Back in the day, feminist academic Judith Butler declared that “sex is socially constructed” and that the powerful imposed their view of sex on the world when she believes in “gender” as “a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world in this way”.
Now she’s “going mainstream” with Who’s Afraid of Gender?” Who indeed, unless you dare to whisper a word against “gender” in media or academia. And if you go to Google Search you find that the whole world is all gaga about Butler’s new book.
I got into the game by reading canceled feminist Kathleen Stock’s take on all this.
Of course, because I am so wise, I understand what is going on here.
Back in the day, in the Enlightenment, trendy types knew that the old order of religious superstition was being replaced with a new world of logic and reason, the world of reality.
But then along came Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason. It was the birth of “critical theory,” which has since got a little out of hand.
On my interpretation, Kant said we cannot know things-in-themselves but only appearances. Sure, there is reality out there, but who can say that their interpretation of appearances — their “theory” — is the real understanding of reality, the things-in-themselves that we cannot know directly?
What does that mean? It means that we don’t know the really real, and never did. Not when the really real was air fire earth and water, then matter, then atoms, and now quarks, or dark matter, whatever. It’s all the latest cool theory until it isn’t.
If this is so, then it makes sense that whatever is the received understanding of reality, it has to be influenced by whoever is in power, politically, religiously, or culturally. Power! Male Power! Patriarchal Power!
So, if you don’t want to live the received narrative about sex, and sexual roles, and your sexual place in the world, then it helps to gussie up the idea of “gender” and say that ordinary biological sex has nothing to do with things-in-themselves, but the interpretation of appearances by White Male Oppressors on helpless feminist victims.
Stands to reason.
Only, of course, when radical feminists like Judith Butler write their books about “gender” and lefty academics work themselves into the catbird seat then it is they who are using power to force their interpretations of things-in-themselves on the rest of us.
And the funny thing is that, since they believe that the old understanding of things-in-themselves was all about the powerful imposing their will on helpless victims, then the only thing they know is to ramp up a monstrous power movement to impose their own will on the notorious oppressors.
And the whole LGBT movement has morphed into forcing the “gender du jour” down the throats of the evil oppressors, whoever they are. Do you not see the irony in that, dear lefty friends?
So, at some point a professional gay writer like Andrew Sullivan gets to worry, like Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch, about going too far. So he writes on his Substack about Butler’s book:
This is a work so embedded in neo-Marxism it’s impossible to grasp it without accepting its collectivist and revolutionary premises. For Butler, in matters of sex and the body, nothing is as it appears, the individual has no independent existence or capacity for reason outside social and cultural forces, and even the basics of anatomy, like a penis, are just socially constructed all the way down.
Well yes, all knowledge is “socially constructed all the way down.” The key is to try to avoid getting politics and power and the friend / enemy distinction into the mix, and trying to come to a common understanding of knowledge with lefty Jürgen Habermas. As I wrote many moons ago:
Thus, for Habermas, humans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world, the lifeworld of Husserl, with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement.
“All friendly like,” as My Fair Lady Eliza Doolittle put it. Or, if you prefer, the words of the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, referring to homosexuals. Said Mrs. Pat:
My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.
But, of course, the whole point of lefty politics is to stampede the horses. In their own best interest, of course.