It appears that Naomi Klein, a Toronto based feminist intellectual who wrote most famously THE SHOCK DOCTRINE (2007), has issues with Naomi Wolf, a San Francisco based feminist intellectual who wrote most famously THE BEAUTY MYTH (1990). Apart from the name, both women are of the same generation and in many respects similar appearance. In THE BEAUTY MYTH Wolf criticizes the cosmetics and fashion industries especially as the forward troops in keeping women embarrassed and exploitable. This book was instantly and emphatically praised by various feminist Big Names, like Germaine Greer and Betty Freidan. Klein says she is frequently confused with Wolf. Their world does not contain room, it appears, for two Naomis. She doesn't like being confused with Wolf because she, Klein, is a more reliable leftist whereas Wolf goes off that reservation too often for Klein's comfort. The annoyance has become much more than that, as the phrase "the green New Deal"...
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I suspect I've mentioned Steven Pinker in this blog before, although I'm too lazy to look it up right now. I've got a Big Thought about Pinker, but I have to get to it in stages. First: who is he? Second: what is the Context of the Big Thought. Third: the Big Thought. Who Is He? The lengthy wikipedia article attached to his name will tell you. But in case you're lazy: Pinker teaches psychology at Harvard. He got his Ph.D. in the field with a thesis on "The Representation of 3D Space in Mental Images," which suggests that cognitive psychology is his especial concern. Aside from his scholarly works -- to which I will return in a bit -- he is the author of several books aimed at broad audiences, including THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (2011) and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW (2018). He is generally considered a conservative intellectual, but since "conservative" still often means counter-Enlightenment, and Pinker is an Enlightenment enthusiast, that may...
I may be thought to be a Martian anthropologist working on Venus here, but I have to say a few words about the feminism of the 21st century. As I understand it, there is an important divide between what we may call "identity feminists" on the one hand, and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg sort, whom one might call 'radical feminists," on the other. Let's just say IF and RF hereafter for short. I'll call the latter "radical" because that is a term that used to be hurtled at them as an insult, sometimes as part of larger constructions such as 'TERF,' because many of them have adopted it, and because it should in this context give no offense. After all, how can it be a bad thing to get to the 'root' of a matter? The contention of RF is that many (most? all?) societies have for a long time given women ("female bodied women" if that phrase is really considered necessary!), a raw deal and that people of that description ought to ...
An odd controversy has popped up in what one might imagine is the sedate world of academic philosophy publishing. In March Hypatia , a quarterly peer-reviewed journal of feminist philosophy, published an article by Prof. Rebecca Tuvel, "In Defense of Trans-Racialism." The gist of it was this: when someone changes his/her mind about racial self-identification, as seems to have been the case with Rachel Dolezal, then she is generally perceived by the public as a fraud. But when the change of self identification is about sexual identity, as with Kaitlyn Jenner, there has been at least some movement of late toward recognition of and respect for that decision. Why the difference? If both sorts of classification are socially constructed, that is if biology is not destiny in either case, then the search for a pertinent principled distinction is not an easy one. So far so good. Philosophy is about pressing questions. The real controversy arose after the editors of Hyp...