Extracted from a letter I sent, I'd like to polish it eventually. Would love to hear feedback in the meantime:

Feminism (gender studies) is not an academic subject like others. It is not like chemistry or astronomy, nor even like philosophy or literary critique. Chemistry and astronomy have their principles that students must master to be able to correctly understand the processes of chemistry and the possibilities of astronomy. This follows the academic principle of using the power of human reason to inquire. Philosophy and literary critique and the like require an understanding of tools of reasoning, too, such as logic, argumentation, and reasonable grasping of historical and sociological principles to support logic and argumentation. At the end of the day, reason must be used, and better reason makes better arguments. This, again, is using the power of human reason to inquire. Feminism, on the other hand, sits down a bunch of 18 year olds and overwhelms them with emotional stories. There is no tool of human reason it uses, because any reasoning it employs is already tainted with a bias. i.e. "How does this relate to women?" Every "question" already has the coloring of an answer. An area of study like philosophy or sociology could use reason to come up with theories concerning women. But the discipline of gender studies already starts from the premise of its answers, i.e., assuming patriarchy, assuming heteronormativity as a biased norm. So, it prioritizes writing answers over asking questions. There is no subject matter in which it can ask questions without providing part of the answer within the question. Remember our friend's "Queering Literature" course in college? He basically watched a movie, and then interpreted the movie based on the principles of queer theory. Queer theory was not used to look rationally into anything. It can't be. It's not a logical tool. A logical tool could be used to inquire about queer theory but as it is presented (and, remember, to a late adolescent with little real-world experience to discern normal from not normal), queer theory is not inquired about, it is assumed, and it does not inquire, but re-frames. The class was simply an introduction to dogma, and then an exercise in re-writing according to the learned dogma. He re-wrote the meaning of "Neverending Story" as if it were about the AIDS epidemic. It wasn't even de-construction, which is semi-rational. It was re-construction. Propaganda. My epiphany about feminist/queer studies came when reading about this "educational" technique in use at Yale & Brown and other schools. Sorry, not an educational technique. A propaganda motivator:

http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=5028

Summary: Fifteen universities worldwide — including Yale University, Brown University, and Pennsylvania State University — will offer college credit to students who “write feminist thinking” into Wikipedia.

Now, as a "thing that universities do"... this really cannot be seen as rational inquiry. And even worse, it is not done within the confines of the university, where ideas are tossed about protected from the world, but is actually going out into the world. But it is worth credit within the university. It is believed that "education" has been attained, not by learning, but by spreading outside the university re-constructed truths. So, this is the side of the equation called propaganda. The counter-activity to propaganda is not competing propaganda, but silencing/shaming.

In the university environment, one does not counter "writing feminist thinking" into Wikipedia by "writing masculinist thinking" into Wikipedia. Anyone who sees that the practice is wrong, would not think to oppose it by doing the same thing in an opposite way. Rather, because the practice is inherently misguided, not reasoning-based, the opponent will come out against the practice altogether. As such, the feminists will say that he is silencing them. The feminists will say, "You are blocking my freedom of speech. You are silencing me!" It is a clever trick. In fact, the opposite is true. The accusation is the silencing. The trick was that freedom of speech is being misused. Freedom of speech is the air in which rational inquiry breathes, but freedom of speech itself is not the process of rational inquiry. When I oppose your doing something not rational, I am presenting a rational argument. But because you have no argument (not just that you're wrong, but you truly are not in the business of defending arguments), because your only argument is the spreading of ideas, not the use of reason to inquire into ideas, the fact that I oppose you on rational grounds, means that I am blocking everything that you have. So you have to tell me that I am wrong for opposing you, because, rationally, you have no points to defend, you have only to defend the fact that you spread ideas, and any opposition to that is deadly, thus freedom of speech, for you, is not the air in which you breathe ideas, it is the yardstick by which you measure your success. Since there is no debate of true and false, there is only how much room do these ideas take up? The more they take up, the more successful the ideas are. (As I think of this, it's really a sort of analogy to lebensraum: I have to take over your space because your occupation of that space violates my freedom to be in that space, which I need to live.) So, quite masterfully, the feminist education value of propaganda occupies the space of rational inquiry. People don't notice because it was not understood that feminism and the new disciplines were not rational inquiry to begin with. I would suspect that universities knew this in the 70's, and were troubled by it, but had to make space for it due to political pressure. Similarly, African American studies is not, strictly speaking, an academic discipline, a discipline of the mind. It is a space to consolidate ideas.

So, few professors now are left from the 70's who remember that these disciplines were an actual shift in the function of a university. Contemporaries in and out of academia assume that gender studies has, not just as much academic merit as other fields of study, but an equal basis in rational inquiry. As if knowing gender theory were as beneficial to the mind as knowing principles of logic. The equal basis in rational inquiry cannot be questioned, because these disciplines, by their essence, silence you for questioning them. The same cannot be said of engineering. The value of engineering can be questioned. And in fact, gender theorists have questioned much about the STEM fields, not because of the values within those fields, or based on any other rational inquiry, but because of their non-cooperation with feminist theory (i.e. gender ratio of participating students, not 50%--which has no relation to the value of the thing studied, it only means something in a feminist perspective).

Here is how the cycle works.

The more woman/gender studies has prestige, the more it is assumed to be true and rational. The more it is assumed to be true and rational, the more it is obliged to be applied to places were "falsehood" reigns. The more it is applied to replace "falsehoods", the more it is omnipresent and feel natural. Thus, to increase prestige, is to increase its omnipresence. So, the more work you do in building the prestige, the more omnipresent the ideas become, and the easier it is to build more prestige.

The imperative of prestige is satisfied by winning in politics. Without political support, these fields fail in academia because they provide none of the rational methods that are required for success in academia as fields of rational inquiry, which, if done correctly, provides its own rewards as the increase of the mind and the increase of truth in knowledge. Gender and ethnic theories cannot increase truth of ideas, they can only increase the spread of ideas, independent of truth. As a necessary side-effect, they must also silence (not disqualify, but silence) opposing ideas.

The spread of ideas and the silencing of opposing ideas, independent of truth, is the domain of propaganda, and is especially efficient in the goals of political marketing.

Now, that was a long introduction to support the way political techniques of propaganda and shaming arise in academia. Though, it can be seen, that it is in fact a cycle, because the very techniques that politics borrows from academia, are the ones that politics put into academia, by pressuring the institution of academic fields not based in rational inquiry.

Basically, politics fertilized academia with non-rational fields of study that relied upon political support, and over the decades, it is reaping an intellectual soil that yields more minds accustomed to propaganda than rational inquiry. And yet the propaganda mindsets are doubly potent, because wombed in academia, they still have the whiff of the free exchange of ideas and rational inquiry. And so, we have a climate where disagreement with the popular wisdom is automatically invalid. And "we must silence it, because their attempts to argue are attempts to silence us." And (delusionally) they call that having reason on their side.

TL;DR The basis of feminism as an academic discipline is rooted in politics, not rational inquiry. And thus, as a discipline, it can only spread ideas, not evaluate them.