When women’s experience is made intelligible in the communications of consciousness raising we can recognize that it is in the structures of men’s stories of the world that women don’t make sense — that our own experience, collectively and jointly appreciated, can generate a picture of ourselves and the world within which we are intelligible.
-Women, Knowledge and Reality, Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall
When it comes to language, I am something of a conservative. There is little that annoys me more than the propagation of ugly, obtuse and unintelligible writing. This is one of the reasons I admire Orwell, who vigorously protested the degeneration of the English language in essays and books, most notably 1984.
Feminists, for their part, often appear to have taken it upon themselves to wage war on the English language. The style and language they use, which employs a number of neologisms and, dare I say, “neosemanticisms,” could be described as having some attributes that mimic classical philosophy, but the effect is more what one might expect from a gang of axe-wielding orcs set loose upon an ancient, wooded grove.
Hallowed academe, once the keeper of the classics, has been invaded by a new form of literature; one that has metastasized throughout the stacks of libraries, shoving the beautiful old books full of clear, delightful prose to the margins. Here, I’d like to offer a few examples of what kind of text can be found in a typical humanities class in the 21st century, and leave it up to the reader to determine why boys and men are fleeing these institutions:
“The power of the Marxian critique of class domination stands as an implicit suggestion that feminists should consider the advantages of adopting a historical materialist approach to understanding phallocratic domination.”
–Nancy Hartsock in “The Feminist Standpoint”
This is the first sentence of Hartsock’s essay. The term “phallocratic domination” is a euphemism for patriarchal society, i.e. rule by men, which is the norm throughout most of the world. Hartsock reduces this to rule by penis. Both Hartsock and I live in Washington state, which is largely ruled by women. Our governor and two senators are female. How would feminists react if men were to call that a “vaginocracy?” Essentially, Hartsock is reducing men to their genitals, which is a very primitive slur. This is easy to do when one has a guaranteed position at a university, and contradicts her fundamental premise that penises rule.
Nancy Hartsock is a tenured professor of Political Science at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“The relation between ourselves as practicing sociologists and ourselves as working women is continually visible to us, a central feature of experience of the world, so that the bifurcation of consciousness becomes for us a daily chasm which is to be crossed, on the one side of which is this special conceptual activity of thought, research, teaching, administration, and on the other the world of concrete practical activities of keeping things clean, managing somehow the house and household and the children, a world in which the particularities of persons in their full organic immediacy (cleaning up the vomit, changing diapers, as well as feeding) are inescapable. Even if we don’t have that as a direct contingency in our lives, we are aware of that as something that our becoming may be inserted into as a possible predicate.”
–Dorothy E. Smith in “Women’s perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology”
Here, Dorothy Smith, who also published“Feminism and Marxism: a place to begin, a way to go”, expresses in convoluted terms her anger and frustration about how her maternal duties imposed upon the “conceptual activity” that she apparently cherished. In fact, her grief is shared by plenty of women who are not conceptually capable, and she is simply a more verbose (although far from eloquent, as the quote clearly demonstrates) example of the woman who just doesn’t want to be bothered by motherhood. Note how she uses “predicate” where she clearly intends “predicament.”
Dorothy Smith is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
One phenomenon feminist historians have focused on is the rape and torture metaphors in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and others (e.g. Machiavelli) enthusiastic about the new scientific method. Traditional historians and philosophers have said that these metaphors are irrelevant to the real meanings and referents of scientific concepts held by those who used them and by the public for whom they wrote. But when it comes to regarding nature as a machine, they have quite a different analysis: here, we are told, the metaphor provides the interpretations of Newton’s mathematical laws: it directs inquirers to fruitful ways to apply his theory and suggests the appropriate methods of inquiry and the kind of metaphyiscs the new theory supports. But if we are to believe that mechanistic metaphors were a fundamental component of the explanations the new science provided, why should we believe that the gender metaphors were not? A consistent analysis would lead to the conclusion that understanding nature as a woman indifferent to or even welcoming rape was equally fundamental to the interpretations of these new conceptions of nature and inquiry. Presumably these metaphors, too, had fruitful pragmatic, methodological, and metaphysical consequences for science. In that case, why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as “Newton’s rape manual” as it is to call them “Newton’s mechanics”?
–Sandra Harding in “The Science Question in Feminism”
The assault on men in this instance becomes so ridiculous as to accuse Sir Isaac Newton, a lifelong virgin, of surreptitiously writing a rape manual while publishing one of the most influential scientific works of all time. Keep in mind that this woman is a tenured professor at a public university, and actually gets paid taxpayer money to write these kinds of things. “Phallocracy” indeed!
Sandra Harding is currently a professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education at UCLA.
