabble as far and wide?

Is there some imperative on *their* part to demonstrate why otherwise quite abtruse work is of vital meaning in the world -- a science variation of my take on artistic ethos?

(The good safety valve they have at present is computational linguistics, I think, or if not that the bridge between traditional and computational linguistics: the part where people start caring about German applicatives is when they want German texts translated into Finnic and then subjected to "semantically rich" databasing and searching.)

Why?

Because she was a woman and men were into threatening women with guns and bullets and therefore the word bullet should not be used because it intimidates women.

So just how in the hell are we to describe a "bulleted" list? A dotted list, perhaps? A listing with symbols before each separate item? It was horrid.

But the class was very interesting (once I got past the whole "men keep women down, therefore all men are evil" stuff that the prof. dished-out - she really disliked males). I was (and am) most taken with the ideas about how male and female writing differs, especially at younger ages (teenage girls talking in exclamations, teenage boys being aggressive in their writing, etc.) While I see much of this as being stereotypical, there is still some basic truth that males and females are taught to espress themseles differently. Anyway, it's made me more conscious of how I use language and what it says about me and other writers. (And I'm now investigating the gender-marked language of the post-operative transsexual community - really interesting, in my mind.)

haha -- s. trife to thread!!!!!!

Suzy, I kiss you (in a nonsexual, non-threatening manner).

nothing has ever happened less than the "gender studies class" described in OP

Ah, the stupendous, death-defying heights of early ILX.

great revive

ffs

I think you mean fp

this thread is depressing.

― mark p (Mark P), Monday, February 24, 2003 4:05 PM (seventeen years ago)

Anyway, OP's faux-anecdote brings to mind the atheist professor copypasta.

in the movie of this thread, the teacher is going to be played by Kevin Sorbo

I keep mistaking him for Brendan Fraser.

not sure why this was worth reviving

-what the EMT will probably say after I go into cardiac arrest