#feminist language reform

[lilacsupernova]

Feminism

Feminism has fought no wars.

It has killed no opponents.

It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practised no cruelties.

Its battles have been for education, the vote, for better working conditions,

for safety in the streets, for child care, for social welfare, for rape crisis centres, women's refuges, reforms in the law.

If someone says, "Oh, I'm not a feminist,"

I ask, "Why? What's your problem?"

– Dale Spender: Man Made Language

[haggishlyhagging]

When I started looking at feminist efforts at the end of the nineteenth century, I knew that women had been involved in work against prostitution because there has been some feminist historical work on the Contagious Diseases Acts. What astonished me about these feminists was that the language they were using was so fiercely feminist. They described men's use of women in prostitution as an abuse of women, as dividing what they called the class of women, and putting aside one half of that class simply for men to use for their own purposes. I was surprised by the strength of the language that was used and the way in which these writers were very directly pointing out men's abuse of women in prostitution, and targeting men directly in everything they said.

I went on to discover something I had no knowledge of and about which there was virtually no information in secondary sources: there was a fifty-year campaign by those women against the sexual abuse of children. This started out of the struggle against prostitution, and it centered at first on raising the age of consent for girls so that young girls could not be used in prostitution. There wasn't a law against men using women in prostitution, but age of consent laws would have removed young girls from men's reach. That campaign culminated in the raising of the age of consent for sexual intercourse in Britain to 16 in 1885, and for indecent assault to 16 in 1922. It took fifty years.

Feminists were not simply trying to raise the age of consent. They were fighting incest, pointing out that incest was a crime of the patriarchal family, of men against women, and that sexual abuse of children was a crime carried out by men of all classes. They were fighting for women jurors, magistrates, women police to look after victims, fighting for all kinds of reforms that I thought had been invented by this wave of feminism. They were involved in setting up shelters for women escaping prostitution, something that is happening again in this wave of feminism.

I was enormously impressed by these feminists. In fact, I sat in the Fawcett Library in London getting terribly excited and wanting to tell everybody what I was finding out. Feminist theorists like Elisabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and Frances Swiney were writing at this time about sexuality. We haven't had access to their work because it hasn't been taken seriously. Where they are written about at all in history books, they are simply called prudes and puritans and their ideas are seen as retrogressive. What these women were arguing was that the sexual subordination of women—men's appropriation of women's bodies for their use—lay at the foundation of the oppression of women.

Interestingly, these two women, Swiney and Elmy, made clear their opposition to the practice of sexual intercourse. This practice has become so sacred that it is almost impossible to imagine any serious challenge being made to it. What we have seen in the last hundred years is the total and compulsory enforcement of that sexual practice upon women so that women are allowed absolutely no outlet or escape from it.

But at the end of the nineteenth century there were feminists who were prepared to challenge intercourse. They were prepared to say, for instance, that it was dangerous for women's health; that it led to unwanted pregnancies or forced women to use forms of technology, contraception, that reduced them simply to objects for men's use; that it humiliated women and made them into things. Feminists pointed out that sexual diseases transmitted through sexual intercourse were dangerous to women's lives. They felt sexual intercourse to be a humiliating practice because it showed men's dominance more obviously than anything else. They believed that this practice should take place only for the purposes of reproduction, maybe every three or four years. I know these are ideas which if you voiced them today would make people think that you had taken leave of your senses. But these were ideas that were absolutely mainstream; they were being put forward by respectably married women, one married to a general.

These women were campaigning fundamentally for a woman's right to control her own body and to control access to her own body. The integrity of a woman's own body was the basic plank of their campaign.

-Sheila Jeffreys, “Sexology and Antifeminism” in The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism

[all-seeing-ifer]

Aromanticism in Academia

Since it's currently Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week and I'm currently in the middle of a master's research project about aromanticism and asexuality, I figured I'd contribute by putting together a list of some books and other academic sources I've read so far that deal with aromanticism! There's very little written about aromanticism in academia, so I think it's important to spotlight what we do have.

DISCLAIMER BEFORE THE LIST: Due to the lack of discussion of aromanticism specifically in academia, most of what I've found are texts that are primarily about asexuality but also discuss aromanticism. It's unfortunate, but it is also where we're kind of at right now in terms of academia, so bear that in mind.

Books:

Ace Voices: What it means to be asexual, aromantic, demi, or grey-ace by Eris Young - Definitely has the most focus on aromanticism of everything that I've read so far, this book draws from a combination of the author's personal experiences and interviews with other members of the a-spec community, including aroace and alloaro people. A good source of discussion of aro issues and how they interact with things like gender stereotypes. Also notable for its discussion of QPRs, a topic which I find has generally been ignored in academia about a-spec identities.

Ace: What Asexuality reveals about desire, society, and the meaning of sex by Angela Chen - Primarily deals with asexuality, as the title suggests, but also contains some relevant discussions of aromanticism, including the experiences of aroallo people. If you're going to check out the book, I would especially recommending looking at chapter 7: Romance, Reconsidered, which features most of the discussion of aromanticism and non-normative relationships

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J Brown - Again, asexuality is the main focus here, but I would still recommend checking out this book as it does still contain some useful discussion of aromanticism, particularly an extended critique of "singlism" (i.e. discrimination of single people) and how it is weaponised against aros. I also find Brown's criticism of the dehumanisation of aromanticism in media to be very compelling!

Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law - I would be remiss not to mention Brake's work here. While Minimizing Marriage is not specificallly about aromanticism and deals with marriage reform and the concept of amatonormativity more broadly, I think it's fair to say that many of Brake's ideas (particularly her coining of amatonormativity as a term) have become vital to the aro community and aro activism in recent years. Definitely a must-read for anyone interested in deconstructing amatonormativity and in contemporary critiques of marriage as an institution, though it's worth noting that this is a work of moral/political philosophy first and foremost, and as such it gets very into the weeds of things. Available on the Internet Archive here

Academic Articles/Essays (all can be found in the collection Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives):

"Why didn't you tell me that I love you?": Asexuality, Polymorphous Perversity, and the Liberation of the Cinematic Clown by Andrew Grossman - A really interesting and engaging analysis of the archetype of the silent film clown, and how it can be read as an a-spec figure. While Grossman uses the language of asexuality, his analysis makes it clear that he is looking at the clown as both an asexual AND aromantic character.

On the Racialization of Asexuality by Ianna Hawkins Owen - A personal favourite of mine. I think many parts of this essay will be very relevant to aromantic people, particularly Owen's investigation of how romantic love came to be pedastalised and her critique of attempts to normalise asexuality by distancing it from aromanticism.

Mismeasures of Asexual Desires by Jacinthe Flore - A critique of the pathologisation of asexuality that also discusses how aromanticism challenges common discourses around intimate relationships

Finally, I would like to mention the work of Bella DePaulo, who has written extensively about singlism and compulsory coupling, and who Brown uses extensively as a source in their writing on aromanticism. I didn't want to make this part of the main list because I haven't yet had a chance to get stuck into DePaulo's work, but based on Brown's mentions of her work I believe she has some very interesting ideas that are very relevant to aro people.

As you can probably tell, the list of academic sources dealing with aromanticism and aro issues is very limited. However, while aromanticism is vastly underdiscussed in an academic context, I'd like to point out that this is also only what I've been able to find so far. If anyone has any other recommendations please do add them to this post - I for one would love to hear about them!

[bookstribepost]

"Feminism has fought no wars. It has killed no opponents. It has set up no concentration camps, starved no enemies, practiced no cruelties. Its battles have been for education, for the vote, for better working conditions, for safety in the streets, for child care, for social welfare, for rape crisis centres, women's refuges, reforms in the law. If someone says, 'Oh, I'm not a feminist', I ask, 'Why? What's your problem?' "

- Dale Spender, Man Made Language

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jun 4, 2024

Here we go again. The culture war is apparently nothing more than a myth, a fabrication intended to distract the lower orders. It’s like the “bread and circuses” of Ancient Rome, or the Easter Bunny, or Milli Vanilli.

On this week’s episode of Newsnight, the former Tory MP Dehenna Davison was asked whether she welcomed Kemi Badenoch’s recent attempts to clarify the Equality Act in order to ensure that women’s rights to single-sex spaces are protected. “I don’t at all,” she said. “I think regrettably the debate around trans issues right now seems to be used as some kind of political football for this mythical culture war that the Conservative party seems to be fighting.”

That’s a relief. So the disabled women who are smeared as bigots for requesting female carers are simply fantasists? And the female prisoners who are terrified of being accommodated with convicted rapists are just worrying over nothing? And victims of sexual assault being turned away from rape crisis centres because they don’t want to speak to a male counsellor have just imagined the whole thing?

Apparently, yes. Here’s what the Tory Reform Group had to say in a post on X:

“The Conservative Party has to think very carefully about the type of campaign it wants to run, and the longer term impact of stoking culture wars. It is clear that voters are rejecting the politics of division. We must not run on ‘wedge issues’ for a narrow core voter base alone.”

I remain unconvinced that the rights of 51% of the population qualifies as a “wedge issue”.

Of course the culture war doesn’t end with the ongoing erosion of women’s rights. Gay people are being shamed for being attracted to their own sex by the very organisations who were set up to protect their interests. We have men demanding access to lesbian dating apps and speed-dating events. We’ve had gay youth medicalised on the NHS for being same-sex attracted. We have the bullying and harassment of gay men and lesbians in the name of “progress”. And yet in her Newsnight interview, Davison claims that same-sex marriage is one of the Conservative government’s “proudest achievements” while in the same breath dismissing these attacks on gay rights as trivial.  

And what about the ongoing assault on free speech? What of those activists who demand that we should be prosecuted if we do not adopt their language (something that is actually happening in Canada and is likely to come to Ireland with the proposed new “hate speech” laws)? And what about campaigners who now leverage huge influence in all our major institutions attempting to rewrite our history, remove statues and monuments that they find “problematic”, censor books, and criminalise dissent? What about the ideologues in schools who are teaching highly contested theories as fact, from Critical Race Theory via Brighton School Council’s “anti-racist schools strategy” to this week’s revelation that 95% of Scottish schools are allowing pupils to self-identify their gender?

At this point, it’s difficult to believe that anyone genuinely believes that the culture war is “mythical”. There is an abundance of evidence of the antics of culture warriors who seek to reconstruct all the fundamental aspects of our society in order to better align with their ideology. I do make a point of assuming that people are telling the truth, and so the charitable explanation is that Davison and her ilk are simply ignorant of some of the most significant cultural developments over the past decade, from the fallout of the Black Lives Matter protests to the Scottish hate crime bill to the campaigns of harassment against gender-critical feminists. Perhaps she doesn’t read the newspapers. If only someone had written a book that provides a wide-ranging overview of the countless examples of how culture warriors have sought to reshape the world. Oh well…

Of course Davison is not the only political commentator to imply that the rights of women and gay people simply don’t matter. Former Labour strategist Alastair Campbell was quick to jump on to X to offer his contribution:

“I’m sure the world of trade and business will take note that the actual Secretary of State for trade and business has decided that the biggest issue on her agenda on her first big election outing is the weaponisation of trans rights. Anyone might be tempted to think Kemi Badenoch has less interest in the general election than the internal ideological shitshow likely to follow.”

As J. K. Rowling pointed out, Campbell seems to be unaware that Badenoch is also the minister for women and equalities, and so it’s hardly a stretch to suppose that women’s rights and the Equality Act fall within her remit. As Rowling put it: “Thanks once again for highlighting Labour’s complacency and indifference towards the rights of half the electorate.”

The culture war is often misunderstood as a matter of Right vs Left, but the ill-informed comments of Davison and Campbell show that it’s nothing of the kind. As I have pointed out many times, the Conservatives have presided over the worst excesses of the culture war during their time in office. We shouldn’t give them a free pass simply because matters are likely to get a whole lot worse under Labour.

Far from being trivial, these issues could not be more important. If we can’t preserve the rights of women and gay people, how can we claim to be living in a civilised society? And when activists are successfully pressurising governments to force citizens to declare falsehoods, how can we in good conscience remain silent?

The claim that the culture was is a “distraction” is, in itself, a distraction. Yes, other issues are crucial and require our attention. But resisting the creeping authoritarianism of our times should also be a priority. When those in power are not only insisting that 2+2=5, but demanding that we all repeat the lie, we cannot afford to be complacent.

[godlovesdykes]

spoiler thoughts

hm. robin is a great character and i love that he sucks and takes the easy way out and doesn’t stick to his ideals (until he does). enjoyed him very much. his doppelgänger moments could have been played for more tension/horror. his parricide foreshadows him taking down the phallic structure of imperial power.

the other three have so little going on. until the bg chapters you don’t know who they are. ramy is the most fleshed out, and i appreciate killing him off because it gives the girls a chance to be characterized. before the hermes reveal, though, the main four and their relationships just feel like YA tropes. got to put in the found family and the hints of gay romance.

i did not like the treatment of letty. the idea of a white feminist liberal character is great, and her betrayal works well, but why is she hysterical and froufy and motivated by love for a man. she is the one female character who gets any personality before the last act and that personality is “sexist stereotype”. and ofc people are calling her a bitch in the tag.

and poor victoire has nothing at all until the end! i get that she’s ignored by letty, at least, and having letty not mention her once in her backstory chapter was poignant. but there is so much potential in her revealed in the VERY LAST CHAPTER. like sure, you can tell me that robin relies on her. but i don’t see it played out.

an excellent way to give the women more characterization would have been to examine their relationship to crossdressing. letty is coming from high society and victoire from indentured servitude. how does each of them feel about giving up her gender? why don’t they react when they have to cut their hair before canton? what does it mean for them to start wearing skirts again in their upper years? how does victoire feel being dolled up for the ball? having letty do her hair? what do they wear in summertime? what about the fact that 1830s men’s fashion has an hourglass waist? do they stay corseted?*

WHERE IS THE RELIGION. i appreciated ramy’s prayers and dietary restrictions, but i wanted more. how dows he feel about the christian worldview that would undoubtedly be taught even in translation and language classes? where is victoire’s folk catholicism? i want more religion in every book, but this would have been a great one for it. how was silver work affected by the septuagint? the vulgate? the reformation?

and finally: the footnotes. the footnote explaining griffin’s cohort was so unnecessary. write that into the story or leave it as a tragic loose end. don’t try to do both. the newspaper footnote about the bridge collapse, however, was very effective and made me gasp.

in summary, i suppose, i wanted a historical novel and didn’t get it. the era is simply a backdrop to the story. the plot is compelling, but the characters weak. i really enjoyed the final act, especially the barricades and solidarity with the strikers. i don’t have much to say on the anticolonial aspect that hasn’t already been said. would recommend, would not read again.

* please enjoy my favourite 1830s crossdressing images, both by gavarni:

[phantomnostalgist]

Progressive, feminist, leftism has become a regressive, misogynist, racist, hate movement

I know no one followed me for politics, but some things are more important than fandom, particularly with the increasingly dangerous violence and division being spread by social enforced conformity to thought terminating cliches that serve to reinforce dangerous ideologies - which the left sees only when we identify them in the right, yet perpetuate constantly ourselves.

And when - more likely if - you finally break through the propaganda, and realize how your compassion, your empathy, your trauma, your isolation, your autism have allowed your mind to be hacked, you may be entirely alone in your breakdown, in the shaking, sobbing, throwing up for weeks, barely able to eat or function.

So, think about what narratives you've been sold, perhaps for over a decade, about who is the oppressor, who does the violence unto whom, and how tricks of language can be used to entirely reverse that dynamic into one which allows victim blaming, harassment, and abuse of anyone you can be tricked into thinking is a bigot, for not using the approved language and not bowing to the bullying of people who make masses of money endlessly twisting the truth, distorting data, and telling you who to hate.

Of course, you'll have to break out of the algorithm, and be willing to listen to people who probably only appear on channels who talk to people with a wide range of views, and who, like all youtubers, use shock click-baity titles and thumbnails.

I mean, we're endlessly told to listen to victims, to women, to LGBT+ people and BIPOC people (a very American term, btw) - but only the ones who stick strictly to the approve script. Otherwise they're a bigot, a right-winger, a self-hating race traitor, a fascist, truscum, TERF, Zionist, Jew. More thought terminating cliches, designed to silence, ostracize, prevent any honest communication, or listening at all.

Waking up from this is scarring, soul breaking, terrifying, particularly when you've been a committed progressive for decades - or thought you were. No wonder it's easier to avoid taking accountability for falling for so much toxic nonsense, let alone spreading it - and monetizing it, in many cases - than to be willing to confront our own fallibility to propaganda designed to twist us into hate. Hating the people fighting for our safety, our protection, human rights, the right to claim our own language to define and describe our own oppression, and protect ourselves from violence.

But god forbid I name names, or link you to any resources. I really can't risk having my life destroyed by violently bigoted haters and misogynists. So all I can do is beg you to think on it, and truly, honestly, question who you've listened to, and who you've merely heard endlessly repeated narratives about. And try, please try, to wake up.

One book recommendation, if you want to understand how this kind of cult ideological thinking works: "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China" by Robert Jay Lifton.

And remember how much your brain can be tricked and manipulated by parasocial relationships, echo chambers, and the utter conviction that you are on the side of righteous justice.

Good luck.

[moosefeels]

basically my current "online self harm" habit is that there's a cluster of anti-vatican II, latin rite-exclusive, hardline conservative traditionalist american catholics that i've been observing. if that's a collection of words that means nothing to you, the TL;DR is that from 1962 to 1965, the vatican (the beaurucratic entity that governs and administers the catholic church (think 'washington' but for the catholic church)) called the second ecumenical council of the vatican and made a series of reforms to both church doctrine and practice. the two that are the most impactful are: 1.) you can have mass in languages other than latin now and 2.) the catholic church made it their official position that the jews were no longer responsible for the crucifixtion. to say this is a big deal is an understatement. it was immediately controversial and it's still hugely controversial and if you take away nothing else from this post, please leave here with the knowledge that if you encounter a catholic with hard, insistient, inflexible opinions about which language mass is conducted in, you should also assume that they are minimum antisemitic but most likely view jewish people as fundementally subhuman and deserving of violence and extermination. this is not an exaggeration. anyway, one of the mainline catholic beliefs is vehement opposition to abortion and when i say that tlm catholics are anti-abortion, i mean these are people who go on twitter and publicly fantasize about hanging women who have had abortions. there's a news story that's circulating conservative media right now about a teen girl (i believe seventeen) who did not realize she was pregnant, gave birth, and then "threw her baby in the garbage." the baby died. the teen girl is now facing prosecution of some variety. "threw her baby in the garbage" is in quotes because sources that aren't conservative media, catholic media, and anti-abortion media show quotes from her lawyer claiming that the hospital did this. at any rate this has been circulating their little sphere for more than a week now. none of them have been tweeting about the thirteen year old rape victim in mississippi who gave birth weeks before starting the seventh grade or the woman in georgia whose baby was literally decapitated mid-labor in uetero by the hospital. both of those stories have been huge in both national and feminist media, though. and it makes me feel crazy. it makes me feel crazy.

[fillejondrette]

the amount of people saying that a tate worshipping son will be easier to reform while a terf daughter is too far gone is nuts. yeah a male supremacist human trafficking worshipping son is not at all far gone. because female hate isn’t taken seriously in the least. it’s not even surpassing at this point at how mens actions are always redeemable but the way so many people have watered down the term terf which had specious beginnings anyway is so silly and insidious like 40% of the time they simply mean transphobic and the other time it’s just code for loud mouth woman who they don’t like. or lesbians if they’re being transparent

yeah they're treating being a vocal woman-hater as like a normal phase that boys go through that shouldn't reflect badly on them. reminds me of the white transfems joking about their nazi phase as if that's normal or relatable. but the comment about "terfs" having a "coherent" ideology was pretty funny to me because it's an admission in our favor, all while maintaining that we're irredeemably evil because......something.

and the most hilarious part of it all is that your average tate fan is way more transphobic than your average radical feminist. i've seen some women on here call trans women "troons" etc (i disagree with this and don't follow/interact with those people) which is language that comes straight from 4chan, which was kind of a precursor to the manosphere. but tate said he'd rather fuck an attractive trans woman than an ugly woman so #transrights i guess.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

(1/2) Speaking as a staunch Conservative, Conservatism absolutely has an inclusivity problem. Their PR mostly presents the "ideal" American family as white and Christian. You can definitely be non-Christian, non-white, and still love America and support small government. Why can't they promote black families? Or a Jewish or Muslim conservative? The also need to stop disparaging unwed, childless women who haven't been fortunate enough to find their person yet.

(2/2) Judgmental shit like that is what turns people off from right-wing circles. You know who doesn't tell women they've "hit their wall" by age 26? Left-wing feminists. You know who doesn't assume Christianity is the default religion for a person? Leftists. I know being non-white/non-Christian/unwed/childless isn't mutually exclusive from Conservatism, but right-wingers really need to show it better.

What the hell are you talking about? There are hundreds on non-white conservative/right wing voices out there. Candace Owens, Colion Noir, Eric July, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, etc. There are dozens of non-white Republicans running for office nationwide in just over a week, at least. Republicans have been running Spanish language ads in majority Latino neighborhoods this year. The last 7 years has seen historic shifts of minorities leaving the Democrat party for the Republicans. Donald Trump is the only president this century that enacted meaningful prison reform, and he had several initiatives aimed at helping black families and black owned businesses. I could go on for practically forever just about the last ten years alone.

What you're talking about isn't an "inclusivity" problem. The right is much more inclusive than the left. What you want is to be pandered to. Sorry, but if that's what you want, the left is right over there. You can get all the soft-bigotry of low expectations and shallow attempts at representation you want, all while they take your vote and ignore you the other 364 days of the year.

As for why the American religious right mentions Christianity so much, it's because most Americans are some form of Christian.

The biggest group outside of Christianity are atheists, not Jews or Muslims. Which is why you've seen a softening of the hardline religious arguments on the right in the last 15 years. Even the pro-life arguments from very religious people have started to include secular and science based arguments against abortion, instead of just religious ones. But even when religion is mentioned, it's mentioned broadly. Faith in God is mentioned more than faith in Jesus. Aside from Mormons who tend to speak "as Mormons" or "to Mormons", you don't have right wing politicians speaking only to Protestants or Baptists or Lutherans or Catholics. They speak of God, and of having faith in God, and in needing to return to God, if they speak of religion at all. Those are all broad ideals. A Muslim has faith in God the same as a Christian. That they call that God Allah means little. The bigger differences are the beliefs and practices of their religion, what kind of God God is, who his prophets are, what doctrine is the official divine word and what's heresy or blasphemy, etc. But faith in God? That's universal to every Abrahamic religion.

As for disparaging unwed, childless women, outside of some trad circles, no one does that seriously. What people on the right tend to do is disparage women who sleep around. They don't like OnlyFans and many of them don't support porn and promote abstinence. For a "staunch conservative", you don't seem to have much experience with modern conservatism as a whole.

[hillhouses]

a lot of the focus in my particular program is on the broad scope of social justice through the discipline of english and i enjoy that and being given the opportunity to excel in areas i understand well - feminist theory, lgbt theory, postcolonialism, the posthuman, etc - but my wheelhouse is very much the psychology of literature and the individual impact literature and language have on us as people who are constantly being formed and reformed by the stuff we consume and produce and i wish that was taken more into consideration. like that’s 80% of the reason i’m concentrating in poetry but no one seems to really understand how my whole bag and it’s really kind of alienating !

[feckcops]

Gender critical feminism isn't feminist. It's just transphobic.

“Queer and trans people have long known that gender-critical feminism is synonymous with transphobia, and that its proponents have very little to do with the kind of campaigning that actually benefits all women. Despite the cost-of-living crisis and the fallout from the pandemic – both of which negatively impact women, particularly low-income women, single mums and disabled women – gender-critical activism remains firmly centred around trans people. Core tactics deployed to apparently advance the cause of women’s rights include: suing rape crisis centres; boycotting trans-inclusive women’s services, supermarkets, brands or retailers; fundraising vast amounts to legally attack trans rights and trans-affirming healthcare, and launching anti-trans groups that lobby politicians ...

“Trans Safety Network (TSN), a collective documenting anti-trans harm, reports ‘a pattern has emerged of harassment and abuse of charities and services working in the areas of sexual violence and reproductive and gynaecological health’. In recent years, six trans-inclusive rape crisis centres and sexual violence charities have been hit with online attacks by gender-critical feminists.

“The Vagina Museum, along with feminist and reproductive rights charities like Bloody Good Period and Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, has also been abused online by gender-critical activists. The harassment, its development and marketing manager Zoe Williams told TSN, ‘diverts resources away from actually carrying out our work’. ‘It seems obvious,’ Olufemi says, ‘but I don’t think suing rape crisis centres would have a positive, or indeed liberatory, effect for the position of women. What they're doing is re-regulating and restating gender as a disciplinary regime.’ ...

“In the years since the September 2020 government announcement that GRA reforms were being dropped, gender-critical messaging has become overtly homophobic and misogynistic. Casual misogyny, like calling Madonna a ‘bitch’ for playing a benefit concert for trans people in Tennessee or calling comedian Janey Godley a ‘cancer-ravaged old cow’ for outspokenly supporting trans people, is rife. So are homophobic tropes – like fabricated claims that LGBTQ+ groups are pushing paedophilia and want to ‘legalise child sex’. Gender critical feminists no longer make so much effort to couch their so-called concerns about trans people in vague language – and, increasingly, they appear to disregard the harmful impact their campaigning has on cis women.”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Michael Sherman

Published: May 8, 2023

On May 7, 2023 a new documentary series by the filmmaker Michael Nayna, titled The Reformers, premiers on Substack (Part 1 is free, the additional 3 parts are paywalled). It's worth watching. The series is about the Sokal Squared hoaxed papers that revealed the hallow obscurantism of grievance studies. Here’s the description and trailer:

Skeptic magazine revealed the first Sokal Squared hoax paper, titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies.” The original paper is full of academic balderdash. For example:

We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity.

And:

We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.

And:

Inasmuch as masculinity is essentially performative, so too is the conceptual penis. The penis, in the words of Judith Butler, “can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility” (Butler, 1993). The penis should not be understood as an honest expression of the performer’s intent should it be presented in a performance of masculinity or hypermasculinity. Thus, the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermasculinity,” is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action.

In their exposé the authors of the hoaxed paper, James Lindsey and Peter Boghossian, offer two reasons for their hoax: (1) the pretentious nonsense that often passes for scholarship in postmodernism studies, and (2) the lax standards of some peer-reviewed journals. Critics of the hoax pounced on the second, claiming that the journal that published their nonsensical paper, Cogent Social Science, is a lowered-tiered journal and therefore the hoax was a failure. My motivation for publishing the exposé focused on the first problem. To me, it wouldn’t have mattered if the hoax were published in the Annals of Improbable Research, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, or even the Onion. The point, for me, is not to fool journal editors, but to expose scholarship that passes for cogent argumentation in support of a thesis that is, in fact, what Gordon Pennycook, James Allan Cheyne, and their colleagues call “pseudo-profound bullshit.”

Bullshit, they write, is language “constructed to impress upon the reader some sense of profundity at the expense of a clear exposition of meaning or truth.” Bullshit is meant to impress through obfuscation; that is, to say something that sounds profound but may be nonsense. It may not be nonsense, but if you can’t tell the difference then, to quote Strother Martin’s character from the 1967 Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke, “what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” Compare, for example, any of the passages from the “Conceptual Penis” hoax to the abstract for the 2016 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Human Geography titled “Glaciers, Gender, and Science”:

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers—particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge—remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

When this paper was published I thought it was a hoax, so I contacted the University of Oregon, the institution of the paper’s authors, and confirmed it was real. And this is just one of countless examples, posted daily on Twitter @RealPeerReview and retweeted all over the Internet to the amusement of readers who cannot decipher what most of these articles are even about, much less comprehend their arguments and gain value from their conclusions.

What matters to me is the truth about reality (lower t and lower r), which science is best equipped to determine. Ever since the 1980s there has been a movement afoot in academia in which postmodernism has encroached on some of biology, much of social science (especially cultural anthropology), and most of history, literature, and the humanities, in which the claim is made that there is no truth to be determined because there is no reality to study. Nearly everything—from race and gender to genes and brains—is socially constructed and linguistically determined by our narratives. And the more obfuscating those narratives are about these socially constructed non-realities, the better. This is the very opposite of how science should be conducted and communicated, and it is, in part, why we are currently witnessing the campus madness involving student protests—and even violence—when their unscientific postmodern unreal worldviews collide with the reality of contradictory facts and opposing viewpoints. It’s time we put a stop to the lunacy and demand critical thinking and clear communication.

The Morality of Hoaxes

The beauty and power of a well-executed hoax is that it reveals deeper truths not only about both the victims of the hoax and the hoaxers themselves, but about human nature and the foibles of our belief systems.

Decades of careful and extensive research into cognition and the psychology of how beliefs are formed reveals that none of us simply gather facts and draw conclusions from them in an inductive process. What happens is that most of us most of the time arrive at our beliefs for a host of psychological and social reasons have little or nothing to do with logic, reason, empiricism, or data. Most of our beliefs are shaped by our parents, our siblings, our peer groups, our teachers, our mentors, our professional colleagues, and by the culture at large. We form and hold those beliefs because they provide emotional comfort, because they fit well with our life styles or career choices, or because they work within the larger context of our family dynamics or social network. Then we build back into those beliefs reasons for why we hold them. This process is driven by two well-known cognitive biases: the hindsight bias, where once an event has happened or a belief is formed it is easy to look back and reconstruct not only how it happened or was formed, but also why it had to be that way and not some other way; and the confirmation bias,, in which we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence.

Given this state of our cognitive limitations, it should not surprise us that a movement arose in the 1980s that is variously described as postmodernism, deconstructionism, or cognitive relativism. Going far beyond cognitive psychology and leaning heavily on Marxist notions of cultural and class determinism, this academic movement came to believe that there are no privileged truths, no objective reality to be discovered, and no belief, idea, hypothesis, or theory that is closer to the truth than any other. In time, the movement spilled out of lit-crit English departments into the history and philosophy of science, as professional philosophers and historians, swept up in a paroxysm of postmodern deconstruction, proffered a view of science as a relativistic game played by European white males in a reductionistic frenzy of hermeneutical hegemony, hell bent on suppressing the masses beneath the thumb of dialectical scientism and technocracy. Yes, some of them actually talk like that, and one really did call Newton’s Principia a “rape manual.”

In 1996 the New York University physicist and mathematician Alan Sokal put an end to this intellectual masturbation with one of the greatest hoaxes in academic history. Sokal penned a nonsensical article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” choc-a-block full of postmodern phrases and deconstructionist tropes interspersed with scientific jargon, and submitted it to the journal Social Text, one of two leading publications frequented by fashionably obtuse academics. One sentence from the article, plucked randomly from the text, reads as follows:

It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

Sokal’s article was accepted for publication (as “real”, whatever that means in postmodernism), and upon release Sokal revealed it was all a hoax, and did so, deliciously, in the chief competitor of Social Text, the journal Dissent. Sokal called it a nonsense parody, but because most of what passes for postmodernism is nonsense and indistinguishable from parody, the editors of Social Text could not tell the difference! Q.E.D.

Subsequently, Sokal published a comprehensive book-length explanation, Beyond the Hoax, that provides readers with an annotated edition of the original article (explaining how he came up with each and every meaningless phrase!), the subsequent article in Dissent in which he explained himself to the disgruntled readers of Social Text, and a number of subsequent articles and essays he wrote in the decade since the hoax in which he elaborated on the problems inherent in postmodern philosophy of science. The golden nugget within this longish book—worth the price of admission by itself—is the annotated parody. For example, explaining the above passage, divided up into the semi-colon phrases, Sokal writes (with ellipses denoting the phrase explanations):

This statement is, of course, absurd, but it reflects several conceits of “postmodern” theoretical writing. First of all, reality (even physical reality) has become in certain circles a no-no concept, which must be placed in scare quotes. … This assertion is a commonplace (dare I say a cliché) in radical-social-constructivist writing about science. Like most clichés, it contains a grain of truth but greatly exaggerates the case. Above all, it fails to make the crucial distinction between actual knowledge (i.e. rationally justified true belief) and purported knowledge. … The theory-ladenness of observations goes back at least to physicist-philosopher Pierre Duhem in 1894; it poses problems for the most naïve falsifiability theories but by no means undercuts the epistemic claims of science. … This statement is silly, but it strikes the right emotional chords: against “privilege” (especially scientists’ privilege) and in favor of the “counter-hegemonic”, the “dissident”, and the “marginalized”. … Note, finally, that the four assertions contained in this sentence are at the very least debatable (if not downright absurd); certainly some argument in their favor ought to be required. But the editors of Social Text were happy to publish an article in which these assertions are taken for granted. Apparently in certain circles nowadays these assertions are taken for granted.

Hoaxes are one of the most powerful tools of instruction and edification ever created because they reveal a weakness in human cognition involving gullibility and self-deception. As long as no one is hurt in the process and the reveal in the end is complete and honest, hoaxes are a form of magic.

Magicians, for example, intentionally deceive their audiences, but as long as they are not claiming to use paranormal or supernatural powers (so-called “real magic”), magic can be one of the best tools for understanding how the mind works by revealing how easily it is tricked. From a scientist’s and skeptic’s perspective, magicians like Penn and Teller are effective because they not only deceive their audiences, they often also reveal how the tricks are done in order to make a deeper point about deception, self-deception, and honesty. A properly executed hoax can be as entertaining and educational as a good magic show.

Moral objections to hoaxes should be reasonably considered, of course, but as long as no one is hurt in the process and the hoax is revealed in the end and shown to be executed with good intentions to make a deeper point, there is nothing unethical or immoral about hoaxing, and in fact the beauty and power of a well-executed hoax is that it reveals deeper truths not only about both the victims of the hoax and the hoaxers themselves, but about human nature and the foibles of our belief systems.

Why do people fall for such hoaxes? The hindsight bias and the confirmation bias. Once you believe that science holds no privileged position in the search for truth, and that it is just another way of knowing, it is easy to pull out of such hoaxed articles additional evidence that supports your belief. It is a very human process, and since science is conducted by very real humans, isn’t it subject to these same cognitive biases? Yes, except for one thing: the built-in process known as the scientific method.

There is progress in science, and some views really are superior to others, regardless of the color, gender, or country of origin of the scientist holding that view. Despite the fact that scientific data are “theory laden,” science is truly different than art, music, religion, and other forms of human “knowing” because it has a self-correcting mechanism built into it. If you don’t catch the flaws in your theory, the slant in your bias, or the distortion in your preferences, someone else will, usually with great glee and in a public forum, for example, a competing journal! Scientists may be biased, but science itself, for all its flaws, is still the best system ever devised for understanding how the world works.

==

It's enlightening, but also disturbing, to see the nonsensical academic shibboleths that we're surrounded by today are unchanged from Sokal's hoax almost 30 years ago when he spotted the problem.

They've been concocting buzzword-laden nonsense, peddling intellectual fraud as wisdom, and inventing fake credentials through bogus journals - aka "idea laundering" - for no less than that long.

[hergan416]

OH RIGHT

Just want to like. Throw a bit of journal article this way.

This method of reference -- in which sexuality and dirtiness interlock -- extended beyond the overtly sexual into whole regions and social classes. Leonore Davidoff has shown that Victorian reform efforts equated the lower classes with the lower realms of the body: "Victorians visualized the 'Nether Regions' of society which, by their definition, were inhabited by the criminal classes, paupers, beggars, and work-shy as 'the stagnant pools of moral filth' comprised of the 'effluvia of our wretched cities.'"43 -Sigel, Lisa Z. “Name Your Pleasure: The Transformation of Sexual Language in Nineteenth-Century British Pornography.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 4 (2000): 395–419. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3704910.

THIS.

This was what made me start thinking about how I can't just look up how Victorians think about things and decide it applies to the MTP protags.

I cannot imagine Liam agreeing with an OUNCE of that. Nor anyone else in his group. Holmes either.

It might be worth it to look into the source being quoted here...here's the citation from footnote 43:

43. Leonore Davidoff, "Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick," Feminist Studies 5 (1979), 89. See also, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Imperial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 152-58.

I haven't even finished reading this article, so I haven't read that one. Maybe I go and find that it's not nearly as idk.... clear cut as this journal article makes it sound? I am not a feminist studies student or a historian.

But I'm also not doing a college paper. I tried to look up whether or not I could say "frig his ass" since apparently Victorians didn't think it was possible for another man to fuck an ass because apparently fuck was reserved for heterosexual things at that point and then ended up on an ENTIRE tangent (which admittedly has quoted enough Victorian-era porn that I have learned that anal intercourse was always buggery regardless of whether it was same sex or not... so I guess that's a thing. Interestingly... the context in which this came up was with a woman calling someone who couldn't bugger her like she'd asked a buggerer in roleplay? I think? The author was not doing much to provide context about that part of it, the concern was the crassness of the language compared to the language a hundred years before). ANYWAY my point is that this wasn't SUPPOSED to be something I was going to go down the rabbit hole on and I ABSOLUTELY am going to. But I've only so far got my foot in the door, and I'm just here to say that this is what broke me in terms of "oh they're Victorians they do what Victorians do" even though the WHOLE FUCKING POINT OF THE SHOW IS THAT THEY ARE FIGHTING AGAINST THAT SHIT THE VICTORIANS GOT BACKWARDS. HOW DID I MISS THAT?

And obviously it's possible they might still say... think human nether regions were dirty but that this comparison should not be applied to the lower classes... but at this point why would I do that? Why would I,

a porn author,

write that into my work when this VERY convenient thing has been dropped in my lap.

[c-40]

A-T-3 071 The Red Krayola

Late 1960s Austin psychedelia meets late 1970s London post-punk (call it Experimental, call it Art Rock, just don't call it Progressive) Mayo Thompson of Red Crayola (label mates of perhaps better know Austin psychedelic band The 13th Floor Elevators) moved to England in the 1970s and joined art collective Art & Language. Thompson produced many Rough Trade Records releases between 1979-1981 including pre-pop Scritti Politti, The Raincoats, The Monochrome Set, The Fall, Cabaret Voltaire

This led to the reforming the Red Crayola as The Red Krayola (for legal reasons) with Mayo Thompson leading the band

Black Snakes was The Red Krayola With Art & Language's third studio album. The line-up changed from 1981's Kangaroo?, Epic Soundtracks (A-T-2 182), Lora Logic (ex-X-Ray Specs), and Gina Birch (The Raincoats) had all left. The Black Snakes line-up keeps Ben Annesley (Essential Logic), Pere Ubu's Allen Ravenstine (Mayo Thompson had joined Pere Ubu in 1980 when their new band sign to Rough Trade) the new member is Chris Taylor (of Gong)

The Red Krayola With Art & Language - The Sloths

The Red Krayola With Art & Language - Hedges

Red Krayola put out 1983 Three Songs on a Trip to the United States, it's a short album by Thompson and Ravenstine (both now in Pere Ubu) with the re-addition of Jesse Chamberlain on drums. Chamberlain had played on Art & Language's debut record as well as Red Krayola's return under the leadership of Mayo Thompson Soldier-Talk (most of the live tracks on Three Songs on a Trip to the United States are from the Soldier-Talk era, recorded in Cologne, Germany, 28th August 1983). Chamberlain had been drummer for The Necessaries (A-T-2 238) and backed Elliot Murphy on the albums Murph The Surf and Milwaukee

Red Krayola - California Girl

Red Krayola - Disipline live version of the track from Soldier-Talk

Red Krayola - Caribbean Postcard

Red Krayola - X live version of the track from Soldier-Talk

Lizzie Borden's feminist sci-fi movie Born In Flames is released in 1983. It gets it's name from The Red Crayola's 1980 single (written by Art & Language, performed by the same line-up as Kangaroo?), is also used in the movie

[theboysaresuchabore]

my main stances/opinions are detailed under the cut

i am pro-palestine and by extension anti-zionism. with that being said, many pro-palestine "activists" (which are mainly white saviours) are objectively antisemitic and i will never stand by that. the genocide of one group will never justify the genocide of another, and that goes both ways.

the main political ideology i follow is democratic socialism.

i am a trans inclusive radical feminist. the world at large has a massive amount of room to improve in the treatment and view of women, including trans women, and the socialisation of men.

trans women are women and trans men are men. white woman tears about how trans women make you feel "unsafe" won't be tolerated.

almost all queer discourse is stupid and reductive and i probably wont interact with it much because .. stupid and reductive.

i oppose the current policing system in virtually every country (acab!!!) but i'm not necessarily anti-police. i believe the system is in need of reform and dripping with racism and any tolerance of the current method of policing inherently supports corruption.

i'm pro-psychiatry but do believe that the psychiatric system needs to be reformed.

anti-endo

i don't believe in narcissistic abuse as a label (for different reasons than npdblr) but i do believe that the abuse people have faced is very real regardless of how they choose to describe it and i don't think it's okay to police the language that survivors use to describe their experiences

i'm ex-catholic (as of very very recently). i identify as an agnostic atheist but i'm not anti-theist (but i am very very critical of organised religion) (and i don't like mormons) (sorry)

anti contact for ANY illegal, morally grey or otherwise questionable paraphilia or kink. this includes any consumption of any sexual material related to these attractions.

ddlg is gross and weird

pro sex worker, anti sex work industry (shouldn't be abolished, just reformed). including porn

i support body positivity and neutrality but i'm against haes. this is solely because i don't like medical misinformation and the haes community fits the bite model. but i believe everybody has the right to live in whatever body they're in, regardless of why their body looks or is a certain way, without judgement, bullying or discrimination.

i don't like the usa.....