Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Feminist Scorecard -IV

I was skimming some of the Feminist drivel (hey, its better to know the devil who haunts you!) across the Lunar New Year holidays when I came across this absolute gem over at Renew America. In it, it postulates the finding that feminists are a ragtag group of retards, incapable of logic and/or rationalization.

This is nothing new -I came to that same conclusion a long time ago. Writer Charlotte Allen at Harry's News, a subset of Angry Harry pontificates: "Where are the women thinkers?" Which set me to thinking. If women are better than men (as they never fail to to remind us), then they should excel in the one area where cerebral power determines whether you make or break. That area is Philosophy.

Excited, I fired up Google and embarked on a search for female philosophers. Here's what I came up with - the leading philosophers are all, without a single exception, male (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Maimonides, Peter Abelard, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Gilbert of Poitiers, Confucius, Willian Ockham, Niccolo Machiavelli, Erasmus, John Locke, Rene Descartes, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Blaise Pascal, William James, George Santayana, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michael Foucault, et al). The list of philosophers runs to several pages, classified by subject area and all male.


What about the list of female philosophers? One (count 'em folks! ONE) page! And of that list, I only recognized Simone de Beauvoir (a wobbly writer, known more her novels), George Eliot (female novelist by the name of Mary Anne Evans), Heloise (Peter Abelard's student and wife), Hildegard of Bingen, Iris Murdoch (novelist), Ayn Rand (novelist and playwright). Out of the 6 I recognized, 5 are story-writers (a novel is NOT philosophy!), leaving only Hildegard with some credit towards philosophical thought.

If you ever wonder why women can never distinguish themselves in this field, with the glory of having their writings savoured and debated over the centuries, consider this beauty, ponderously pontificated by Susan Estrich (Michael Dukakis' campaign manager) about Apple's naming of the iPad:
"Is there a woman in America who did not laugh, or at least roll her eyes, the minute she heard that the newest, hottest tablet computer from one of America's most ingenuous companies was going to sound like a feminine hygiene product? The iKotex is what most people I know are calling it, with apologies to Kotex."

The thrust of her preposterously laughable complaint was that Apple needed to come into the 21st century and involve women in the upper strata of corporate decision making. Her verbiage shows that this is as likely to happen as pigs flying. After all, can she claim sanity if she views a (cute) digital device as proof positive of gender oppression? And you wonder why women don't make it philosophy or critical thinking!

I need not say more!
Maybe she/they will get it next time around.
Onward!

2 comments:

Memphis said...

Now every time I hear someone mentioned the iPad I'm going to think of tampons. Damn!

n/a said...

To be fair, there is also Hannah Arendt.

But this doesn't change the fact that there are about 2000 male philosophers for every one female.