Christina Hoff Sommers usefully distinguishes between equity feminism and gender feminism. I am all for the former, but I find the the latter preposterous. In his chapter on gender in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin 2002, Steven Pinker explains the distinction:
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive -- power -- and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from the motives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups -- in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender. (p. 341, bolding added)
Do these risible claims need refutation, or are they beneath refutation? I say the latter, but if you think they are worth refuting, Pinker does the job in detail.
Nonsense, if believed by policy makers, has dire consequences some of which are in evidence in The End of Gender? (HT: Spencer Case) Loons, agitating for their 'reforms,' exercise the tyranny of the minority.
Addendum (6/26): The dark and ugly side of feminism is revealed by Rebecca Walker in How My Mother's Fanatical Views Tore Us Apart. ( HT: Horace Jeffery Hodges. )
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