"Sexism" is the term that was coined by feminists for wrongs of belief or action with respect to gender, it is now
er, it is now common to find questions of the form, "What gender are you?"
women that seemed to them comparable to the wrongs of belief and action signified by
racism. However, where racists may be reasonably said to have erred in seeing significant
genetic differences between human races, there are real continuing questions, and steadily
mounting evidence, about whether human sexual differences of behavior and psychology
have a genetic basis.
On the other hand, most contemporary feminism, and almost the entirety of academic and
political feminism, as Farrel discovered at NOW, is what Sommers has called "gender
feminism," which is essentially based on a form of Marxist theory that substitutes " gender" for
Marx's category of "class," or simply adds the two together, usually with "race" thrown in. This
sort of "race, class, and gender" theory is typically a dangerous form of political moralism,
with the same totalitarian characteristics as other versions of Marxism have proven to display.
One consequence of this is that the substantive content of criticism is rarely addressed but
that it is considered sufficient to vilify critics as, in effect, "class enemies," i.e. directing ad
hominem arguments against them that their status, in terms of race, class, or gender, or
simply in terms of their critical attitude, is sufficient to refute their arguments. Hence the
convenient device of dismissing most of Western civilization as the product of "dead white
males" -- though for feminism the inconvenient fact remains that Eastern and Middle Eastern
civilization (and every other) must also be dismissed as the products of "dead non-white
males."
A fundamental move for early feminism was to distinguish between sex and gender, where
sex, male or female, is about physical differences between the sexes, while gender,
masculine or feminine, is about characteristics of behavior, demeanor, or psychology which
feminism wished to claim are culturally constructed and conditioned and so ultimately
arbitrary. Since the moral and political program of "gender feminism" was essentially to
abolish gender differences, so that men and women would end up living the same kinds of
lives, doing the same kinds of things, and perhaps even looking pretty much the same in
"unisex" grooming and clothing, it was important to distinguish between the class of cultural
and alterable items, matters of gender, and the class of physical and unalterable items,
matters of physical sex differences.
Regardless of whether "gender" differences ever were entirely matters of cultural
conditioning, and so oppressive discrimination, the clear and simple feminist distinction
between "sex" and "gender" has become confused by a couple of developments:
1. First, the use of the word "gender" instead of "sex" simply became a badge of
political correctness, by which speakers marked themselves through speech as
having a proper feminist consciousness. Then, since meaning didn't much matter for
that usage, "gender" has tended to simply replace all uses of the word "sex," except
for direct references to sexual activities. Thus, where the answers "male" and
"female" should indicate that the question was about the sex of the person, and the
answers "masculine" and "feminine" should indicate that the question was about
where the answer is clearly expected to be "male" or "female" rather than
"masculine" or "feminine." If this replacement becomes complete, however, then the
original feminist distinction simply disappears, and the word "gender" can easily take
on the whole original meaning of "sex," including all the unalterable differences,
physical or otherwise, between the sexes. One can imagine the dilemma of feminists
whether to rejoice in their transformation of ordinary language or worry that such a
transformation, by obscuring the distinction they wanted to make, will not actually
make any difference. They may well wonder when Rush Limbaugh can say "gender"
instead of "sex" without ideological difficulty.
2. On the other hand, "gender" feminists never did accept even physical differences
with very good grace, and it now appears that their political program is of a sort that,
even if most women cannot, for instance, lift and carry the fire hoses and ladders, this
weakness must simply be accommodated in such a way that women will
nevertheless have "equal opportunity" to be "firefighters" (rather than "firemen"). This
is conformable with the apparent philosophy of enforcement of the "Americans with
Disabilities Act" (the ADA), by which the "reasonable accommodation" language of
the Act (which already violates the prohibition by the Fifth Amendment of taking
"private property for public use without just compensation") has come to be
interpreted by the EEOC as "spare no expense." In these terms, the takeover by
"gender" of the whole sex/gender semantic spectrum may be perfectly consistent
with the evolving goal of feminism, which is to erase through political action, by any
means necessary, any differences whatsoever between men and women, even
physical ones. Thus, a few stories recently have been about schools removing urinals
from the boy's bathrooms, and telling the boys they should urinate sitting down, like
the girls. This is to eliminate the sense of power that boys supposedly have in using
their penises to direct urine where they wish. Such an evolution, however absurd, is
no less than what we might expect from the overall thrust of leftist egalitarianism,
which is that society must be engineered so that everyone will be exactly the same
in any way that makes any real difference (as all the promotion of "diversity" and
"multiculturalism" is not expected to produce any actual differences in economic
performance or "gender" deportment -- a paradoxical expectation considering the
marked "gender roles" in traditional world cultures).
Thus the future of the use of "gender" is unclear. It depends on the true purposes of
feminism, which may not be candidly stated to the public. It also depends, of course, on the
ability of "gender" feminism to maintain its political influence and success in the face of the
falsehood of its theory and the anti-capitalist roots and program of its politics.
Porn
The discussion in this matter is presented in an unusual way. Above is the top of the
"personal statement" about pornography from my own Vita page. Since the premiere Stalinist
of feminism, Catharine MacKinnon, in whom the Orwellian "Anti-Sex League" has come to
horrifyingly full life, accuses defenders of pornography of using pornography, and thus of
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being sex criminals whose views, evidently, don't need to be considered, defenders of
pornography should, indeed, have the courage of their convictions and say if they use it and
enjoy it. As Richard Feynman discovered when he went to testify for topless bars in
Pasadena, many people he knew who enjoyed those bars were ashamed, or afraid, to testify
in their defense. He was not. So, to follow in Feynman's footsteps in a small way,
mydiscussion of pornography (meaning, of course, that made with consenting adults) is here
introduced with this statement that, not only do I like and approve of pornography, not
only do I think it can be enjoyable, useful, and, yes, wholesome, but in fact I often
enjoy it myself, in its various forms as text, photo, and video. The discussion is thus,
indeed, a personal statement -- and also a political statement, since, as a candidate for
California State Assembly from the San Fernando Valley, I would love to publically defend
one of the major industries of the Valley -- pornography. My only concern is that Nina Hartley
and Dian Hanson would regard the essay and the defense as "Sex Positive."
Fortunately, pornography is defended, not just by libertarians, like Wendy McElroy (XXX, A
Woman's Right to Pornography), but by mainstream, anti-censorship Liberals, like Erica
Jong (Fear of Flying), Nadine Strossen (President of the ACLU and author of Defending
Pornography), and Lisa Palac, herself a pornographer (The Edge of the Bed, How Dirty
Pictures Changed My Life). Curiously, performance artist Karen Finley, who will live in
infamy among Conservatives for using her grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to
smear chocolate syrup on her nude body and invite audience members to lick it off, recently
(July 1999) appeared in Playboy magazine (pp.72-77). The original act seemed to be a
standard angry feminist parody or send up of the "objectification" of the female body or, as
the Playboy article itself says, "a symbol of degradation." However, appearing in the nude in
Playboy magazine, especially with Bill Maher (who referred to himself on the "Politically
Incorrect" of October 16, 1999, as "us libertarian guys") licking the chocolate off her himself,
would hardly be interpretated by the standard angry feminist as sending the "right message";
and Finley compounds the problem by appearing, not just in her trademark chocolate, but
without it also, in some standard Playboy nudes. She doesn't look particularly angry or
feminist and indeed is a very good looking woman -- wholesome and enjoyable -- little if any
inferior to any Playmate.
Conservatives who think that pornography is the kind of decadence that led to the Fall of
Rome need to read "Decadence, Rome and Romania, the Emperors Who Weren't, and Other
Reflections on Roman History" first. Anyone who thinks that there is no defense of
pornography possible, or that defenders who are users are simply discredited enemies of
humanity and womankind, probably will not like much of anything at this site and should
consider browsing elsewhere. Otherwise, anyone interested in my treatment of this issue, and
who will not be offended by adult themes and images, can view the entire "personal
statement" by using this link.
Against the Theory
of "Sexist Language"
The word "sex" -- clearly evocative of an unequivocal demarcation between men and women
-- has been replaced by the pale and neutral "gender," and the words "man" and "he" -- now
avoided as if they were worse than obscenities -- have been replaced by the neuter "person"
and by grammatically confusing, cumbersome, or offensive variants of "he/she" or "she"
alone as the pronoun of general reference.
Since it was never even remotely in doubt that when used as a general referent, the male
pronoun included females, this change was never designed to prevent confusion. The change
has, on the contrary, often created confusion. Its purpose is solely ideological.
Questions about Socrates
While Plato never does this in a formal way, we can say that what Socrates did raised a set of
questions and created a series of problems that Plato endeavored to solve.
QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY PLATO'S THEORY OF RECOLLECTION:
1. How could Socrates be so inconsistent? He says he knows nothing (or "practically
nothing"), but then makes several claims to knowledge. He knows that the god
cannot lie; he knows that it is wicked and shameful to do wrong; he knows that a
good man cannot be harmed by a bad one; etc.
As a matter of fact, it would have been impossible for Socrates to be consistently
ignorant, for everything that we do, or he did, presupposes some judgment about
value. We may go to bed because we are sleepy, or eat because we are hungry, but
we also judge that it is better to sleep than to be tired and better to eat than be
hungry. And it is certainly better to sleep on a good bed than on a bad one, and to eat
something good rather than something bad. Each such judgment, then, opens us to
Socrates' typical question, "What is the good?" But we could ask the same kinds of
questions of Socrates: In the Apology he certainly acts like someone with strong
judgments about right and wrong. Indeed, like Euthyphro, Socrates does what he
does because it is pious.
2. What is everyone talking about if we don't actually know what goodness, virtue,
justice, etc. are? If we were simply ignorant, we wouldn't even be using the words.
A version of this question actually occurs in the Meno, where Meno asks Socrates:
How will you look for it [i.e. virtue], Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is?
How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet
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 with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know? [80d, G.M.A.
Grube translation]
This answer given to this in the Meno, of course, is just the theory of Recollection,
that we already know what virtue is.
QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY PLATO'S THEORY OF FORMS:
3. How can we use terms like "justice," "goodness," etc. to judge and condemn every
actual instance of justice or goodness in the world? What are we talking about if it is
not anything that we can actually see or point to in the world?
This is still a very serious issue in the 20th century, often called (after David Hume)
the problem of "Is and Ought" (or "Fact and Value") since what we see in the world
merely "is," yet when we talk about matters of value, we mean what "ought" to be.
What "ought" to be doesn't always, or often (or ever), seem to exist, so how do we
know about it?
4. What are the objects of mathematics? Numbers and geometrical objects, the way we
talk about them in mathematics, do not and cannot possibly exist among the ordinary
objects of the world. Geometry begins by defining things, points, lines, planes, etc.
that do not exist as such in the world we experience. Socrates does not seem to have
been too interested in this himself, but it is a problem similar to the previous one that
came to particularly fascinate Plato.
This is also a very good issue in the 20th century. Philosophers tend to say that
mathematics is simply something that we have made up and which exists only in our
minds. Thus, the July 20, 1998, issue of Newsweek magazine, in an article on the
relationship of science to religion, says, just along the way, "Humans invent abstract
mathematics, basically making it up out of their imaginations..." (p. 49). This casual
claim reflects a real climate of opinion. Such a view, however, is paradoxical in that
mathematics has become the most powerful tool in human history for manipulating,
and presumably for understanding, nature. Practicing mathematicians tend to think
that they discover mathematics, not make it up. For thinking that, such
mathematicians are often called Platonists, but this is usually used to mean that they
simply think mathematical objects are real, not that they necessarily agree with Plato
that mathematical objects exist in the World of Forms. On the other hand, astronomer
Allan Sandage, who is quoted in the August 1998 Scientific American saying "I am a
Platonist," also is said to believe that the equations of fundamental physics are all
that is real and that "we see only shadows on the wall" (p. 22). This sounds like
Platonism indeed.
5. What are universals? When we talk about dogs, we may refer to actual dogs; but the
nature of being a dog, which is not an individual dog, is what enables us to refer to
individual dogs or to talk about dogs in general. That nature is a universal, not an
individual, thing. So how do we know about it? There are no universal things in the
world of experience. Since Socrates was always asking for universal definitions, not
for particular examples, the question about universals inevitably follows from what he
did.
The Problem of Universals is still a good issue too, but historically it is of special
interest because it was the Great Issue of philosophy in the late Middle Ages, pitting
those called Realists, like St. Thomas Aquinas, who believed with Plato and Aristotle
that universals correspond to real essences in the world, against those called
Nominalists (from Latin nomina, "name"), like William of Ockham, who believed that
universals corresponded to nothing real in the world but were merely words, or "puffs
of air," in language. This debate foreshadows the later division between Continental
Rationalism and British Empiricism.
PLATO'S ANSWERS:
The fundamental paradox of what Socrates did, and the fundamental paradox of Plato's
answer, may be stated in this way:
SOCRATES: What we think we know, we don't.
PLATO: What we really know, we don't know that we know.
To explain how we can know something without knowing it, Plato's develops the theory of
Recollection (introduced in the Meno) and the theory of the Forms (introduced in the
Phaedo). Neither of these have been very popular since Plato, but it is important to remember
that they simply account for Plato's basic response, which is the paradox of knowing without
knowing.
Womens' rights
 It should not prejudice my voice that I'm not born a man, if I say something
advantageous to the present situation. For I'm taxed too, and as a toll provide men
for the nation.
 We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to
the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.
--Susan B. Anthony
 Women: their rights, and nothing less; Men: their rights, and nothing more. --Susan
B. Anthony
 It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens;
but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. --Susan B. Anthony
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Defining feminism
 Does feminist mean "large unpleasant person who'll shout at you" or "someone who
believes women are human beings"? To me it's the latter, so I sign up. --Margaret
Atwood
 If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's
movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based. --Betty
Friedan speech, New York City, January 20, 1974
 I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist. --Sally Kempton,
journalist
 Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings. --Cheris Kramerae,
author of A Feminist Dictionary, 1996
 A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and
men. --Gloria Steinem
 I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that
people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a
doormat, or a prostitute. --Rebecca West, 1913
Roles
 Women do not have to sacrifice personhood if they are mothers. They do not have to
sacrifice motherhood in order to be persons. Liberation was meant to expand
women's opportunities, not to limit them. The self-esteem that has been found in new
pursuits can also be found in mothering. --Elaine Heffner
 Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards
and in high heels. --Faith Whittlesey
Revolution
 Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all
relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females
only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete
automation and destroy the male sex --Valerie Solanas
 If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment
a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice
or representation. --Abigail Adams
 This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy
and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into
superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour in which this system still
depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than
those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism. --Gloria
Steinem
 Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. ~ Timothy Leary
 Every special, distinct form of work among the women of the working class is
simply a means of arousing the consciousness of the woman worker and
drawing her into the ranks of those fighting for a better future... Women's
Days and the slow, meticulous work undertaken to arouse the self-
consciousness of the woman worker are serving the cause not of the division
but of the unification of the working class. ~ Alexandra Kollontai 'Women's Day'
Male and feminism
 Men's relation to feminism is an impossible one. . . . the point after all is that this is a
matter for women, that it is their voices and actions that must determine the change
and redefinition. . . . Women are the subjects of feminism, its initiators, its makers, its
force . . . Men are the objects, . . . agents of the structure to be transformed, . . .
carriers of the patriarchal mode; and my desire to be a subject there too in feminism--
to be a feminist--is then only the last feint in the long history of their colonization.
-Heath, Stephen. "Male Feminism." Dalhousie Review 64.2 (Summer 1984): 70-101.
Shorter version rpt. in Jardine and Smith, 1-32.
Anti-feminist quotes
 Feminism is the radical notion that feminists are women. -Rush Limbaugh
 Then the women got the vote, and everything went to hell. While our boys was
overseas fighting the Kaiser the women got prohibition put in. Drinking and gambling
and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men
became crimes. -Judge Roy Bean
 I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were
taking care of women today, we wouldn't have to vote. -Kay O'Connor (Kansas
Senate Republican)
 The demise of our community and culture is the fault of sissified men who have been
overly influenced by women. -Tony Evans (Promise Keepers)
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  Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the
mainstream of society. -Rush Limbaugh

 Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by
nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to
succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism. -Pat
Buchanan

 The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-
family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their
children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." - Pat
Robertson

In the media and popular culture

 In women, courage is often mistaken for insanity. --a doctor in Iron Jawed Angels

 I love my country, by which I mean I am indebted joyfully to all the people throughout
its history, who have fought the government to make right. Where so many cunning
sons and daughters, our foremothers and forefathers came singing through
slaughter, came through hell and high water so that we could stand here, and behold
breathlessly the sight; how a raging river of tears cut a grand canyon of light. Why
can't all decent men and women call themselves feminists, out of respect for those
that fought for this? --Ani Difranco Grand Canyon