Jen McCreight—a.k.a. Blag Hag—takes on/takes down anti-porn “feminists” who dismiss studies showing that porn isn’t harmful by attacking science and scientists:
Every time a feminist treats science like some great big boogeyman, she makes all feminists and women look foolish and ignorant. Science isn’t a bunch of horny dudes in plush chairs sitting around a grandiose table commiserating about how they can best oppress women and get to poke a vagina in the process. To treat it that way by disregarding all scientific studies is simply ignorant. If someone shows me a bunch of scientific studies and I disagree, my response is not going to be a lot of hand waiving, speculation, opinion, and anecdotes. It’ll be scientific studies that contradict their findings, or critiques of the methods and analyses of those studies. One of the comments really illustrates how pervasive this woo-thinking is: “Alas, this is why I prefer to hold up women’s intuition, which is actually a rational scientific tool of reasoning, over dude science any day. That doesn’t mean science is bad, it means that woman’s intuition is often far superior.”
No. Woman’s intuition is not far superior because it does not exist (you also have no idea what “scientific” or “reasoning” means). PZ Myers just wrote an excellent post on how supporting the myth of women’s intuition actually hurts women and science….
Oh, wait. PZ has a penis, I forgot. I get that makes everything he said bunk, and I only agree with him because I’m trying to be a funfeminist or something. Damn. I guess I’ll stop thinking rationally, quit my job as a scientist, and sit around expressing how I feel about things with no facts to back my assertions! Good thing I already have a blog.
Blag Hag is my new favorite blog. Check it out.
Some days I can’t figure out what’s going on in the world. Iesu christo.
I love this. Thanks for posting it.
@1
Amen.
Yeah this was pretty great. I don’t follow many blogs besides slog but I may give this one a shot.
I think “women’s intuition” is on my Bottom Ten of terms.
This is Jen (aka, Blag Hag). Just wanted to drop in and say as a huge Dan Savage / Savage Lovecast / Stranger fan… OMFG! *flails around with glee*
*ahem* Thanks, Dan! Oh,and I’ll be moving to Seattle in September for grad school, wooooooo!
I think Jen is pretty great, and good on her for addressing what matters in this case – not the minefield that is a discussion about porn, but the mangled view of science that some people will take in order to support their positions.
If the science is wrong, the peer review process and/or future studies will prove it wrong. If it’s right, then you have some re-thinking to do. Belittling scientists for doing research in the first place, just because the conclusions don’t conveniently match up with your opinions about the word is mind-numbingly stupid.
porn bad?
how could watching hours a day of totally unrealistic depictions of sex and women possibly have a negative effect on people?
cause, you can show kids hours a day of depictions of homosexuals as child molestors, perverts and degenerates and it will have no effect- they obviously will get that it is not real
and you can show folks hours a day of violent white supremist anti-black material and kids won’t go out and get nazi tattoos or join the Aryan nations- that’s crazy to even think
and you can show arab and palastinian kids hours of daily anti-semetic programing and they will grow up to be pacifist jew loving peaceniks
and you can show kids hours of fundamentalist propoganda about jebus hates fags and fags will burn in hell but don’t worry those kids will invite gay kids to their prom and grow up to be aclu lawyers
so sure…
let guys look at hours a day of porn that totally misrepresents what women desire and need in sexual relations- it won’t matter
they’ll be loving patient giving partners and will thrive in longterm caring stable relationships from which they and their partners will derive much mutual satisfaction and joy.
everyone knows it works just like that
Read the post she linked to, though, and you’ll realize that Jen completely misrepresents its author. Some feminists may well be anti-science, but Jill at I Blame the Patriarchy certainly is not.
Here’s the original post, if you’re interested: http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2010…
And a post by Jill about “women’s intuition”: http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2010…
@9, she’s remarking on one of the comments made on the post in that blog, not the post itself.
Apparently this comment system eats long links. They’re both on IBTP’s home page, anyway: http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/
I first found Blag Hag several months ago when she did a pretty good job of taking down a Purdue professor who claimed to have made an “economic case” against homosexuality. Among other things he couldn’t even get the title of an article he cited correct.
Jen’s commentary is definitely worth reading:
http://www.blaghag.com/2009/11/purdue-pr…
@8: I made some edits to your reasoning:
If your logic is sound, then you have to agree with the same conclusion for the type of crap women like: romance novels, movies, and rom-com in general. Do you? Or do adults–men and women– have a magical ability to distinguish reality from fantasy?
I’ll never be complete until I get my Atheist Barbie.
“Every time a feminist treats science like some great big boogeyman, she makes all feminists and women look foolish and ignorant.”
uh, what?
Bonus points for taking on I Blame the Patriarchy, one of the most egregious echo chambers of self-congratulatory dumb-assery in the known blogosphere.
“Every time a feminist treats science like some great big boogeyman, she makes all feminists and women look foolish and ignorant.”
In all fairness, Twisty Faster & her weird cult following commenters are very far outside the mainstream of feminist thought; anyone who, reading that post & its comments, concluded that’s what “feminists” or “all women” think like, has got a problem with women/feminists to begin with. I think it’s pretty despicable when feminists make ignorant claims, or dismiss scientific research that conflicts with their view of the world. But I don’t think it’s capable of making feminism as a whole look bad. People oughta realize that every movement contains a few wingnuts & tin foil hat people.
Also – individuals do not represent the whole.
“woman’s intution” is real, though not some magic super power. It can now be handily explained by science. Females either have more or respond more to mirror neurons, the feature of the brain in part responsible for empathy and understanding / decoding behavior in others. In laymen’s terms, Chics are better at picking up on minute behaviors and changes, therefor being “intuitive” to what is going on with the person they are observing.
The research is new and I’m not a scientist so I probably got it all wrong, but for further reading about mirror neurons, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neur…
@19, that might explain how women could respond more readily to subtle cues in facial expressions, but it says nothing about any superior ability to discern, say, the laws of physics. Or the neurological effects of porn viewing on men.
Anyways, Jen is right about the wackadoodles at IBTP: they’ll pay lip service to science until it says anything about men possibly _not_ being monsters for having sexual desire. Then science suddenly becomes a bunch of “dudely dudes” cockslapping their way around town. Go figure.
20, you’re absolutely right.
I just wanted to mention that this supposed intuition might be real and scientifically explainable on a minor scale, though NOT as a dogma, as underscored by this good blog.
This isn’t as simple as feminists vs. science. The media spin that’s put on scientific findings is totally absent in this debate. Whenever I read a feminist blog railing against the sexism of a given scientific study, the blog inevitably links to a news story *about* the study, rather than the *actual* scholarly article. Maybe science is objective (or at least strives to be) but media certainly isn’t, even when they’re writing about science.
There’s a number of things that can go wrong with this approach; a.) in order to make a compelling news-bite, the story simplifies the study and exaggerates its most potentially inflammatory findings to the point of obscuring the actual conclusions made by the scientists; b.) the media picks up on a study with crazy conclusions that’s published in a vanity press or Podunk journal with an incredibly lax review process—in short a study that no other scientists take seriously and is contradicted by the majority of academic literature on the subject; and c.) the media reports on a study with inflammatory results that was poorly conducted, leaving out any critique of the researchers methods.
Given this reality, I think it’s unfair to attack feminists for calling bullshit on the “science” one gets from the news, but letting anyone trumpeting the findings of said “science” to bludgeon home a sexist point slide. Those people certainly aren’t going to the source material to thoroughly research their opinion; they’re merely repeating a biased sound-bite and falsely claiming objectivity.
my women’s intuition is effing infallible.
It’s been my experience that a lot of “women’s intuition” relies heavily on astrology. What accounts for the phenomenon wherein otherwise rational, intelligent women often fall for this gibberish?
She’s pretty great, but now the radical feminists are just going to call her a gender traitor and hate her even more than the male oppressors.
@22
People are responsible for vetting the news they get and for their own reactions to it. It’s pretty easy to find out that science reporting is generally terrible. I think that’s a step anyone ought to take before they attack a specific scientific endeavor, let alone the entire process and methodology of science. If a shitty pop-sci piece on FOX gets someone’s goat, they need to look at FOX at least as hard as at the science itself if they’re going to get up in arms and respond. You can’t excuse people attacking science in response to shitty science reporting any more than you can excuse the shitty science writing in the first place. People – in this case, extreme feminists – are failing to perform basic due diligence to participate in civil discourse.
@15, 17, 18: Oh, definitely. Ideally. But we’ve seen again and again that plenty of people will generalize based on the few loud wingnuts they’ve met. It goes for all kinds of groups.
Don’t tell me that there aren’t Republicans, Christians, Muslims, and yep, feminists, who don’t facepalm when they hear another batshit story about one of “their own.”
Bloggers like Blag Hag pointing out this phenomenon aren’t the enemy. The enemies are people who refuse to see the nuance and that even though we may be members of a group, we’re also individuals.
…and Jen McCreight loves you too! Apparently she’s an avid follower of Savage Love.
@25 – I’m a radical feminist and I love what she has to say, here. Don’t generalize, it’s unscientific.
Also, 25, what the hell does the phrase “extreme feminist” mean? I hate when people say shit like that…as if what makes the difference between “good” feminism and “bad” feminism is a matter of…moderation?
What *I* see in feminists who engage in these batshit behaviors that get labeled as “extreme” is not people who take feminism “too far,” but people whose opinions were never truly about equality in the first place. Feminist equality is about deconstructing constrictive gender rules and roles, not about “balancing” women’s status to equals through anti-male backlash.
This “women’s intuition” bullshit is a perfect example: it’s not about equality. It’s a nasty piece of gender essentialism that is obviously antithetical to true gender equality; it’s women trying to create and assert an unfair female privilege in response to the male privilege they perceive, rather than deconstructing the patriarchy. It’s lazy, it’s counterproductive, and, of course, it’s complete horse shit.
laurelgardener: read any dozen articles on Twistie’s blog IBTP and you’ll know exactly what 25 meant by “extreme feminism.” She makes Dworkin’s Intercourse look pretty tame.
@30 – I wasn’t actually asking what sorts of people the label referred to, but questioning the choice of label itself to refer to them. But thanks.
Oh man, I so loved PZ Meyer’s post on women in science. THAT guy actually respects women.
If anyone actually bothered to READ PZ Myer’s women-in-science post, they might notice that it contains my actual views regarding the scientific method, not the moron anti-science crap mysteriously ascribed to me by the reading-comprehension-challenged Boobquaketeer Jen McCraight. But no, it is much easier to label me a “wingnut” and go back to jerking off in blue glow of your Dell laptops. Knobs.