Women's Studies??? I thought that would be parallel parking and balancing the checkbook...
What The Heck Happened to Feminism?
1. It is so difficult to discuss feminism, when keeping up with definitions of who is female is becoming a full time job. "Transgendered - an umbrella term that includes a wide range of identities and includes pre-operative, postoperative, and non-operative transsexual people. In its general sense, it refers to anyone whose behavior or identity falls outside of stereotypical expectations for their gender." http://handouts.aacrao.org/am08/finished/T0415p_K_Posey.pdf
2. But, for a moment, let's be quaint and pretend that 'anatomy is destiny,' and there are only males, and females. And the latter is the group to whom the term 'feminism' applies. Simply arguendo.
3. Gender studies departments are ubiquitous in colleges, but incorrectly named, as they are oriented toward only one gender. In fact, 'studying' the female experience and female sexuality, students explore the male experience and male sexuality, but from a feminist perspective. What this means, with few exceptions, is the interpretation of men's lives in line with the doctrine that men are, by definition, oppressors, warmongers, potential rapists, the beneficiaries of patriarchal social structures, and should be views through this negative feminist lens.
a. "Any expressed wish for a traditional career as a homemaker is quashed at a young age by a prevailing feminist mentality in schools and colleges. The resulting mental conflict often makes young women confused and angry."
Angry young women
Any wonder why many refer to the departments as "Angry Women's Studies"?
4. While Women's Studies was supposed to give a voice to 'silenced' women, those who dissent from its orthodoxy have themselves felt silenced by intolerant professors and even students, the fierce enforcers of dogma.
a. In "Professing Feminism," Patai and Koertge found the following with respect to women's studies.... "Students are being cheated. I feel really bad for them, because they're not being given an education. And you know, once they're in women's studies, it's like Stepford Wives. Women's studies turns them into ideologically inflamed Stepford Wives. I was always able to recognize it when these kids come, kind of zombified, and start uttering stock phrases. Politics is driving out their ability to think."
b. From the blurb of Katie Roiphe's "The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus":
"To Katie Roiphe, feminism had always meant freedom but as an undergraduate at Harvard and a graduate at Princeton, she was shocked to discover that the same movement that had once promised women a voice was now being used to tell them what they ought to say and think and feel."
5. The widespread antagonism toward male-identified traditions results in a slovenly approach to the whole business of teaching: a lack of preparedness, sloppily written syllabi, and so on. For many Women's Studies practitioners, the attempt is made to reject the entire edifice of civilization as a product of male culture. If Friedan and Greer encouraged women to charge boldly into formerly male-dominated fields, and to strive for excellence in competition with men, in Women's Studies today, the entire concept of merit is often viewed with suspicion as too masculinist, and as some sort of threat to harmony and self-esteem.
6. Can we mention the 'math problem'? Yes....many female students fall behind in math and science, but rather than encourage them to work harder, Women's Studies professors are likely to inform them that the problem lies not in their own shortcomings, but in the fields themselves. Math and science, they are told, are of limited value because these subjects are based on "male" ways of knowing, i.e., rationality, that ignores "female," or emotionally centered ways of understanding the world. We should beware, it seems, of strictly intellectual endeavors.
Bawer, "The Victim's Revolution"
a. "Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (Thinking Gender)" by Andrea Nye...." In a series of studies of the logics of historical figures--Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Abelard, Ockham, and Frege--she traces the changing interrelationships between logical innovation and oppressive speech strategies, showing that logic is not transcendent truth but abstract forms of language spoken by men, whether Greek ruling citizens, or scientists."
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Words-Power-Feminist-Reading-Thinking/dp/0415902002]Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (Thinking Gender): Andrea Nye: 9780415902007: Amazon.com: Books[/ame]
b. And this, from Nye's book, is what passes for learning in many Women's Studies courses: "Desperate, lonely, cut off from the human community which in many cases has ceased to exist, under the sentence of violent death, wracked by desires for intimacy that they do not know how to fulfill, at the same time tormented by the presence of women, men turn to logic."
What????
Separatism, gender superiority or inferiority.....is this how we wish to raise our daughters?
A reminder:In colleges and universities, programs, and departments of African-American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, Peace Studies, and LGBT (Lesbian/Gay/Bi-sexual/Transgender) Studies can all be traced to the ascendance of neo-Marxism, and the drumbeat attacks on Western civilization.
What The Heck Happened to Feminism?
1. It is so difficult to discuss feminism, when keeping up with definitions of who is female is becoming a full time job. "Transgendered - an umbrella term that includes a wide range of identities and includes pre-operative, postoperative, and non-operative transsexual people. In its general sense, it refers to anyone whose behavior or identity falls outside of stereotypical expectations for their gender." http://handouts.aacrao.org/am08/finished/T0415p_K_Posey.pdf
2. But, for a moment, let's be quaint and pretend that 'anatomy is destiny,' and there are only males, and females. And the latter is the group to whom the term 'feminism' applies. Simply arguendo.
3. Gender studies departments are ubiquitous in colleges, but incorrectly named, as they are oriented toward only one gender. In fact, 'studying' the female experience and female sexuality, students explore the male experience and male sexuality, but from a feminist perspective. What this means, with few exceptions, is the interpretation of men's lives in line with the doctrine that men are, by definition, oppressors, warmongers, potential rapists, the beneficiaries of patriarchal social structures, and should be views through this negative feminist lens.
a. "Any expressed wish for a traditional career as a homemaker is quashed at a young age by a prevailing feminist mentality in schools and colleges. The resulting mental conflict often makes young women confused and angry."
Angry young women
Any wonder why many refer to the departments as "Angry Women's Studies"?
4. While Women's Studies was supposed to give a voice to 'silenced' women, those who dissent from its orthodoxy have themselves felt silenced by intolerant professors and even students, the fierce enforcers of dogma.
a. In "Professing Feminism," Patai and Koertge found the following with respect to women's studies.... "Students are being cheated. I feel really bad for them, because they're not being given an education. And you know, once they're in women's studies, it's like Stepford Wives. Women's studies turns them into ideologically inflamed Stepford Wives. I was always able to recognize it when these kids come, kind of zombified, and start uttering stock phrases. Politics is driving out their ability to think."
b. From the blurb of Katie Roiphe's "The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus":
"To Katie Roiphe, feminism had always meant freedom but as an undergraduate at Harvard and a graduate at Princeton, she was shocked to discover that the same movement that had once promised women a voice was now being used to tell them what they ought to say and think and feel."
5. The widespread antagonism toward male-identified traditions results in a slovenly approach to the whole business of teaching: a lack of preparedness, sloppily written syllabi, and so on. For many Women's Studies practitioners, the attempt is made to reject the entire edifice of civilization as a product of male culture. If Friedan and Greer encouraged women to charge boldly into formerly male-dominated fields, and to strive for excellence in competition with men, in Women's Studies today, the entire concept of merit is often viewed with suspicion as too masculinist, and as some sort of threat to harmony and self-esteem.
6. Can we mention the 'math problem'? Yes....many female students fall behind in math and science, but rather than encourage them to work harder, Women's Studies professors are likely to inform them that the problem lies not in their own shortcomings, but in the fields themselves. Math and science, they are told, are of limited value because these subjects are based on "male" ways of knowing, i.e., rationality, that ignores "female," or emotionally centered ways of understanding the world. We should beware, it seems, of strictly intellectual endeavors.
Bawer, "The Victim's Revolution"
a. "Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (Thinking Gender)" by Andrea Nye...." In a series of studies of the logics of historical figures--Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Abelard, Ockham, and Frege--she traces the changing interrelationships between logical innovation and oppressive speech strategies, showing that logic is not transcendent truth but abstract forms of language spoken by men, whether Greek ruling citizens, or scientists."
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Words-Power-Feminist-Reading-Thinking/dp/0415902002]Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic (Thinking Gender): Andrea Nye: 9780415902007: Amazon.com: Books[/ame]
b. And this, from Nye's book, is what passes for learning in many Women's Studies courses: "Desperate, lonely, cut off from the human community which in many cases has ceased to exist, under the sentence of violent death, wracked by desires for intimacy that they do not know how to fulfill, at the same time tormented by the presence of women, men turn to logic."
What????
Separatism, gender superiority or inferiority.....is this how we wish to raise our daughters?
A reminder:In colleges and universities, programs, and departments of African-American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, Peace Studies, and LGBT (Lesbian/Gay/Bi-sexual/Transgender) Studies can all be traced to the ascendance of neo-Marxism, and the drumbeat attacks on Western civilization.
