The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Feminist-Industrial Complex: Academia and the Means of Production

Posted on | April 25, 2015 | 112 Comments

@SarahNAhmed a/k/a “feminist killjoys.”

Sara Ahmed is a lesbian and a feminist, not necessarily in that order. There is always a chicken-and-the-egg question about such matters. Correlation is not causation, but this particular correlation is sufficiently common as to be a phenomenon deserving its own categorical label, as Professor Ahmed acknowledges.

“Last week,” Professor Ahmed wrote in late February, “I enjoyed attending the Lesbian Lives conference in Brighton (my fifth!). I gave a lecture drawn from material in my chapter on ‘Lesbian Feminism’ which is the final chapter of the book I am working on.”

Gosh, what a coincidence. Lesbian feminism is also a subject of my own book, Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature. As I explain in the introduction to this 120-page book now available through Amazon ($11.69 in paperback, $1.99 on Kindle), it is a work in progress. Later this year, I plan to publish a revised and expanded second edition, but after many months of research, I felt a need to publish something — even if it was something with typographical errors that make me grind my teeth in agony — as I had promised loyal readers who had repeatedly told me, “You should write a book.”

OK, so I did write a book, and I am in fact still writing the same book, which is to say that I continue compiling material for the second edition. Self-publishing through Amazon’s CreateSpace program affords me the opportunity to do this exactly the way I want, when I want, without the hassles of arguing with an editor or publisher. People who have never been through the non-fiction book publishing process can scarcely imagine what it’s like: You informally “pitch” a proposal to a publisher. He loves your idea. You crank out a few thousand words — an outline, a couple of draft chapters, etc. — and send that off, then wait to hear back on the approval. Alas, the publisher took it to his editorial board, and the board had some issues, so the publisher is going to need you to re-work your proposal, and so forth. There comes a point in this process where it dawns on you that (a) you are no longer talking about them publishing your book, but rather are negotiating for a chance to write their book, and (b) if their book idea is so much better than your book idea, let them hire somebody else to write it. But I digress . . .

Professor Sarah Ahmed is director of the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths College, University of London:

The Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) provides a coordinating hub for feminist work at Goldsmiths. In addition to organising seminars and conferences, the CFR offers a symbolic and intellectual home for the MA in Gender, Media and Culture, co-convened by the Departments of Media & Communications and Sociology. . . .
By ‘feminist research’ we include any work that is informed by an active engagement with feminist intellectual debates, and any research that investigates questions of power, inequality and difference including race, class, disability as well as gender and sexuality. . . .
We have identified four key and loose strands of feminist research activity at Goldsmiths:

  • Intersectionality; gender and class; feminist of colour scholarship and activism; queer feminism; transfeminism.
  • Feminist genealogies, new feminism, post-feminism.
  • Feminist cultural theory (including feminist engagements with visual culture, new media, screen culture and technology)
  • Feminist work on embodiment, affect and emotion

In other words, the Centre for Feminist Research is a major institutional cog in the wheel of the Feminist-Industrial Complex and the lesbian Professor Sarah Ahmed is its director. Correlation is not causation, but neither is this correlation entirely a coincidence. Professor Ahmed is author of several books, including Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006) which is described thus:

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.
Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts — by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon — with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

Published by Duke University Press Books, Queer Phenomenology currently ranks #4 among Amazon.com’s bestsellers for “Textbooks . . . Gay & Lesbian Studies,” which tells you that it is widely assigned for college students in this field. This is not trival information, but is important to understanding how the Feminist-Industrial Complex operates. Based in academia, especially in Women’s Studies programs, this system creates employment opportunities for Professional Feminists who get paid to indoctrinate young women. Higher education is subsidized by taxpayers, and thus the Women’s Studies programs amount to taxing citizens in order to pay Professional Feminists to promote their ideology. However, it’s not as if teaching one or two courses each semester requires a 40-hour work week. The tenured Ph.D. has plenty of spare time for “research” and, if they are industrious and ambitious, this spare time is spent writing journal articles and books or (as is entirely common) writing journal articles that are then compiled into books. So the Professional Feminist writes a 5,000-word essay one month and a 1,500-word book review the next month — getting paid for each of these articles, extra income on top of her university salary — and if she’s shrewd enough to keep her work focused around a general theme, she steadily produces the raw product of her next book.

Suppose she can crank out 4,000 words a month. This isn’t really that much. When I was on the presidential campaign trail in 2011-2012, I would regularly produce 1,500-2,000 words a day. For a tenured Ph.D. in Women’s Studies to write a thousand words a week would seem quite an easy workload, even in addition to her teaching and other faculty work, attending staff meetings and so forth. Supposing a production rate of roughly a thousand words per week, then, a Women’s Studies professor could produce a new 75,000-word book every 18 months. (Hint: Just checked my word-count on this blog post, and it’s about 1,100 words already.) Let us now examine Professor Ahmed’s authorial output:

Put aside all questions about the quality of Professor Ahmed’s research and writing and instead focus only on the quantity of her authorial output. During a period of 16 years, she published seven books totaling 1,807 pages. That is to say, she published about 113 pages per year in books, on top of her other academic production. Professor Ahmed “has also edited or co-edited 7 books and journals, and has published over 60 journal articles and book chapters,” according to her Wikipedia page, which quotes one enthusiastic admirer: “Few academic writers working in the UK context today can match Sara Ahmed in her prolific output, and fewer still can maintain the consistently high level of her theoretical explorations.” Professor Ahmed is, then, a relentless dynamo of feminism whose efficient production of “high level . . . theoretical explorations” make her a marvel of postmodern academia. Yet despite her fame within the feminist universe, it is quite likely that you never heard of Professor Ahmed before, and that you have never encountered any of her several books. This is because the Feminist-Industrial Complex operates inside an academic bubble, insulated both from the commercial marketplace and the ordinary lives of ordinary people.

Except for her 2000 book Strange Encounters (published by Routledge, “the world’s leading academic publisher in the Humanities and Social Sciences”), all of Professor Ahmed’s books were published by university presses. While I don’t want to write a treatise on the economics of academic publishing, let’s just say it’s not about cranking out bestsellers. You’re not going to find a big display of Sara Ahmed books at your local Barnes & Noble store. No, the market “demand” for the output of university presses comes almost entirely from within academia itself. A moderately successful book will be purchased by several hundred university libraries, while the more successful book will be assigned as a text in university classes, thus generating several hundred more orders from university bookstores. If a book from a university press should become in any way popular outside this institutional marketplace, that’s a bonus. What this means for the Feminist-Industrial Complex is that, without the artificial marketplace created by taxpayer-subsidized college and university Women’s Studies programs, the economics of supply and demand would shrivel the career opportunities in this field to the merest fraction of what now exists. If what Professor Glenn Reynolds calls The Higher Education Bubble should ever burst, feminism as we know it would be devastated.

Consider, for example, the February conference at which Professor Ahmed presented her lecture which was, as she said, “drawn from material in . . . the final chapter of the book I am working on.” The 22nd Annual Lesbian Lives Conference was “hosted by University of Brighton LGBT and Queer Life Research Hub in conjunction with Women’s Studies Centre, University College Dublin.” So we have two universities producing this lesbian conference which featured lesbians from other universities talking about lesbianism. If you’re wondering what sort of topics were discussed at this two-day university-sponsored event in Brighton, you’re in luck. The program for the conference was posted online, and we can therefore list this small sample of the proceedings:

QUEER SPATIALITIES AND LESBIAN INTERSECTIONS
Chair: Kath Browne
Sheila Pardoe: Borders and betrothals: queer tourism and Toronto’s Grand Pride Wedding
Laine Zisman Newman: (Un)Happy haunted houses: Queering majoritarian space through protest and
performance
Megan Chawansky: The next Abby Wambach: Lesbian sporting celebrity within Sport for Development and
Peace (SDP) projects
Ilana Eloit: Feminist trouble: The lesbian political subject and the archaeology of an anti-racist lesbian thought
in France (1970-1985)

SEX, LESBIAN FEMINISM AND ACADEMIC BED-DEATH: TOWARDS A LUBRICATION OF THE “ISMS”
Moderator: Jane Czyzselska (Diva Magazine and Middlesex University)
Speakers:
CampbellX :‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’: How to De-Colonize / Reclaim Lesbian Desire
Janet Jones: ‘Hey lesbian feminism! Don’t tell me how to have sex!’ Radical feminist silencing and what
disabled lesbians do in bed
Jane Traies: Invisible Intimacies: Sex and the Older Lesbian

LESBIAN LOOKS: REGARDING THE LESBIAN GAZE
Chair: Jane Hattrick
Suzanne van Rossenberg: At the intersection of feminist art, LGBTI activism and research
Karin Sellberg and Joanna Benecke: Femme is a Feminist Issue
Sneha Kar Chaudhuri: Closet Lesbian Love and the tradition of Sakhiyani: Representing queerness in Bollywood now
Gail Neill: ‘A different kind of girl’: Young women’s understanding and negotiation of sexual identities

The reader may well wonder how anyone ever managed to become a lesbian before there were academic conferences where they could learn how to “reclaim lesbian desire” or represent “queerness in Bollywood.” Yet perhaps a more interesting and relevant question is: Exactly who the hell are these people?

Randomly, I did a Google search on a couple of the panelists. Dr. Megan Chawansky is a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton’s School of Sport and Service Management:

Dr. Megan Chawansky was awarded her PhD in Sport and Exercise Humanities from Ohio State University (USA) in 2008. She was a postdoctoral research officer at The University of Bath from 2009-2011, and then worked as a lecturer at The University of Iowa. Megan received her master’s degree in women’s studies from Ohio State University and acquired her undergraduate degree in psychology and women’s studies from Northwestern University. While at Northwestern, Megan was a captain and all-league performer as a member of the women’s basketball team.
Megan’s research focuses on socio-cultural power struggles around gender, and the way in which these struggles shape the subjectivities, bodies, and lives of girls and women. Megan accesses various theoretical understandings of power, gender, and methodologies within her research. Early in her career, Megan’s research outputs focused primarily on US women’s sports. At present, Megan’s research focuses on the transnational sport for development and peace (SDP) movement, and her research outputs have been both theoretical and applied. Megan was a fellow of Women Win, a Programme Director for PeacePlayers International-Cyprus, and also served as a development intern at the Women’s Sports Foundation (US).

So, basically, she went to Northwestern on a basketball scholarship (a 5-foot-11 guard, she wore jersey No. 24 for the Wildcats) and never left academia — a prototypical feminist success story. Then there is Suzanne van Rossenberg, a student in the Art and Design doctoral program at Middlesex University, where her research is described thus:

The Business Case of Feminist or Queer Art
Creating the possibility to say no to the dominant hetero-normative economic and political structures of art. Or yes. But to least write a story about it that replaces an older one.
Feminist art and queer art have recently gained major visibility, but how does this create reliable positions for feminist and queer cultural practitioners to carry out their work? The historicisation of feminist art clashes with the political and economic position of artists, like myself, who have decided to operate within the space between art and feminist activism. My research raises the question whether the omission of the economic contextualisation and interpretation of art has hindered artists with minority backgrounds to have full and equal access to the multiple art worlds that characterise the global art scene; to money and recognition. It seeks to explore the relation between everyday feminisms, their economic structures and the function of feminist art practices by making deliberate intersections with LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) activism, emancipation and human rights advocacy. Repeatedly stepping in and out of artistic, activist and theoretical structures informs the (fragmented) creation of feminist or queer art spaces on either side; spaces that take the political and economic structures of art, art theory and feminisms into account, increase a network of audiences and improve the political and economic positions of feminist and queer cultural practitioners. Conclusively, my research aims to investigate whether transdisciplinary “methodologies” of queer or feminist art, art theory and institutional critique augment the “constituency” for feminist or queer art spaces.

If the transdisciplinary methodologies of your deliberate interesections aren’t queer, blame the dominant heteronormative economic and political structures, or something.

Whenever I quote this kind of feminist jargon to sane people who live in the real world, the reaction is a mixture of incredulity (“Do people really go to college to learn that crap?”) and dismissal (“What a bunch of fringe kooks!”). yet the fact is that such activism/research is taken very seriously within academia. Remember that every year, more than 90,000 students enroll in Women’s Studies courses, which are taught at 700 U.S. colleges and universities. Thousands of faculty members are employed to teach these classes, and what the faculty are paid to teach is what defines “feminism” in the minds of their students.

In answer to the most obvious question — “What use is any of this in the real world?” — the answer is, “None whatsoever.” However, the “real world” (i.e., the capitalist marketplace, where profit is generated from the sale of goods and services) produces enough excess revenue that many millions of dollars a year can be siphoned off to fund these academic swamps, as well as to pay for government agencies where a Women’s Studies graduate can be employed to do nothing except to meddle around in the lives of other people. Also, the “real world” of capitalism has over the past century heaped up untold billions of dollars at tax-exempt philanthropic foundations which, in turn, constantly hand over huge sums in grants to various non-profit groups that employ “activist” types to advocate for social change. The Feminist-Industrial Complex thus intersects both with the ever-expanding liberal Welfare State and with the non-profit sector which (surprise!) constantly advocates for even more government Welfare State programs.

So while (a) the jargon of radical feminism strikes most people as nonsensical gibberish, and (b) you might think that the graduates with their Women’s Studies degrees would be qualified to become nothing other than a barista at Starbucks, in fact (c) academic gibberish is enormously influential because (d) it drives the agenda of major institutions in society, including perhaps the school your children attend. As much as you may want to dismiss the Feminist-Industrial Complex as an irrelevant absurdity, just keep in mind that there were people who laughed off the 1960s New Left as a bunch of fringe kooks, but now one of their disciples is the President of the United States.

Now think about what “fundamental transformation” might be next. If I haven’t yet convinced you to take feminism seriously, just imagine what Hillary Clinton might accomplish if she gets elected in 2016.

While you contemplate that nightmare, let’s return to the lesbian conference in Brighton, England, where Professor Sara Ahmed gave her speech about “Living Lesbian Lives.” Many of Professor Ahmed’s sources will be familiar names to those who have followed the “Sex Trouble” series here: Shulamith Firestone, Rita Mae Brown, Marilyn Frye, Adrienne Rich, Julia Penelope, Audre Lorde and Judith Butler. Here is a 350-word slice of what Professor Ahmed told the Brighton lesbians:

Heterosexuality could be described as an elaborate support system. Support is how much you have to fall back on when you fall. To leave heterosexuality can be to leave those institutional forms of protecting, cherishing, holding. You have less to fall back on when you fall. When things break a whole life can unravel.
When family is not there to prop you up, when you disappear from family life, you had to find other ways of being supported. When you disappear from family life: does this happen to you? You go home, you go back home and it feels like you are watching yourself disappear: watching your own life unravel, thread by thread. No one has willed or intended your disappearance. Just slowly, just slowly, as talk of family, of heterosexuality as the future, of lives that you do not live, just slowly, just slowly, you disappear. They welcome you, they are kind, you are the lesbian aunties from London, say, but it is harder and harder to breath. And then when you leave you might go and find a lesbian bar or queer space; it can be such a relief. You feel like a toe, liberated from a cramped shoe. And we need to think about that: how the restriction of life when heterosexuality remains a presumption can be countered by creating spaces that are looser, freer not only because you are not surrounded by what you are not because you are reminding there are so many ways to be.
So much invention comes from the necessity of creating our own support systems. Note here the significance of fragility to this history: how we too can be shattered, how we need each other to put our lives back together again. And: if we are recognised as fragile, breakable, broken, we are often assumed to have caused our own damage. We after all have willingly left the apparently safer paths, the more brightly lit paths of heterosexuality. What did you expect, dear: what did you expect? . . .

You can read the whole thing, in which Professor Ahmed portrays lesbian feminists as engaged in a heroic struggle of “creating our own support systems” — except that they have really done nothing of the kind. What feminists like Professor Ahmed have done instead is to attach themselves parasitically to taxpayer-funded institutions, using political power (and legal threats of “discrimination” claims) to force the rest of us to subsidize their racket. Without the money the Feminist-Industrial Complex has extorted from society through their political shakedown scheme — “Bake us a lesbian wedding cake, or else!” — there would be no funding for their conferences, no tenured jobs for their leaders, no one willing to buy their books full of lunatic gibberish.

No one inside academia is permitted to say this, however. You might be sued for violating someone’s civil rights if you told the truth about feminism at any university in America today. The power of the Feminist-Industrial Complex is deployed to silence truth-tellers and to empower liars. Fortunately, they have no power over me.

Loyal readers have been funding my research, thanks to the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

By the way, I’ll be on the Joe Prich BlogTalkRadio show tonight at 9 p.m. ET. Today Joe’s co-host Bree Mars called to remind me about the schedule and I went on about 45-minute rant.

Like I keep saying: People need to wake the hell up!




 

Comments

112 Responses to “The Feminist-Industrial Complex: Academia and the Means of Production”

  1. Phil_McG
    April 25th, 2015 @ 8:33 pm

    Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use.

    This is an interesting use of the word “productive”.

    When the higher education bubble finally bursts, and all these rotten and worthless fake universities and pointless faculties are swept away, Miss Ahmed will finally have the chance to be productive, for realsies.

    Maybe she has an uncle who owns a kebab shop and needs someone to man the till.

  2. tomthumb015
    April 25th, 2015 @ 8:37 pm

    Interesting but alittle bit too long I thought. Well I am not surprised Prof Sara Ahmed as a lesbian and a feminist churns out endless feminists books, read only by other femrad acdemics. On this side of the pond in the UK @GoldsmithsUoL university is considered a loonie leftie uni full of academics that in reality should all be living inside padded cells with strong doors.

    @GoldsmithsUoL ‘diversaity officer’ nutjob #BaharMustafa recently held a public meeting but openly BANNING all white men from the meeting and it caused a UK national outrage on twitter. So I am not surprised by your findings, personally I think academia does exist in its own weird bubble, amd all the books published by academic Prof feminists are only ever only read by other radfems academic nutters.
    Very thing is offensive to feminists, everything also needs a pycho babble PC label on it, oh and everything needs to be BANNED or controlled.

    On a positive note I think men are waking up to this rentless tide of feminist bullsh*t in the media and all emenating from over paid academics with too much free time to write all this garbage, they just call it ‘research’ or ‘studies’ ??

    http://dailym.ai/1zW73JP

    http://bit.ly/1bvZJiF

  3. arcadius
    April 25th, 2015 @ 8:47 pm

    “what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time”

    It’s about physics, then. Or no?

  4. The Feminism-Industrial Complex: Academia and the Means of Production | Living in Anglo-America
    April 25th, 2015 @ 9:12 pm
  5. Daniel Freeman
    April 25th, 2015 @ 10:10 pm

    No. It’s been a couple of decades, but IIRC phenomenology is a philosophical approach that emphasizes the inherent limitations of our understanding of the world, due to having to extrapolate what we can’t actually see from where we stand.

    It is an epistemology of grounded humility, so it would take quite a lot of work to queer it; without having read the text, I would imagine that she accomplished the task by emphasizing humility for thee, but not for me.

  6. Adobe_Walls
    April 25th, 2015 @ 11:11 pm

    According to Wikipedia:

    ”Accordingly, “A unique and final definition of phenomenology is dangerous and perhaps even paradoxical as it lacks a thematic focus. In fact, it is not a doctrine, nor a philosophical school, but rather a style of thought, a method, an open and ever-renewed experience having different results, and this may disorient anyone wishing to define the meaning of phenomenology”.

    Yeah disorient, that’s it, their disoriented.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

  7. DeadMessenger
    April 25th, 2015 @ 11:14 pm

    Besides which, “phenomenology”…really? They can’t just say “experiences”? I see that even in Husserl’s day, narcissistic and clinically insane blowhard elitist academes were already trawling for yet more inconsequential and meaningless topics solely to impress other blowhard academes. Phenomenology, my a$$.

  8. Durasim
    April 25th, 2015 @ 11:25 pm

    “So, basically, she went to Northwestern on a basketball scholarship (a 5-foot-11 guard, she wore jersey No. 24 for the Wildcats) and never left academia — a prototypical feminist success story. ”

    If college basketball lesbians do not remain in academia, they may be forced to confront mediocre lives, and then resort to desperate measures to feel relevant.

    http://journalstar.com/news/local/judge-rogers-hate-crime-lie-exploded-in-her-face/article_8a527eef-a992-5144-b178-026226bfaa4e.html

  9. concern00
    April 26th, 2015 @ 1:03 am

    This all sounds pretty queer to me.

  10. Steve Skubinna
    April 26th, 2015 @ 1:15 am

    The first time I encountered the term phenomenology was in college in the seventies. Not in a course, it was a pivotal point in the film Dark Star, which has since become a regular staple of midnight screenings on campuses along with Rocky Horror and King of Hearts.

    So I am living proof that sometimes one does learn things in college. Sadly I only attended a state university and did not fork over a hundred grand for this knowledge, so it’s not worth as much had I gleaned it at Harvard or Brown.

  11. Steve Skubinna
    April 26th, 2015 @ 1:17 am

    So when these people say “work’ and “research,” it’s what you or I would call “making sh!t up.”

    Man, have I wasted my life, “working” by actually, you know, working.

  12. Steve Skubinna
    April 26th, 2015 @ 1:17 am

    I’m sure they’re all having a gay old time.

  13. Fail Burton
    April 26th, 2015 @ 1:42 am

    I no longer consider things such as Mongols and Huns as quite so bad as I once did.

  14. Daniel Freeman
    April 26th, 2015 @ 1:58 am

    Well, I called it an epistemology, while the entry calls it an ontology. I don’t think that either are wrong, per se; it’s kind of both, as a philosophical approach that posits both an objective truth and our limitations in understanding it.

  15. Daniel Freeman
    April 26th, 2015 @ 2:06 am

    I got my understanding of phenomenology from a higher-up Catholic priest — I forget exactly, maybe a Monsignor — that was invited to speak at my college, so I have a specific perspective on it. (Which is very phenomenological.)

    It was one of the few times in my life that I was aware of not being the smartest person in the room. (There were no doubt other times that I was not aware of it.) That was when I learned what “piercing eyes” meant.

  16. CGoodMT
    April 26th, 2015 @ 2:21 am

    Lots of people go home and find that there are things they don’t have in common with the rest of their family.

    I don’t think it’s something so new and unusual that it deserves a whole book devoted to it.

    For instance, I’m the only one in my family who’s fenced, the only one interested enough in military history to read multiple books about it, and the only one who plays MMORPGs. There’s lots of other things I don’t have in common with my family. And there are lots of things I do have in common. That’s life.

    I would laugh at anyone who suggested I write a book about my coping strategies. In addition to the general craziness of feminists, it seems like a lot of them want to imagine they have been through something unique and new that’s never been experienced before by anyone else.

  17. Adobe_Walls
    April 26th, 2015 @ 2:21 am

    I think disoriented describes it best in the context of this article.

  18. Sony Sunshine
    April 26th, 2015 @ 2:35 am

    As if all we heteronormative cis-people share one giant homogeneous brain. No need to ask each other what to bring to Thanksgiving or what time to meet somewhere. We all just know. It must be hell to be outside the collective.

  19. Steve Skubinna
    April 26th, 2015 @ 3:34 am

    And those Vandals? Totally bad rap, man.

  20. Steve Skubinna
    April 26th, 2015 @ 3:38 am

    I think you’ve hit on something there – most progressives desperately want, maybe need to belong to something that subsumes their personality. Maybe it’s that they’re afraid of being responsible for themselves, maybe having renounced religion they still have a need for belief, but the progs are the ones marching, ant-like, towards the clarion call of Social! Justice! without being able to articulate what it is they seek.

    Hence the dense, impenetrable synthetic jargon they cloak their ignorance in. Also, the insistence on uniformity of expression and opinion.

    As for the cis-people collective, I myself am not fond of canned yams with marshmallows melted on them, and yet they keep showing up at Thanksgiving gatherings. So maybe I’m being rejected by the body.

  21. Daniel Freeman
    April 26th, 2015 @ 4:23 am

    I’m listening to the radio show now, and of course Cultural Marxism and political correctness started as an attack on the Church. Already need a cigarette break (my quit is next week) and you barely started.

  22. Daniel Freeman
    April 26th, 2015 @ 5:25 am

    I’m about halfway through the show and you’re nailing it out of the park.

  23. Andy
    April 26th, 2015 @ 6:24 am

    She has a moustache, but i’d still tap it.

    I read your book and liked it. No mention of Germain Greer?

  24. Andy
    April 26th, 2015 @ 6:27 am

    oH and ifyou read her twitter feed, she has a real problem with white people.
    I guess she never got asked out by the handsome boys at school/
    .

  25. Daniel Freeman
    April 26th, 2015 @ 6:40 am

    Oh man, that rant starting about one hour in is epic. “People have to care about truth in a very, very serious way. Okay, I can joke around day and night, you know, I love to joke and clown around, but when it comes down to facts, buddy, facts matter.” And that was the smallest boom in the fusillade.

  26. Daniel Freeman
    April 26th, 2015 @ 7:26 am

    Finished and you hit all the major points. Well done, thank you.

    Everyone should listen to that interview.

  27. RS
    April 26th, 2015 @ 7:32 am

    You’ll find no disagreement from me regarding your thesis and evidence. I note only that what you write regarding the “Feminist/Lesbian Industrial Academic Complex” has been true for even longer with respect to the Postmodern Humanities in General. There were vague hints that it was in the offing before, but the explosion of Ph.D. programs occasioned by the Vietnam War’s draft deferral policies combined with academe’s mantra of “Publish or perish!” as the way to tenure and the postmodern inclination toward “deconstruction” has led us in part to the current circle jerk we see today in the liberal arts. There is no premium for quality anymore, ony quality. The surfeit of “academic” journals, where colleagues publish each other ad infinitum in hopes of getting tenure and there are no market forces or gatekeepers to call most of this stuff what it is: Garbage. Meanwhile, we’re graduating English B.A.s who’ve never read Paradise Lost>

  28. Daniel Freeman
    April 26th, 2015 @ 7:48 am

    I assume by “ony quality” you mean “only quantity.” I envy your relative anonymity, yet I could never give up my ability to edit. 😉

    Excellent wide-ranging-yet-succinct rant otherwise.

  29. Young men off to college really need to put this movie on their Netflix queue… | Batshit Crazy News
    April 26th, 2015 @ 7:51 am

    […] The Feminism Industrial Complex Smitty: Her Majesty’s Example Instapundit: Campus Sex Culture and the Parody of Bill […]

  30. marcus tullius cicero
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:07 am

    …I repeat, you cannot reason with crazy people and even worst, angry crazy womyn!
    <:~P

  31. DeadMessenger
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:10 am

    Dude, you used “phenomenological” to define “phenomenology”. Is that allowed, lol?

  32. Daniel Freeman
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:12 am

    Yes, because I used it to describe my knowledge of phenomenology, not phenomenology itself. You dig?

  33. RS
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:24 am

    Major screw up on my part. Forgiveness sought.

    As for the anonymity, I had a blog in my own name for about six years which had a modest following–40 hits a day or so–of non-political readers. Sadly, it was still enough to attract a few trolls, all of whom I tracked down and who received a packet of evidence in the mail regarding their activities. Unfortunately, the experience left me disinclined to continue posting stuff in my own name or with online profiles that can be doxxed. I know it’s not impossible, but I don’t wish to make it easy for the casual imbecile.

  34. Steve Skubinna
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:25 am

    Were you educated by Jesuits, by any chance?

  35. robertstacymccain
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:27 am

    the only one interested enough in military history to read multiple books about it

    Military history is simply not taught in schools anymore. All anyone knows about the Civil War is slavery. All anyone knows about WWII is Hitler and Hiroshima. Try to find someone under 50 who knows anything about, say, Chancellorsville or Midway. One might think that the value of basic ideas about strategy, tactics and weaponry would be self-evident. But no, all that is important to teach kids is WAR IS BAD and AMERICA SUCKS.

  36. From Around the Blogroll: NBC News and a culture of dishonesty | The First Street Journal.
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:27 am

    […] Stacey Stacy McCain on The Other McCain: The Feminism-Industrial Complex: Academia and the Means of Production. It seems that without the academic treadmill and university publishing companies, feminists would […]

  37. Steve Skubinna
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:30 am

    Well, war is bad. That’s why it’s paramount that, when we decide we must engage in it, we pursue it with a single minded dedication to see it through and finish it so we don’t ever have to revisit it.

    The ultimate refutation to that asinine bromide that “violence never solved anything” is: Slavery. Nazism. Japanese torture and rape of civilians.

    Now, when the topic of war is on the table, it’s about surgical strikes and exit strategies. And thus we find ourselves in a war against a vaguely defined foe (terror) and no idea what victory will look like.

  38. DeadMessenger
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:34 am

    This entire thread is phenomenological.

  39. theBuckWheat
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:35 am

    “Orientation” is the process of redefining reality. Notice how such realities reliably converge on statism, socialism, moral relativism and only freedoms that the hive-mind approve of.

    If feminists follow the same pattern as homosexual have, when they get sufficiently influential, they will start to demand that everyone not only acquiesce to their morality, but that people must affirm it. We have already seen some HR departments in government refuse to allow employees to decline to remain silent. We are entering a phase of this moral depravity that will be dangerous to society.

  40. Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:37 am

    […] The Other McCain discusses the Feminism-Industrial Complex […]

  41. theBuckWheat
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:46 am

    How ironic! The left (er, now “progressives”) loves to scold the rest of us on the topic of “sustainability”, yet none of their schemes are themselves sustainable. Socialism is not economically sustainable. Homosexuality is not demographically sustainable.

    Both of these systems can only exist when they can acquire assets from systems that are self-sustaining. The alternative is to consume the finite capital they can acquire by coercion, lies, and guile.

    Liberalism is a religion. It is a religion that leads to death. Of the individual and of society.

  42. Fail Burton
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:48 am

    The goofball thing about this truly weird cult is the Western white patriarchy they despise above all other things is the only thing that allows them to exist. It’s like the idea of Martin Luther King or Gandhi in Nazi Germany or ’60s Argentina – they just disappear. That means lesbo culture is actually a tribute to and confirmation of the superiority of the Western white patriarchy. Sure, it’s a backhanded compliment but a compliment nonetheless.

  43. Fail Burton
    April 26th, 2015 @ 8:56 am

    Her problem is she never got deported to where there’s lots of people who look just like her. Is she forbidden to leave the U. K.? There’s an entire world of non-whiteness for these morons to experience. They never do. All gender feminists are liars.

  44. Fr. Paul Lemmen
    April 26th, 2015 @ 9:32 am

    I learned what “piercing eyes” meant.
    Did you ‘glean’ that knowledge by listening, or did the Monsignor ‘pierce’ you with eyes??

  45. Fr. Paul Lemmen
    April 26th, 2015 @ 9:37 am

    It appears as a liberal standard, the situational truth of anything. There is no immutable truth, only the truth of the situation.
    This permeates the liberal (i.e., Progressive) world-view.
    This also explains how Progressives lie, cheat and steal: situational truth engenders situational law enforcement.

  46. Bumr50
    April 26th, 2015 @ 11:16 am

    I think a lot of Lefties simply jettison God from their lives without ever contemplating what they actually DO believe, creating a subconscious void.

    I completely understand questioning one’s faith to the Nth, or even changing it in response to said investigation. But simply amputating it from a life without any regard for what will replace it or how one will continue forward without it is crippling.

  47. Dana
    April 26th, 2015 @ 11:29 am

    Our esteemed host wrote:

    Based in academia, especially in Women’s Studies programs, this system creates employment opportunities for Professional Feminists who get paid to indoctrinate young women. Higher education is subsidized by taxpayers, and thus the Women’s Studies programs amount to taxing citizens in order to pay Professional Feminists to promote their ideology.

    Translation: without the academy and university publishing companies, feminists wouldn’t need to produce hundreds of pages of words on feminism, but simply learn the six most important words their talents and intelligence merit in the real world: “Would you like fries with that?”

  48. Dana
    April 26th, 2015 @ 11:30 am

    Woman the till, you sexist pig!

  49. Daniel O'Brien
    April 26th, 2015 @ 11:39 am

    Stacy, have you had any push back of your research and publications from anyone central in the FIC? I’d love to see a public debate of this, but then again, they are chicken to expose their esoteric dialogue exoterically.

  50. Finrod Felagund
    April 26th, 2015 @ 3:09 pm

    “Love is a matter of chemistry, sex is a matter of physics.”