‘There Is No Spoon’: Radical Feminism and the Paranoid Matrix of Patriarchy

Posted on | March 6, 2015 | 78 Comments

“Given that woman cannot ‘fit’ into the cartography of male thought, she cannot be expected to communicate in ways that are understandable to those caught within a patriarchal mindset. Thus the typically male disparagement of women’s thinking as confused, irrational or superstitious is simply a lack of imagination: women’s thinking is only irrational if understood within a rigid paradigm of linear (phallocentric) thought.”
— Jennifer Rich, Modern Feminist Theory (2014)

“While feminists believe that the patriarchy makes women crazy, the rest of us suspect that crazy women made the patriarchy — inventing this imaginary conspiracy of ‘male supremacy’ as the phantom menace of their paranoid minds, a fantasy bogeyman, a rationalization of their own unhappiness and misfortunes.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War on Human Nature

My friends Nice Deb and the Lonely Conservative express amazement at my ability to maintain sanity after spending so many months wading deep into the feminist madness. Really, it’s a miracle, and your continued prayers are most earnestly requested as I continue this research. As I remark in the book, you can’t understand feminism without studying abnormal psychology, especially the etiology of paranoia.

Paranoia and narcissism are related phenomena, because the paranoid person’s delusions of persecution require him to believe that he is so important that powerful people and institutions are conspiring against him. Unable to cope with his own inadequacy, overwhelmed by feelings of shame about his failures, the narcissist’s psychological defense mechanisms inflate his damaged ego to grandiose proportions.

He did not fail; they conspired to thwart him. Stipulate that, in reality, people often do suffer unjustly through no fault of their own. Stipulate also that sane people actually do have enemies. The narcissist, however, is unable to accept his misfortunes as simple bad luck. Confronted by failure, the narcissist can’t say, “Well, that’s just the way life is,” and move on to seek success elsewhere. Instead, he becomes obsessed with the idea that he is a victim of injustice, and rationalizes his suffering by attributing malign motives to scapegoated enemies. This characteristic trait of externalizing blame is necessary to protect the damaged ego of the narcissist and, however much damage he inflicts by lashing out at scapegoats, the narcissist may still be able to maintain a neurotic semblance of normality. The descent into madness begins when his failures multiply beyond his ability to rationalize them, so that his enemies — “they” who conspire against him — become fantastic in size and power. He imagines himself pursued and persecuted by demons and monsters, by Jews or Freemasons, by the CIA or by aliens from Mars.

All of this madness begins, you see, with an inability to accept responsibility for one’s own failures and shortcomings. Strong, healthy minds can withstand not only the routine annoyances of daily life, but can even overcome extraordinary hardship without resorting to the kind of scapegoating attitude that characterizes the narcissistic personality. Because we are living in what Christopher Lasch famously called The Culture of Narcissism, however, we have seen a proliferation of movements that offer ready-made theories of victimhood that enable personal irresponsibility, rationalizing the fears of unhealthy minds.

Feminism is an ideology of madness, denying the fundamental reality of human nature. Feminists enable (“empower”) the irresponsible woman by offering her the convenient scapegoat of patriarchy — “male supremacy,” “misogyny,” etc. — as the all-purpose explanation for every misfortune she may suffer. The fact that other women are going about their daily lives, happy and successful, is never acceptable to a feminist as evidence that disproves her ideology. The overwhelming majority of female college students manage to make it through their undergraduate years without being gang-raped by fraternity brothers and yet we find feminists promoting claims that “rape culture” is out of control on university campuses. Feminists produce big-budget documentaries that portray college life as The Hunting Ground where women are constantly menaced by their male classmates. “Rape culture” propaganda is a way of promoting Fear and Loathing of the Penis, as I have described the typical anti-male/anti-heterosexual worldview of radical feminism.

In August 2013, I wrote a post called “Taking Feminism Seriously,” and one of the consequences of my in-depth study of this subject is that when I look at the description of Jennifer Rich’s book Modern Feminist Theory, I recognize nearly all the authors she names. Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, Monique Wittig, Gayle Rubin, Adrienne Rich, Judith Butler — this radical roster of lunatics and lesbians is very familiar to me. The question is whether students at Hofstra University recognize this ideology as a sort of navigational chart that guides unhappy women on a metaphorical voyage across the Mytilini Strait to a legendary island off the coast of Asia Minor.

The recent surge of radical madness is so strangely paranoid that even a feminist like Meghan Daum is offended by it:

[T]he idea that all sexual assaults are created equal — and deserve equal treatment in the court of public opinion — has become an article of faith in the liberal gospel.
But at the risk (the guarantee) of being branded a rape apologist or worse, I’m going to say what many reasonable people have been thinking for a while: Violent rape is not the same as psychologically coercive sex, which in turn is not the same as regrettable sex, which is not the same as fielding an unwanted touch or kiss at a party.
None of these things are good; many of them are quite bad. But insofar as they do fall along a spectrum ranging from truly horrific to merely annoying, some demand legal or punitive action, and some simply do not. Some are crimes and some are the inevitable fallout of social obtuseness. Some desperately require more attention, and some — I’ll just say it– are getting too much attention.

Read the whole thing and notice how Ms. Daum cushions her criticism in caveats, aware that anyone who dares express skepticism about feminism’s propaganda claims is subject to becoming a demonized scapegoat, a “rape apologist.” What is happening here?

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead … only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

That famous scene from The Matrix expresses the problem of confronting an imaginary “reality” like the feminist worldview. Once you understand feminism as a theory of radical egalitarianism akin to Marxism (and, indeed, directly inspired by Marxist-Leninist ideology), the illusion of the spoon becomes apparent. Beginning with the premise that men and women are naturally “equal” in the sense that they are essentially identical — that there are no innate differences between male and female — feminists then theorize all observable inequalities between men (collectively) and women (collectively) as the result of oppression. This concept of women as victims of universal oppression requires feminists to further theorize the existence of patriarchy as the social system of male supremacy. All of this depends on the belief that androgyny (a condition of sameness as the basis of “sexual equality”) is natural, and that any apparent differences between men and women are artificial, “socially constructs” imposed by patriarchy.

“[W]oman’s social inequality is not an inevitable attribute of her biology but biologically inherent in the heterosexual sex act. . . . Woman’s biology oppresses her only when she relates to men. The basis of the inequality of the sexes here is seen as the inequality inherent in heterosexual intercourse as a result of sex-specific anatomy. To transcend or avoid this in personal life by having sexual relations only with women — lesbianism — eliminates the gender-based underpinnings of sexual inequality in this view. . . . Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of its dominant form, heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission.”
— Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989)

“I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy. . . . I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality.”
— Marilyn Frye, “A Lesbian’s Perspective on Women’s Studies” (1980)

“These people are crazy!” proclaims every sane person after learning what feminist Gender Theory teaches. Our natural instinct, as common-sense people living in the real world, is to dismiss feminism as a joke, to insist that their ideas cannot be taken seriously. Unfortunately, we must take them seriously:

Feminism is propagated daily on campus — As of 2009, some 90,000 students at 700 colleges and universities were enrolled in Women’s Studies courses, including 31 Master’s programs and 13 Ph.D. programs. Thousands of professors are employed in teaching Women’s Studies which, because of its “interdisciplinary” nature, influences many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.
Feminism exercises hegemonic power within academia — Because federal Title IX legislation prohibits discrimination against women, and because criticism of feminism has often been interpreted as indicative of discriminatory intent, almost no one within academia will dare speak out in direct opposition to feminism. The classic example of how feminism wields uncontested authority on campus was the purge of Larry Summers as President of Harvard University. At a 2005 conference on women in science, Summers suggested that “innate differences” between men and women might explain the relative small number of top female scientific researchers. Within a year, Summers was forced to resign.
Feminism has become a decisive force in American politics — The so-called “gender gap” of women favoring Democrat candidates has become a basic organizing principle of liberalism in the 21st century. In 2012, President Obama was re-elected with the largest “gender gap” since Gallup began measuring the difference between male and female voters. This result followed a campaign in which Democrats accused Republicans of waging a “War on Women,” and in which Obama’s election team carefully targeted TV ads at women voters in key swing states.

“Politics is downstream from culture,” as Andrew Breitbart insisted, and feminism’s influence in culture — in academia, in the publishing industry, in the news media and in popular entertainment — is so pervasive and powerful that we can neither ignore it nor treat it as a joke.

Sure we can laugh at their radical insanity, but we need to understand that this insanity defines reality for millions of women who subscribe to the feminist worldview. When Professor Rich claims that logic is “a patriarchal mindset . . . a rigid paradigm of linear (phallocentric) thought,” she dismisses the possibility that men and women experience the same reality. There are no objective facts, according to feminist theory, only subjective interpretations. Anyone who claims that objective reality exists is trapped in “a rigid paradigm” of “male thought.” This insistence on subjectivity is what inspired Irish law student Anja Eriud to invoke the spoon metaphor from The Matrix:

Feminism is like that force, and the spoon represents the object, the thing that this force is wishing into existence, that thing or object being the sum of all evil, the fount of all badness — the big bad patriarchy.
Just like in the film, the only object that actually exists is the boy – the thing he has created is the illusion of a spoon — the trick is not that he can bend this imaginary spoon — the trick, if you will, it is that he can make you believe in that spoons existence.
So. Feminism is — the ability to make you see something that is not there — and to manipulate and bend that thing into any shape. . . .
In effect — the loons of feminism not only created the spoon, they poured all their malice, all their bitterness, all their rage and hatred for men into that creation.
Feminism is that malice, that bitterness, that rage and hatred, polished and moulded, layered and then re-layered with “credibility” with “academic cachet” with “plausibility” . . .

You can read the whole thing. What she is saying is that feminists have invented a jargon — “patriarchy,” “misogyny,” “heternormativity,” “gender,” etc. — to describe intellectual abstractions which have become a reality over which they exercise complete control. Because feminists control the existence of this “spoon” they have created, they are able to bend it however they wish, and we find ourselves in the position of Alice on the other side of the looking glass, arguing with Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

This is where feminist “rape culture” discourse takes us, to a bizarre alternative reality where normal definitions do not apply, where the burden of proof is shifted from the accuser to the accused, who is expected to prove a negative, that he did not rape his girlfriend. Really: Auburn University student Joshua Strange’s ex-girlfriend accused him of assault and he was expelled even after being exonerated by a grand jury. (Watch a video about the case that is deeply disturbing.) In England, this shifting of the burden of proof is now a matter of law:

Men accused of date rape will need to convince police that a woman consented to sex as part of a major change in the way sex offences are investigated.
The Director of Public Prosecutions said it was time for the legal system to move beyond the concept of “no means no” to recognise situations where women may have been unable to give consent.
Alison Saunders said rape victims should no longer be “blamed” by society if they are too drunk to consent to sex, or if they simply freeze and say nothing because they are terrified of their attacker.
Instead, police and prosecutors must now put a greater onus on rape suspects to demonstrate how the complainant had consented “with full capacity and freedom to do so”.
Campaigners described the move as “a huge step forward” in ensuring fewer rapists escape justice. . . .
“We want police and prosecutors to make sure they ask in every case where consent is the issue — how did the suspect know the complainant was saying yes and doing so freely and knowingly?”

Read the whole thing. You risk being called a “rape apologist” if you see how this “step forward” jeopardizes the freedom of every heterosexual male. Any woman’s post-coital regret — or her desire for revenge against a man who in some way aroused her wrath — could become a pretext for a rape accusation under this “full capacity” standard. One can easily imagine the bloke in a pub who thinks he’s gotten lucky with a bird. She goes home with him for a shag, everything seems fine, but the next day (or the next week) she regrets their tryst. She goes to the police saying she was raped because she’d had a few pints and thus did not possess the “full capacity” to consent. For that matter, if his wife or girlfriend ever decided to spite him, she could claim she did not “freely” consent because she was “terrified” of him.

“Women never lie about rape!” the feminists shriek, no matter how many rape accusations are exposed as hoaxes.

Just as they have created the “spoon” of patriarchal oppression, however, “rape culture” is also a feminist creation that no amount of factual argument can disprove. Department of Justice statistics showing that rape has declined significantly in the U.S. during the past 15 years, and that female college students are actually at less risk of rape than other women the same age — well, never mind your so-called “evidence,” you misogynist! Facts and logic are tools of the patriarchy! Any evidence contradicting feminist arguments can be dismissed by their rhetorical arm-waving. Once their pet “1-in-5” statistic had been exposed as a lie, feminists launched a hashtag campaign #NotJustAStat to promote the claim that statistics don’t matter.

In other words, feminism is a non-falsifiable theory. It’s a religious cult, and this feminist theology can never be disproven.

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Category: Feminism, Sex Trouble

Comments

78 Responses to “‘There Is No Spoon’: Radical Feminism and the Paranoid Matrix of Patriarchy”

DeadMessenger
March 6th, 2015 @ 9:26 pm

I’d seriously like to know how you spew out this volume of researched material as often as you do. I wish I could do that. Hats off to you, Mr. McCain.
Julie Pascal
March 6th, 2015 @ 9:34 pm

Dorothy Sayer was frequently asked how she wrote male characters so well… she explained she wrote human characters. She found questions that assumed that her mind was a female mind rather than a human mind insulting. Feminism has gone from insisting that we’re all the same, in our brains, to insisting that we are entirely different organisms from men and in no way do we meet. While it’s absurd to say there are no differences, the differences are in degree rather than type. Clearly and uncontroversially men and women range on separate but overlapping curves when it comes to how they think and any individual will have more difference with some of those of their own sex than with a large portion of the other sex. We can identify some things as common to women and others as common to men, but none are exclusive. I easily identify with Sayer and find myself profoundly annoyed when “feminists” want to do me a favor and make something or other more “woman friendly” because it generally means that I’m going to be screwed over by whatever they do.

And I’d really rather not think that the profound absurdity of the idea that our biology is *imposed* by a nefarious patriarchy is an artifact of the “female” mind. Bat sh*t crazy insane mind… yes. Female mind, oh please no. What’s wrong with simply viewing one’s self as an outlier while still accepting the very simple science of genetics and biology? What leap of illogic is necessary to go from “I really have no interest in men” to “none of those other women do either?”

Do people around them, other feminists, recognize the irrationality of this and just decide to treat them like a crazy aunt who thinks she’s Marie Antoinette but she’s not likely to hurt anyone so they smile and pat her on the hand and ask how was Paris?
‘There Is No Spoon’: Radical Feminism and the Paranoid Matrix of Patriarchy | Living in Anglo-America
March 6th, 2015 @ 9:40 pm

[…] http://theothermccain.com/2015/03/06/there-is-no-spoon-radical-feminism-and-the-paranoid-matrix-of-p… […]
marcus tullius cicero
March 6th, 2015 @ 10:14 pm

It comes to two words, penis envy…Give a woman a dildo and she becomes a “man”, is it not the preferred toy for Lesbians? I could go on but McCain already pointed all the arguments…
Adobe_Walls
March 6th, 2015 @ 10:27 pm

So Marilyn Frye is now trying to give the credit for creating the Patriarchy (blessed be it’a name) to women? Talk about penis envy!
Joe Katzman
March 6th, 2015 @ 10:28 pm

This is your summa, your capstone. Bravo.
Daniel Freeman
March 6th, 2015 @ 11:21 pm

Every time I think that, he outdoes himself again.
Zohydro
March 6th, 2015 @ 11:41 pm

If one has never seen our longanimous host speak at length (and I hadn’t) the vids at Nice Deb are worth the 20 minutes!
robertstacymccain
March 6th, 2015 @ 11:57 pm

Ha! I just ordered another $56 worth of radical feminist books today.

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!
Adobe_Walls
March 7th, 2015 @ 12:17 am

Have you read the ”The Womans Room”?
Daniel Freeman
March 7th, 2015 @ 12:31 am

I’m sure there’s a multitude of disorders at play. I just said this today:

If you take the “victim identity” that is common to borderlines and
cross it with the “group identity” that is common to authoritarians,
then you get something like “cultural marxism,” which replaces the
proletariat with a multitude of victim classes. If you reject
victimhood, then (in their dangerous-yet-cute little collectivist
minds), you reject the class — a black conservative isn’t really black,
an anti-feminist woman isn’t really female, etc.

However, I learned about the “victim identity” aspect of BPD from an AVfM hangout that was also talking about narcissists, and to some extent “cluster B” disorders in general. It was about “the Fearsome Foursome,” a.k.a. “What makes borderlines tick?”
Daniel Freeman
March 7th, 2015 @ 12:55 am

Better you than me. The raw material would drive me nuts. Tip jar hit.
concern00
March 7th, 2015 @ 2:29 am

“Given that woman cannot ‘fit’ into the cartography of male thought, she cannot be expected to communicate in ways that are understandable to those caught within a patriarchal mindset.”

This is a ‘get out of jail free’ card. These ‘enlightened’ feminists are essentially claiming that men and others caught within the patriarchal mindset can not possibly hope to understand them. That disqualifies all men – sorry Stacey – and any women that falls under our spell.
Fail Burton
March 7th, 2015 @ 2:54 am

Everyone who’s heard of an all-female army raise your hands

Do you believe men prevented that?

Why didn’t women prevent all-male armies?

Conclusion: gender abolition feminists are mental.
Steve Skubinna
March 7th, 2015 @ 2:58 am

Right now the aspect of this issue that engages me is this: why does every empowered feminist appear to respond to everything with a full bore linear hysterical freakout? Because to me “empowered and self confident” don’t go with endless shrieking and flailing.

Case in point, Shirtstorm. A healthy well balanced individual would say “Landed on a comet! Awesome! Oh, and cool shirt, by the way.”

An empowered feminist bewails that this has set back women in STEM because they’re all too weak, stupid and fragile to even look at a shirt with cartoon women with ray guns on it.

Okay ladies, if you literally cannot exist in the same space as a man, then what the hell are you doing stamping and screaming about it? Go the hell away to your safe place, the one with no men anywhere near it. I promise you we’ll leave you alone. I’m not budging just because you’re an emotional basket case.
Steve Skubinna
March 7th, 2015 @ 3:00 am

Emotionally healthy women don’t want to be in combat. Well, neither do emotionally healthy men, but they realize that sometimes bad things have to be endured to protect the group. So the emotionally healthy women can bear and raise the next generation.
Fail Burton
March 7th, 2015 @ 3:05 am

Are there dildo-washing machines, like… they have for bowling balls?
Steve Skubinna
March 7th, 2015 @ 3:09 am

Oh, and in reply to your question, how about the Amazons? How about Pussy Galore’s gang?

And no matter that these examples are fictional.
Fail Burton
March 7th, 2015 @ 3:13 am

No disrespect to Mr. McCain, but the amount of sheer nuttiness one can find is the complete opposite of cherry-picking. The books are so full of insanity it’s tempting to want to quote the whole thing.

For example, what do you leave out of Andrea Dworkin’s insane chapter in her book Woman-Hating called “Gynocide”? It takes up 1/6 of the book and has “neolithic” magic matriarchal Hobbits and 9 million witches killed in medieval Europe.

Feminists are quote factories. If you visit the Twitter feeds of Mikki Kendall, Shanley Kane and Lauren Chief-Elk, it’s like paying a visit to a mental hospital.
DeadMessenger
March 7th, 2015 @ 4:53 am

I prefer to let you and McCain go down that road. I have kids, and that’s as close to mental hospital as I want to get.
DeadMessenger
March 7th, 2015 @ 4:54 am

I go there to pee.
Francis W. Porretto
March 7th, 2015 @ 5:32 am

Paranoia and narcissism are related phenomena, because the paranoid person’s delusions of persecution require him to believe that he is so important that powerful people and institutions are conspiring against him.

Exactly. I am the center of the universe, the hub around which all of reality turns. If “they” succeed in warping me, all of reality will crash. That’s why the Feds, the Trilateralists, and the Bilderbergers are trying to make me paranoid, but I’m not going to let them!

Seriously, though, that observation is itself a political lodestone. It applies, in varying degrees, to every form of self-promotion and self-absorption observable today. Select any special-interest group and examine the assumptions behind its focus, and you will find both narcissism and paranoia: the first, because the group has promoted its narrow interest to the pinnacle of all human concerns; the second, because they condemn and oppose any and every statement or action that deviates from that focus, as if the rest of us aren’t allowed to have anything else on our minds.
M. Simon
March 7th, 2015 @ 5:40 am

If a woman has sex with a Beta – post sex it is assault. If a woman has sex with an Alpha – post sex it is “how soon can we do it again?”

The best blog on the subject of human males/females and sexual strategies is ” The Rational Male ” the best single post for a start on the subject is:

http://therationalmale.com/2014/08/07/open-hypergamy/

For women there are three sexes. Female – Alpha – Beta. Everything else stems from that.
M. Simon
March 7th, 2015 @ 5:45 am

Joe,

No mention of female hypergamy is a very serious omission.

You read http://therationalmale.com/

RSM could use a clue.
DeadMessenger
March 7th, 2015 @ 5:45 am

I live in Florida, and people say that boats are a money pit. But I’d say, not more than feminist literature. Holy schnikes, is there no end to it??? Think of it this way, McCain: you could either have a nice bass boat, or an a$$load of feminism, and you picked feminism, LOL!

Someday if you get a bass boat, I think you should name it Patriarch.
DeadMessenger
March 7th, 2015 @ 5:50 am

Huh. Maybe it’s that, but as a woman, I think it might hinge on the next day phone call.

If a woman has sex with an alpha, she pretty much knows there’s no follow up, on account of they’re known a$$holes, and you know that going in. But if you don’t get a call from a beta, then you are totally getting dissed, and, you know, woman scorned and all that.
M. Simon
March 7th, 2015 @ 5:54 am

Women will do everything and anything to hide their sexual strategies. It is not to their advantage for them to become well known.

================

No fault divorce empowers the female sexual strategy.

================

What you have to ask is “why do bad boys make women hot”? You answer that question with facts and all the rest falls in place.
M. Simon
March 7th, 2015 @ 6:06 am

For women it is all about “what can I get”? Nothing wrong with that. Evolutionarily that is their best strategy.

Alphas provide sperm.

Betas provide resources.

Alphas make women hot when they are in the ovulation cycle. Women will fake enough hot for a beta to maintain access to his resources.

Ovulating women favour dominant men’s smell
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050704/full/news050704-6.html

The best of course is finding an alpha that also has resources and figure out how to keep him.
DeadMessenger
March 7th, 2015 @ 6:59 am

So…how much do you make a year, I’m wondering?

/jk
DeadMessenger
March 7th, 2015 @ 7:03 am

You got me. I always had a thing for nice guys, who had brains and personality. You know, the geeks from high school who were shaping up to be future surgeons or something.
M. Simon
March 7th, 2015 @ 7:33 am

This year? Not much. Other years quite a bit. This is my latest project.

http://protonboron.com/portal/
M. Simon
March 7th, 2015 @ 7:35 am

That would make you unusual. FWIW I’m a bad boy aerospace engineer – electronics.

I spent 3 years in an outlaw MC gang.
Daniel O'Brien
March 7th, 2015 @ 7:56 am

McCain, this right here is some PhD level research.
DeadMessenger
March 7th, 2015 @ 8:05 am

Oh really? Former electrical engr @ KSC, myself; launch telemetry.
M. Simon
March 7th, 2015 @ 8:10 am

I worked on black boxes for aircraft electrical generators. Passed by a Shuttle refurbishment station every day on my way into work.

I was also a test eqpt. master. And a few other things. I was a contractor.
RS
March 7th, 2015 @ 9:04 am

. . .women’s thinking is only irrational if understood within a rigid paradigm of linear (phallocentric) thought.

Forgive the lengthy comment which may appear to be tangential at first blush.

I would modify the above MacKinnon quote to add the qualifiers “American feminist” to “women’s thinking.” I would further note, our educational system has worked since at least the early 70s to eliminate “linear (evidence-based) thought) from the abilities of American students.

For those of us of a certain age, we recall our first grammar school forays into expository writing: The ubiquitous five-paragraph essay consisting of an introduction with a thesis statement, i.e. an assertion of fact, followed by two paragraphs of evidence supporting the thesis, a paragraph reciting and refuting or distinguishing contrary assertions or evidence, followed by a conclusion reiterating the thesis and demonstrating how it had been proven, or least made more likely that not.

Composition historians–there’s a line of work–will tell you that in the Seventies, American writing instruction moved away from that evidence paradigm to a more “expressivist” form of writing, especially in the Humanities and Social Science arenas. That is, the subjective became the most important aspect of writing. Feelings and opinions replaced evidence. What this meant was that a writers personal beliefs–that is, his reality—trumped any actual facts. Assertions based upon those individual feelings were equally valid to any another other contrary assertions merely because the holder of those feelings existed. Composition instructors became confronted with students who took extreme umbrage to criticism of their writing, because dammit, “My opinion is as good as yours!”

And this began with the advent of Feminism as well as the other “Victims’ Rights” movements of the time. Obviously, one cannot necessarily point to a manifesto where academe announced a desire to eliminate the ability to think critically based upon acknowledged facts which, of course, would be expressed in student writing, but certainly, that has become the end result of this shift.

Note, at the outset of this comment, I used the modifiers “American feminist.” This shift in instruction took place here first. I’ve know quite a few female continental European expats who’ve attempted to teach English composition here over the years (including my spouse who possesses a Ph.D. in English Language & Linguistics) and they have astounded at how American students refuse to acknowledge evidence, admitted facts and logical syllogisms in their thinking and by extension, their writing. All critiques are viewed as personal attacks.

To square this with our host’s essay, part of the problem with Feminists–whether deliberately or subconsciously–is that their thought processes have been shaped to function solely in the realm of personal expression and feelings, where they are immune from criticism. And they have taught recent generations–both males and females–to think the same way. Is it any wonder then that this sort of lunacy abounds in various forms in our society.
Fail Burton
March 7th, 2015 @ 9:35 am

Have you heard about “gendered time”?
robertstacymccain
March 7th, 2015 @ 10:11 am

“… logical syllogisms …”

In college, I aced Introduction to Principles of Logic, which was taught as a sophomore-level elective in the Department of Psychology. It did not seem strange to me then, but seems strange to me now, that Principles of Logic should be an elective. It should be a required course, taken by all freshmen, preferably in their first semester. Being able to construct a syllogism, to identify the premises of arguments, to recognize fallacies, and to understand what qualifies as evidence and logic to refute an argument, is essential to rational discourse.

Now, it happens that I am quite lazy in my rhetorical methods. That is to say, I understand that the object of the argument is to win the argument. In politics, we find that most people have profound partisan prejudices, so that there is no hope of persuading a Democrat to support, say, tax cuts or a larger defense budget. Therefore, when we find ourselves confronted with an antagonist in public argument, the simplest way to win is to ask ourselves, “How do I demonstrate that this person is a fool?”

My methodology in this regard was developed from years of youthful studies of military history: Locate the weakest point of the antagonist’s argument and pile onto that point with everything you’ve got. Deliver a crushing blow at the point of attack, and then wait for the response. The antagonist will invariably make some new error in attempting to defend the point you’ve attacked and — rather than continue your previous attack — you then shift to attacking his new error. “Unfair!” the antagonist will shriek, but as they say down home, “I ain’t never heard of no fair fight.”

These tactics work best against arrogant fools. I’m always on the lookout for such people, who always begin with the presumption that they are smarter than me and, when the argument is over, never can figure out how they got beat by a dumb hillbilly.
robertstacymccain
March 7th, 2015 @ 10:12 am

Glad you enjoyed it. Hit the freaking tip jar!
robertstacymccain
March 7th, 2015 @ 10:29 am

Women care about two things (a) relationships and (b) status. The summer of 1980, I met a lovely redhead who was thoroughly smitten with me, and began a relationship that I hoped would continue. Then I went back to college and, when I called her again — this was in pay-phone days, where I was feeding quarters into the machine — she said she wanted nothing more to do with me. What happened? Well, she had talked to someone who knew someone who knew me from college, who had disparaged my reputation. My status was diminished in her eyes, and she was no longer interested.

Women seek relationships that will enhance their own social status, and most men understand this at an intuitive level, which is why so many guys spend their money on flashy cars and other status symbols. One often hears women complain that men are “superficial,” but anyone who has carefully observed female social behavior knows that women are equally superficial, although in different ways than men are superficial. Have you ever watched women in a room with a male celebrity? Have you ever listened to women gush over a particularly sexy man?

As I tell my sons, “Don’t listen to what women say. Watch what women do.” There is a yawning gulf between what women say they want in a man and what they actually go after. I do not say this to disparage women, but rather to say that one cannot fairly judge a woman without accurately observing a woman. Learning the difference between a good woman and a bad woman requires careful study, and woe unto he who fails to judge accurately.
Quartermaster
March 7th, 2015 @ 10:41 am

In the military it is said that if you find yourself in a fair fight you planned poorly. In my book, a fair fight is one I win.
Quartermaster
March 7th, 2015 @ 10:46 am

As it is, the entire country is on the road to becoming a nut house.
Isa
March 7th, 2015 @ 10:57 am

the best definition for feminism i’ve heard comes from Bill Whittle (i may be paraphrasing a bit): “the intellectual belief that women are just as strong and as capable as men, which is why they must be protected at all times from thoughts and ideas that causes them to break down into emotional fits and uncontrolled hysterics.”
ericjg623
March 7th, 2015 @ 10:58 am

Tried that link and spent a few minutes there. Good God, what a nut-fest!
Greg
March 7th, 2015 @ 12:22 pm

Excellent article Mr McCain.
DeadMessenger
March 7th, 2015 @ 12:26 pm

Well, you know, it’s written that by their fruits you shall know them, which applies to us all.
DeadMessenger
March 7th, 2015 @ 12:28 pm

I think the fusion thing is coolest of all. I checked out that website.
Squid Hunt
March 7th, 2015 @ 12:32 pm

All you gotta do to win against a liberal is keep them talking. It’s inevitable that they’ll eventually expose themselves if you bait them properly.
Squid Hunt
March 7th, 2015 @ 12:38 pm

“and any women that falls under our spell”
An exception which pretty much upsets the entire theory. Stupidity with a degree and a captive audience.
RS
March 7th, 2015 @ 12:41 pm

Logic used to be a part of what was known as “Rhetoric,” which was a required course. My father had it in high school in the Thirties. I had Logic as part of my sophomore Geometry class in high school, believe it or not and it dovetailed with our composition courses where it was also taught. As I said, that instruction had disappeared from composition courses by the late Seventies or early Eighties.