Why am I so utterly oblivious to the misandry you’re asking me about? Am I the victim of false consciousness? If misandry were as ostentatiously rife within gender studies courses as you claim, how did I manage to extract so much personal enjoyment from such a course? How did so many other males manage to do the same thing? Do they realise they’re enslaved by femi-nazi propaganda and derive some sort of masochistic kick from it? Or are they pitiable dupes infatuated by anti-male ideology until the point when the shining light of your mighty intellect pierces their veil of illusion and leads them out of the cave and into the light?
I can’t take you (or your crusade) seriously because the substantive intellectual content of everything I’ve read that you’ve written on this subject – and worryingly I’m fairly certain I have read a substantial quantity of it – endlessly elaborates on a conceptually impoverished motif which you cling to like a scared aggressive child. I just read the methodology for the content analysis of the ‘discriminatory’ LSE course materials which you posted on your website and I’d suggest others to do the same. Even if I agree with the underlying moral commitments, I have a huge intellectual problem with anyone who reduces the politics of a given issue to the representation of groups within academic discourse. I’ve also rarely encountered anyone who does it quite as crudely as you do: repeatedly using the word ‘egalitarian’ doesn’t make you sound clever if you also make it obvious how narrowly you operationalize the concept.
When did the feminazi cultural conspiracy start? If you did this exercise 50 years ago on intellectual writing about sex & gender, what would you find? What about 100 years ago? 200 years ago? Did misogyny previously dominate society before a bolshy feminist reaction went ‘too far’? Or were gender relations ‘ok’ until a feminist movement ruined everything? Or have men always been oppressed by woman? It’s meaningless for you to quote isolated research findings at people if you also refuse to engage with these questions. Your ‘methodology’ makes it pretty clear that you consciously cherry-pick the research you cite. If research that makes negative claims about men is prejudiced then, given your own self-definition as someone seeking to further fair representations, you’re dismissing such research as irrelevant to your project at the outset. The fact it hasn’t occurred to you to apply the same evaluative standard to the research you cite – largely through single sentence summaries – as ‘proving’ the facts of widespread misandry pretty much sums up the difficulty here. I mean you say all this pretty much outright on your site.
I suspect you’ve found that academics avoid getting into substantive discussions of research papers you’re citing with you and, it seems, this establishes their participation in a political conspiracy to avoid recognising ‘inconvenient truths’ about gender politics. It doesn’t. It means they’re people who have better things to do in their spare time than give detailed refutations of the interpretive activities of someone who patently lacks the critical faculties to competently read research papers, understand them and draw on them as sources of evidence in making claims about wider social processes. I suspect you assumed the hostility which people in your classes at LSE undoubtedly directed at you was evidence of wider tendencies for feminists to collectively suppress the truth. It wasn’t. I’m guessing it was much more likely people reacting to you being a rude ass-hole who, I imagine, lacked the basic decorum necessary to interact reasonably with others in an academic setting and the intellectual imagination (dare I say intelligence?) to sustain a dialogue with people who held positions other than your own.
Also if you want to “set out a few broad terms of [your] investigation” then, ffs, actually define your terms rather than just listing a whole series of psuedo-objective questions constructed out of entirely unexamined and undefined concepts.
Genuine question: do you ever think that, alleged misandry notwithstanding, it might have benefitted you intellectually to have finished a social science Msc at a top university if you were going to devote your life to making social scientific arguments in the public sphere?
For what it’s worth I don’t work in gender studies, my degrees are in philosophy and sociology, the three month gender studies course I once did was an optional module and, although I’m a feminist, gender studies isn’t an area I have any intellectual involvement in or am likely to in the future. I don’t have some personal stake in defending gender studies, Tom – I just think you’re a twat. Now please fuck off and stop posting comments on my blog.
Mark Carrigan 