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9/23/2015 7:55 pm  #1


Critiques of feminism

Hi everybody,
I have been looking for books that systematically attack or critique feminism. One book that I have and critiques feminism is Michael Levin's "Feminism and Freedom." Does anybody know any philosophical books, articles, essays, etc that critique feminism?

 

9/23/2015 11:51 pm  #2


Re: Critiques of feminism

It will depend what you mean by feminism, since feminism is not a unified body or position.

Also, to a certain extent, common coin feminism that you might see on Gawker or Jezebel is not philosophically interesting to refute both because it's clearly bad and also because it's laboring under a mere ideology, and usually the person writing is not reasoning through their position but merely using their ideological framework as clumsy tool to look at one issue or another (sometimes even falsifying things) for the sake of getting readers.

If you dial that sort of position up just a tad until you get to serious and semi-serious thinkers, you'll need to take a look at a core group of very flawed ideas. You should keep in mind that when you're looking at common coin feminism, you're looking at the operation of a set of totally fractured and dissociated Marxist ideas which have lost all mooring. A grounding in serious Marxism makes understanding a great deal of common feminist writing coming out of and derivative from things in Women's Studies departments much easier and also permits a leftist critique, since it's painfully obvious that this sort of feminism has no idea or remaining consciousness of actual economic and class disparity any longer, nor either any coherent goals or direction.

There are a number of concepts you'll need to know about and take apart. They are as follows:

Patriarchy - The reification fallacy made political. Feminists often simply assert that there is a vague force of male power that oppresses women (and much else) as a class. This is called "the patriarchy". Who is this? Which men? Every individual man? No one says. The problem is that what's being done is that an abstraction of actual power (which is often most publicly exercised by men) is made to take concrete and unified action against women as a whole in vague hard to identify ways. No evidence for this entity will ever be provided nor will any sensible approach to fighting it ever be given. All that will be given is examples (both real and fantastical) of particular men doing things disagreeable to the feminist writer who will then say "*See* we suffer under a patriarchy that all of us need to combat everywhere at all times. Stopping the particular men is not sufficient, as they will always be taken merely as instances (or rather agents since it is not permissible that "patriarchy" be a platonic entity) of the patriarchy which is over and above particular men.

False-consciousness/Internalised Misogyny - There is a notion that women who disagree with common feminist ideas about things have somehow become infected with a false ideology that distorts their vision of things. This is thought above merely having bad ideas, and requires not back and forth argumentation but, essentially, re-education. It amounts to an ideological shielding mechanism against outside experience, insofar as it denies the perception that, for instance, there are substantial and important sexual differences.

Violence/Male Oppression - A core idea in many common kinds of feminist thinking is that women are oppressed and aggressed against in all sorts of ways that are often (1) not usually considered violence or oppression and (2) not even obviously about women as a class.

A core example of 1 is any number of forms of what would usually be called crassness or rudeness. A man at a trade conference making crass sexual jokes is not merely considered an idiot, rather he is "oppressing" or aggressing against the women around him because they feel uncomfortable. His jokes will be said to "demean" or "lower" women and this will be understood in the most literal way possible, even though it's not clear how that's so. If I speak of a woman sexually in a crass way to my friends it is treated as if I have literally, somehow, made her and all women less powerful in some sense that is supposed to carry important normative force against me.

A recent example of 2 is, for instance, backlash against sex robots. Some feminist writers have taken the existence of robots that look like women designed for male sexual use to be a kind of oppression. Apart from being in no way obviously damaging to women in a politically relevant way, it's not even clear that such a thing is obviously even relevant to women as a class. They look like women and perhaps, replace (supplement more likely) women sexually from some small percentage of men. There is very little sense in thinking that this has any kind of bearing on any individual women, let alone their whole class.

Gender - Gender is, in various ways, treated as a unifying class. It is also treated, most usually, as not a natural kind. In feminism, femininity is generally treated as a constructed socio-political institution that all people with the right set of fleshy bits are oppressed into being whose purpose is the vastly unfair advantage of men, as a class. Feminists, in many different way, seem to change or free people from this construct in a way that will foster better lives and a certain notion of equality.

Equality - Equality in feminism is a complex notion, but it's generally important that it be realized that the sort of feminists I'm talking about do not usually mean "equality" in any traditionally liberal way. They do not mean, or merely mean, 'equality under the law, 'equality of opportunity', or even usually the lite notions of equality of public treatment and rank that are only mildly politically contentious. Feminists often actually mean something you might call equalization: the forced rearrangement of power in society such that women as a class are no longer in a position of "oppression". This may, itself, look very unequal under traditional notions of equality- going even so far as to demand things like 'the mandatory paying of women more money simply because they are women and irrespective of their productivity, in order to close a questionably interpreted difference in the gross earnings of men and women.'

Philosophical analysis of this kind of feminism is a useful inoculant against it, but it is not useful for discourse, since the people who you are arguing against refuse to think their position through or to hear objection. You are more likely to receive from feminist advocates rhetoric, distortion, and harassment than actual discourse when you try to look at anything said by them critically. Critics are the enemy, and they have nothing serious to say in reply.

Last edited by iwpoe (9/24/2015 12:01 am)


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

9/24/2015 5:44 am  #3


Re: Critiques of feminism

Mysterious Brony wrote:

Hi everybody,
I have been looking for books that systematically attack or critique feminism. One book that I have and critiques feminism is Michael Levin's "Feminism and Freedom." Does anybody know any philosophical books, articles, essays, etc that critique feminism?

Practically any pre-20th century ethical theory which considers its proscriptions universally valid? This is the main problem with modern feminism isn't it that instead of seeking for the most general categorical ethics valid for all human beings or even all persons it consciously aims to be the ethics of a privileged group.

Modern social ethics needs more Descartes, a lot more Descartes.

 

9/24/2015 6:53 am  #4


Re: Critiques of feminism

DanielCC wrote:

it consciously aims to be the ethics of a privileged group.

Not even this, much of the time (though it depends) their relativism is entirely unconscious. Many middle brow feminist thinkers of the quasi-Marxist second and third wave variety really think that they have got a hold of some normative core that's powering the gender-disparity in their positions- usually equality of some kind -that they are striving to attain. There's also a certain residue of the Marxist 'proletarian universal class' floating around in the gender fluidity segments of feminism: strange how the gender fluid people in question gravitate towards a feminine form.

Only the high post-moderns were clear and open relitivists, though they slip in and out.


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

9/25/2015 4:23 pm  #5


Re: Critiques of feminism

Yes, I noticed that the modern version of feminism presupposes some rehashed Marxism, social constructionism, and other postmodern ideas. Nevertheless, "old" feminism is more classically liberal even though the idea that gender is a social construction comes from one Mary Wollstonecraft's works. I also noticed a lot of "common coin" concepts in feminism are in other postmodernist theories such as multiculturalism or critical race theory (whiteness bad/multicolorness good), LGBT theories(straight bad/gay, lesbian, trans good), etc. 

     Thread Starter
 

9/25/2015 8:40 pm  #6


Re: Critiques of feminism

Mysterious Brony wrote:

Yes, I noticed that the modern version of feminism presupposes some rehashed Marxism, social constructionism, and other postmodern ideas. Nevertheless, "old" feminism is more classically liberal even though the idea that gender is a social construction comes from one Mary Wollstonecraft's works. I also noticed a lot of "common coin" concepts in feminism are in other postmodernist theories such as multiculturalism or critical race theory (whiteness bad/multicolorness good), LGBT theories(straight bad/gay, lesbian, trans good), etc. 

It's because late academic social sciences and humanities marxist critique is the common background to Gender Studies and African American studies departments. It's not merely floating around in there, as it might be in other Arts and Sciences departments, it's a foundational cornerstone- particularly the background Marxism cribbed from The Second Sex, Black Skin, White Masks, and the New Left movement and identity politics more generally. In my Old Left moments this theft is both obvious and painful, since I understand what they're doing and look in horror as I watch Marxist-flavor nihilists deny even the class structure and devolve further and further on points of mere socio-sexual discomfort. More effort in the last 35 years has been spent on matters of political correctness and labeling than has been spent on anything that a traditional Marxist would ever recognize as substantial political activity. Basically in the 50s we rediscovered what the romantics and the Christian tradition had known for many centuries: modern worldly life is suffering and lonely. Then it's as if someone came up with the bright idea that 'if you really highlight moments of particular discomfort and do everything in your political power to prevent those then you end suffering and alienation.'

Of course, since this kind of approach creates *further* suffering on the part of now hyper-sensitive "victims" and incredulous "oppressors" (even if the latter *want* to help), and leads to even further alienations between genders and races and thus further despair, the whole thing, even on its own terms is madness.

There is nothing philosophy can *fix* here. Zizek, in one of his better moments, really seems to think that all you can really do with philosophy in the face of this is pause, stop acting, and really take the time to think again, particularly to think thorough new and substantial change and a truly new world, since otherwise Cultural Leftism is nothing but a distraction and an uncashable cheque.

Postmodernism postdates all of this in its own way. It almost acts as a kind of cure if you can get out of the performance, since it insists on accelerating and continuous narrative criticisms and ideological pluralism, but no one breaks out the other side and gives up feminism on the basis of postmodern thinking, even though they should.


Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
 

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