Paglia is a force of nature. It's so exhilarating to come across such a passionate yet clear-sighted academic, battle scarred by exposure of her past misconceptions to the brutality of testing in the real world, and with such a stronger voice for it.
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.
Agreed - Peterson has some important things to say, and much nonsense, but that specific conversation is absolutely hilarious, by virtue of her hyperbolic and rambling, but fun excursions.
She’s got the same level of understanding of Foucault and Derrida as Jordan Peterson, ie. ill-informed and superficial. What a shame to call these people clear-sighted when they clearly not only misread Continental philosophers but it becomes apparent that they didn’t even read some of the works they’re criticizing.
Peterson is unbelievably well read, he was on a project for the United Nations and read 300 books on climate science. I'd be very hesitant before accusing him of criticising a book or author without having done his research. I've seen him catch out interviewers a few times where they hadn't read the material in question, but he had and knew it very well.
Doubtful that a clinical psychologist would grasp 300 books in a highly mathematical field. You know, next to doing his job.
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.
You can disagree with Camille Paglia's ideas, but one must respect her for her integrity and commitment to honest academic debate, which is sadly lacking nowadays in most western universities.
"The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind"
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.
“These minor French theorists have had a disastrous effect on American education. Lacan encourages pompous bombast and Foucault teaches cheap cynicism, while Derrida’s aggressive method, called deconstruction, systematically trashes high culture by reducing everything to language and then making language destroy itself.”
She's right, but it really upsets many academics for someone to say that. Good.
I think her analysis is wrong in that regard. American puritanism is more to blame. French universities do not suffer from the current campus hysteria.
I think having free education (e.g. in some EU) makes students appreciate their education. Education is a privilege and something to be earned for many. The universities have more power over the student life as they know best.
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.
I had not seen this interpretation of the perceived value of education before and find it intriguing (and tentatively agree). I am surprised there aren’t more dissenting comments because it flies in the face of the free-market libertarian interpretation of value, which would argue that people do not value things that are free.
A clearer way of stating it might be not "the euro students value their education more because it's free," but "the euro students value their education more because college attendance is determined by academic status rather than ability to pay. So, they had to work hard at their studies to get into college, and must continue to perform well academically or risk being kicked out."
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 and Derrida are certainly still read widely (and deservedly so IMO) - more widely than Paglia in Europe at least - describing them as 'minor' is a little silly. You don't have to accept everything they say to see that they have some relevance and value.
On reading up on this, it seems Derrida particularly is quite influential in Continental Philosophy, but in contrast his influence in the Anglophone world is mainly in literary studies. So us Anglophones see, understand and in some cases apply his work in very different ways than is prevalent in France.
They have relevance amongst themselves alone, and their value can be established empirically as more negative than positive. They add confusion and noise, and their utility is that of a Che Guevara T-shirt.
>She's right, but it really upsets many academics for someone to say that. Good.
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.
“Offered some new insights” seems innocuous enough. I don’t think you’ll find such modesty in the claims these writers make. Despite the ostentatious self aggrandizement inherent in their critiques of our intellectual and cultural traditions, the best defense any honest person can offer for their work is a backstepping timid “they offered some new insights”. Well the newness of their insights is debatable. Listen to any child’s tantrum and you’ll hear echos of foucault’s whining about the unfairness of power.
>Listen to any child’s tantrum and you’ll hear echos of foucault’s whining about the unfairness of power.
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.
And anyone who wants to know a bit more about some of these theorists might want to read 'Intellectual Impostures'
by the Left-leaning physicist Alan Sokal.
Putting all the "French philosophers" in one bucket is not fair. Lacan is clearly a charlatan, Foucault, while controversial, is absolutely a deep thinker.
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.
> There is some truth about their writing being too obtuse, but this is (was ?) unfortunately a requirement in some circles in Paris.
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.
It is funny that of these three names, two were among the four explicitly exempted by Sokal and Bricmont of being impostors in a 1997 letter to Liberation following publication of the book: "Famous thinkers like Althusser, Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault are mainly absent from our book"
I don't think it's fair to say they were "explicitly exempted of being impostors" - Intellectual Impostures focuses exclusively on the use of scientific and mathematical terms by philosophers, as it's often clearly evident when an author doesn't know what they mean, and/or is using them in a totally absurd way. It's easier to catch them in the act of perpetrating nonsense. The four you mentioned just don't happen to use mathematical or scientific terms in the same egregiously nonsensical way. That is very far from the only way of writing bad philosophy. For some of the many others, see David Stove's What is wrong with our thoughts? (which, by the way, features Foucault)
No she's not. She's not a serious academic and nobody who studies Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault would take her seriously. She's a propagandist and entertainer. She's not even a popularizer of complex ideas because I honestly think she either doesn't understand the thinkers she critiques or she does understand them but decides to score cheap points by attacking straw man arguments.
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.
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.
While no idea is impervious to criticism, I think Americans take those authors much more "serious" (as in their ideas as "hard truths") than them themselves take it (in France).
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"
If you summarize Derrida to one or two sentences, you could say he critiqued western civilization to have a tendency for black and white thinking. Quite ironic.
Camille Paglia is over-rated IMO. I've read a couple of her books and there is little of substance there under the gnomic bombast and pseudo-academic jargon. An example from the start of her most famous book:
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.
I’m not that familiar with her work. But my understanding is that when disciplines like gender studies were being formed they completely ignored biology and nature.in fact there were no biologists in the gender studies departments. And she was one of the first people to suggest that we must study gender with a basis in biology.
This is what she may be referencing in the passage you quoted.
Gender studies did indeed start out this way, dismissive of notions of "biological sex," until the case of David Reimer threw a bucket of cold water on those second-wave feminist theories. David was the victim of a botched circumcision as an infant. His doctors decided to turn an outie into an innie, constructed a vagina, and told his parents to raise him as a woman. He was given "vitamin" pills (actually estrogen) and forcibly socialized as female, but it didn't take. He identified as male throughout his life, transitioned as an adult, eventually discovered the truth his parents were hiding and finally killed himself.
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.
It supports believing people about what their gender identity is instead of imposing it on them.
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.
There is almost no scientific evidence for the idea that complete support will prevent adverse outcomes for this group.
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...
Celebrating the death of a feminist woman because you disagreed with her politically is probably the best way to get people to trust you, produce helpful discourse and not fall in line with whoever makes their argument most aggressively
> and forcibly socialized as female, but it didn't take.
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.
> 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
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.
Ahem... Do you know about Anne Fasto-Sterling or Donna Haraway? They are both highly credentialed biologists and pivotal figures in the development of women's/gender studies.
I doubt there's much desire around here to argue the merits of gender studies in good faith. However, those proclaiming that gender scholarship doesn't get biology, I suggest you pick up Evelyn Fox Keller's excellent book Making Sense of Life (HUP, 2002) and allow yourselves to be surprised.
(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...)
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
Sure, but that's a weird publication of hers to take issue with. For context (from Wikipedia):
> 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.
I am addressing a specific claim she made in her paper, quote in full.
"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"
The paper "The Five Sexes, Revisited" which you can find at [1], is at best an essay on gender and recent changes in gender-based legislation, at worst badly written political activism, but most certainly not in the slightest a scientific investigation into the biology of reproduction. The latter is what those who criticise modern conceptions of gender have in mind.
I replied to "jboynyc" uncritical remarks about
"The Five Sexes, Revisited", as if "The Five Sexes, Revisited" mitigated the weaknesses of Fausto-Sterling's work.
According to Wikipedia [1] her PhD was about "use of metaphor in shaping experiments in experimental biology". This is not what I'd call biology proper. You can have a look at it: it was later published as a book "Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields" which is available online [2]. I'm not sure how [2] makes her a "highly credentialed biologist" (in the same sense that "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" doesn't make Kuhn a highly credentialed physicist).
I spent about 20 minutes reading parts of it. I'd classify it as "history of science" (a perfectly valid subject).
Bottom line is she's highly
No. She is in no way "highly credentialised in biology". She has
taught at universities but "Women's Studies and the History of
Science", and "History of Consciousness [...] and Feminist
Studies". (From [1])
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,
I don't see why this is relevant for Haraway, not every great scientist has a
great dissertation or written their dissertation in the field they
later became famous for. The "bottom line" is that Haraway has no
substantial credentials in biology, and certainly she has not done research in biology in the sense the term is usually understood. Anyway, to take up your challenge, I'm fairly
familiar with the following highly credentialed social scientists:
Karl Marx (PhD in philosophy on ancient Greek philosophy, I have been
unable to locate it, if you have a link to the text, I'd be grateful), Max Weber (PhD in law about commercial law in
Italy [2, 3]), Talcott Parsons (PhD is [4]), Émile Durkheim (PhD is on
the division of labour [5]) and Niklas Luhmann (PhD about automation
in administrations [6]). How is all this relevant regarding Donna Haraway?
Link me Haraway's PhD thesis please, I can't find it on scihub.
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.
Thanks for the link to Marx PhD.
As far as I understand [1] is (a book version of) Haraway's doctoral dissertation.
"highly credentialed biologists",
which is different than
"highly credentialed in biology"
By that sophistic logic, I'm a "highly credentialed chess player" simply
because as a child I played a few games of chess and now have lots of
credentials in a STEM field. By the same logic I would also be a
- 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.
>What does this really mean? Does it mean anything?
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.
FWIW, I find Paglia's passage you quoted much more intelligible than Lacan or Derrida's notoriously impenetrable prose, and find it surprising and actually disingenuous that you'd accuse her of "bombast and pseudo-academic jargon" when that's a charge that can very much be laid at the feet of the postmodernists. I mean, there are literally books about it, such as Sokal and Bricmont's Intellectual Impostors (or Fashionable Nonsense in the US).
I haven't read Intellectual Impostors, but suspect it is more about people like Paglia who find elaborate ways of saying nothing (or is it everything?), than about Foucault or Derrida. Indeed the authors said this themselves as someone linked lower down:
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.
Actually, the quote sounds like a profoundly wise thing to say. Anyone who has ever noticed in him/herself that sexual fantasies are not necessarily very political correct should know this. E.g., rape fantasies as either the perpetrator or the victim occur in large percentages of the population.
I agree it sounds wise (something she works very hard at), but is it wise?
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.
Again, the assumption that fantasies are purely natural creatures of the "id" and not products of your particular culture is assuming the conclusion.
(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)
I have to admit that I fail to see any connection between that quote and the thing you wrote about sexual fantasies. Also, that thing about sexual fantasies... is it not obvious? Does anyone need to read a book to discover it? I might be missing something and I want to be corrected if that is the case but so far it seems like one of those cases when famous authors write something so vague or even empty that people project their own discoveries into it and get affirmative pleasure from that.
> What does this really mean? Does it mean anything?
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.
Morality is a human construct. Nature has no morality, only survival matters - by any means. That's why such cruelty (from human moral viewpoint) is found in Nature.
It seems fairly self-explanatory. Sex didn't evolve independently of the rest of humanity and evolution occurs at the level of the organism as well as at the level of the social group (religion, culture, hierarchies, etc). You can't break sex away from the rest of evolution and assume it has no impact on the rest of what and who we are or that what and who we are had no direct impact on the evolution of sex differences. It's not obscure or vague, it's obvious.
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.
Many great minds are in some way flawed, the thing that makes them great thinkers able to come up with revolutionary ideas probably makes them more susceptible to crackpottery.
Examples: Linus Pauling, Peter Duesberg, William Herschel, Isaac Newton, Fred Hoyle, Lynn Margulis
I recommend reading fools fraud and firebands on the matter by Roger Scruton as long as Taleb on the dictatorship of the minority https://link.medium.com/P6JRZtgtuZ
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...
The latter Roger Scruton. However, the New Statesman had to publish a lengthy retraction for the interview that the Guardian article is based on after manipulating his quotes. Scruton was also reinstated in the Government position he was sacked from.
As a conservative, I like to read Camille Paglia. I don't always agree with what she writes, but I find a lot of it well thought-out and very sensible. We could use more writers like her.
"Behind that devotion to heterodoxy lies something softer. She admitted that she’s chosen to censor herself in front of her students [...] I don’t want to upset them. The historical material is too painful for a music class,” she said."
I don't know if this is representative of the current times, but sad if so.
Her primary goal is to teach the students. You don't serve a novice mechanic well by asking them to build a Formula 1 racing engine from scratch on their first day in the machine shop.
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.
Paglia is one of those conservatives who is incredibly transphobic and hides it behind the facade of being a “provocateur.” She has defended the completely absurd belief (in this case, proposed by Sheila Jeffries) that cross-gender hormone therapy is a conspiracy by big pharma to get trans people taking hormones for life, among other things:
“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.”
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.
Blockers have a negative effect on bone density and it is unknown if they affect brain development. I guess we will only really see the negative effects(if any) in a couple of decades.
The bone density risk is the only one that has been shown reliably, and even then it’s not enough to warrant not using them. A review of the current literature shows the evidence on brain development impact to be spotty. And here’s the Endocrine Society, saying they’re safe and effective: https://www.endocrine.org/news-room/press-release-archives/2....
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.
I have trouble understanding the need to transition as a close friend is just undergoing it. Though I support him/her, I cannot bend my mind around it? What are the perceived benefits? In what way is it that different from using different clothes without the (not sure if small or big) risk of health? 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?
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.
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.
I don't see how my post was any more gratuitous than the one I was replying to. Also a speeding ticket is not comparable because this is an issue which has greater societal implications.
Trans people can be transphobic! Especially against trans women and other transfeminine people, which is where most of the brunt of Paglia’s transphobia is.
I actually followed Camille Paglia from her time as salon columnist and found her really annoying. First of all for someone being celebrated for being provocative she is depressingly mainstream. Her views are generally center-right. She supports and repeats whatever views and opinions corporate america chooses to foist on us, supports the military industrial complex and is guaranteed to go gaga over every female celebrity sex symbol the mainstream media chooses to trot out for our adulation.
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?
Oh yes you can: men have testosterone, so they're more aggressive, which turns out to translate to asking for more pay raises more often and changing jobs more quickly if unhappy with their pay. Hey presto, a biological basis for unequal pay. Now obviously this doesn't explain everything about unequal pay -- but it would be foolish to ignore entirely, no?
Okay, what does this have to do with what she said?
> 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.
>There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait.
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.
That wasn't the best phrasing on my part. Quoting the abstract[1]:
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.
>The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny, especially in social interaction.
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).
> 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.
>Substantial parts of HN think this is something that could be rectified technologically.
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).
>The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny
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.
Fair warning, this topic has been beaten to death and is now radioactive and everyone has settled in their tranches. But just Google around and you'll find tons of resources, though the wikipedia page[1] has a good overview of some of the subtleties, and some good examples (the recent Uber study is referenced on the page). And the fact that there are deep, nuanced, subtleties that require context to properly digest shows you that activists are really dishonest whenever they make shallow claims of wage discrimination.
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).
> 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
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.
>That used to be the case until the equal pay laws came in, though.
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.
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!
Peterson lost a lot of credibility for me when he took a group selfie with some guys with a big Pepe The Frog flag. I mean it’s kind of funny but 90% of the Pepe memes are actually racist and horrible (from what I’ve seen). After that I couldn’t take his alt-right denialism very seriously.
It’s a shame because I actually think some of his talks are quite good.
So you disregard a person's all opinions only because he took a selfie with bunch of people and a cartoon character and the 90% of the said cartoon character's memes you have seen are racist and horrible.
So lets disregard the hundreds of hours of in depth explanation and analysis of his actual opinion, and condemn him for a decision made in a handful of seconds in a context we don't fully know. Because clearly the worst thing we can find on anyone, interpreted as uncharitably as possible, is the only thing about them that matters.
>The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile.
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.
It’s sad to see people fall for guilt by association. In most interviews that Jordan Peterson has when he talks about meeting his fans is when he sounds the happiest.
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.
It is funny how this can be clearly observed about the OK gesture deal. I would say most people see that as your regular OK gestures, while some see it as final proof of subscription to a particular ethnic related ideology.
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.
> the guy on the left is doing a pseudo white nationalist symbol (even though again, I’ve heard it’s not, but sometimes yes?
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".
Ok so us normies out here who use the ok gesture and have no idea about the stupid 4 chan meme are going to be considered white nationalists now? Seems like a good way to make a problem where there isn't one.
“Normies” don’t use the word “normie”, and the label of harm applied by the SPLC isn’t prescriptivist, your beef is with the white nationalist Internet kids.
This is absurd. Where on earth are these "racist and horrible" Pepe memes coming from? In reality, 90% of uses of the Pepe character (which is now a fading meme) are as an avatar or highlight of a post's emotion. Seriously, the majority of all Pepes ever posted have been either a sad frog, a smug frog, or a happy frog. People use the meme to help express themselves along with their text, and then people spazz out worse than a bored housewife hearing about D&D in 1985 or NWA in 1995.
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.
One of the most insidious effects of internet news in general and social media in particular is that we latch to information bubbles where people spread material painting "the other" in the worst possible view. It is entirely possible that u/sprafa news feed is a place where 90% of Pepe-related content does consist of "look at what those evil racists are peddling all day long" outrage based like-bait.
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.
Appreciate the courage. Can't speak for Jordan Peterson, but there are some of us that don't have a lot of time for or interest in browsing reddit in general and political subreddits in particular. We very rarely see a Pepe meme.
He probably takes pictures with hundreds of fans after each talk. Taking a picture with a random fan having a frog flag is not an endorsement of nazism.
>" In the early 1970s, as she was finishing her doctoral course work, a new school of literary studies gained its first U.S. foothold at Yale and would eventually overthrow New Criticism as the main way academics would interpret texts in English departments across the country. "
It sounds as if she resents having the text interpretation methodology she spent a lot of time learning become irrelevant so quickly
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.