"Ania Björk \(sveana\)" <s...@h...com> wrote in message
news:<bbda48$9dc$1@news.onet.pl>...
> > Jasne, feministki górą.

> Masz cos przeciwko feministkom? Jakies osobiste urazy? A moze byles w ciazy?


"Wszystkie argumenty feminizmu ostatecznie opieraja sie na mysleniu ad
hoc, w zaleznosci od potrzeby chwili: uzywa sie jakiegokolwiek
argumentu, ktory moze dowiesc tego, czego chce sie dowiesc w danej
chwili (dyskryminacji, przesladowania, polowania na czarownice,
czegokolwiek). Nie jest wymagane, aby argument uzywany dzisiaj byl
zgodny (ang. consistent, byl spojny/nie stal w sprzecznosci), z
argumentami uzywanymi wczoraj, lub argumentami, ktorych uzyje sie
jutro. Mezczyzni zarowno sa, jak i nie sa bardziej agresywni, lepsi w
matematyce, w przekonywaniu, itd. Rzadzi tym potrzeba chwili"

[All arguments within feminism are ultimately ad hoc: one uses
whatever arguments one can muster to prove what it is desired to prove
at the moment (victimization, discrimination, oppression, persecution,
whatever). There is no requirement that the argument one uses today be
consistent with the ones used yesterday, or will use tomorrow. Men
both are and are not more aggressive, better at math, more persuasive,
etc., depending on what is required by the exigencies of the moment.]
-- http://www.debunker.com/texts/noblelie.html


===================================================
Feminism against science.(feminism in everything
from anthropology to physics)

Brief Summary: Feminist scholars have attempted in past years to use
Margaret
Mead's work to justify sex-role reversibility. Even Mead stated
repeatedly that
men have dominated societies as 'leaders in public affairs and the
final
authorities at home.' Feminism seeks to impose its own ideological
interpretation.

Steven Goldberg
National Review, Nov 18, 1991 v43 n21 p30(3)


IN 1935, when Margaret Mead published her Sex and Temperament in Three
Primitive Societies, the prevailing view was that the basic
differences between masculine
and feminine behavior was owing to physiological differences. In
attempting to
correct a view that was nearly as exaggerated as the absurdly
environmental explanation of sex
differences that infuses the social sciences today, Miss Mead
exaggerated the
degree to which one of the societies she studied (the Tchambuli)
associated what we would
call the masculine with women and the feminine with men.

Few social scientists bought this view. For example, Jesse Bernard,
who would
have very much liked to be able to accept Miss Mead's conclusions,
pointed out that, if
the reader ignored the adjectives, the Tchambuli did not seem very
different from other
societies.
"Effete" headhunters and "comradely" women feeding their children are
still
male headhunters and women feeding their children, and it is only the
adjectives
provided by Margaret Mead that even begin to suggest otherwise.

In response to such criticism, Miss Mead wrote a famous letter to The
American
Anthropologist in which she pointed out that

Nowhere do I suggest that I have found any material which disproves
the
existence of sex differences. . . . This study was not concerned with
whether there are or are
not actual and universal differences between the sexes, either
quantitative or qualitative.

Over the course of fifty years Miss Mead repeated her denial a hundred
times,
in response to one or another claim that she had found a society that
reversed sex roles;
in a review of my The Inevitability of Patriarchy, she wrote:

It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out, that all the claims so
glibly
made about societies ruled by women are non-sense. We have no reason
to believe that they
ever existed. . . . Men have always been the leaders in public affairs
and the final
authorities at home.

Finally, eight years ago I published--in the American Sociological
Association's journal of
book reviews, perhaps the most-read journal in sociology--a letter
making all of the above
points.

Now, one would think that all this would be sufficient to preclude
even the
most ardent environmentalist's invoking Margaret Mead's study as
evidence of sex-role
reversibility.
And yet, a couple of years ago I went to Barnes and Noble and located
38 introductory
sociology books published in the few preceding years. Of these 38, 36
began their
sex-roles chapters with a discussion of Miss Mead's work on the
Tchambuli and
how it demonstrates the environmental nature of male and female
behavior.

It is not clear how many of these 36 knowingly misrepresented the
facts and how
many were incompetent as much as dishonest (uninformed cribbing from
other textbooks
is near-standard procedure in introductory-textbook writing). But it
is clear why
the textbooks misrepresent the evidence. They, like the discipline
whose work they
represent, have an ideological commitment to denying that masculine
and feminine behaviors
and emotions are rooted in male and female physiologies and that all
social systems
conform to the limits imposed by this reality.

My point here is merely that no case can be made for Miss Mead's
having even
claimed to have demonstrated that the Tchambuli refute that
explanation. Yet 36 of 38
introductory sociology textbooks state it as truth.

Ideology for Truth

ONE MIGHT think that this sort of substitution of ideology for truth,
while
rampant in the social sciences, could not possibly threaten the
physical sciences. One would,
as Margarita Levin demonstrates so stunningly in a recent American
Scholar, be wrong.

Mrs. Levin gives examples of accepted scientific findings whose
putative male
biases are seen by feminists as requiring "re-conceptualization":

["Feminist scientists"] see male dominance at work in, for instance,
the
"master molecule" theory of DNA functioning; in the notion of forces
"acting on" objects; in the
description of evolution as the result of a "struggle" to survive; in
the view that scarcity
of resources results in "competition" between animals--in short in any
theory positing what
they deem destructive, violent, uni-directional, or hierarchical. . .
. The idea of
dominance is directly linked to the notion of scientific objectivity,
which . . . is understood as
"distancing oneself" from nature.

Let us ignore the fact that, as Mrs. Levin points out, there is an
equal number
of scientific models that can be viewed as feminine: symbiosis,
feedback, catalysis, mutual
attraction, and the like. Much more destructive to the feminist
objection is the fact that
these, like all successful scientific conceptions, are held because
they accurately explain
nature; they demonstrate their correctness by making correct
predictions. In other words,
they work.

Because it is their success that validates accepted scientific
explanations, it
would not matter even if it were true that (as one feminist claims)
our acceptance of the
concept of inertial motion is rooted in capitalism's need for the
movement of money, or if
it were true (as another claims) that the replacement of a Ptolemaic
system by a Copernican
system was a victory of the masculine over the feminine (because the
Ptolemaic
earth-centered system is "feminine"). Mrs. Levin asks the question
that in one sentence trumps
all the volumes of the feminist critics: "Do they think we have a
choice?"

We don't, of course. We believe in inertial motion because we find
that,
ceteris paribus, objects in space keep moving along at an unchanging
speed and that inertial
motion is our best explanation of why. We believe that the earth goes
around the sun not
because this is the macho way of seeing things, but because the earth
does (speaking a bit
loosely) go around the sun.

Moreover, motives for and functions of a claim are irrelevant to the
truthfulness of the claim. Thus, the failure of "feminist science"
(and "feminist models") is not
that it serves psychological, political, and social impulses and
purposes. The failure of
"feminist science" is that it does nothing more than this; it does not
explain anything. If it
did, or if it demonstrated a logical flaw or failure of prediction in
models invoking
inertial motion or heliocentrism or anything else--if it were capable
of doing anything that cast
doubt on any scientific conclusion--then it would be worth taking
seriously. Failing utterly
to achieve this, "feminist scientists" attempt to cast doubt on
accepted scientific explanations
through endless discussions of "male paradigms." Such discussions tend
to be potpourris
of irrelevant facts and misconceptions that have nothing to do with
any empirical
question; they fool only the nonscientist, who sees impressive-looking
scientific
references and incorrectly assumes that these necessarily indicate
that the person invoking
them knows what he or she is talking about.

It is not merely wish and ideology, however, that lead feminist
science to such
muddled thought; there is a tradition, embodied in semiotics,
hermeneutics, and certain forms of
phenomenology that feminist science is reflecting (or perverting,
depending on one's
assessment of the tradition). This tradition tends to deny that there
is such a thing as truth
and to see perceived truths as merely shared cultural meanings that
could, with proper
redefinition, be converted to their opposites. It tends to deny
underlying realities that set
limits on what may be perceived as truth.

Whatever the virtues of this tradition in the humanities, its
fallaciousness in the sciences is,
or should be, too obvious to mention. Science leaves far less room for
differing views of
truth: someone who believes that gravity is such that when he lets go
of a bowling ball it will
float gently upward is simply incorrect, and someone who believes it
will fall to earth is
correct. This is validated by correct prediction and by the painful,
swollen foot that
accompanies the incorrect prediction.

If Wishes Were Horses

ALL OF THIS is as true of social science as of the physical and
natural sciences. But it is
that former that first, most completely, and most nakedly exhibited
the contemporary
tendency for ideological wish to replace scientific curiosity. In a
few major
areas of the social sciences this tendency has gone so far that there
is but the barest
pretense of scientific objectivity. Truth is measured not by
concordance of explanation and
reality, but of one social scientist's ideology and that of another.
Unlike the blind
leading the blind, who are at least trying to follow the right path,
the majority of practitioners in
some of the subdisciplines of the social sciences do not in the
slightest care about truth
when wish is to be served. If the majority agree on nonsense, then
nonsense is truth.

Consider, for example, the fact that, among all the thousands of
societies on
which we have any sort of evidence, there have never been any
Amazonian or matriarchal
societies. The hierarchies of all societies have always been dominated
by males. Virtually
anyone with a scintilla of scientific curiosity responds to this
empirical fact by
asking, "Why?"

An answer that can be powerfully defended sees psycho-physiological
differences
between the sexes as determinative to male and female behavior and to
the
unvarying social realities that reflect this behavior. Feminist
attempts to explain the
universality of patriarchy, unwilling to entertain the possibility
that psycho-physiological
factors are determinative, invariably display certain features.

1.They are unparsimonious, claiming, for example, that patriarchy is
a result
of capitalism, an "explanation" that requires different causal
factors to
explain patriarchy in the thousands of societies--primitive,
socialist, and
the like--that are not capitalist.

2.They beg the question by giving causal primacy to the
socialization of boys
and girls. This "explanation" fails to ask the central question: Why
does every
society's socialization associate dominance behavior with males? To
give
socialization causal primacy is like saying that men grow facial
hair
because we tell little boys and girls that facial hair is
unfeminine.

3.They attempt to deny the universality of the male dominance
tendency and
patriarchy by demonstrating that some other behavior or institution
is not
universally differentiated. This is akin to denying that males are
taller on
average by demonstrating that the sexes do not differ in knowledge
of
history.

4.They confuse economic cause with economic function. To see
economic factors
as the cause of male dominance behavior is like seeing McDonald's
need for
profits as the cause of the human need to eat.

5.They spend much of their time attacking straw-man arguments that
play no
role in the explanation we are discussing--for example,
sociological
explanations of why males and females evolved the way they did. The
issue is
no how male and female physiologies evolved, but the role of the
male and
female physiologies that did evolve in determining the
differentiated
psychologies and behaviors of males and females and the
institutions that
reflect these.

6.They make the mistake of treating the social environment as an
independent
variable, thereby failing to explain why the social environment
always
conforms to limits set by, and takes a direction concordant with,
the
physiological (i.e., never does environment act as sufficient
counterpose to
enable a society to avoid male domination of hierarchies). This is
easy to
explain if one sees the environment as given its limits and
direction by the
psycho-physiological natures of males and females.

Much Talk, No Science

MUCH feminist social science is not even bad reasoning about empirical
questions, but empty or confused discussion that substitutes
terminology for explanation. One
would be hard put to find another group that talked so much about
science without ever
doing any science. There are, of course, many women scientists who do
science: but these
women never make the arguments made by the "feminist scientists" and
acknowledge, in
private, to being more than a little embarrassed by them.

The strongest impulse of the serious scientist is to eradicate the
ignorance
that the unanswered question represents. The models that the scientist
uses serve this
impulse.
Because "feminist scientists" feel more strongly the need for a
picture of
reality concordant with their wishes than a need for a picture
concordant with reality, they are
incapable of understanding the serious scientist. The history of
science is replete with
examples of scientists who were impelled by emotional impulse to find
one thing, but who
were forced by logic and evidence to find another. Where the ideologue
is content with the
inappropriate model or false explanation as long as it satisfies
psychological
and political desire, the serious scientist cannot live with the awful
gnawing of the
explanation that doesn't work.

But it is the success of the answers to specific empirical questions,
and not
the difference of motivation between the scientist and the ideologue,
that is crucial to science.
For science recognizes that even the most serious of scientists is,
like everyone else,
vulnerable to nonscientific impulses. This is why science has at its
core the mechanism for
exposing the relevant manifestations of such impulses.

Moreover, it might be the case that, if the majority of scientists
were women,
the selection of empirical realities to be studied would be different.
But even if this is
true, it has nothing to do with the corrections of analyses of that
which is selected for study.

If "feminist science" develops a "feminist model" that helps us to
answer some
empirical question, or demonstrates the scientific inadequacy of
accepted explanations,
then it will be, as it should be, taken seriously. It will not need
the adjective; it will
be science. But as long as "feminist science" is nothing more than a
failure to
explanations--explanations that make successful predictions, the test
that separates the adults from the
children in science--it will be, correctly, dismissed from serious
discussion.

To this point, "feminist science" has provided nothing more than
endless,
embarrassingly self-congratulatory discussion of
terminology--discussion that neither can
explain why traditional terminology permits explanations capable of
making accurate
predictions nor can itself make accurate predictions. When its
explanations manage to avoid
refutation by a cursory logical glance, they invoke bogus empirical
evidence whose
misrepresentation can be exposed by spending ninety seconds with the
source invoked. (I have
checked well over a hundred claims--never made by the ethnographer who
actually studied the
society in question--that a specific ethnography describes a
non-patriarchal society;
it has never taken over ninety seconds with the invoked ethnography to
demonstrate the
ludicrousness of the claim. I have never found anyone willing to
attempt to back up such a
claim once it became clear that I had checked the ethnography that had
been invoked.)

In any case, no one possessed by even the shadow of a scientific
impulse cares
in the slightest whether an interesting hypothesis is provided by a
man or a woman or
a goldfish.

What matters is not who makes the claim, but the claim itself and its
accord
with nature; for the explanation of nature is the only justification
for the existence of
the claim.

Those who follow another imperative while pretending to care about
discovering
nature's secrets--those whose dishonesty and incompetence have muddled
the process that
has proved infinitely the best for discovering those
secrets--subordinate truth to
an a priori image of how they would like truth to be. This is
indefensible for the
scientist, or, indeed, for anyone who cares about finding out what is
true. It replaces curiosity with
narcissism and rationalizes the narcissism with a claim of humane
purpose.

All this is obvious. Nonetheless, there is an astonishing number of
scientists
who publicly acquiesce in a position that they know should have long
ago been laughed out of
the university, while telling you in private that they know what they
support is
jejune nonsense, but that they do so in the service of the good. We
used to call this lying.