21st Century Feminists Suck

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.

P
A
R
S L A V E S
D
I
C
E

+

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.