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Ayaan talks with Christina Hoff Sommers about an alternative to radical feminism: freedom feminism. Christina shares her experiences with radical feminists and how she pushes back against the hysteria.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she studies the politics of gender and feminism, as well as free expression, due process, and the preservation of liberty in the academy. Before joining AEI, Dr. Sommers was a philosophy professor at Clark University. She is best known for her defense of classical liberal feminism and her critique of gender feminism.
Her books include “Freedom Feminism—Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today” (AEI, 2013); “One Nation Under Therapy” (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), coauthored with Sally Satel; “The War Against Boys” (Simon & Schuster, 2001 and 2013), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2001; and “Who Stole Feminism?” (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Her textbook, “Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life,” currently in its ninth edition, is a bestseller in college ethics. Her writings have appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
In addition to frequent radio and television appearances, Dr. Sommers is the host of the popular video blog, The Factual Feminist.
Dr. Sommers has a PHD in philosophy from Brandeis University and a BA from New York University.
Follow her on Twitter @CHsommers.
Follow Ayaan on Twitter @ayaan.
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At about 22:30 in the podcast:
“A feminist theorist…was talking about the sexism of Isaac Newton’s theories and referred at some point to Newton’s rape manual. It was comparing the way the scientist approaches nature to the way a predator rapist attacks a woman…” That was a much-discussed item in the Science Wars of the 1990’s, which was a postmodern war against science, reason, and truth:
See, for instance:
by Paul Gross & Norman Levitt:
Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science
The Flight from Science and Reason
by Noretta Koertge (Editor):
A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science
by Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont:
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science
by Alan Sokal:
Intellectual Impostures
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/
by David Lehman:
Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man
Why do girls suddenly want to become boys? I sometimes speculate that it has something to do with the #metoo movement.
The subtext there, for the most part, is “women are wimps”. (Feel free to insert your favorite euphemisms.)
When, for example, Harvey Weinstein made the moves on a young Gwyneth Paltrow, her then-boyfriend, Brad Pitt, threatened to beat him up.
But what did she do?
OK, she may not have been big and strong enough to plausibly threaten to beat him up. But did she yell at him, slap his face, threaten to report him to somebody in authority? Did she do anything at all, aside from telling her boyfriend?