Listen now | Kit Kowalski and Edie Wyatt talk about the world of sex and gender from a gender-critical perspective, not just the culture war, but law, policy, activism, feminism and all the nonsense.
Perhaps the word EW was groping for was 'uncountable' which is used to distinguish between 'countable' and 'uncountable' nouns. I can't help feeling that there's something parochial, which is to say anglo-centric, about arguments surrounding the meaning of the word 'gender'. For speakers of romance languages, gender is strictly a grammatical concept and so even when referring to cultural meanings (as in 'gender non-conformity' or 'gender stereotypes') we still use the word 'sex'. A lot of these confusions just can't naturally exist in other languages and cultures, unless they're very forcefully imported.
On that score, I would have included Vaishnavi Sundar on your hit list of thinkers. Other GC femisists have mention some of her points here and there, but she really carries the torch for the view that gender ideology is a form of neo-colonialism in developing countries, presented as the latest science by the usual gangs of shyster NGOs in search of new markets abroad. This stuff will never get into Russia or China, not because they're smarter than us, but because dictatorships have the saving grace of viewing foreign NGOs with deep suspicion. For my money, Kathleen Lowrey also deserves a shout for being the only person to have looked at this in its historical context--- across millenia---so deep history; an analysis which I think is somewhat lacking from GC feminist who at most only go back 100 years.
Thank you for mentioning Vaishnavi Sundar. Agree that was an omission on our part. I'll have to look up Kathleen Lowrey. Have you read any of Camille Paglia's work? She theorises that a steer toward androgyny is a marker of civilisations near collapse.
I remember Paglia first articulating that view in an interview. Since then, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and others have given it more currency. Against it, I would say:
1) No doubt perversions, sexual and non-sexual, flourish when society is collapsing; but such an outbreak doesn't necessarily imply collapse; it could be the marker of many other things as well.
2) It is difficult, especially from the inside, to judge whether a civilization is collapsing. Is this the final descent, or are we merely going through turbulence?
3) It is defeatist. None of us can stop a civilization from collapsing; those fighting against this ideology are doing no more than arranging the deckchairs on the Transtanic.
If we are to take a grand historical view, I find Lowrey's more intriguing: that throughout history, we see downgrades in the status of women (she mentions state sponsored prostitution and the removal of goddesses from temples), when the elite men running the show want or need the buy-in of lower status men. Helen Joyce is thus correct to say that this is, above all, a men's sexual rights movement.
Perhaps the word EW was groping for was 'uncountable' which is used to distinguish between 'countable' and 'uncountable' nouns. I can't help feeling that there's something parochial, which is to say anglo-centric, about arguments surrounding the meaning of the word 'gender'. For speakers of romance languages, gender is strictly a grammatical concept and so even when referring to cultural meanings (as in 'gender non-conformity' or 'gender stereotypes') we still use the word 'sex'. A lot of these confusions just can't naturally exist in other languages and cultures, unless they're very forcefully imported.
On that score, I would have included Vaishnavi Sundar on your hit list of thinkers. Other GC femisists have mention some of her points here and there, but she really carries the torch for the view that gender ideology is a form of neo-colonialism in developing countries, presented as the latest science by the usual gangs of shyster NGOs in search of new markets abroad. This stuff will never get into Russia or China, not because they're smarter than us, but because dictatorships have the saving grace of viewing foreign NGOs with deep suspicion. For my money, Kathleen Lowrey also deserves a shout for being the only person to have looked at this in its historical context--- across millenia---so deep history; an analysis which I think is somewhat lacking from GC feminist who at most only go back 100 years.
Thank you for mentioning Vaishnavi Sundar. Agree that was an omission on our part. I'll have to look up Kathleen Lowrey. Have you read any of Camille Paglia's work? She theorises that a steer toward androgyny is a marker of civilisations near collapse.
I remember Paglia first articulating that view in an interview. Since then, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and others have given it more currency. Against it, I would say:
1) No doubt perversions, sexual and non-sexual, flourish when society is collapsing; but such an outbreak doesn't necessarily imply collapse; it could be the marker of many other things as well.
2) It is difficult, especially from the inside, to judge whether a civilization is collapsing. Is this the final descent, or are we merely going through turbulence?
3) It is defeatist. None of us can stop a civilization from collapsing; those fighting against this ideology are doing no more than arranging the deckchairs on the Transtanic.
If we are to take a grand historical view, I find Lowrey's more intriguing: that throughout history, we see downgrades in the status of women (she mentions state sponsored prostitution and the removal of goddesses from temples), when the elite men running the show want or need the buy-in of lower status men. Helen Joyce is thus correct to say that this is, above all, a men's sexual rights movement.