Well, you won’t find me defending Daly; everything I’ve read of her suggests she’s a nut. As you yourself note the passage doesn’t directly imply the sex=rape thesis, and there’s always context etc. (Dworkin for instance has some quotes describing sex as conceived by what she considers patriarchal ideology that have been taken out of context) but it also doesn’t seem like a perverse interpretation.
I mean, if I said that “if life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth; a natural process resulting in drastic reduction of the females” and “under feminism, every women is a rapist or exploiter of another man”, those would also be perfectly OK, politically correct, inoffensive, and uncontroversial statements, ready to get me to the textbooks as a defender of equality and everything good. (Just joking, those are not my opinions.)
Ah, but surely as rationalists we must not let emotions cloud our judgments or subject truth to the inquisitorial glare of political correctness, if men universally evolved to be scum may we should want to believe that they did, human biodiversity between untermenschen and überfräuen ought be celebrated, &c.
I don’t have a problem to believe things like “most mass murderers are male”, etc. (I just hope people around me are good enough at math to recognize that the statement is not equivalent to “most males are mass murderers”.) Just give me evidence from a reliable source.
Show me a sustainable utopia with 10% males (I would actually encourage feminists sympathetic to this idea to try it, but only with volunteers), give me reliable reports from independent sources, and I might be convinced. Until then, it is just a hypothesis in the idea-space, and I find other explanations more likely.
My last paragraph was, like yours, just joking and not my actual opinions. I’m a pretty strong constructionist on gender and also a dude, if that means anything.
Well, you won’t find me defending Daly; everything I’ve read of her suggests she’s a nut. As you yourself note the passage doesn’t directly imply the sex=rape thesis, and there’s always context etc. (Dworkin for instance has some quotes describing sex as conceived by what she considers patriarchal ideology that have been taken out of context) but it also doesn’t seem like a perverse interpretation.
Ah, but surely as rationalists we must not let emotions cloud our judgments or subject truth to the inquisitorial glare of political correctness, if men universally evolved to be scum may we should want to believe that they did, human biodiversity between untermenschen and überfräuen ought be celebrated, &c.
I don’t have a problem to believe things like “most mass murderers are male”, etc. (I just hope people around me are good enough at math to recognize that the statement is not equivalent to “most males are mass murderers”.) Just give me evidence from a reliable source.
Show me a sustainable utopia with 10% males (I would actually encourage feminists sympathetic to this idea to try it, but only with volunteers), give me reliable reports from independent sources, and I might be convinced. Until then, it is just a hypothesis in the idea-space, and I find other explanations more likely.
My last paragraph was, like yours, just joking and not my actual opinions. I’m a pretty strong constructionist on gender and also a dude, if that means anything.