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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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 Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 5:52 pm Post subject: Hoff Sommers and Gender Feminism |
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Hoff Sommers Sparks Lively Discussion
by Gary James �10
April 18, 2008
Feminist critic Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers sparked a lively discussion about the effects of gender feminism on young men Thursday night in Baxter 101.
Dr. Sommers� lecture was based on her 2000 book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men, in which she utilizes extensive social data to challenge the notion of the shortchanged female and the emotionally repressed male. Her talk Thursday focused primarily on what Sommers described as the hypocrisy and false information perpetuated by some gender feminists.
"As I was writing my book, all I heard about was how girls were shortchanged victims and were falling behind," said Dr. Sommers, who described herself as an equity feminist. "The area where I found the most egregiously false record of information was about education. I was reading that girls were victims, but I saw girls were dominant, not just in going to college more: they were winning all the awards. They were the valedictorians. They were getting the best grades. There was one area where you find more boys than girls: sports. Boys are falling farther and farther behind and girls are flourishing."
Dr. Sommers is a Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was a Professor of Philosophy at Clark University for 13 years. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism?, The War Against Boys, and One Nation Under Therapy. She has been published in a variety of journals, including The Journal of Philosophy and The Wall Street Journal. She has also appeared on programs like Oprah and The Daily Show. Her talk was sponsored by The Wabash Conservative Union in collaboration with the Young America�s Foundation.
http://www.wabash.edu/news/displaystory.cfm?news_ID=5829 |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 6:06 pm Post subject: |
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| As I was writing my book, all I heard about was how girls were shortchanged victims... |
It is an entirely unimaginative, bureaucratic, check-list mentality that has created this, Manner. Gender, class, and race. Class, race, and gender. And race, gender, and class. Reimagine the othered class; deconstruct the gendered race. Dazzle us with theoretical jiujitsu. And round up the usual suspects (i.e., whites, especially men, corporations, and "the state," and all forms of govt). Become angry and outraged when you talk about it.
Then write the history of single-mothering, working-class, black women, or better yet: Native Americans, and then denounce society as hopelessly oppressive and evil, a glass that was deliberately made to be half-empty by people driven by greed and malice.
And there you have the contemporary feminists' perspective on the world. How Sommers survives in such an environment is hard to explain, even if it is encouraging. |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 12:58 am Post subject: |
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I know.
Whaddaya gonna do.  |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 1:17 am Post subject: |
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| Find out who they are and avoid their seminars. Do not cede any power over your grade and/or career to them unless you wholly subscribe to their worldviews. They are as tyrannical and suppressive as they come. They will practice a very positive form of affirmative action, too. If you are a white male you start off with severe disadvantages with respect to any other student in the room, intelligence and discipline notwithstanding. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 7:27 am Post subject: |
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Finally, something we can all agree on: the conspiracy against men by gender feminists.
I wonder what they'd think of Korea Sparkling.
Last edited by bacasper on Sun Apr 27, 2008 7:56 am; edited 2 times in total |
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stillnotking
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Location: Oregon, USA
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| Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 7:29 am Post subject: |
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Gender feminism is a load of absolute bollocks, and believe it or not, this fact is gaining wide recognition in academia. The publication of Thornhill & Palmer's A Natural History of Rape had a great deal to do with the shift. (They exploded the gender-feminist theory that rape is a tool to keep women in line.)
Gender feminism is like religious creation myth. It sounds vaguely plausible until you actually start to study human nature, then you realize how ridiculous it all is. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 4:39 pm Post subject: |
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| stillnotking wrote: |
Gender feminism is a load of absolute bollocks, and believe it or not, this fact is gaining wide recognition in academia. The publication of Thornhill & Palmer's A Natural History of Rape had a great deal to do with the shift. (They exploded the gender-feminist theory that rape is a tool to keep women in line.)
Gender feminism is like religious creation myth. It sounds vaguely plausible until you actually start to study human nature, then you realize how ridiculous it all is. |
That book has had a lot of criticism - I tried to find one of the better peices that explored its shortcomings but (short on time) I only found this from Amazon:
| Quote: |
Amazon.com
Evolutionary psychology often stomps where other branches of science fear to tread. Case in point: A Natural History of Rape. Randy Thornhill, a biologist, and Craig T. Palmer, an anthropologist, have attempted to apply evolutionary principles to one of the most disgusting of human behaviors, and the result is a guaranteed storm of media hype and debate. The book's central argument is that rape is a genetically developed strategy sustained over generations of human life because it is a kind of sexual selection--a successful reproductive strategy. This runs directly counter to the prevailing notion--that rape is predominantly about violent power, and only secondarily about sex.
The authors base their argument partly on statistics showing that in the United States, most rape victims are of childbearing age. But disturbingly large numbers of rapes of children, elderly women, and other men are never adequately explained. And the actual reproductive success of rape is not clear. Thornhill and Palmer's biological interpretation is just that--an interpretation, one that won't withstand tough scientific scrutiny. They further claim that the mental trauma of rape is greater for women of childbearing age (especially married women) than it is for elderly women or children. The data supporting these assertions come from a single psychological study, done by Thornhill in the 1970s, that mixes first-person interviews with caretaker's interpretations of children's reactions.
While Thornhill and Palmer claim that they are trying to look objectively at the root causes of rape, they focus almost entirely on data that support their thesis, forcing them to write an evolutionary "just-so" story. The central problem is evident in this quote, from the chapter "The Pain and Anguish of Rape":
We feel that the woman's perspective on rape can be best understood by considering the negative influences of rape on female reproductive success.... It is also highly possible that selection favored the outward manifestations of psychological pain because it communicated the female's strong negative attitude about the rapist to her husband and/or her relatives.
Women are disturbed by rape mostly because they are worried about what their husbands might think? In statements like this, the authors repeatedly discount the psychological aspects of rape, such as fear, humiliation, loss of autonomy, and powerlessness, and focus solely on personal shame.
A Natural History of Rape will no doubt have people talking about rape and its causes, and perhaps thinking about real ways of preventing it. In fact, the authors suggest that all young men be educated frankly about their (theoretical) genetic desire to rape. And it reopens the debate about the role of sex in rape. But without more and better data supporting their conclusions, Thornhill and Palmer are doing the very thing they criticize feminists and social scientists of doing: just talking. --Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly
Can we get rid of rape? If not, how can we reduce it? Biologist Thornhill (University of New Mexico) and anthropologist Palmer (University of Colorado) contend in this already highly controversial book that prevailing explanations of why men rape and how we can prevent them rely on wrong, dangerous and outmoded dogma. The right explanations for rape, they contend, as for all other human behavior, rely on Darwinian models of natural selection. Rapists want sex, they say. Rape, or the drive to rape, is an adaptation: some of our ancestors increased their reproductive success by mating with unwilling partners, and the brain-wiring that led them to do so got passed on to their male descendants. Women, meanwhile, have evolved adaptations against rape, and against getting pregnant if they are raped. What we call rape happens in most if not all cultures; nonhuman primates rape, too. Among the policy consequences if Thornhill and Palmer are to be believed: teenage boys should be educated to acknowledge and control their lust, and young women should show less skin and be chaperoned more. Using surveys of rapists and victims, and analogies from the animal kingdom, the authors make provocative claims about specific motives for rape, specific reactions to it and ways to test their hypotheses. One study suggests that young women become more risk-averse "in the follicular (fertile) phase of their menstrual cycles"--unless they are taking birth-control pills, in which case menstrual phase and risk-aversion won't correlate. This suggests a real anti-rape adaptation. But Thornhill also claims his own research has shown that rape victims of reproductive age (12-45) feel worse afterward than older and younger victims. One wonders how he measured young girls' or older women's pain. (Apr.)
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http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Rape-Biological-Coercion/dp/0262201259
I've never heard that rape was soley devised to keep women in line - but it certainly is used to keep women in line in some circumstances. Rural Pakistan comes to mind.
Anyway, some of the problems with the book are that they don't really look at how successful rape is as a method of reproduction. How many pregnancies take after a single rape? After the trauma of rape would a women really do her best to care for the new life in her? I would want to abort it, frankly. Short of that, I would probably not eat properly and be in poor mental (and then) physical condition which would not be good for the child. I imagine that the incidence of miscarriage might be higher than average for rape victims. All that stress can not be good for the foetus. And could you properly love a child that was borne of rape? I think a lot of women might detest their child and abandon him/her, or at least severly neglect the child. Some woman (so f**ked in the head by the memory of the rape) might punish their offspring in some way, for the sins of the father. Well, some of the latter concerns assume that the human female understands the correlation between the rape and the pregnancy - but even so, the trauma of the rape would not be very conjuicive to a happy healthy pregnancy.
The most succesful way of ensuring the continuation of his DNA is for a man to get a woman to fall for him and be in a committed partnership with him. That way he has regular sexual access to her, and is far more likely to successfully impregnate her, and he can also protect and guard the vehicle of his DNA (her) - helping to keep her healthy and happy so that she carries the baby successfully - and then sticks around a while to protect his child while he/she is still extremely helpless. Raping seems the desperate loser's way of trying to produce offspring. Moreover, it's not so good for the species if the female isn't able to select the best mates to fertilise her eggs and has to accept any old rubbish that comes her way.
And how about all this raping of elderly women and 6 year old boys? The book doesn't adequately explain why so many men fantasise about or engage in rape of people who can not possibly be used as a vehicle for their DNA. Nor do they explain why so many rapists enjoy causing so much pain and humiliation to their victim - how will this assist in carrying on their DNA?
My other problem with their book is that if rape is such an excellent way to reproduce, why aren't all men rapists? Perhaps I'm very naive, and all the male posters on this forum are daily and desperately controlling their urges to rape in order to remain good citizens, but I find it hard to believe. It seems to me that only a minority of men have the urge to rape, and most men would feel great aversion to intercourse with an unwilling woman. If a thousand rapes happen in a town in one year - that's not one thousand rapists at work. Some of those rapes will be committed by the same perpetrators. Most men do not rape. |
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stillnotking
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Location: Oregon, USA
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| Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 7:26 pm Post subject: |
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This is a good post and I want to come back to it when I have more time, but let me address this quickly:
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| My other problem with their book is that if rape is such an excellent way to reproduce, why aren't all men rapists? Perhaps I'm very naive, and all the male posters on this forum are daily and desperately controlling their urges to rape in order to remain good citizens, but I find it hard to believe. It seems to me that only a minority of men have the urge to rape, and most men would feel great aversion to intercourse with an unwilling woman. If a thousand rapes happen in a town in one year - that's not one thousand rapists at work. Some of those rapes will be committed by the same perpetrators. Most men do not rape. |
T&P make it clear that rape is a reproductive strategy of last resort. You're absolutely correct that being in a committed relationship is the best way to reproduce, but that's not always an option -- and the incidence of rape is by far the highest in precisely the circumstances where it isn't an option. (For example: in wartime, or when the man in question is socially or economically marginalized.)
I also wanted to mention that many of evo psych's critics, including some of the ones you cite, make a fundamental error of understanding, typified by this passage:
| Quote: |
| Women are disturbed by rape mostly because they are worried about what their husbands might think? |
Of course not, just as we don't enjoy sweets because we think "You know, I could use some complex carbohydrates right now". The question is why are sweet things sweet? Why is rape traumatic? (Or more to the point, why is rape more traumatic than getting hit on the head?) Natural selection shaped our tastes and inclinations; the job of science is to figure out how and why. |
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bacasper
Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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| Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 10:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Big_Bird wrote: |
| The most succesful way of ensuring the continuation of his DNA is for a man to get a woman to fall for him and be in a committed partnership with him. That way he has regular sexual access to her, and is far more likely to successfully impregnate her, and he can also protect and guard the vehicle of his DNA (her) - helping to keep her healthy and happy so that she carries the baby successfully - and then sticks around a while to protect his child while he/she is still extremely helpless. Raping seems the desperate loser's way of trying to produce offspring. Moreover, it's not so good for the species if the female isn't able to select the best mates to fertilise her eggs and has to accept any old rubbish that comes her way. |
The hypothesis you mention sounds like the converse of the best female reproductive strategy, i.e. attract a strong male and keep him around throughout pregnancy and childbearing.
For the male, this hypothesis is in competition with another which states that the best reproductive strategy for the male is to inseminate as many females of reproductive age that he can. Sperm is plentiful enough that he could simultaneously have several females carrying his DNA. Even if he cannot provide for all of them, more are likely to survive than the single product of a monogamous relationship.
| Big_Bird wrote: |
| And how about all this raping of elderly women and 6 year old boys? The book doesn't adequately explain why so many men fantasise about or engage in rape of people who can not possibly be used as a vehicle for their DNA. Nor do they explain why so many rapists enjoy causing so much pain and humiliation to their victim - how will this assist in carrying on their DNA? |
Not sure what you mean by "all this," because such cases are relatively rare. In any event, they can be explained by paraphilia, specifically in the cases you mention, gerontophilia and pedophilia.
Also unexplained by this theory is an explanation for homosexuality. One alternative has it as a natural valve on overpopulation, but I am not aware of this hypothesis being tested. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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Actually, the best strategy for the male is to have a long term mate and screw around behind her back. But I'm not interested in getting into the ins and outs of that.
I haven't got time to write much now - but we are discussing what rape is all about. Rape is (these days) considered to be primarily an act of violence and power, the sexual aspect of it being secondary. A poster mentioned a book which he thinks demonstrates that rape is mostly about reproduction. I'll get back onto that later - when I have time. |
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stillnotking
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Location: Oregon, USA
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| Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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OK... I wanted to come back and defend Thornhill & Palmer a bit more.
| Quote: |
| The authors base their argument partly on statistics showing that in the United States, most rape victims are of childbearing age. But disturbingly large numbers of rapes of children, elderly women, and other men are never adequately explained. And the actual reproductive success of rape is not clear. |
That's a pretty dramatic shortchanging of the T&P argument. Their evidence is basically as follows:
1. Rapists are mostly young men who are not in a position to have long-term relationships, either because they are undesirable to women or because there are few opportunities for consensual sex.
2. Rape victims are mostly women of childbearing age, i.e. women that would be sexually attractive to the average man.
3. Rapists are much less likely than perpetrators of other violent crimes to inflict death or serious physical harm.
4. Women's aversion to being raped is disproportionate to the physical trauma; the trauma of rape is primarily emotional and is distinct from other kinds of violent injury.
5. Shame often attaches to the victim of rape as well as the perpetrator.
Now, focusing on 1 and 2 for the moment, what does this tell us? It tells us that rapists choose their victims along the same lines that non-rapists choose voluntary sex partners, and that men are most likely to rape when voluntary sex is not feasible. This is the death knell for the gender-feminist theory of rape, which is essentially that men use rape as a tool of control. If men raped in order to control, why would they mostly rape young, attractive women rather than older ones, who are more likely to be in a position of social influence? Why wouldn't rapists be powerful, established men, rather than the socially marginalized (or grunts in enemy territory, or in situations where access to women is limited)?
The gender-feminist theory predicts exactly the opposite of the actual data on these points. T&P are simply pointing out that men rape for the same reason they seek out consensual sex partners, and using most of the same criteria. What's amazing is that this contention is controversial at all. Of course young, attractive women are at the greatest risk for rape. Of course rapists tend to be men who aren't likely to obtain consent from a woman. These things are common sense. But they aren't gender feminism.
The reasons for 3-5 are less obvious, but T&P argue that they follow logically from the idea that rape is a biological adaptation, a reproductive strategy of last resort. If rape even occasionally results in conception, then by the logic of natural selection, certain things should be true: men should experience an urge to rape when consensual sex is not feasible; rapists should have an interest in keeping their victims alive to bear the child; women should feel an aversion to being raped that is out of proportion to the immediate physical trauma (because the rape may result in an unwanted pregnancy); and other men should feel averse to rape victims, just as they do to female adulterers, because the man runs the risk of raising another man's child as his own.
Evolutionary psychology explains these odd facts about rape very elegantly. Gender feminism really can't explain them at all. If rape is a tool of social control, why is it more emotionally traumatic than beating? Why don't rapists more often resort to murder, the ultimate means of control? And why would other men look askance at a rape victim, once she's been "put in her place"? If rape makes women pliable, domineering men should prefer rape victims as spouses, but in fact -- and this is especially noticeable in traditional societies -- the exact opposite is true. In extreme cases, a woman may be liable for "honor killing" by her husband or family if she is raped.
I will grant that T&P's policy prescriptions are a little ivory-tower-ish, and they've been justly criticized on that score. But that's not the meat of their thesis. They've diagnosed the problem accurately; the solutions are up to society to figure out.
By the way, the idea that a biological explanation of rape somehow "excuses" men who rape, or makes all men "potential rapists", is absurd. Men are only "potential rapists" in the same sense that they are potential thieves and murderers -- and their potential to be loving, stable spouses is obviously much greater than their potential to rape. Biology may be a reason, but it can never be an excuse. If anything, the temptation of men to rape invites the imposition of greater social and criminal sanction, not less. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 10:23 pm Post subject: |
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| It's very interesting, and I haven't had a chance to read your latest post fully SNK, but the 5 reasons you give initially are just not compelling (to me) for reasons I will outline later. I'm busy as hell right now, but I'll come back to this thread in a couple of days. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 10:39 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
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| As I was writing my book, all I heard about was how girls were shortchanged victims... |
It is an entirely unimaginative, bureaucratic, check-list mentality that has created this, Manner. Gender, class, and race. Class, race, and gender. And race, gender, and class. Reimagine the othered class; deconstruct the gendered race. Dazzle us with theoretical jiujitsu. And round up the usual suspects (i.e., whites, especially men, corporations, and "the state," and all forms of govt). Become angry and outraged when you talk about it.
Then write the history of single-mothering, working-class, black women, or better yet: Native Americans, and then denounce society as hopelessly oppressive and evil, a glass that was deliberately made to be half-empty by people driven by greed and malice.
And there you have the contemporary feminists' perspective on the world. How Sommers survives in such an environment is hard to explain, even if it is encouraging. |
I won an essay competition during university and was given the opportunity to present a paper to the faculty on the Botswanan pre-colonial political systems. During my presentation I used the word "he" to describe a common citizen. As in, the citizens are yadda yadda and he is less burdened yadda yadda". I was absolutely dressed down for 30 minutes by some woman from the UK for not using "she" or "they". No further comment on my paper was offered. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 11:09 pm Post subject: |
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I am sorry that audience did not address your paper's content. I have been advised to "read" the room and its mood and then strictly stay within and conform to its confines in such situations. So much for free speech.
By the way, allow me to quote from the editorial guidelines of an encyclopedia I have contributed to for a year or so. I am sure you will appreciate it...
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| He [sic!] who says "man" or "mankind" when writing about humans will bear the wrath of a seasoned feminist. Please use "humankind," "humanity," "people," or whatever gender-neutral term you can devise unless you are specifically discussing males. |
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Czarjorge
Joined: 01 May 2007
Location: I now have the same moustache, and it is glorious.
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| Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:10 am Post subject: |
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I really like girls.
And I honestly think they can do anything I can do given that they have the potential to be as awesome as I am.
Gender is irrelevant.
Ultimately, you determine your own fate. |
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