Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Is radical feminism compatible with skepticism?


There’s something that’s been bugging me a lot recently, especially in the wake of Elevatorgate/Bunnygate/T-shirt-Gate/Camera-on-a-stick-Gate... I keep seeing the trope "if you are a skeptic then you have to reject Teh Patriarchy and become a radical feminist."

This is stupid. First of all, skepticism is about questions of fact. Does Bigfoot exist? Do UFO’s exist? But if you take some random ideology, you are no longer dealing with questions of "is" but "ought" – how ought society be ordered? Should this ideology be implemented in sociery? It’s a totally different category of question, so it has nothing to do with skepticism.

But it’s even worse when you consider radfem specifically. Radfem is the ideology that male oppression of women is a "transhistorical phenomenon prior to or deeper than other sources of oppression, not only the oldest and most universal form of domination but the primary form and the model for all others." (Wikipedia) Everything in nature and society must be viewed through the lens of patriarchy theory, privilege theory, rape culture theory etc. etc. And every idea on any subject must be filtered through this agenda.

Of course there is not a shred of evidence that there is some vast international Y-chromosome conspiracy and that every man on earth is privileged over (and the oppressor of) every women on earth, but that means nothing to the "Sisterz in Skepticism". In a nutshell, it is not possible to pick an ideology that is more the antithesis of everything skepticism stands for.

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