Philosophy of Feminist Criticism: An Introduction (Paragon Issues in Philosophy)

This book would be more aptly titled "I, the feminist ego, hate and detest white-privileged males". In fact, the book seethes with hate and resentment and arrogance. The writer is articulate yet her prose so, needlessly complex, that one has to think every sentence through and read sentences over more than once simply to resolve the complexity of the sentence which I believe obfuscates the messages for her undergraduate audience. Ms. Cole could have heeded the following passages from Mary Wollstonecraft's book A Vindication of the Rights of Women which certainly every feminist has read: "I shall be employed about things, not words!...I shall try to avoid that flowery diction..... These pretty nothings, these caricatures of the real beauty of sensibility, dropping glibly from the tongue...create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple unadorned truth; and a deluge of false sentiments and over-stretched feelings, stifling natural emotions of the heart, render the domestic pleasures insipid, that ought to sweeten the exercise of those severe duties, which educate a rational and immortal being for a nobler field of action". A redundancy of the book is her expressions of anger at the "white male-privileged class. This and her pedantic writing diminishes her message which she states on page 94, "that in an age of a postmodernism state-of-mind..."To feminist philosophers, postmodernism has promised the most thorough and radical destruction of traditional binary gender thinking of any intellectual tradition so far manifest." And pg 19: "While of course many philosophers have striven for moral seriousness, feminist philosophers are differentiated by the goal to seriously work for-human liberation-and by the methods they pursue-critique and transformation." In the final analysis, her theme is white "arrogant eye" males have delivered unto women the worst half of Descartes' dualism, a scorched earth, polluting cars and airplanes, a technologically violated and trampled moon, ugly, pyhallic-like skyscraping architecture, an infinite amount of detestable polluting devices and heinous products such as iPods, computers, cell phones, air conditioners, indoor toilets, and all of the other detestable symbols of materialism to be blamed on white males; and, further, the Western world's 85 year average life-time is just another insult to have to endure all the privileged white male's mess. (May I invite such feminists to move to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan where they really know how to treat the ladies....and Note to self: Then as now, there is no mention of middle eastern contemporary religious philosophy in the book, much less any critique. It seems that the most honest and enthusiastic anti-male critiques occur in the comparatively "safe" world of Western philosophy". Oh, and I don't recall that the Koran is very inclusive of Lesbian women or gay men, but then, I digress). The assumption is that if during the Western world's origins it had been made of matriarchal societies, today we would all be living in an era of diversified bliss. It is tempting to rewrite the rules but perhaps, first, we should all review Animal Farm. Ms. Cole refers on page 8 to the Socialist feminists, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman whose "socialist-feminist Utopia has citizens to whom both private property and individualist thinking are utterly foreign "(as is individual responsibility and entrepreneurship, the latter of which she states "roam freely through the economic landscape, annexing goods and property to themselves and allowing others access to them only at a cost"). Gilman apparently believes that all manner of innovations will appear without incentive. I suppose I should be led to ask- why have inequitable distributions of income when the world can have equality of poverty and total loss of freedom at some point? Perhaps, I overlook the possibility and value of the concept that total poverty wipes out all envy and jealousy and ,moreover, without wealth one cannot buy those polluting things such as gasoline. Wow! What an epiphany! The book mostly motivates me to care about nothing since my gender over the millennia apparently has accomplished nothing and with the lack of understanding that my gender possesses, there is apparently no reason to try to change my understanding as my male consciousness is embedded with unfixable flaws by definition. Of course, I will not bow to that feminist wish. Although I can support a legitimate goal, I have to be convinced that the end result will not be anarchy and nihilism just for the sake of revenge and quelling the feminist rage. Moving along, Ms. Cole states that women must be "skeptical even about the popular word empowerment in naming an acceptable feminist goal; do we want power of this kind", she asks? " She states that Western culture has most frequently interpreted power as "power over," and the very term brings to many people's minds "images of clenched fists, arms raised over another person's cowering body, flexed biceps, readiness to exert force". (Let's pause while I try to recall if Genghis Kahn, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Osama Bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahamadinejad, Kim Jong Ill and other more Eastern cultures are susceptible to the egregiously-violent foibles of Western culture). Whew! I feel better now as I feel sure the author did after getting her book's "good-girl-bad-white-guy" dialectic off her chest. So now that I feel better, I can say that I do agree with certain aspects of the feminist arguments. No doubt (oops! Sorry doubt is a Descartes' term) feminists and non feminist (differentiated I suppose by degree of feminism) have a lot to add to the field of philosophy. It's simply not additive to an undeserved criticism of "privileged white males" that is expressed with such sanctimonious glee as the likes of Maureen Dowd when describing the plight of Republicans; "I love watching Republican's suffer". In fact, it is subtractive; not additive. When these feminist speak of their cultural, gender advantages in philosophy in negotiation, compromising, empathizing, one does not see it in their "smack down approaches" in books like this. I do like the idea that a better starting point for philosophy could have been and still can be "the relational self" rather than Descartes "separate self". But to assume that had the first philosopher been a "Theodora" rather than Thales or an "Adonia" rather than Aristotle, it stretches the imagination as to what thousands of years of subsequent history might have wrought. It would be pure biased fantasy to speculate where we would be today. One can speculate that a similar conclusion would have been reached by some feminists, at least, that the only valid conclusion is a reality that self-interest is a fact of life and the only workable solution to order. The question is why have women been so malleable over the millennia that they have allowed such undesirable developments for women to evolve, particularly, in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Iran? For centuries and especially in recent decades and most obviously at this moment in time, they could have stopped or can stop it by collectively refusing to live with men or by their rules; by refusing to be excluded from schools; by refusing to wear burkas. Men have to have women in their lives to give them purpose. And women need the same regardless of modern politically correct protestations. If Middle Eastern women refused to follow their own cultural and religious dogmas these cultures would change very quickly. Do not simply blame these silly, ignorant men in these cultures. It takes silly, ignorant women too. "It takes a village". In the Western world and culture which apparently so many feminists detest, conditions have existed that have allowed feminists far more freedom to criticize their conditions than are allowed in many other countries and cultures. And so they do so with abandon and without restraint. Yet, there has been so little criticism of their gender's plight in other parts of the world. We certainly live in a politically correct country and culture where it is easy to criticize one's own culture and religions but not the places that are the best examples of anti-feminism in the world. It is no different than the Western liberal news media which refuses to print much of anything, including, cartoons critical of the dogma and practices and prophets and teachings of those cultures. I call that self-interest and the "separate self", not the "relational self"; and that is hypocrisy and cowardice!