The Provocations of Camille Paglia
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
I know he's just as much of a divisive figure, but there's a great video of a conversation between Paglia and Jordan Peterson on Youtube.
I’m not saying he isn’t smart just that his conceptions about Continental philosophers stem from poor understanding and shallow reading of the philosophers’ works.
Debate is extremely alive an well in nearly all universities
Where do we still have "honest academic debate" then?
We live in interesting times. Teachers of the Paglia calibre, have become visible to larger and larger numbers of students worldwide. And that raises the bar for all those who claim to Teach.
She's right, but it really upsets many academics for someone to say that. Good.
Having students pay for everything (e.g in US) makes their education into a product and they are the consumer. Students can then demand to have certain conditions met. The consumer knows best, is king.
Whereas in the US, college attendance generally* is determined by ability to pay, and a student who can pay will almost certainly be able to find some college that will let them attend, whether they take their studies seriously ("value their education") or not.
*Of course achievement still matters if you want to get into the most selective institutions ... but I gather you can do that with (a lot) of money, too.
-Foucault is quite interesting and accessible (his writing contains much more facts and observations than jargon)
-Lacan is a complete fraud
-Derrida might have interesting things to say but it's extremely hard to tell
Is it "good" just because it upsets academics? Is she "right" just because you agree with her? To me, her comment sounds like a very uncharitable critique of those writers.
I'm not a fan of Derrida or Lacan, but I've noticed they get a lot of criticism from people who've never read them. They were not necessarily original thinkers with revolutionary ideas, but they definitely offered some new insights.
No offense but it appears you've never read Foucault. He never said power is unfair. It's like saying gravity is unfair because someone was hurt after a fall.
There is some truth about their writing being too obtuse, but this is (was ?) unfortunately a requirement in some circles in Paris. Also, culturally, being pedant in French has been for a long time a sign of sophistication culturally speaking (http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/jean_searle_on_foucault_a...). I find French more "overfit" for pedantism than English, but that could just be because French is my native language / culture.
[edit] the link above in openculture.com actually links to a video when Chomsky and Foucault discuss about social organizations. Foucault is as clear, if not clearer than Chomsky. I find Chomsky's language extremely dry, to a point where it is difficult for me to stay engaged.
In the article, that is one of the criticisms Paglia raised. That it doesn't make sense to apply the techniques of these French thinkers to non-French culture and art, when their work is so specific to French academic traditions.
Orig. https://next.liberation.fr/livres/1997/10/18/sokal-et-bricmo....
Cf. http://www.critical-theory.com/read-derridas-response-sokal-...
If you want an easy way to engage with the ideas these French thinkers put forward I highly suggest listening to Stephen West's "Philosophize This" podcast. He not only covers "French Philosophers" but much of Western philosophy and does so in a pretty accessible and relatively unbiased manner.
The "Introducing" series of books can also be a good resource for understanding complex thinkers: https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Foucault-Graphic-Chris-Ho...
Although honestly, it's just as important to understand other thinkers in the Western philosophy tradition to grasp where thinkers are coming from.
Having said all that, yes, there are many people in American academia whose understanding of these thinkers is just as bad if not worse than Paglia's and these folks give academic study of French philosophy a bad name. Paglia has built a career of attacking people like these, not by holding them to higher standards but by merely sinking to their level and engaging in simple-minded, yet entertaining, polemics.
But it's always going to the be the case that poor thinkers abound. There's also a lot of very poor thinkers in CS, physics and other so-called "hard science" fields. It's just that they're a lot easier to ignore because they're so boring.
So her criticism might be right in substance (in the American context) but targeting the wrong thing.
Derrida is pretty much Gödel's incompleteness theorem for philosophers instead of just "reducing everything to language and then making language destroy itself"
In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of god were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.
What does this really mean? Does it mean anything? I find it truly hard to say with any precision. If anyone is trying to make language destroy itself it is Paglia with her vague, circular, name-dropping arguments. If the rest of the book then tried to justify these assertions that'd be ok, but it continues in the same vein for hundreds of pages.
If you accept her vitriolic and reductive definitions of these interesting thinkers (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida), you are doing yourself a disservice.
Foucault to take one example is far from cheap cynicism and more rigorous and accessible than Paglia in every sense. Where is the cheap cynicism in The order of things (les mots et les choses) or Madness and Civilisation? These are really important works about issues that will be studied in 100 years, unlike Paglia's empty posturing. They're asking questions like What is normal? What is madness and how does the definition change? Questions which were ahead of their time and still vital and interesting today.
This is what she may be referencing in the passage you quoted.
This was an early factor in third-wave feminism accepting gender identity, which is why almost all millenial and gen-Z feminists accept trans and intersex people and why TERFs tend to be older (or deceased, good riddance Janice Raymond.)
I've found that the left tends to distrust science that may contradict its ideology, and the right tends to distrust experiences too alien from their own. In Reimer's case, the science had a human tragedy at the center of it which bridged the gap and led to change.
The rate of attempted suicide in transgender people is over 40% if they are not socially supported. That rate drops to general population levels in trans people who have familial and community support when transitioning.
Long-term the evidence is the opposite. Claiming that the difference between long and short-term outcomes is explained by the difference between support levels is not science. It is guessing.
"One hypothesis, the social stress model—which posits that stigma, prejudice, and discrimination are the primary causes of higher rates of poor mental health outcomes for these subpopulations—is frequently cited as a way to explain this disparity. While non-heterosexual and transgender individu- als are often subject to social stressors and discrimination, science has not shown that these factors alone account for the entirety, or even a major- ity, of the health disparity between non-heterosexual and transgender subpopulations and the general population. There is a need for extensive research in this area to test the social stress hypothesis and other poten- tial explanations for the health disparities, and to help identify ways of addressing the health concerns present in these subpopulations." https://www.thenewatlantis.com/docLib/20160819_TNA50Sexualit...
[0] http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AFS...
Reimer's socialization was a lot more traumatic than being told he was female. The wikipedia article only touches the surface of the disturbing abuse he was subjected to.
I don't see why this story would lead anyone to accept gender identity.
I also think there are many millenials and gen-Z's who would be classified as "TERFs", and in fact would view the term as derogatory.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/252414605231327/posts/7186233552771...
*Edited to be less snarky
Did Janice Raymond pass away? Did you mean Mary Daly?
(Yes, Keller is a physicist, not a biologist. Those trying to belittle or dismiss what women's studies has accomplished will probably use that to disqualify her contribution...)
Fausto-Sterling seems to be loose with data. In The Five Sexes she cites Money as the source for upwards of 4% of the population being intersexual.
Money denied the claim here (last page) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239657377_The_Five_...
Later she revised to 1.7% in this paper with some fairly loose definitions of what constitutes "frequency of deviation from the idea female or male" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.sci-hub.tw/pubmed/11534012
If you dig into the 1.7% figure, 87% of it comes from late onset CAH. Problematic, as Late onset CAH is very similar to PCOS, which affects 5-10% of the population and was excluded. Both fit her definition of deviation from the sexual idea (hirtuisim, infertility) https://i.imgur.com/BYi5dem.png
> In a paper entitled "The Five Sexes", in which, according to her, "I had intended to be provocative, but I had also written with tongue firmly in cheek." Fausto-Sterling laid out a thought experiment considering an alternative model of gender containing five sexes: male, female, merm, ferm, and herm. This thought experiment was interpreted by some as a serious proposal or even a theory; advocates for intersex people stated that this theory was wrong, confusing and unhelpful to the interests of intersex people. In a later paper ("The Five Sexes, Revisited"), she has acknowledged these objections.
"Not surprisingly, it is extremely difficult to estimate the frequency of intersexuality, much less the frequency of each of the three additional sexes: it is not the sort of information one volunteers on a job application. The psychologist John Money of Johns Hopkins University, a specialist in the study of congenital sexual-organ defects, suggests intersexuals may constitute as many as 4 percent of births. As I point out to my students at Brown University, in a student body of about 6,000 that fraction, if correct, implies there may be as many as 240 intersexuals on campus - surely enough to form a minority caucus of some kind."
This section of the essay is not tongue in cheek. She clearly states she's teaching this idea.
This was John Money's response
"To the best of my knowledge there is no publication attributable to me in which I suggest, as Ms. Fausto-Sterling puts it, intersexuals may constitute as many as 4 percent of births. Moreover, it is epidemiologically reckless to conjecture that on the campus of Brown University there are 240 students with a birth defect of the sex organs that would justify their being diagnosed as intersexuals, that is, hermaphrodites"
[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/21a4/4d10b40354a974c8d1d3a9...
You have referenced the 2000 essay, "The Five Sexes, Revisited"
No on claimed it was a scientific investigation, I quoted the full text of the issue I was discussing in a previous comment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway
[2] https://monoskop.org/images/5/58/Haraway_Donna_Crystals_Fabr...
Feel free to list some highly credentialed social scientists you respect, and we can look up their PhD thesis titles.
Bottom line is she's highly credentialed with a PhD from Yale, taught at John Hopkins, and is now a "distinguished professor emerita" at UCSC.
we should probably read it
Bottom line is she's highly
The content of her Yale PhD is not in biology, in the way this term is usually understood (DNA, proteins, signalling chains, PCR, bench work, taxonomy of animals, ... i.e. studying the physical structure, chemical processes, molecular interactions, physiological mechanisms, development and evolution of living organisms).
Since the scientific credibility of subjects like "Feminist Studies" is controversial (unlike biology) claiming high credentials where there are none, makes me think of HN guidelines [7]: when discussing highly controversial subjects like, discussions about scientific credentials, should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less.
list some highly credentialed
social scientists you respect,
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Haraway
[2] http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/research/weber1.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zur_Geschichte_der_Handelsgese...
[4] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1820700?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Division_of_Labour_in_Soci...
[6] https://www.amazon.de/Recht-Automation-%C3%B6ffentlichen-Ver...
Original assertion was "highly credentialed biologists", which is different than "highly credentialed in biology", and I would agree with your objection to the later statement, her credentials lie mostly outside biology.
She's highly credentialed by the nature of her PhD from Yale, teaching at Hopkins & UCSC. She's a biologist by training, achieving her PhD in the field.
I asked for a list of social scientists so I could pick one and attack their PhD's or credentials under the same premise you criticized Haraway's, to demonstrate the absurdity of that line of thinking.
Marx's PhD was in philosophy, thesis something about greek philosophy being superior to religion. Spent most of his life as a journalist, so he's not credentialed in the social/political science field he's most notable for.
^^^ makes me sound foolish
Marx's PhD thesis https://archive.org/details/Marx_Karl_-_Doctoral_Thesis_-_Th...
"highly credentialed biologists",
which is different than
"highly credentialed in biology"
- highly credentialed soccer player
- highly credentialed surfer
- highly credentialed linguist
and many more variants. All of the above would be misleading because clearly statements like "X is a highly credentialed Y" are usually assumed to mean that X's credentials are in subject Y. Since a persistent and widely known criticism of Gender Studies and the concept of gender is the severed link with biology in general, and the biology of fertility in particular, is remarkable, and it is difficult to believe it is done in good faith.
[1] https://monoskop.org/images/5/58/Haraway_Donna_Crystals_Fabr...
Haraway did not play a few games of chess as a child, she studied 7+ years to get a PhD.
I'm with you that gender studies has an evidence/science problem in general, baselessly attacking a researchers credentials does not prove that point.
Yes, a lot of things. And it's pretty trivial in its meaning really (also in its expression). In other words, it's not like some academic obscurantism. She clearly says something clear itself.
At first I thought your disagreement stemmed from unfamiliarity with European philosophy, and wanting everything to be spelt out in the dry style of anglosaxon philosophy.
But since you're OK with Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, I can't possibly fathom where your disagreement with the above is.
If you can read Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, you can surely parse Paglia (at least the above except). As for the vitriol she expresses against them, well they too have expressed vitriol against each other, at some point or another. It's par for the course, as these philosophers don't pretend to express some kind of scientific understanding (which converges), but ways to look at the world (which can diverge).
As for what she says, I'll try putting it more crudely below:
1) "In the beginning was nature".
Civilization and humans start from being parts of nature (e.g. we start as regular animals).
2) "The background from which and against which our ideas of god were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem".
Our religion (and other ideas, philosophy, morals, etc) evolve from our initial animal status and in connection to nature (e.g. consider how early gods where embodiments of natural forces, but also how natural constraints, from death to drought, to emotions, to reproductive urges, etc where things we responded with religion, song, myth, etc.
What's "natural" to us (and conversely, unnatural/obscene/etc) is our most common moral question.
3) "We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man".
Sex and gender are tied to our natural (animal) origins (male/female organs, reproductive instinct, different physiology, etc). Sex is natural to us -- but it's still a complex issue (e.g. morally, legally, culturally). To feel comfortable and open towards sex, we should finally feel comfortable with our animal nature.
Finally, she asserts that since sex is part of nature, it is the natural part in us (e.g. not our artifice or construction, but something we inherited from our animal nature, and which connects us to it).
You could easily find similar excerpts in all three of Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida.
Des penseurs célèbres tels qu'Althusser, Barthes, Derrida et Foucault sont essentiellement absents de notre livre. [1]
Barthes is another quite obtuse but really wonderful writer (IMO) - who crucially has something to say. Paglia I suspect of having nothing to say I'm afraid.
Lacan I haven't read anything significant, but he does have a reputation for being obtuse and a bit of a fraud yes, so maybe the charge by her against him is accurate, though frankly Paglia should not be calling anyone else difficult or bombastic given her style. Note the person grouping these three very disparate thinkers is Paglia.
I didn't cherry-pick that quote, it's just the first para of her book. I honestly am not sure what she means by that first page of Sexual Personae (for example she doesn't define nature), and one paragraph is not enough to do her awful writing justice because it bludgeons the reader with paragraph after paragraph of the same thing, as if to bully them into submission; she flits about from pithy assertion to clever sounding reference, giving other authors an adjective and not much more, then moving on to her next thought, without any sort of research or backup for her bald gnomic assertions. Indeed her confident nonsense about the authors quoted above sums up for me her depth very well.
[1] https://next.liberation.fr/livres/1997/10/18/sokal-et-bricmo...
On reading the rest of the book, I concluded no. You make up your own mind, but I would not dismiss those other writers because of a criticism from Paglia.
(Mind you, I'm not sure where the cutting edge of research in this is; it's a very difficult field and it's been a long time since I read Nancy Friday)
She means that human consciousness is born from our actions towards nature since before we were conscious and that we cannot detach morality from that. Furthermore, we can't hope to define sex and gender, before understanding the roots of morality since they are defined by our primeval nature, not by society rules born out of conscious thought.
But perhaps it does? Animals kill other animals only to survive (to kill them in order to eat them or to defend themselves from being killed/eaten)
Humans may be the only species who hurt other humans just for the fun of it - now _that_ is cruelty.
Now it may not be USEFUL to make that observation, but it certainly contradicts the manner in which many activist social scientists construe notions of sex and gender with unfalsifiable claims.
I’m deeply worried about the evolution of the universities it looks more and more like a cult is taking over instead of science debate and rationalism over emotions...
I don't know if this is representative of the current times, but sad if so.
She's not saying that material is not worthy of study, clearly she thinks it is because she did teach it in class previously. She just found that the material didn't provide the best platform for education in the subject relevant to the students.
EDIT: Note that the reason for changing the material was not due to the students being soft. It was because "The historical material is too painful for a music class". The point of the class was to study music, not the historical context of the lyrics, so selecting such historically charged material distracted from the actual purpose of the course.
And yet in the face of great suffering, music can speak when words are insufficient.
“In it she [Jeffries] argues among other things, that the pharmaceutical industry, having lost income when routine estrogen therapy for menopausal women was abandoned because of its health risks, has been promoting the relatively new idea of transgenderism in order to create a permanent class of customers who will need to take prescribed hormones for life.”
From https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/camille-p...
Bioidentical estradiol is a generic medication with many manufacturers and costs very little. There is not very much money to be made manufacturing it. More profitable would be the GnRH agonists, frequently used as the puberty blockers which she claims are so potentially dangerous. However their benefit is clear, and furthermore there is an entire field of medical research devoted to understanding the impacts of those drugs, and so far nothing in the evidence suggests blockers are significantly risky at all, let alone anywhere near as dangerous as the increased risk of suicide that trans kids have going through the wrong puberty.
Source for much of this: I’m a trans woman, also a pharmacology, psychiatry, and endocrinology nerd. I’m not taking hormones for life because I “need” to, I’m doing it because I want to, as is every other trans woman I know. If that changes, I can stop. It’s as simple as that.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/when-transgender-...
The doctors treating trans children keep up to date on this literature and should definitely review risks with parents and children. I personally had to sign an informed consent form stating that I had to assume I’d become immediately and irrevocably sterile upon starting treatment, but this is widely known among trans women to not be the case. Medical science is absolutely still catching up on transgender care, but all the concern trolling about risks in popular media is unwarranted. I had several unsuccessful suicide attempts in my adolescence, and I’ve been a loyal HNer since around the age of 14. That’s the huge risk that doctors and parents understand, and doctors, being for the most part hardcore utilitarians (particularly at the research level) will gladly take the small risk of blockers over that one.
What are the benefits of putting oneself over such a hard (at least it seems socially and medically) ordeal to change how others perceive one? One thing I know is that expecting others to perceive us in a certain way is a losing proposition. We can only change ourselves and it is unreasonable to expect it from everyone else I think.
Once again, sorry for being so extended, I just would like to understand better my friend. I have tried asking her and she seems to have a block around it, saying that I would not understand. At a certain level I feel this is only a superficial change I think but then if it's that small then why bother? (I mean my friend still has his same personality and mind)
If you’re a man, how do you know you’re a man? Is it because of your genitals? If you looked down at your groin tomorrow morning and saw something different, would you still think of yourself as a man? Or would you suddenly believe otherwise?
>In what way is it that different from using different clothes without the (not sure if small or big) risk of health?
My body is physically uncomfortable for me to exist in for significant periods of time, because it feels wrong. Health risks from just estrogen are increased risk of clotting and breast cancer, but in line with what cis women experience, from what current evidence suggests. Anti-androgens change this a lot, and I don’t really want to get into it because of how varied it is.
>Is it not enough to know oneself is X or Y or Z identity-wise? Why is there a need to externalize it and externalize it in this particular way?
You say later that it’s an insult to be called a girl or woman where you grew up. Imagine if it felt the same way to be called a boy or a man.
>At risk of sounding condescending, one particularly hard thing for me to understand is the need for the rest of her friends to call her appropriately especially since she is just beginning. If someone called me a girl or a woman (common childhood insult where I grew up, and very bad in its own way) I simply could not care less.
To put it simply: you’re not trans. And to ask another question, wouldn’t it bother you if people called you a woman and furthermore treated you like one all the time? (it’s ok if not, but there are some cis people for whom it would. trans people are more like those cis people in those ways.)
>What are the benefits of putting oneself over such a hard (at least it seems socially and medically) ordeal to change how others perceive one?
Because it hurts that much. It just feels that wrong.
>One thing I know is that expecting others to perceive us in a certain way is a losing proposition. We can only change ourselves and it is unreasonable to expect it from everyone else I think.
Sadly, most trans people are well acquainted with this fact. And that is why we end up going through this ordeal. Unreasonable to expect it from other people? No, I wouldn’t say so. Unless you think it’s reasonable for people to expect you to shave your whole body and grow your hair long and start wearing blouses and dresses and skirts, which is the other side of this coin. Unrealistic? Perhaps, and that’s what being an activist in this area is about.
>Once again, sorry for being so extended, I just would like to understand better my friend. I have tried asking her and she seems to have a block around it, saying that I would not understand.
She probably does think you wouldn’t understand. This is something cis people do have a fairly difficult time understanding, and it’s not easy to explain. The best I can explain is if you woke up tomorrow and everyone around you started acting like you were a woman, but nothing had actually changed about you.
The interventions might seem superficial, but it’s not about what they physically do to our bodies. It’s about how those changes feel to us, and how they quiet the discomfort we often feel with our bodies. The identity is already with us, it’s our bodies that we feel the need to change.
Please don’t feel bad about the length. These are difficult things to discuss.
But she does everything in such complicated convoluted language (liberally throwing in a lot of intellectual talk about sex in there) that she makes herself sound brilliant, radical and revolutionary for dumbly and unquestioningly following the same corporate mainstream.
It is really a shame because not all social science is bullshit. There really was great social science and literally theory being done challenging the status quo and looking for ways to make societies better but people like paglia merely just take the air out of the conversation, by taking up attention “being provocative” while not saying much.
From what I'm seeing, the struggle of Paglia-Peterson vs the dastardly postmodernists has about as much effect on the real world as royal weddings. Tabloid shit for pseudointellectuals.
The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny, especially in social interaction. The roles we play and the relationships we have with each other aren't a mere clockwork expression of our chromosomes. They are far more memetic instead.
You can't point to a spot on the Y chromosome that is responsible for unequal pay.
Edit: I know it's frowned on to complain about downvotes, but would people at least try to understand what the nature and purpose of gender studies is before dismissing it?
As is often the case, it's not simply either/or.
> We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.
She's not saying that biology is the sole factor that determines how we behave. She's saying that we need to understand it and integrate it into our understanding of cultural, psychological, sociological artifacts. Or more importantly, we can't understand them without taking into account biology. I don't see anything wrong here.
Are we talking about outliers or are we talking about the vast global and historical populations. These kinds of examples usually point to some small tribe in Africa, or some matrilineal or matriarchal property in some civilization (e.g. Spartan inheritance laws) as a counter-example, but miss that you still need to explain why the vast majority of civilizations and societies independently ascribed the same properties to men and women.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/slowes/files/lowes_competi...
Never heard this before. Could you list some examples?
https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/gend...
See the comment by obviuosly for some caveats.
We use a controlled experiment to explore whether there are gender differences in selecting into competitive environments across two distinct societies: the Maasaiin Tanzania and the Khasi in India. One unique aspect of these societies is that the Maasai represent a textbook example of a patriarchal society, whereas the Khasi are matrilineal. Similar to the extant evidence drawn from experiments executed in Western cultures, Maasai men opt to compete at roughly twice the rate as Maasai women. Interestingly, this result is reversed among the Khasi, where women choose the competitive environment more often than Khasi men, and even choose to compete weakly more often than Maasai men.
[1] https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/gend...
No, that's a modern fashionable idea IN gender studies.
Doesn't mean all gender studies should (or does) bow to this idea. And even when they do, it's far more nuanced than that, as there's an interplay between biology and social elements. (Paglia doesn't say biology is destiny itself -- but parts of biology ARE destiny -- for example, death is).
Substantial parts of HN think this is something that could be rectified technologically. And there are a few species that are "biologically immortal"; lobsters don't have telomere aging, for example.
Well, until they manage to rectify that, it is. I will update the comment when that happens (assuming it's not so far in the future that me and those substantial parts of HN are all dead, in which case it wont matter).
>And there are a few species that are "biologically immortal"; lobsters don't have telomere aging, for example.
Good for them, but still not applicable to humans as of yet (or at any point in our past).
That's the whole point? Because I think this is the sentiment of pretty much every rational person, and heck, every non-rational person. Nobody argues biology is destiny. Even the most stringent materialists won't argue that physics or chemistry or biology is the best way to understand interactions between people. This is why biologists don't necessarily make good therapists. That doesn't mean humans are complete free agents that can violate laws of physics and chemistry and whose biology plays no part in their development and behaviour.
>You can't point to a spot on the Y chromosome that is responsible for unequal pay.
No. But we can do in depth economic analysis. And in fact, we can explain unequal pay quite well, and it has very little to do with discrimination. On the other hand, can gender studies explain unequal pay, or can it only provide an unsupported, a priori, ideological-based conclusion? I suspect the latter is closer to the truth.
Gender studies doesn't strike me as an area of scholarship that is self-critical, self-reflective, and scientifically rigorous. And yet, it is perfectly fine with making overarching conclusions about complex, chaotic systems.
Because I'm really interested in this and have been unable to find something convincing, could you point me towards any such studies?
For the sake this next example, grant me that difference in wages is due to life choices, even in that case, you can reach a state where things are, on the surface, unfair, like for example the fact that the pension will be greater for men than for women (or vice versa if we're talking about a female dominated field). You can take a shallow view and look at the raw numbers and assert bigotry. But that misses something, because it isn't quite the same as a government having a policy where, even when all things are equal, women get a low pension rate.
Almost every single explanation or example has this kind of nuance. It is almost never the case that someone just decided that Jane should make less than Bob because he's a man and she's a woman (though I'm sure in a country of 350 million, you can find plenty examples of that too). Furthermore, no company, and no government department has policies on the books that mandate one gender should be paid more than the other, and in fact they all have policies to disallow that - which really cuts against the claim of systematization (how can it be systematic if everyone is actively against it).
That used to be the case until the equal pay laws came in, though. And that change was historically recently - within Paglia's lifetime, for example. It has hardly been eradicated from thought simply because the law changed.
Right. As a society, we should pat ourselves on the back. It was the right thing to do.
Having said that, nobody actually disputes that there was active, direct, and systemic discrimination against women in the past. Or even that it doesn't exist today in some isolated cases (the recent case in Japan where female applicants were denied medical school admission solely due to their gender is one such example).
That's not the same as saying this is broadly the case today.
>It has hardly been eradicated from thought simply because the law changed.
You're right. It wasn't eradicated because the law changed. It was eradicated because society changed which enabled the law to change.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
I'm not well-informed enough to say that this is an accurate summary of the current understanding, and certainly not in a position to say it will convince you!
It’s a shame because I actually think some of his talks are quite good.
But yes.
The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. And in this photo he’s grinning ear to ear.
I hope you hold yourself to the same standard.
Where do you usually look for his smile? In footage of high-pressure media interviews and public debates? In the photos carefully selected by the editors of whichever news sites you browse?
Could be he just likes meeting fans, and is amused by a goofy cartoon frog. See also: Hong Kong protestors’ use of Pepe, and prevalence of the meme among less politically-afflicted but still sad and disaffected young men on the Internet. Also mainstream on Twitch.
This really is what Scott Adams talks about with two movies and one screen. The interpretation of events speaks more about the interpreters rather than the actual events now.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vkSEmNoqhZY/maxresdefault.jpg
I wasn’t going to mention it because sometimes I think it’s just 4chan trying to have a laugh by making everything appear controversial, but the guy on the left is doing a pseudo white nationalist symbol (even though again, I’ve heard it’s not, but sometimes yes? I don’t know everything is confusing now.)
I judge people by their actions as much as their words. And this, to me, is a very strange photo.
No, it's not now, and never was. It's always been the "OK" symbol, and always will be (as in, "Everything's okay over here!"). That was just some pathetic campaign from the left to get someone in trouble that merely disagreed with the "agenda".
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white...
Again I like Peterson. But keep saying this is a coincidence or innocent photo... I don’t know, I wouldn’t be caught dead in this photo.
Peterson may not even be able to see the flag in the photo, but he has known about Pepe for a while, and even mentioned the meme in his livestreams as "interesting", possibly because as a Jungian psychologist he sees some association with Abraxas, which is a kind of "god of nature" / good+evil archetype in some of Jung's writing.
The sad part is the u/sprafa may well be unable to reconcile the perspective of what he saw with his own eyes with the perspective of others, in which Pepe is merely an avatar of one's own benign emotion.
It sounds as if she resents having the text interpretation methodology she spent a lot of time learning become irrelevant so quickly