So yesterday Steve pointed to some AFR articles on misogyny particularly one by Susan Sheridan – it seems that piece must have been too much for the leader writer who blasts her today.
Dr Sheridan, an adjunct professor in English and women’s studies at Flinders University, argues that Mr Abbott is a misogynist because he inhabits and reflects a culture “with a long tradition of hatred and fear of women”. She claims even women who do not consciously resist our modern society’s long tradition of sexism may speak and act in ways that are misogynist. This type of feminist fundamentalism bears similarities to other fundamentalist ideologies including Marxism, green environmentalism and religious fanaticism, all of which draw on notions of oppression and hierarchical power structures that jar with the reality of our modern pluralist culture.
Dr Sheridan’s suggestion that even women can unconsciously act and speak in a misogynist manner harks back to the Marxist idea of “false consciousness”, whereby even the consuming middle classes don’t understand they are being oppressed. The proletariat may have been “oppressed” in the early industrial revolution that prompted Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to publish The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Rather than revolting, however, the working class has long ago mostly morphed into a prosperous middle class that itself increasingly owns the means of production. As Paul Keating notes, Labor has failed to embrace the aspirational class that its own economic reforms encouraged in the 1980s.
Good.
I’ll continue buying the AFR. I was teetering today, on the basis of what that fatuous old-fashioned reactionary Sheridan wrote.
Mk50 of Brisbane
19 Oct 12 at 10:18 am
Re the AFR piece , sorry but I find it hard to think of the current cabinet as “thought leaders” in our society.
Marcuse polluted the thoughts of so many with his metaphysical nonsense about the ignorance of everyone at all times. Vanguardist self serving crap.
Except the lunatic leftists who were destined to rule over us of course.
murph the surf.
19 Oct 12 at 10:23 am
That probably should be “back pedalling”. Unless you’re implying that they have returned to retailing their misogyny. In which case, carry on.
m0nty
19 Oct 12 at 10:24 am
Militant feminayzeeism has been possibly the single greatest disaster inflicted on western society by marxists.
Destruction of the middle class? Destroy the family as the central social building block by delegitimising marriage as the normative basis of the family structure.
Cripes – I’m starting to sound like some sociologist moonbat…
Rabz
19 Oct 12 at 10:28 am
The poor old AFR. A business paper that employs La Tingle? It needs to spend a few hundred hours on Dr Freud’s couch …”Tell me about your father”.
At least the receiver should be able to sell it to someone who knows how to run it.
H B Bear
19 Oct 12 at 10:32 am
“Dr Sheridan’s suggestion that even women can unconsciously act and speak in a misogynist manner harks back to the Marxist idea of “false consciousness”, whereby even the consuming middle classes don’t understand they are being oppressed.”
Shorter Dr Sheridan: I know what’s good for you so shut the fuck up!
Pedro
19 Oct 12 at 10:36 am
Good point, Pedro.
I have decided that on Sheridan’s definition I must be sexist by saying I have never encountered sexist behaviour towards me, that I can recall.
It’s getting very po-mo.
Judith Sloan
19 Oct 12 at 10:46 am
Well, perhaps they have simply realised that there are women and children cowering in shelters, women who have been raped, hiding from the true misogynists.
candy
19 Oct 12 at 11:01 am
No surprise that Sheridan “works” at Flinders
-a “progressive” leftist “think tank”(oxymoron!}from its inception(established by the ALP 1966)–ranks 17th in Australia and ” In 2011, Flinder’s registered the Australia’s worst fall in the year’s rankings, when it dropped 49 places from the 2010 position in the QS World University Rankings.[5] (Wiki)”
PS Declare my bias , as an Adelaide graduate
blind freddy
19 Oct 12 at 11:40 am
Postmodernist theorists have always been obsessed with power relations from every angle and in every sphere of life. Instead of employing critical theory constructively to discover how individuals oppress themselves through their own sometimes distorted thought processes, they direct the attention outwards to always blame others and hence “play the victim” – which is how Abbott has characterised Gillard’s preferred position.
Viva
19 Oct 12 at 11:48 am
I must mention that when I am told of the social construction of gender, I point to the social construction of homosexuality.
Back in the day, an old University mate of mine, Rodney Croome used to be protesting to reform to the Crimes Act.
• Rod even marched into a police station to confess to abominations against the course of nature, as the Tasmanian criminal code called it. It was a gender neutral prohibition.
• The police said they could not prosecute with the other party – the abominee – coming forward as a witness. He did.
• The Tasmanian Director of Public Prosecutions then declined to prosecute on public interest grounds.
25 years later, Rod is campaigning for the right to marry. All in one generation! Times change, and we forget how quickly times have changed.
In the 1980s, gays and lesbians were under no illusions about how hated they were and how easily that could spill into violence. They did not need to read a book to discover that they were hated and in danger
I often use rapid social change such as over gay rights when I must listen to someone drone on about how preferences and social roles are socially constructed.
You have to be a young pup to not have adult memories of how open racism and bigotry was as recently as the 1980s. You must know nothing of the history of the labour party and unions, and more recently, Pauline Hanson.
Jim Rose
19 Oct 12 at 5:05 pm
MK, I was the same re: The AFR. I was glad to read Stutch’s rebuttal to that obvious lunatic from the day before. I thought they’d actually lost the plot as a paper for a minute there.
tbh
19 Oct 12 at 5:09 pm