#Christina Hoff Sommers | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 2 months

Text

By: Edward Schlosser

Published: Jun 3, 2015

I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that’s simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher’s formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

What it was like before

In early 2009, I was an adjunct, teaching a freshman-level writing course at a community college. Discussing infographics and data visualization, we watched a flash animation describing how Wall Street’s recklessness had destroyed the economy.

The video stopped, and I asked whether the students thought it was effective. An older student raised his hand.

”What about Fannie and Freddie?” he asked. “Government kept giving homes to black people, to help out black people, white people didn’t get anything, and then they couldn’t pay for them. What about that?”

I gave a quick response about how most experts would disagree with that assumption, that it was actually an oversimplification, and pretty dishonest, and isn’t it good that someone made the video we just watched to try to clear things up? And, hey, let’s talk about whether that was effective, okay? If you don’t think it was, how could it have been?

The rest of the discussion went on as usual.

The next week, I got called into my director’s office. I was shown an email, sender name redacted, alleging that I “possessed communistical [sic] sympathies and refused to tell more than one side of the story.” The story in question wasn’t described, but I suspect it had do to with whether or not the economic collapse was caused by poor black people.

My director rolled her eyes. She knew the complaint was silly bullshit. I wrote up a short description of the past week’s class work, noting that we had looked at several examples of effective writing in various media and that I always made a good faith effort to include conservative narratives along with the liberal ones.

Along with a carbon-copy form, my description was placed into a file that may or may not have existed. Then ... nothing. It disappeared forever; no one cared about it beyond their contractual duties to document student concerns. I never heard another word of it again.

That was the first, and so far only, formal complaint a student has ever filed against me.

Now boat-rocking isn’t just dangerous — it’s suicidal

This isn’t an accident: I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We’ve seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on.

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate. That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.

I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that’s considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, “Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.

In 2009, the subject of my student’s complaint was my supposed ideology. I was communistical, the student felt, and everyone knows that communisticism is wrong. That was, at best, a debatable assertion. And as I was allowed to rebut it, the complaint was dismissed with prejudice. I didn’t hesitate to reuse that same video in later semesters, and the student’s complaint had no impact on my performance evaluations.

In 2015, such a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion. Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness (or even acceptability) of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the student’s emotional state. As I cannot speak to the emotions of my students, I could not mount a defense about the acceptability of my instruction. And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow.

I wrote about this fear on my blog, and while the response was mostly positive, some liberals called me paranoid, or expressed doubt about why any teacher would nix the particular texts I listed. I guarantee you that these people do not work in higher education, or if they do they are at least two decades removed from the job search. The academic job market is brutal. Teachers who are not tenured or tenure-track faculty members have no right to due process before being dismissed, and there’s a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place. And as writer and academic Freddie DeBoer writes, they don’t even have to be formally fired — they can just not get rehired. In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn’t just dangerous, it’s suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won’t upset anybody.

The real problem: a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice

This shift in student-teacher dynamic placed many of the traditional goals of higher education — such as having students challenge their beliefs — off limits. While I used to pride myself on getting students to question themselves and engage with difficult concepts and texts, I now hesitate. What if this hurts my evaluations and I don’t get tenure? How many complaints will it take before chairs and administrators begin to worry that I’m not giving our customers — er, students, pardon me — the positive experience they’re paying for? Ten? Half a dozen? Two or three?

This phenomenon has been widely discussed as of late, mostly as a means of deriding political, economic, or cultural forces writers don’t much care for. Commentators on the left and right have recently criticized the sensitivity and paranoia of today’s college students. They worry about the stifling of free speech, the implementation of unenforceable conduct codes, and a general hostility against opinions and viewpoints that could cause students so much as a hint of discomfort.

I agree with some of these analyses more than others, but they all tend to be too simplistic. The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics, a discourse that “is focused much more on taxonomy than politics [which] emphasizes the names by which we should call some strains of inequality [ ... ] over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them.” Under such a conception, people become more concerned with signaling goodness, usually through semantics and empty gestures, than with actually working to effect change.

Herein lies the folly of oversimplified identity politics: while identity concerns obviously warrant analysis, focusing on them too exclusively draws our attention so far inward that none of our analyses can lead to action. Rebecca Reilly Cooper, a political philosopher at the University of Warwick, worries about the effectiveness of a politics in which “particular experiences can never legitimately speak for any one other than ourselves, and personal narrative and testimony are elevated to such a degree that there can be no objective standpoint from which to examine their veracity.” Personal experience and feelings aren’t just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it’s no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses.

(It’s also why seemingly piddling matters of cultural consumption warrant much more emotional outrage than concerns with larger material implications. Compare the number of web articles surrounding the supposed problematic aspects of the newest Avengers movie with those complaining about, say, the piecemeal dismantling of abortion rights. The former outnumber the latter considerably, and their rhetoric is typically much more impassioned and inflated. I’d discuss this in my classes — if I weren’t too scared to talk about abortion.)

The press for actionability, or even for comprehensive analyses that go beyond personal testimony, is hereby considered redundant, since all we need to do to fix the world’s problems is adjust the feelings attached to them and open up the floor for various identity groups to have their say. All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis —from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away.

So it’s not just that students refuse to countenance uncomfortable ideas — they refuse to engage them, period. Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand. As Judith Shulevitz wrote in the New York Times, these refusals can shut down discussion in genuinely contentious areas, such as when Oxford canceled an abortion debate. More often, they affect surprisingly minor matters, as when Hampshire College disinvited an Afrobeat band because their lineup had too many white people in it.

When feelings become more important than issues

At the very least, there’s debate to be had in these areas. Ideally, pro-choice students would be comfortable enough in the strength of their arguments to subject them to discussion, and a conversation about a band’s supposed cultural appropriation could take place alongside a performance. But these cancellations and disinvitations are framed in terms of feelings, not issues. The abortion debate was canceled because it would have imperiled the “welfare and safety of our students.” The Afrofunk band’s presence would not have been “safe and healthy.” No one can rebut feelings, and so the only thing left to do is shut down the things that cause distress — no argument, no discussion, just hit the mute button and pretend eliminating discomfort is the same as effecting actual change.

In a New York Magazine piece, Jonathan Chait described the chilling effect this type of discourse has upon classrooms. Chait’s piece generated seismic backlash, and while I disagree with much of his diagnosis, I have to admit he does a decent job of describing the symptoms. He cites an anonymous professor who says that “she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma.” Internet liberals pooh-poohed this comment, likening the professor to one of Tom Friedman’s imaginary cab drivers. But I’ve seen what’s being described here. I’ve lived it. It’s real, and it affects liberal, socially conscious teachers much more than conservative ones.

If we wish to remove this fear, and to adopt a politics that can lead to more substantial change, we need to adjust our discourse. Ideally, we can have a conversation that is conscious of the role of identity issues and confident of the ideas that emanate from the people who embody those identities. It would call out and criticize unfair, arbitrary, or otherwise stifling discursive boundaries, but avoid falling into pettiness or nihilism. It wouldn’t be moderate, necessarily, but it would be deliberate. It would require effort.

In the start of his piece, Chait hypothetically asks if “the offensiveness of an idea [can] be determined objectively, or only by recourse to the identity of the person taking offense.” Here, he’s getting at the concerns addressed by Reed and Reilly-Cooper, the worry that we’ve turned our analysis so completely inward that our judgment of a person’s speech hinges more upon their identity signifiers than on their ideas.

A sensible response to Chait’s question would be that this is a false binary, and that ideas can and should be judged both by the strength of their logic and by the cultural weight afforded to their speaker’s identity. Chait appears to believe only the former, and that’s kind of ridiculous. Of course someone’s social standing affects whether their ideas are considered offensive, or righteous, or even worth listening to. How can you think otherwise?

We destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus

Feminists and anti-racists recognize that identity does matter. This is indisputable. If we subscribe to the belief that ideas can be judged within a vacuum, uninfluenced by the social weight of their proponents, we perpetuate a system in which arbitrary markers like race and gender influence the perceived correctness of ideas. We can’t overcome prejudice by pretending it doesn’t exist. Focusing on identity allows us to interrogate the process through which white males have their opinions taken at face value, while women, people of color, and non-normatively gendered people struggle to have their voices heard.

But we also destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus. Consider a tweet I linked to (which has since been removed. See editor’s note below.), from a critic and artist, in which she writes: “When ppl go off on evo psych, its always some shady colonizer white man theory that ignores nonwhite human history. but ‘science’. Ok ... Most ‘scientific thought’ as u know it isnt that scientific but shaped by white patriarchal bias of ppl who claimed authority on it.”

This critic is intelligent. Her voice is important. She realizes, correctly, that evolutionary psychology is flawed, and that science has often been misused to legitimize racist and sexist beliefs. But why draw that out to questioning most “scientific thought”? Can’t we see how distancing that is to people who don’t already agree with us? And tactically, can’t we see how shortsighted it is to be skeptical of a respected manner of inquiry just because it’s associated with white males?

This sort of perspective is not confined to Twitter and the comments sections of liberal blogs. It was born in the more nihilistic corners of academic theory, and its manifestations on social media have severe real-world implications. In another instance, two female professors of library science publicly outed and shamed a male colleague they accused of being creepy at conferences, going so far as to openly celebrate the prospect of ruining his career. I don’t doubt that some men are creepy at conferences — they are. And for all I know, this guy might be an A-level creep. But part of the female professors’ shtick was the strong insistence that harassment victims should never be asked for proof, that an enunciation of an accusation is all it should ever take to secure a guilty verdict. The identity of the victims overrides the identity of the harasser, and that’s all the proof they need.

This is terrifying. No one will ever accept that. And if that becomes a salient part of liberal politics, liberals are going to suffer tremendous electoral defeat.

Debate and discussion would ideally temper this identity-based discourse, make it more usable and less scary to outsiders. Teachers and academics are the best candidates to foster this discussion, but most of us are too scared and economically disempowered to say anything. Right now, there’s nothing much to do other than sit on our hands and wait for the ascension of conservative political backlash — hop into the echo chamber, pile invective upon the next person or company who says something vaguely insensitive, insulate ourselves further and further from any concerns that might resonate outside of our own little corner of Twitter.

youtube

This has been going on for over a decade. The correct response is to mock and laugh at the people complaining, and point out that they're not ready for the big wide world outside their kindergarten mindset, so they'd be better off going back home to mommy and daddy. Not validate and endorse their feelings. We need to get back to that.

#Edward Schlosser #trigger warnings #hypersensitivity #Christina Hoff Sommers #safe space #academic corruption #higher education #religion is a mental illness

7 notes · View notes

titleixforall · 9 months

Text

Analysis and affirmation of Dr. Hoff-Sommers' pro-boy education article in TIME magazine

Dr. Hoff-Sommers has recently written an article which has been published by TIME magazine titled “What Schools Can Do To Help Boys Succeed.” It has been successful in generating quite a discussion and positive feedback. I agree with most of her article, and will provide some of my own observations over the course of my study of boys’ educational issues that run parallel to hers. She begins (my…

View On WordPress

#Christina Hoff-Sommers #North America #United States

0 notes

feminismisstillahatemovement · 7 months

Note

So you would say that feminists are making up the DV stats? But don’t you also have confidence in governments, that they would be using information and relying on qualified experts?

"don’t you also have confidence in governments,"

"they would be using information"

Think about what you've said there. Flat earthers use lots of information. Is that a reason to believe the earth is flat?

"relying on 'qualified experts'"

What would you expect to be the ideological affiliation of those "experts" in a field established and infested by feminism to be? What percentage of those "qualified experts" and the government departments devoted to Relationship Violence would you expect to identify as feminist, bearing in mind that only around 10-15% of the wider population do? What conclusions about domestic violence would you expect people indoctrinated into believing the world can be explained as "men bad, women good" to come to?

These are all questions a person looking into this issue need to ask themselves.

Another one is: when studies within their own system show that Domestic Violence is something carried out by both sexes at roughly equal rates, why does that not change the narrative of "male oppressor/female victim" that they have been relentlessly pushing for over 50 years? How do they expect to solve a problem by steadfastly ignoring half of it? In what ways does the ideological lens they are viewing the issue through prevent them from doing any genuine, lasting good?

(source)

As professor-of-law Linda Kelly wrote in her 2003 Disabusing The Definition of Domestic Abuse: How Women Batter Men & The Role of The Feminist State

"Over the last twenty-five years, leading sociologists have repeatedly found that men and women commit violence at similar rates. The 1977 assertion that “the phenomenon of husband battering” is as prevalent as wife abuse is confirmed by nationally representative studies, such as the Family Violence Surveys, as well as by numerous other sources".

Couldn't find any easy-to-digest clips online, but I would suggest you read any of Christina Hoff-Sommers' writings on feminism, particularly her debunking of the "Superbowl Sunday" domestic violence hoax and other feminist myths that will not die.

And, if you want to take a look at how those "qualified experts" you mentioned rose to the position of prominence they now have and gained the obedience of all western governments, you could check out Dr. Katherine Young and Dr. Paul Nathanson's dauntingly large (672 page) but thorough "Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men"

46 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 2 months

Text

Writing for the Bulwark the other day Cathy Young asked a brilliant question: what on earth happened to the Intellectual Dark Web and its critique of the left?

Go back to the 2010s, and all kinds of people, myself included, were wondering why leftists allied with the most fascistic versions of Islam, and why there was such screaming intolerance in liberal institutions. All of a sudden we were told to accept that white people were inherently racist and that men could become women – just by saying they were.

If you moved in leftish circles and refused to clap your hands and cheer the new orthodoxy, your career was over.

In theory the response ought to have been a liberal defence of democratic freedoms. And from many it was.

But the “Intellectual Dark Web” - the melodramatic name came from a New York Times piece from 2018 – was something else. It consisted of online celebrities opposed to progressive orthodoxy, who revelled in the joy of shocking the liberal bourgeoisie.

The full list of its members ran: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Greenwald, Sam Harris, Heather Heying, Claire Lehmann, Bill Maher, Douglas Murray, Maajid Nawaz, Camille Paglia, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, Michael Shermer, Christina Hoff Sommers, Bret Weinstein, and Eric Weinstein.

As you can see, it was a journalistic concoction, which did not hang together well. Genuine liberals, such as Steven Pinker and Sam Harris were yanked together with reactionaries like Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.

Meanwhile the self-aggrandising willingness of many of them to announce that they were “heretics” and “dissidents” was ridiculous. No one is a true heretic, unless they are persecuted. And dissident is an honourable title you cannot in good conscience bestow on yourself – not that that ever stopped anyone.

But once the caveats had been made, you could say that these were people who were willing to attack progressive orthodoxies as they turned oppressive, and in 2018 had a kind of radical glamour.

All gone. Utterly gone. Many of those acclaimed in 2018 have become what they despised – or purported to despise. They are on the side of the enemies of liberty now. They threaten basic democratic freedoms. The alt right has turned out to be the far right, as perhaps it was always going to.

If you are looking for an immediate cause it is clear that Trump has done for them. When the crunch came far too many supposedly intelligent conservatives bent the knee and tugged the forelock, and engaged in an intellectual justification of dictatorial power.

In the process they showed that there are two ways of dealing with left authoritarianism. You can defend the values of liberal democracy, and ally with the many on the left who agree with you.

Did the conservative members of the Intellectual Dark Web do that?

Did they hell.

They produced arguments for tyranny, which the conspiratorial atmosphere of the alt right positively encouraged. In the process, they showed how a critique of the left can end up justifying the authoritarianism of the right.

If you paint the globalist elite as all powerful. If you maintain that progressives have the means to indoctrinate the young through their control of the universities, schools and the mainstream media. If you further posit that they are guaranteeing their power by importing immigrants they know will vote for their centre-left parties, then a dictatorship is a justifiable response to such supernaturally powerful enemies.

Indeed, such is their supposed power of the "woke mind virus," overturning free elections is the only plausible response to a rigged system.

If everything from immigration policy to the schools is a con played by progressive elites to ensure their control of society, there is no other option available to the right. The 20th far right century used the justification that they were saving their countries from the communist menace. The woke menace serves the same purpose today.

I remember being interviewed by one member of the New York Times list, a media entrepreneur called Dave Rubin.

He could not get enough criticisms of the left. And indeed there was much to criticise. However, I pointed out that, if he was a serious man, he must be as willing to criticise the right. He assured the viewers he would.

Now he thinks there are “plenty of good arguments to make for voting for Trump,” even if he’s prone to “lying about everything.”

How brave. How very, very brave.

Cathy Young records how principled people have walked away in disgust. Claire Lehman, the editor of the genuinely challenging online magazine Quilette, said that she had started out believing that the US liberals' claims that Trump threatened democracy were deranged.

She assumed that warnings about Trump refusing to accept defeat in the 2020 presidential election were also “hysterical nonsense”—until it actually happened. The invasion of Ukraine and the willingness of the US right to work for Putin were further blows to her conservative assumptions.

“It really made me reassess my priors,” says Lehmann. “I realized that I had had a blind spot on those two huge issues. So I updated my beliefs.”

Others preferred to adjust the facts to fit their priors—or, Lehmann suspects, pretended to do so “because they don’t want to lose the audiences they built.”

Just so. Sam Harris added a second justification for intellectual cowardice when he said that he was disassociating himself from the IDW label because of other IDW figures’ embrace of Trump’s election-fraud claims. Some of his former allies were “sounding fairly bonkers,” he concluded.

Indeed they were. But they had to. If they were not bonkers to begin with they had to learn to give a decent impression of bonkerdom, if they wanted to appeal to their audience.

Jordan Peterson, a thinker who once had a few good arguments to make, now claims that covid vaccines caused more deaths than the “so-called pandemic,” and declares his lack of faith in every other vaccine for good measure. The podcast king Joe Rogan broadcasts vaccine conspiracism. As does a figure British readers may remember, Maajid Nawaz, who was once a liberal Muslim who fought extremism and now needs avoiding when the moon is full.

There’s a booming market for covid conspiracism in the US and beyond, and it pays to keep the customers satisfied. But, and perhaps I am being naive here, I do not believe cynics can do it. Like so many ideologues the alt-right must believe their paranoid fantasies as they tell them and allow the mask to eat into the face They cannot just pretend. They must believe.

Young writes

“It may be that, because of the dynamics in today’s intellectual and political marketplace, any commentator, media outlet, or group that opposes the illiberal left but doesn’t explicitly oppose far-right Trumpian populism is in danger of being co-opted by it.”

And not only in the US. The next British general election will almost certainly take place near the date of the US presidential election. We have already had Boris Johnson and Liz Truss announce their support for Trump, even though he is hugely unpopular in this country, and is a clear threat to Nato. It would be politically mad for Conservatives to tie themselves to Trump in an election campaign. And yet leading figures will do it for the same reason alt right in the US right do it.

First, they want the money. In the case of British politicians and journalists, the money American conservative lecture circuit provides. Second, they have talked themselves into a position where progressives are an enemy so dangerous that any measures are justified to bring about their defeat – including supporting a threat to the American republic and Western security.

As someone who shared the critiques of at least some members of the intellectual dark web in the 2010s, I can make a fair prediction about what will happen next.

Whenever I wrote criticisms of the left, colleagues would say that the right would welcome and exploit all my arguments, and that was true. As someone once said, I think it was me, “the left looks for traitors and the right looks for converts”. But, so what? A good argument must be made regardless of the consequences.

But then they made a further point. You should never listen to conservatives when they said they believe in freedom of speech, democracy and human rights. All they are concerned with is sectarian advantage.

It has been the historic achievement of the Intellectual Dark Web to prove that the sneering leftists were right all along.

12 notes · View notes

datasoong47 · 9 months

Text

Hunh, always wondered where "based" came from

Based comes from the slang basehead, a term from the 1980s to describe people addicted to freebasing cocaine, a method which makes the drug smokable. The term basehead became synonymous with the crack epidemic that swept the United States at the time. Over time, calling someone based was a way of saying that they were a crack addict, or acting like one, especially in West Coast street slang.

In the way slang things go, people acting eccentric or abnormal were labelled based. At least that’s what seems to have happened with quirky West Coast rapper Brandon “Lil B” McCartney. In reaction to people calling him based, Lil B decided to redefine the term. In 2007, his group, The Pack, released their debut album, Based Boys. In a 2010 interview in Complex magazine, Lil B described his new definition of based: “Based means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do.”

It’s not clear when Lil B started calling himself Based God, but by 2011 that nickname was firmly associated with him. Eventually, a cosmology of Based God (or BasedGod) emerged, referring to becoming a sort of higher power that Lil B could access, allowing him special abilities, such as the power to curse basketball player Kevin Durant.

The re-invented based, as a signal of power and swagger, was picked up by the alt-right/white nationalist community online in the 2010s. In 2014, during a controversy over female video-game reviewers known as Gamergate, conservative commentator Christina Hoff Sommers was referred to as Based Mom for pushing back against criticisms that video games and their culture are sexist. Since then, referring to alt-right or right-wing conservative figures as based has become a sign of approval in online social-media forums like the pro-Trump subreddit, r/The_Donald.

Who uses based?

Being based is a core part of Lil B’s brand, and so it’s no wonder he—and his fans—are all about that based life. In this hip-hop subculture, it’s all about being a based God—someone with “maximum swagger, a mansion, sports cars, wonton soup, and the inherent ability to fuck your bitch,” as one user on Quora put it. Not sure if the wonton soup bit is universal, but we think the point is that you can have whatever you want.

A catch phrase for Lil B fans is Thank You Based God—a sort of tongue-in-cheek conflation of a sincere thanks to God and an expression of Based God fandom. It even has its own acronym: TYBG. This catchphrase is a popular meme, typically shown over image macros of someone crying dramatically.

On the other side of the spectrum, alt-right, white nationalist, and other Trump supporters online have, incongruously, adopted based for their own purposes. They routinely post on forums like Reddit with headlines describing someone whose actions they approve of as based (e.g. “Based Boris Johnson refuses to apologize for saying women in burkas look like letterboxes.”).

In 2016, Slate writer Ben Mathis-Lilley perhaps best summed up this strange turn of events with based, worth quoting at length:

“So what we have here, then, is a word that was created amid an addiction epidemic in urban communities being adopted by bigoted fans of a presidential candidate who was demonstrated unprecedented contempt for, and ignorance of, said communities.”

#etymology #interesting

7 notes · View notes

the-conquest-of-shred · 1 year

Text

"Antifeminist women like Christina Hoff Sommers curry patriarchal favor with men by spreading the idea, put forward in Sommers’s book The War against Boys, that “feminism is harming our young men.” Sommers falsely assumes that educating boys to be antipatriarchal is “resocializing boys in the direction of femininity.” Conveniently, she ignores that feminist thinkers are as critical of sexist notions of femininity as we are of patriarchal notions of masculinity. It is patriarchy, in its denial of the full humanity of boys, that threatens the emotional lives of boys, not feminist thinking. To change patriarchal “traditions” we must end patriarchy, in part by envisioning alternative ways of thinking about maleness, not only boyhood."

-bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

8 notes · View notes

eleemosynecdoche · 1 year

Text

One of the basic problems people have when talking about organized transphobia is assuming that Mumsnet posters are basically the same thing as Valerie Solanas or the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and they're much more like Christina Hoff Sommers. They're right-wingers taking bits of feminist language and theory to reassemble into a reactionary political vision.

Now you've got your Germaine Greers, but I think, candidly, that Greer went right-wing because she sensed the emergence of pedocons in the breeze and knew this would be her home.

More relevantly, the "GC" thought pattern is so strongly built on the inevitability of men as a factor in women's lives- in their view, it is men who will do the work of brutalizing the transness out of trans people, and for transphobic radfems generally, this was not the case. It's a key difference and it makes grand theories of why TERFism inevitably leads to total bigotry appealing emotionally but factually questionable.

8 notes · View notes

redpillfuturist215 · 1 year

Text

Male discrimination in education

*I have to reblog to add more pics.

A collection of links and videos highlighting the discrimination against males in education, as well as some solutions to the problem.

I have made this in response to a tweet from UN Men and Boys, unaffiliated with the UN because of course they don’t care.

Verbatim Twitter bio

Because @un won't tackle men's issues but they'll have @UN_Women tackle 1'st world white women issues. Not affiliated with the United Nations... Sadly.

The tweet, sharing a video by Better Bachelor

UN Men And Boys on Twitter: "Young men are being held back, and it's 100% on purpose. - YouTube https://t.co/naPqAbHydS" / Twitter

Direct link to the video

YouTube

Young men are being held back, and it's 100% on purpose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OucFis41eCE

Rumble

https://rumble.com/v215zbd-young-men-are-being-held-back-and-its-100-on-purpose..html

Excellent contributions from CRC, whom you can follow here

https://twitter.com/CRC57325971

92 percent of sex-specific scholarships are reserved for women, study finds

https://www.thecollegefix.com/92-percent-of-sex-specific-scholarships-are-reserved-for-women-study-finds/

Teachers mark girls higher for IDENTICAL work to boys (OECD study).

https://www.the-sietch.com/index.php?threads/teachers-mark-girls-higher-for-identical-work-to-boys-oecd-study.3467/

Teachers Are Hard-Wired To Give Girls Better Grades, Study Says

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2022/10/17/teachers-are-hard-wired-to-give-girls-better-grades-study-says/amp/

The Boys Feminism Left Behind

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-boys-feminism-left-behind

UNESCO and IEA Release New 5-Year International Literacy Report: Boys Lagging Girls

https://publishingperspectives.com/2017/12/unesco-iea-release-international-literacy-report-boys-lag/

Teachers, You Are Biased Against Boys and Need to Change

https://www.wokefather.com/education/teachers-you-are-biased-against-boys-and-need-to-change/

Boys left to fail at school because attempts to help them earn wrath of feminists, says ex-Ucas chief

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2018/11/16/boys-left-fail-school-attempts-help-earn-wrath-feminists-says/

Stanford University Under Investigation For Sex Bias—Against Men

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2022/11/30/stanford-university-under-investigation-for-sex-bias-against-men/?sh=14dfa7843c17

Boys falling far behind girls in HSC and at university

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/boys-falling-far-behind-girls-in-hsc-and-at-university-20220607-p5arsk.html

The war on boys by Christina Hoff Sommers

"If boys are in trouble, so are we all"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFpYj0E-yb4

The high school I went to, was all male for 139 years until feminists destroyed the space despite having their own all female school right up the street.

https://darlenecraviotto.com/2012/08/16/no-girls-allowed/

*Slight correction. I said 139 years but that was counting from 1st graduation, I was still 2 years off though. It was 147 if counting from founding in 1836. The school opened in fall 1838, with the 1st class graduating in 1842. The 1st girls transferred in as seniors in 1983.

JUDGE ORDERS ELITE OLD PHILADELPHIA HIGH SCHOOL TO ADMIT GIRLS

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/03/us/judge-orders-elite-old-philadelphia-high-school-to-admit-girls.html

PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL ADMITS WOMEN

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/13/us/philadelphia-school-admits-women.html

Fenn School - How Boys Learn

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1p2GTpziwE

How feminism fails boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8Icwgux5c0

Young Boys Are Being Treated Like Defective Girls and Falling Behind In EVERYTHING

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcNmJV8EY3k

“Do something for these black boys now or you're going to be running from them later”

From paywalled NYT article

U.S. Judge Blocks Plan for All-Male Public Schools in Detroit

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/16/us/us-judge-blocks-plan-for-all-male-public-schools-in-detroit.html

The judge said no matter how important the goals of improving education for black males in Detroit, it couldn't happen while girls were excluded

https://greensboro.com/judge-blocks-detroit-plan-for-all-male-schools/article_db848d1e-9ddd-5d3f-ac27-887460ae024c.html

Detroit's Boys-Only Schools Facing Bias Lawsuit

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/14/education/detroit-s-boys-only-schools-facing-bias-lawsuit.html

The drugging of the American boy

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32858/drugging-of-the-american-boy-0414/

Teachers give higher marks to girls

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672

Girls Make Higher Grades than Boys in All School Subjects, Analysis Finds

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/04/girls-grades

Do Schools Discriminate Against Boys?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qloY4OJxBoQ

Best Practices for Teaching African American Boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeUFhei81wg

Strategies for teaching boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azTH0icHox4

School Girls vs School Boys – MGTOW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QdYjURn_qc

Eliminating feminist teacher bias erases boys' falling grades, study finds

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/eliminating-feminist-teacher-bias-erases-boys-falling-grades-study-finds/

The Role of Play in the Overly-Academic Classroom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jK-jC2__Fw

Don't want to miss orientation, esp. if you're male, don't want to be parading that toxic masculinity on campus – sarcasm

Is College Worth It?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIyMXNeT16o

The Collegiate War Against Men

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2020/01/02/the-collegiate-war-against-men/?sh=6f8944e115b7

Britain's schools are failing boys who fall behind

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6400597/Britains-schools-failing-boys-fall-behind.html

Schools are designed more for girls than for boys

https://dailycollegian.com/2018/04/schools-are-designed-more-for-girls-than-for-boys/

False paedophile smears and poor job prospects force male teachers to quit

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/false-paedophile-smears-and-poor-job-prospects-force-male-teachers-to-quit-lwbcrxmn8

MGTOW - Middle School Boys Speak Out Against Feminism & The Next Gen of MGTOW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRrD-n12ZVM

We must stop indoctrinating boys in feminist ideology

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11747413/We-must-stop-indoctrinating-boys-in-feminist-ideology.html

Not only should boys learn in an all-male environment with plenty of physical activity and unstructured play, but their school should start later.

*Boys mature slower physically, socially, and linguistically.

Be Worried About Boys, Especially Baby Boys

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201701/be-worried-about-boys-especially-baby-boys

Boys Lag Behind: How Teachers’ Gender Biases Affect Student Achievement

https://mitili.mit.edu/sites/default/files/project-documents/SEII-Discussion-Paper-2016.07-Terrier.pdf

A longer, 20 minute video, Christina Hoff Sommers: The War on Boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPgoyK_5KV0

Feminism has gone too far says universities admissions chief as she calls for positive action to help more boys study degrees

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3386637/Feminism-gone-far-says-universities-admissions-chief-calling-action-help-boys-study-degrees.html

7 notes · View notes

noodleincident · 2 years

Text

marginal revolution guy and david brooks and matt y and christina hoff sommers. nightmare blunt rotation.

2 notes · View notes

fivedollarradio · 5 months

Text

I picked up Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger, which I'd had on hold at the library for like a month now, and while I'm not surprised at the confusion, especially on social media, with her and Naomi Wolf (her doppelganger), I had no idea how far it went. I've read both women and they're radically different. The only thing they share is a first name.

In fact I can remember where I was when I read Wolf's The Beauty Myth and Fire With Fire, and Klein's No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. The Beauty Myth is pop-feminism lite and I don't even think I was out of my teens when I read it. Fire With Fire I distinctly remember picking up on winter break and reading it with the flu. At the time I was reading a lot from the "women's studies" section, anything and everything from Gloria Steinem to Camille Paglia to notorious anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers. I never felt that feminism was for someone like me; it was too academic and allegedly out of my range, so I didn't feel any particular pull toward the "good" feminists, so I read all the bad ones too. However, I hadn't kept up with Wolf's career since she went off loony edge.

No Logo I found in the little back room at the main library where they kept the marketing/advertising books. I don't know why there weren't shelved in the big room with the other cultural/sociological topics. (Same place I found The Clam Plate Orgy by Wilson Bryan Key. Briefly, man looks a plate of clams, sees an orgy and comes to the conclusion that we're being subliminally manipulated by everything including our dinner. I actually wrote a paper debunking it, even though it was already a decades-old topic by then.) The Shock Doctrine I poured through during the Iraq War when I was getting into discussions with online randos on whether Bush should be tried as a war criminal. (We thought he was the absolute worst -- Nixon mixed with Hitler mixed with that guy who always wanted to eat the smurfs. We were innocent then.) So yeah, very different. If anything I confused Naomi Wolf with Susan Faludi who wrote Backlash, another 90s pop feminist book. (I think Faludi wrote a book about penises, too, but I might be wrong.)

0 notes

megashadowdragon · 1 year

Link

www . nytimes . com/2023/04/30/nyregion/lawrenceville-school-suicide . html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

false rape accusations ruin lives

#false rape accusations #false rape

0 notes

titleixforall · 9 months

Text

Dr. Sommers on MSNBC About Boys' Education, Mocked & Dismissed by Hosts

Continue reading Untitled

View On WordPress

#Christina Hoff-Sommers #MSNBC #North America #United States

0 notes

ku911 · 2 years

Text

【人生を豊かにするために知っておくべき豆知識】

💖【人生を😄豊かにするために知っておくべき📖豆知識】 🎵人生なんてララン🎶ランラン♬詳しくは💕クリックしてご覧下さいませ🤗

人の価値基準はそれぞれ違って当然です。しかし、それを平均値や欲求階層論などに区分けして管理Wikipediaしやすくしているのも現状です。心理学者：アブラハム・マズローの自己実現理論は、西洋的な価値判断またイデオロギーにバイアスがかかっているとして非難されて、2006年には、Christina Hoff SommersとSally Satelが経験的実証の欠如により、マズローの着想は時代遅れであり「もはやアカデミックな心理学の世界では真面目に取り上げられてはいない」と断言されました。しかし日本では依然として自己啓発などで、これが正しい教科書だと随時取り上げてられています。マズローの欲求５段階説～マネジメントの基礎知識～ Kaizen Base カイゼンベース United Gratitude -ユニグラ…

View On WordPress

#＃エビデンス #＃思考 #＃研究 #＃考え方 #＃頭が良い

0 notes

rosiewitchescottage · 2 years

Video

youtube

Has feminism gone too far? — with Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Pag...

Right back in 1994.

Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia, both proudly Feminist intellectuals themselves.

These are ladies unafraid to say where they think their movement was already taking a wrong turn, and by doing so, was letting women down.

#youtube

0 notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 years

Note

I appreciate the things that the west has brought my country and others in the global "south" (third world I suppose), but what I absolutely can't understand is: why do "woke" people defend things that women and children are subjected to here. There are rules barring females to enter certain places (temples, kitchens during menstruation, certain women not being allowed to work etc) , forcing us to cover up, etc. And its even worse in the middle east of Asia. Why do they defend our oppression as cultural relativism?? If they would not like to be subjected to the same rules, why is it okay for the women here to be subjected to that? Do they not want equality for us?

They really don't.

Let me clarify that a bit. There are two phenomena I've observed.

Firstly, in s simplified form, Post-Colonial Theory insists it's unacceptable to judge another culture by western standards, or view other countries through western cultural norms. Like treating LGBT people as humans, and not executing people for what they say. (Although....)

Because, as everybody knows, "western" culture is monolithic - since American, British, Canadian, Australian, German, French, etc, etc, cultures are all interchangeable, donchaknow - and all dictated by cis, straight, white men, rather than having developed, evolving and experienced as a result of embracing the participation of many different cultures, as well as solving pragmatic issues, such as how do we determine what is true, how do we maintain peace, some of which result in different answers.

But, who are we in the west to say that women in Iran might not have a deep cultural connection to wearing a full-length body-bag their entire lives? Or treated as unclean and a pariah due to normal, healthy biological cycles. It's not for us to judge.

It makes people who are struggling and need advocacy into pawns in stupid political games. in order to "stick it" to the cis, straight, white men who they imagine just want to colonize the shit out of everything, they turn around and say how empowering hijab is, how beautiful and peaceful Islam or Hinduism are.

It's deliberately contrary.

Never mind that in Islamic nations, the original culture has been completely subsumed under the boot of religious dogma, the true colonizer here.

And many people want to be free of it.

What these ideologues are actually saying is that women in these countries don't have the same hopes, ambitions, dreams. Like they're a different species altogether.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-bBHpJ9_KI

"I would like them to talk about Muslim women the same way they talk about themselves. I would like them to see us as no different from them."

-- Yasmine Mohammed

So, yes, cultural relativism, and shall we call it, "western guilt" over telling the brown people - since this is also an astonishingly racist mindset - in a foreign country that maybe there's other, better options.

The second phenomenon is best described by a quote from Christina Hoff Sommers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O47bXIznf-E

Now Atena Farghadani is one of millions of women and men whose basic rights have been ruthlessly violated.

I have been to international women’s conferences and met women’s rights activist from countries like Yemen, Iran, Egypt and Cambodia. They are struggling for freedoms that most women in the west take for granted.

They are organizing against barbaric practices such as child marriage, forced veiling, honor killings and acid burnings. Many of them are asking for moral, intellectual and material support from American women’s groups.

Too many young feminists are too preoccupied with their own supposed victimhood to make common cause with women like Atena Farghadani.

If you look at texts used in gender studies classes, visit feminist blogs or websites—you find alarm and outrage over the allegedly oppressed state of American women.

[..]

This past year [Note: 2015] I visited Yale, UCLA, University of California at San Luis Obispo, as well as Oberlin and Georgetown. I found activist feminist students passionately absorbed in the cause of liberating themselves from the grasp of the oppressive and violent patriarchal rape culture.

Their trigger warnings and safe spaces and micro-aggression watches are all about saving themselves from the ravages of the male hegemony.

It’s not that they don’t feel bad for women in places like Iran, they feel that they share a similar fate.

Except they don’t. They are free women. They are the beneficiaries of two major waves of feminism. Their rights are fully protected by law.

American women, especially college women, are among the freest most self-determining people in the world.

Instead of retreating into safe spaces and focusing on their own imagined oppression, they should be reaching out to women like Atena Farghandani.

Oppressive patriarchies do exist—but the United States is not one of them. Millions of women are suffering. There are few nobler causes than finding ways to help them.

We must remember that third-wave feminism was the vector through which the woke theology gained a foothold, via intersectionality.

Empowerment has gone out the window. It requires responsibility and acknowledging agency. Instead, you have an entire culture of people whose core personal identity is best described as "learned, mutually-affirmed victimhood." The problem is that it works. So while newspapers run articles about such things as whether "Jedi" is a term of white supremacist, trans-patriarchal-able-bullshit-phobic-jargonistery, people like you who need to be heard are drowned out.

It's astonishingly narcissistic, and directly the result of Intersectionality.

Once they liberate themselves from their imagined oppression, such as Dungeons & Dragons, skyscrapers, Mozart, men sitting comfortably, and air conditioning, then they'll get around to helping others.

Don't hold your breath.

Both are gross. There is a deafening silence from western feminist and LGBT groups, who pretend to be interested in the plight of women and LGBT people, over what happens in other countries.

But are instead preoccupied staring at their own navels.

So, to return to my original answer: they care, just not enough to stop signalling their own virtues, or start thinking about anyone else.

138 notes · View notes