"My Gender Workbook"

Sigh

This is the kind of stuff I sometimes find in my departmental inbox.

It's like this stuff just gets goofier and goofier every year, and there's more and more of it.

It's not as if gender isn't a somewhat interesting topic. Yes, it is indeed somewhat interesting. But the ceaseless, breathless, and largely brainless obsession with it in the contemporary academy is annoying in the extreme. Its importance has been blown radically out of proportion and stuff of this kind basically has "protected species" status. You can basically write anything you want about the holy trinity (race, sex, class) and the penumbra of of topics surrounding them (e.g. gender) and, so long as what you write is sufficiently lefty and PC...well, you can basically say anything you want.

And I say this as a mostly-liberal.

And a workbook no less... Because academia is no longer about understanding, but it's now about vocational training (which the right pushes) and social transformation (which the left pushes). So, y'know, just studying the subject isn't enough. What's wanted is self-help...

Argh.

And I'm kind of a hard guy to alienate on this point, incidentally...but this stuff has managed to do it.

I remember reading this collection of essays as an undergrad called Feminism and Philosophy, and was really struck by the observation, in one of the essays, that sex and gender aren't the same thing, and are separable, and can be mixed and matched, and that there's a tendency to move from generalizations to norms in this vicinity. That is, from the true generalization men tend to be more masculine than women, we, by the magic of social irrationality, move to the conclusion that men ought to be more masculine than women. And this kind of thing leads to not only discrimination against less-masculine males and less-feminine females, but it also leads to the lamentable tendency of some males to work hard to act hyper-masculine, and of some females to act hyper-feminine.

All, good, man. That's some stuff worth reflecting on, I say--or at least it was news to me at the time.

But lo, these many years later, and having had to hear the damndest, dumbest things said about gender...and having had to hear so many of them...well, it's hard not to view stuff like this "workbook" without a certain degree of cynicism.

These topics, the holy trinity and its penumbra, are, apparently, of endless fascination to certain academicians...but most of the sensible stuff got said about them long ago. But that didn't stop people from saying the non-sensible stuff... And, given its protected-species status, the dopier stuff doesn't get culled from the herd...and so it goes.

Ah, who knows? Maybe this publication is more reasonable than I'm guessing. Maybe it would surprise me...though, of course, I'd be surprised if it did. With a longer life and less to read, I might even check it out. But...probably not in the actual world...

(And thus do our preconceptions become self-reinforcing...  SMH)