21st Century Feminists Suck

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.

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