In the third part of this video series, Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia address what they see as the biggest gap in women’s studies — the failure to have any requirement for biology. They go on to talk about the effects of the “social constructionist view of gender” that entirely dismisses the importance of hormones and endocrinology in the behavior of the sexes.
CP: The biggest gap in women’s studies is the failure to have a requirement about biology. There’s no reference to biology. You’ve now had 40 years of women’s studies where there is the social constructionist view of gender — without the slightest reference to hormones or endocrinology.
CHS: Forty years of women’s studies and I think we know less about gender than we did when they started, for this very reason. This dogma that men and women are the same; that we’re cognitively interchangeable…
CP: … we’re blank slates at birth and society inscribes gender on us. It’s absurd.
CHS: One feminist philosopher said many years ago — we’re all born bisexual, and then through socialization we are transformed into gendered human beings — one destined to command and the other one to obey. I went throughout that with my husband too and he said: ” Which one obeys and which one commends?”
CP: There you go. For heavens sake, I’m someone who was writing a dissertation on androgyny and I never for one moment in my entire life doubted that sexes are actually different. There are some very powerful hormonal compulsion that drives the sexes together for procreation, hello!
CHS: It’s so obvious and people say” “What’s the evidence?”. Hum let’s start with the entire anthropological record. Or just look at a magazine rack and it’s clear that men are looking on average — I’m not talking about every man and woman — but on average they have different propensities.
CP: Men have on average 8 to 10 times the amount of testosterone circulating in their body than women do. There are consequences from that. But of course this subject is entirely untouched in gender studies. You can graduate from with a degree in women studies and know nothing about it.
CHS: Nothing! And anytime they find statistical disparity between men and women. Any field — if there are more male, particularly in engineering — it has to be discrimination.
CP: It can’t be women’s free choice for any reason. On average, women are interested in other things.
CP: Also women want more flexibility in life to allow for children. But that’s also not part of the feminist picture.
CHS: As if we don’t have a special bond with children. The denial of nature, of femininity and masculinity — which for most people is a source of enjoyment.
If you are conventionally feminine, you enjoy that typically. Same with men — you enjoy a masculine men. And all of that is now either denied, or there’s this aura of disapproval around conventional sexuality.
And there’s little of a pushback in the academy.
CP: Well it’s because there’s no knowledge. People are just settled and sluggish within their little ideological selves. There really are very few truly inquiring minds left; no true intellectuals left in the academy. The academy is now at the request of college and universities — they’ve never been known for producing free thinkers. It is after all a bureaucratic entity. That’s why, if you want intellectuals in the academy, the present system is certainly not the way to produce them.
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Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia discuss the dangerous trend of today’s academics who aim only to deconstruct and debunk great works of art rather than seeking to understand them through historical context.
CHS: I was in Portland and I went to the the local museum. There was a beautiful display of some Indian artifacts and some exquisite photographs of Indians, Native Americans. It was all beautiful, but in every room some feminist art historian had written a hectoring little description, censoring, centering and talking about the “gaze” of the tourist and all this kind of deconstruction stuff. So you couldn’t just learn about the art, you couldn’t just enjoy it — it had to me mediated through the mind of this fanatical.
CP: The idealogical perspective had to be filtered through: the judgementalism, the moralism, the guilt tripping and so on..
CHS: It was guilt tripping, it was one big guilt trip.
CP: Instead of an actual encounter with an artifact from the past, and a sense of awe in reverence before that object, we have to have this interposed contemporary figure hectoring us. Exactly what you’re saying.
CHS: Hectoring us!
CP: These are the new preachers, the new scolds.
CHS: They’re pests! We see it going into the media, that’s a given. And now in the museum.
Then they’re this “cultural appropriation, this is one of the new ideas. On some level there is a kernel of wisdom in this: you know, you don’t put on a black face and you know, essentially demean another culture.
But now they’re going after yoga classes and you know that sort of thing. You’re not supposed to say ‘Namaste.’ That’s gonna put all of Portland out of work — its nothing but yoga studios! Now performances of ‘The Mikado,’ (the Gilbert and Sullivan opera) are regarded as cultural appropriation.
You had a museum in Boston where they had beautiful kimonos on display. There were protestors — and it’s almost always people who are not in that culture that are the most shrill — so the Boston museum had to apologize. This going on. It’s permeating the culture. And I want it to stop!
CP: Yes, thats right it’s so unsophisticated.
CHS: So anti-intellectual.
CP: This is not the way that you contemplate history and art, through these contemporary political filters. This distorts the true meaning of history and art.
CHS: It trivializes it. And that’s what I see with students: they’re not having these encounters with great works of art. That’s what the teacher should do.
CP: We were produced by a ‘great books’ curriculum.
СHS: We always had no matter what, even if you had a bad teacher, you always had a classic.
CP: And a sense of respect for the greatness of the work not this debunking, smearing deconstruction stuff. Oh this is the product that’s an outmoded aracial gender paradigm, and so-on. Give me a break!
The whole history of the world is seen through this contemporary lens. And that’s why we’re not getting any important intellectuals, young intellectuals, young writers, young analysts. If you’re ever gonna get any, they have got to start going back to the library and finding other independent thinkers. Because there is certainly nothing presented to them in the classroom.
This video is courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
AEI is a non-partisan public policy think-tank dedicated to research and education on issues of government, politics, economics and social welfare. You can like them onFacebook and follow them on Twitter.