The Other McCain

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

Men and Women Are (Still) Different

Posted on | February 16, 2020 | 2 Comments

 

How did basic biology become “controversial”? Girls have to file a federal lawsuit to prevent males from competing in girls’ sports, and you’re a bigot — a hater, a proponent of transphobia — if you take the side of the plaintiffs in what would seem like a slam-dunk case to anyone with an iota of common sense. Alas, common sense is prejudice, according to the High Priesthood of Wokeness in the Temple of Gender Ideology.

 

As I have argued elsewhere (“A World Without Norms: The Influence of Judith Butler’s ‘Gender Trouble’”), this confusion can be traced to exactly one book by an influential professor. Because Gender Trouble has become required reading for so many university students, Judith Butler’s ideas have permeated the culture of the intelligentsia and have, in the process, corrupted the feminist movement. Much of this mischief can be understood as misinterpretation of Professor Butler’s authorial intent; there was a reason she wrote that book, but because she did not explicitly state her purpose, the collegiate reader was left free to draw his or her own conclusions from Professor Butler’s opaque text.

‘Gender Trouble’ made Professor Judith Butler a major academic figure.

It was not until 2004, in her anthology Undoing Gender, that Professor Butler bothered to explain what few readers of her most famous book could have understood: Gender Trouble was intended as a defense of “butch”/“femme” identities within the lesbian community. To understand why a professor of philosophy would have felt the need to publish such a book in 1990, it is necessary to study the so-called “Sex Wars” that erupted within the feminist movement in the 1980s. This controversy centered on the 1982 Barnard College conference “Toward a Politics of Sexuality.” Pornography was the dividing line between the two sides of the “Sex Wars,” and the radical feminists (who were anti-porn) were also critical of the lesbian BDSM scene, which was celebrated by such of the Barnard conference participants as Gayle Rubin. Let anyone who has a copy of Gender Trouble handy search the index for Gayle Rubin, read Professor Butler’s text and notice where she first cites Rubin. On page 39 of the 1999 second edition of Gender Trouble, we find this sentence:

This utopian notion of a sexuality freed from heterosexual constructs, a sexuality beyond “sex,” failed to acknowledge the ways in which power relations continue to construct sexuality for women even within the terms of a “liberated” heterosexuality or lesbianism.

That sentence is footnoted and, turning to the notes (p. 201), we find:

See Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole S.Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 267–319. Also in Pleasure and Danger, see Carole S. Vance, “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” pp. 1–28; Alice Echols,“The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968–83,” pp. 50–72; Amber Hollibaugh, “Desire for the Future: Radical Hope in Pleasure and Passion,” pp. 401–410. . . .

The ordinary reader (i.e., the college sophomore for whom Gender Trouble is the assigned text for her “Introduction to Women’s Studies” class) could not possibly be expected to grasp the significance of Professor Butler’s sourcing here. Perhaps, if she were diligent, this typical student might visit her college library and check out Carol Vance’s Pleasure and Danger, an anthology of the works presented at the 1982 Barnard conference. However, the student cannot possibly be expected to understand the controversy that surrounded that conference, which was protested by feminists who had the support of such notable pioneers of the movement as Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin. Nor is it likely that the college sophomore assigned to read Gender Trouble will do enough research to discover that Rubin and Hollibaugh were both active proponents of the lesbian sadomasochism scene. Nor would the typical student be aware that Rubin had expressed support for the gay pedophile group NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) and criticized laws against child pornography.

Context is everything in interpreting Gender Trouble‘s original purpose, a fancy philosophical justification of the “butch”/“femme” identities closely associated with the lesbian BDSM practices for which Rubin’s “Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” was an academic Trojan horse. A generation of college-educated young women (and men) have had their perception of “gender” warped by Professor Butler’s dishonest book, whose author deployed an impenetrable façade of academic jargon to conceal from the unsuspecting reader the subtextual argument which her choice of sources signified to those of her peers directly familiar with the “Sex Wars” controversy. Today’s 19-year-old, enrolling in a Women’s Studies class, cannot be expected to know anything about that 1982 Barnard conference, and certainly can have no concept of what the San Francisco gay “leather” scene was like in 1982. It was in that scene, of course, that homosexual men promiscuously engaged in anonymous encounters that incubated the AIDS epidemic.

Gayle Rubin was directly familiar with what was happening in that scene during the late 1970s and early ’80s, because she was part of a small group of lesbian and bisexual women associated with The Catacombs, a notorious gay BDSM club (see “The Catacombs: A Temple of the Butthole,” Chapter 9 of Professor Rubin’s anthology, Deviations). If you don’t know what practices made The Catacombs notorious, I’ll spare you the details, but the point is that Rubin was part of that scene which, through the auspices of Rubin’s ideological comrade Pat Califia, expanded its original all-male clientele to include “other groups — kinky lesbians, heterosexuals, and bisexuals” (Deviations, p. 226). Rubin and Califia were also co-founders of Samois, a “lesbian-feminist BDSM organization” they started in San Francisco in 1978. Highly relevant to 21st-century Third Wave “queer feminism” and its celebration of polymorphous perversion, the consequences of making the leather/BDSM scene “inclusive” were deadly. Cynthia Slater, a bisexual woman who in 1974 “co-founded the Society of Janus, which quickly became a point of connection between straight, bisexual, and gay sadomasochists in the Bay Area” (Deviations, p. 233), “introduced a couple of her female lovers” to The Catacombs and one of these women, Professor Rubin explains, was Pat Califia, who in 1979 organized the first lesbian S&M night at The Catacombs. Alas, Cynthia Slater died of AIDS at age 44 in 1989, which was eight years after the first known AIDS-related death of a Catacombs regular, Tony Tavarossi, who had been a pioneer of the San Francisco gay leather scene back in the early 1960s.

The “kinky” BDSM culture that Gayle Rubin represented as her “Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” at the 1982 Barnard conference was directly implicated in the death of Cynthia Slater, and yet no college student assigned to read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble today is likely to connect the dots when Professor Butler cites Professor Rubin.

Men and women are different, and these differences are rooted in biology, specifically the different roles men and women assume in the process of reproduction and child-rearing. It is possible for intellectuals (particularly LGBT academics like Butler and Rubin) to ignore the fact that human beings are mammals, and that the biological differences between male and female (“sexual dimorphism,” to use the scientific term) are necessary to the reproductive process.

 

What does the word “sex” mean, after all? Perhaps the hedonist thinks of sex only as a recreational activity, but scientifically, sex among mammals is inextricably connected to procreation. In the final analysis, Third Wave “gender theory” is just The Culture of Death dressed in drag, so to speak, and I wish feminists — including those radicals who fought against pornography in the “Sex Wars” of the 1980s — would give thoughtful consideration to what religious conservatives have been saying for years. We have seen a generation of young minds warped by the wicked ideology of “gender” that now threatens to destroy the category of women, without which feminism can have no meaning.




 

Category: Sex Trouble, The Transgender Cult

Comments

2 Responses to “Men and Women Are (Still) Different”

  1. News of the Week (February 17th, 2020) | The Political Hat
    February 18th, 2020 @ 2:20 am

    […] Men and Women Are (Still) Different How did basic biology become “controversial”? Girls have to file a federal lawsuit to prevent males from competing in girls’ sports, and you’re a bigot — a hater, a proponent of transphobia — if you take the side of the plaintiffs in what would seem like a slam-dunk case to anyone with an iota of common sense. Alas, common sense is prejudice, according to the High Priesthood of Wokeness in the Temple of Gender Ideology. […]

  2. News of the Week (February 23rd, 2020) | The Political Hat
    February 24th, 2020 @ 1:51 am

    […] Men and Women Are (Still) Different How did basic biology become “controversial”? Girls have to file a federal lawsuit to prevent males from competing in girls’ sports, and you’re a bigot — a hater, a proponent of transphobia — if you take the side of the plaintiffs in what would seem like a slam-dunk case to anyone with an iota of common sense. Alas, common sense is prejudice, according to the High Priesthood of Wokeness in the Temple of Gender Ideology. […]