The "Social Construction" of Sex Is Next On the Docket
facepalm
How can you cram that many confusions into one paragraph?
Seriously. That is not scholarship. It's straight-up, unmitigated bullshit. It would take a fair bit of time just to clearly explain what's wrong with that fucking abstract. And you've got innumerable activist pseudo-scholars all across the globe cranking out this nonsense. And the rest of us either have to waste our time on it or let it stand. These people have devoted their lives to obfuscation. It's both sad and loathsome.
Oh and: if you thought these people were going to be satisfied with pretending that gender is "socially constructed"...well...you were wrong. But the thing is it doesn't matter all that much really. "x is socially constructed" is almost entirely lacking in content. It barely means anything at all to say that sex is a "social construct." It basically doesn't mean anything more than: x has some relation or other to society. When you force them to try to say what it means they commonly retreat to meanings that cannot legitimately be expressed by "x is socially constructed" at all. Often they're not even talking about x. They're talking about the idea of x, or even merely the word 'x'. Seriously. Corner them on it and just about as often as not, they'll eventually retreat to well...we made up the word 'x'! Yeah...we did. For any value of x. We're the ones who make up words alright. But you can't say "aardvarks are socially constructed" and mean "we made up the word 'aardvark.'" I mean...they do...but you can't. It's intellectual malpractice. Honestly, they should revoke your Ph.D. for making such a dumb mistake.
I really am incapable of properly expressing my outrage about this.
How can you cram that many confusions into one paragraph?
Seriously. That is not scholarship. It's straight-up, unmitigated bullshit. It would take a fair bit of time just to clearly explain what's wrong with that fucking abstract. And you've got innumerable activist pseudo-scholars all across the globe cranking out this nonsense. And the rest of us either have to waste our time on it or let it stand. These people have devoted their lives to obfuscation. It's both sad and loathsome.
Oh and: if you thought these people were going to be satisfied with pretending that gender is "socially constructed"...well...you were wrong. But the thing is it doesn't matter all that much really. "x is socially constructed" is almost entirely lacking in content. It barely means anything at all to say that sex is a "social construct." It basically doesn't mean anything more than: x has some relation or other to society. When you force them to try to say what it means they commonly retreat to meanings that cannot legitimately be expressed by "x is socially constructed" at all. Often they're not even talking about x. They're talking about the idea of x, or even merely the word 'x'. Seriously. Corner them on it and just about as often as not, they'll eventually retreat to well...we made up the word 'x'! Yeah...we did. For any value of x. We're the ones who make up words alright. But you can't say "aardvarks are socially constructed" and mean "we made up the word 'aardvark.'" I mean...they do...but you can't. It's intellectual malpractice. Honestly, they should revoke your Ph.D. for making such a dumb mistake.
I really am incapable of properly expressing my outrage about this.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:09 PM
4 Comments:
Wow, that's a complete mess.
Yup.
I'm not even a philosopher (though do read the stuff, so am not ENTIRELY uneducated in the field), but this all seems to basically wrong. As in, the bloody thing starts off with a political rationale for even having a theory like this!
And don't get me started on this gem of wisdom:
As there are no norms or values in nature, normative categories are social constructions; hence, female and male are not natural but social categories.
that's an awful lot to assume flat out, much of it (or all of it) pretty confused.
btw like the blog, good stuff.
Egad, that really is a mess.
Thanks, and glad to have you around.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home