Links
Archives
Monday, September 10, 2007
|
Big Babies In 2003, Martha Nussbaum, in Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy, wrote this about male philosophy professors: [Their] ways of being infantile vary. Some are flirtatious and silly in a relatively harmless way. Some fear old age dreadfully, and believe that continual exercises in seduction will produce something like erotic immortality. Some long to tell you in no uncertain terms that you are a whore, because it makes them feel power. Some hate themselves and have contempt for any woman who is nice to them. Some — and these are the worst, I think — are satanic, by which I mean that they have an emptiness at their core that they fill with exercises in domination, which they market with a frequently dazzling charm. ... Pretty strong claim: the main problem... Now Inside Higher Ed links (the link doesn't work - I found what I think is the same paper elsewhere on MIT's site) to an essay by Sally Haslanger, a philosopher at MIT, which notes the under-representation of women in philosophy, and accounts for it in similar terms. Haslanger feels deep "rage" at her treatment by the men who dominate the field. "Philosophy departments are often hyper-masculine places," she writes, full of "poorly socialized," "competitive, combative, judgmental" men devoted to "hyper-rational, objective, masculine" thought. IHE quotes David Schrader, executive director of the American Philosophical Association, agreeing to some extent: While he said he didn’t want to overgeneralize, he said that “clearly we have some significant enclaves of chauvinism.” The association is currently planning to collect data on women and employment in the discipline. Haslanger and others who care about the representation of women in philosophy departments are right to make a fuss. But you want to be careful here. UD linked awhile back to an LA Times opinion piece by Deborah Tannen (the link doesn't work anymore -- here's the post on UD) in which she sets women back by claiming that they're hard-wired to hate aggressive intellectual combat: [A]rguing ideas [is] a way to explore them … . Because they're used to this agonistic way of exploring ideas — playing devil's advocate — many men find that their adrenaline gets going when someone challenges them, and it sharpens their minds: They think more clearly and get better ideas. But those who are not used to this mode of exploring ideas, including many women, react differently: They back off, feeling attacked, and they don't do their best thinking under those circumstances. …[Women are] put off by the competitive, cutthroat culture of science. The assumption that fighting is the only way to explore ideas is deeply rooted in Western civilization. It can be found in the militaristic roots of the Christian church and in our educational system, tracing back to all-male medieval universities where students learned by oral disputation. … [Males see] fighting as a format for doing things that have nothing to do with actual combat: They show affection by mock-punching, getting a friend's head in an armlock or playfully trading insults. If you think women are put off by competitive and cutthroat intellectual ways, take a look at Nussbaum's notorious attack on Judith Butler in The New Republic [Or don't: "The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler," February 22, 1999, pp. 37-45 -- doesn't seem to be online anymore]. Most serious women aren't, and certainly shouldn't be, put off by mental battle. You don't want to create a feminist ghetto within academic philosophy. You need to take on the nerds, the flirts, the satanists, the power-mongers, the old-age-phobes, the self-haters... |