A woman is whoever wants to be a woman
What has happened to people? What have they done with their brains?
Why do people – especially women, especially feminist women, but really any people – say things like that? When they’re so obviously absurd? So like baby talk? It’s just not true that a woman is whoever wants to be a woman, any more than it’s true that a tree is whoever wants to be a tree or a shark is whoever wants to be a shark. I’m pretty sure Naomi Wolf realizes that about other categories, so why does she think the rules suddenly vanish into thin air when the wants-to-be is a woman? Why does she think woman is the only category that’s fungible in that way? Why does she think that if Trump decided he wants to be a woman he would be a woman simply because he wants to?
They seem to believe sex is yesterday’s dogma. And yet they know it isn’t – per your comment a few posts ago, ask them why trans women aren’t able to serve as surrogate mothers. Or see how they squirm when you ask something simple, like what sex a trans woman is. Morales squirmed when asked that one not so long ago – hi John! (He still hate-reads you, btw)
I found the following list online, which attempts to encapsulate what “a woman is whoever wants to be a woman” entails. Men being able to claim female status results in:
Removing the legal right of women to organize politically against sex-based oppression by males
Removing the legal right of women to assemble outside of the presence of men
Removing the legal right of women to educational programs created for women outside the presence of men
Eliminating data collection of sex based inequalities in areas where females are underrepresented
Elimination of sex-based crime statistics
Eliminating athletic programs and sports competition for women and girls
Removing the legal right of women to be free from the presence of men in areas of public accomodation where nudity occurs
Elimination of grants, scholarships, board and trustee designations, representative positions, and affirmative programs for women
Removing the legal right of women to create reproductive clinics, rape crisis services, support groups, or any organizations for females
Eliminating media and all public discourse specific to females
Removal of the right of journalists to report the sex, and history, of subjects
Eliminating the legal right of lesbians to congregate publicly
Elimination of lesbian specific organizations and advocacy groups
Removing the legal right of women to free speech related to sex roles and gender
Elimination of the legal right of women to protection from state-enforced sex-roles (appearance/behavior/thought)
Elimination of the legal right of girls to protection from state-enforced sex roles in education
Elimination of the patient right of dependent females to hospital/facility bed assignments separate from males
Elimination of the right of dependent females to prefer female providers for their intimate personal care requirements
Elimination of the human right of female prisoners under state confinement to be house separately from male prisoners.
That seems like it ought to be a big deal.
Naomi Wolf is perhaps not as clever or incisive thinker as she believes herself to be. After all, she is the one who wrote a book, the key premise of which was an archaic English term of law that she totally misunderstood. Sadly for her, that did not become apparent until she was into the publicity phase. Still touts the book though, even if it’s only real use is as kindling or mulch. She also got into a twitter fight with T. Greg Doucette and a Portland journalist (Olmos?) about Doucette retweeting Olmos reporting from the scene of the protests. She demanded – DEMANDED – proof of the location and date, even though Olmos was doing live reporting every night, night after night, and even though the buildings in sight (Federal courthouse amongst others) are well known and have been reported on by multiple organisations for weeks now.
Just another failed academic turned grifter IMO.
And possibly more important than that, removing the right of lesbians to determine which genitals they prefer in a sex partner, since any preference for not-penis will result in outraged cries of bigot, and probably lead to an internet dogpile. It could also, in some cases, lead to loss of job, friends, or other amenities.
Not being able to say no to a sex partner is the very quintessence of rape.
And all to accomodate the <1% of men who say they want to be women. It seems to me that it is getting bloody close to the right time to tell them all where to go. And that is not to the nearest womens' change room.
Wolf is just dodging the question, because it can’t be answered without admitting that gender really isn’t just sex misspelled, and is in fact enabling sexism by foisting gendered stereotypes on women.
All of this, plus the whole baby-talk silly pretend-along-with-me NONSENSE aspect, which I am also thoroughly sick of.
Why does it matter, Naomi Wolf? I’ll give you a quick and easy answer: it matters to the EMT who is going to dose a patient with a dangerous drug because that patient was pretending to be the opposite sex, a drug that could be inappropriate for the actual sex of the patient. That’s a good way to get that patient killed. You’ve heard of contraindications, I assume?
That is one quick example, but there are others. Grow up. Start acting like an adult!
Ophelia, #7:
I was thinking something along the lines of this last night. Most children like to play make-belief and even though their parents might play along with them the kids usually understand that it is make-belief.
I’m sure that we’ve all seen this in action, either with our own children or with young relatives, friends’ kids, and so-on. Young Suzy announces that she’s invisible and walks around giggling as the adults are asking has anybody seen Suzy? I can hear her but I can’t see her. Another person walks into the room and speaks to Suzy, who’ll simply tell the newcomer that she’s invisible and the game goes on.
However, there is always that child, the little Kevin who’ll respond to the person spoiling the pretence with an absolute tantrum, screaming I’m invisible, you idiot. You always spoil things for me. YOU HATE ME!
What we’re seeing now is a load of little Kevins who were over-indulged in their pretences and undisciplined for their rages, all grown up – physically at least – and still demanding full compliance when they insist that they’re invisible, or else.
I spent a huge chunk of my childhood pretending, but not only did I know it was pretending, I also didn’t particularly want to involve other people, and certainly not adults. It didn’t even really involve much overt pretending, I just pretended I was some other child out playing in the fields. It was an in the head kind of pretending, and it was local to me. Forcing other people to ratify it was just not part of the fun AT ALL.
And for people who do want to involve others, there’s always acting. Set up a goddam theater group and let the rest of us get on with our lives.
I recently saw the “If you say you’re a woman then of course you’re a woman!” routine compared to the elaborate social pretense of Santa Claus. It makes children happy to believe it, so woe betide the adult or older child who ruins the illusion. Children can only believe in Santa if we refuse to police their choices, and refrain from gatekeeping what’s real or not for them by joining in enthusiastically. “Santa not real? Of course he is! I saw him just the other day, flying on his sled!”
Children, though, usually take the discovery re Santa philosophically. It’s the parents and other adults who throw fits when someone blurts out the truth.
They have bought into a worldview that is actively unconcerned with Truth as basically everyone else conceives it. Truth is only truth inasmuch as it is manifest in systems of power. Here’s an excerpt from Hypatia that makes this explicit.
(Emphasis mine.) Now, this paper is on Critical Pedagogy, but this section is broadly applicable to the whole phenomenon. Validity, soundness, and conceptual clarity are simply not of import, as the important project is the dismantling of structural power. Objections made by TERFs and transphobes are not “propositions to be assessed for their truth value”. They are merely power trying to maintain itself. And apparently logic can justify and defend any epistemic “home terrain”, so if logic shows that the critical theorist is mistaken, that’s only because the game is rigged.
I’ve just re-read an essay-review by Fred Crews in the anthology Theory’s Empire, republished from the NYRB 1986, about that very thing – the explicit rejection of trying to get at the truth and replacing it with talk of power-knowledge yadda yadda.
“The Grand Academy of Theory” is the title.
‘Childhood pretending’ – I am reminded of doing mask-work while doing acting training (which can be alarming – some odd things come out, and the emotions called forth can be overwhelming), and of the way a Noh actor (the shite – which is pronounced, roughly, ‘shte’ and not the way you might suppose, though it may be there are some real shites among Noh actors, as there are among all actors), having put on his mask, looks into a mirror to allow the spirit of the character to enter him. And I feel that when you are acting well, it is as though you have a kind of second skin an infinitesimal distance from your actual skin, and that this leads you. It is like a mask. You are no longer in control – though there remains a constant sort of double focus, since you know the role is leading you, and allow it do so. I have come across some actors, in nearly every case, poor ones, who so lose themselves in what they suppose to be their role that they will behave violently towards other actors in rehearsal and then excuse themselves, first of all, usually, to themselves (since they feel this loss of control shows that must be good actors) and only then to others if they do so at all.
The Danish anthropologist Rane Willerslev has written very interestingly on Siberian hunting tribes, whose members enter the animal world in dreams and are given tips by the Mistress of Animals where to go on the following day or in a few days’ time. The hunters, if hunting an elk, will, after spotting an elk, so move that the elk supposes they are an elk and will at times come towards them. They have, while retaining human form, as it were put on the skin or mask of an elk and allow this to guide them. At the same time, however, the hunters told Willerslev, you must not allow yourself to be too caught up into the world of animals, for you will eventually lose your humanity, and, it seems, this occasionally happens, so someone will actually become mentally deranged. There is a sort of double focus here, too, which it is important to maintain.
This kind of thing is profoundly connected with all the arts – and very obviously in the case of imaginative literature, where a good playwright or novelist or poet enters deeply into the skin of a character, whether of the same sex as the writer or not. I recall the composer and violinist George Enescu speaking, concerning the composing of his great opera ‘Oedipe’, of struggling to to build an almost unbearable tension in order to depict the victory of Oedipus over the Sphinx. Ah, I’ve found the place in the book: ‘To describe the howling of the Sphinx, he had “to imagine something unimaginable.” “When I finished that scene,” recalls the composer, “it seemed to me that I was going mad.”‘
But he didn’t go mad.
There is this fluidity, if you like to call it that, in all of us, and it is a great part of what makes us human. And, particularly in youth, one’s imagination can seem to be all too real – particularly if it is in part a defence against some traumatic experience, as in the case of that poor young girl quoted in a thread here some days ago, who, having experienced abuse at the hands of a cousin, and having discovered that she was attracted to someone of the same sex, declared that she was a boy called ‘John’, and absolutely denied that she was a lesbian. And, certainly, there is something called gender dysphoria which may be connected with this fluidity.
Which all seems to me pertinent to the case of claiming to be a sex other than you are, particularly in the case of the behaviour of the most vociferous of the trans-females, a number of whom sport beards, wear male clothing, and who behave like bad actors and real shites.
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Ophelia @ 13: I feel like I’m late to the Critical Theory party. Maybe it’s because my university years were spent in engineering and analytic philosophy, but I managed to avoid the stuff almost entirely until a little over a year ago. Now it’s like I’ve put on the sunglasses from They Live, ’cause see Theory everywhere. And just like Rowdy Roddy Piper, it’s freaking me out. It’s Orwellian and horrifying.
Not say that I in any way support ‘Critical Theory’ and its ready reduction of everything to some sort of thing that is raw power, which is superficial, stupid, and dangerous, but power – in the sense of stable political and judicial institutions that depend on the genuine assent of the governed and are designed to be fair (though they may not always be) and in the sense of there being a sufficiency of citizens who support these institutions – is important. The trouble with Critical Theory (though I do not pretend to be well-acquainted with it) is that it seems to take delight in much the same kind of ‘daring’ and ‘shocking’ reduction as Francis Crick’s assertion that your emotions, ambitions, etc are merely chemicals swilling about in your body, or the assertion that human beings and other animals are only crude machines or robots designed to reproduce themselves, or that the males belonging to a certain South American tribe who are killers are able to spread their genes more effectively than other males, and that is the reality that underlies any human society.
I’m pretty sure I have seen it described as transphobic to suggest that gender identity involves choice or wanting to. Apparently it’s not that these people “want to” be women. It’s that they just are whether they want to or not. I smell thoughtcrime…
(And of course circular definition, as always)
‘I was three or four years old when I realised that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.’ The first two sentences of Jan Morris’s book ‘Conundrum’, which is well worth reading. It seems to me to be an exceptionally honest book on a very difficult subject (which is why it is called ‘Conundrum’). And it certainly suggests that ‘gender dysphoria’ is a very real, if uncommon, thing, and is not at base simply play-acting. In later life, after fighting in World War II, getting married and having children, and writing many books, Jan Morris fully transitioned. Her account of learning to become a woman does involve elements that seem close to acting, but then I remember reading some advice from some elderly counsellor to closeted males homosexuals who come out late in life and try to live as homosexuals, in which he says that, having denied their own nature for so many years, they have to learn to lead a life as a homosexual, and how to behave towards other homosexual males. And that, too, seemed to involve elements of acting (as in fact all our lives do). I think we should be careful not to confuse acting with pretence in every case, or to suppose that in every case gender dysphoria is a delusion or a defence, as in the case of ‘John’, brought on by trauma.
Holms@1:
That’s an easy one: not all women can have children. ARE YOU SAYING THAT WOMEN WHO CAN’T HAVE CHILDREN SUDDENLY BECOME NOT-WOMEN???!!!!???
etc.
Ophelia@7:
With pronouns being perhaps the silliest thing at all. It’s not good enough to pretend to people’s faces, we have to pretend behind their backs, too. It’s like parents pretending to each other that Father Christmas is real, even when their kid is not around.
Nullius in Verba #12, Ophelia #13
And of course it didn’t take long for the far right to decide that two can play that game. After all, what is Trumpism. other than the far right beating the deconstructionists at their own game? As others have pointed out, the main purpose of “fake news” (actual fake news, not just whatever the orange sewage fountain in the Oval Office calls “fake news”) was never to make people believe in them, but to make them think that every truth claim is like that, so you might as well pick the “facts” that support your own “side”.
Many have sought to distance themselves from the idea of the “post truth” era because they take it to imply that until recently we were living in the “truth” era, which of course, we didn’t (duh!). Politicians, commercial interests, and ideological pressure groups of every kind have always employed the whole arsenal of outright lies, subtle lies, bullshit, bending the truth, half-truths, spin, disingenuous and self-serving “framings” etc. And yet it seems to me that something has changed, and I think it’s this: Even if people – even back in the pre-post-truth era – often failed to live up to the accepted norms and standards of honesty and truthfulness, at least it used to be implicitly understood that there were such norms and standards, and that the truth did indeed matter, which is why even liars (at least the clever ones) would usually make some effort to cover their tracks, make sure there was “plausible deniability” etc. Being caught telling obvious, outright, shameless lies used to be embarrassing no matter who you were and carry a penalty, even among your the people on your own side.
Today it seems to be more or less openly accepted that there are no standards other than winning at all costs. Who cares if it’s true if it’s something we can use against the other side. It reminds me of something I was once told by someone who used to be considered a very promising athlete in my country (on the national team in his particular sport) who now, years later, openly admitted using steroids. As he described it, it was hardly even a secret within the community that everybody was doing it. And if you didn’t, it made you less rather than more respected among your peers: “Sucker”, “Loser”, “Those unwilling to do whatever it takes to win only deserve to lose” etc. That seems to be where we’re at.
Sastra #2 Ah, but you forget that women can now simply identify as men. So if a man wants to rape a woman, the woman can just declare to be a man, problem solved. Yay, no more men on women violence anymore.[\sarcasm]
The denial of physical reality will only get you so far, and only operates without penalty in a smaller sphere of action than that which we regularly deal with. If you push reality, reality pushes back.
Collisions with truth aren’t pretty. In a pissing match against reality, reality wins. If you try to build stuff based on how you’d like things to be rather than how they really are, then you end up with lots of flaming wreckage, and bodies to bury. Reality is a merciless testing ground for sloppy programming and careless design. It doesn’t care what you want to do, only what you actually do. In rocket science, a misplaced decimal point, a plus sign instead of a minus, can be the difference between a successful landing and a new crater on another planet, assuming your mission didn’t blow up on the pad because the machining of some tiny, crucial part was out by a small fraction of a millmeter. Viruses don’t give a fuck about your economy or politics, and atmospheric physics and chemistry will unfeelingly settle on a Venus-like condition should you thoughtlessly trigger the initial conditions required to get there, even if you don’t “believe” in global warming.
Arbitrary human societal constructs trespass on the laws of physics, chemistry and biology at their own peril, and at ours. Things like legal fictions (Biological males, by another name, in women’s prisons? Biological males, by another name, in women’s sports?) do not make any resulting trauma, injury and death go away. The question then becomes “How much trauma, injury and death are acceptable to maintain the legal fiction?” And “Whose trauma, injury and death are you willing to accept to maintain the legal fiction?” We’re beginning to see what one side’s risk assesment seems to be, how much damage is fine with them. Too many TAs willingly choose “validation” of the legal fiction over safety for women and girls, in some instances rejecting third spaces for trans individuals in favour of demanding access to female only spaces. Women and girls are to make space and accommodate biological males unwilling to put the effort into making their fellow males accept them in their own spaces. “No debate” means they do not have to be held accountable, don’t have to listen to the voices of those being forced to pay the price of maintaining a legal fiction in the real world. How much of the uncritical brandishing of “the most oppressed people” trope is to counter the much better evidence of actual harm to women and girls that is the “acceptable” price for maintaining the legal fiction?
Tim Harris:
From what I gather, the reasoning process of Critical Theory, such as it is, is more analogous to literary interpretation than any sort of logical analysis. Now, literary interpretation is a fine thing, but it’s inherently subjective and thus can’t provide access to an external reality. Which, of course, is why they reject the concept of objectivity and objective reality. Instead, CT adopts a kind of hard-core constructivism about descriptive truths, where metaphysics is nothing but discourse. (See Jane Clare Jones on the subject.)
While it is certainly conceivable that gender dysphoria might have an underlying neurological etiology in some cases, I’m not sure what conclusion you’d like to draw from that.
What the counselor said about homosexuals who leave the closet late in life rings true in my own experience with social anxiety disorder, for which I only started treatment when I was thirty-three. Even now that my general anxiety in social situations is markedly diminished, I still feel like a newbie at a game that everyone else has long since mastered.
Bjarte @ 23:
After all, “It’s not a foul if it doesn’t get called.”
I think you’re right. Failing to live up to a norm neither invalidates the norm nor diminishes its value. Even if a norm functions as nothing more than a navigational beacon, it is still doing work and still has value.
When it comes to post-truth, some of it seems related to one of your hobby horses: identifying a term’s referent. It’s as though there is a massive confusion now between sign and signifier, like there’s an underlying belief that changing the way we talk about something changes the thing itself. In that vein, I saw a Twitter fight last night (that apparently continued into today) over 2+2=4.
Yes, you read that right.
No, I’m not joking.
It went something like this.
Andrew Sulllivan, about whom I have very mixed feelings, discusses on his new website ‘The Weekly Dish’ the book ‘Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody’ by Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay. It is worth reading.
Regarding literary interpretation or interpretation of any of the arts being inherently subjective, I don’t think it is so simple – despite the pernicious influence of Freudianism and much post-modern literary theory, whose self-regarding fiddlings I rapidly grew fed up with. I have written for a number of literary journals over years, and have always grounded interpretation in the evidence provided by the text, not considered in some sort of aesthetic isolation, but in the context of its times and the life of its creator, and have always admired scholars and critics who proceed in the same way.
‘While it is certainly conceivable that gender dysphoria might have an underlying neurological etiology in some cases, I’m not sure what conclusion you’d like to draw from that.’ (Nullius in Verba #26)
I think that the conclusion I should draw from that, is that if (as I suspect there must be – for minds are not something that exist apart from what physically makes them up) some ‘underlying neurological etiology’, then some kind of correction of this aetiology might be possible that would save people who have this aetiology from a great deal of pain and suffering.
I preordered it. :) Also ordered some books Ophelia recommended, like Higher Superstition.
Oh, make no mistake: I prefer your methodology. It bothers me to no end when people don’t take things like authorial intent and general plausibility into account. Perhaps I should have been clearer.
To say that a set of facts should contribute to one’s interpretation is to make a normative judgement. Justifying a normative claim by reference to descriptive ones presupposes another normative claim. We can say that the creative context is such-and-so, but the question is why ought that matter? Suppose we answer that it gives insight into the intended meaning and cultural significance. But why ought those matter? At some point the Q-and-A ends with a bare assertion that we ought value a thing, and we run straight into the is-ought/fact-value problem. What set of normative presuppositions each of us carries around is subjective; i.e., it is free to differ from person to person.
Ah, yes. That would no doubt be a good thing. There is a non-zero number of trans people I’ve heard say that if there had been a pill to eliminate the dysphoria, they would have opted for that over transition in a heartbeat.
But the point about normative values would also surely apply to science in the end? And surely we should end, were we to pursue the same sort of inquiry into why we value science or why we value scientific method, in the same sort of aporia? ‘Interpretation’ is, I know, a very thorny and complicated issue, and, since I am married to a professional pianist and act and direct myself, it is something that has exercised us both over the years, but I nevertheless think that it can be demonstrated in the case of two different interpretations of a particular work (Ernest Jones, the Freudian, on ‘Hamlet’, say, compared with the account given in Granville Barker’s Preface to the play) that one (GB’s) does more justice to the play than the other does, or that Kosintsev’s great film of ‘Hamlet’ does far greater justice to the work than does Olivier’s film of it, or, for that matter, Peter Brook’s chamber version of it with the very good Adrian Lester in the title role (an old essay of mine on the deficiencies of Brook’s approach has just appeared in a book of essays from an American academic press) .
Yes, it most certainly applies to whether and why we ought value science and the scientific method. Even the topics we choose to investigate are a normative matter. “We ought study X,” is a normative claim. If we attempt to justify it by reference to descriptive claims, such as “water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen”, then we have to further ask why we ought care about increased cognitive function. And so on ad nauseam. Epistemology, therefore, has been said to be partly normative. We should believe certain classes of things, because [reasons].
The thing to note is that what justifies normative propositions is other normative propositions, and descriptive other descriptive. Scientific claims themselves are descriptive. A descriptive proposition, such as “water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen”, can be justified by another descriptive proposition. What we cannot do is use normative propositions to justify descriptive ones. That would look like, “I am a woman, because I deserve to be a woman.”
In the case of interpretation, one can certainly demonstrate that one interpretation of a work is superior to another. That demonstration necessarily supervenes on other evaluative propositions, and to the extent that it refers to descriptive facts, those evaluative presuppositions tell us why the descriptive facts matter. We might say that one interpretation is truer to the author’s intent. We might say that a particular interpretation is not something a reasonable man would accept. And so forth and so on. Whatever descriptive facts we try to marshal in service of the
Obviously, the Mel Gibson Hamlet is the best version.
That’s a joke, by the way.
Whoops, that bit in the first paragraph is supposed to read as such:
Sorry to keep banging on, but it seems to me there is an assumption that if we can’t make everything Cartesian clear (though even he didn’t manage it), then everything somehow becomes ‘subjective’, which all too often has the implication of ‘arbitrary’ – the charge commonly thrown at the arts by supporters of science. But the points a great critic like William Empson makes in ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ are far from being arbitrary, and they are illuminating. And arguments over the nature of science and scientific theories, what constitutes knowledge, etc and truth persist among philosophers. Alex Rosenberg espouses, apparently, the belief that ‘the natural sciences are the only sources of knowledge, justification, rational belief, or the like’ (a view that derives ultimately from Plato’s distinction between knowledge and opinion), others, including Jerry Cohn, take the very slightly broader view that it is ‘the sciences’ and not ‘the natural sciences’ that are the only sources…’ Neither seem very helpful views, since it is largely a matter of defining knowledge in a very narrow way that denies that the practical knowledge we use in our daily lives, the knowledge a musician has of harmony, etc , the knowledge that a scholar like Wittkower had of the Renaissance arts, or the knowledge one has of one’s own language or might have of another language are really knowledge, and would, for example, make nonsense of Franz de Waal’s observation that chimpanzees know that they are stronger than human beings. Yes, when we come to the humanities and the arts, things are vaguer, more fuzzy, and in some ways more difficult to pin down, but why shouldn’t they be? The arts do preclude the kind of final judgement that scientists aspire to, but that does not mean that all aesthetic and critical judgements are worthless.
Ah, your response came while I was writing the last comment. Thank you. Perhaps part of the first part of that final sentence should read ‘the kind of final judgement that scientists aspire to but can never quite reach’.
Nullius in Verba #27
That is indeed one of my hobby horses. It’s remarkable how many of the silliest arguments ever made ultimately rest on the idea that using the same words/labels/signs/symbols etc. amount to talking about the same things/concepts/ideas etc. As Daniel Dennett put it in a different context, it’s just a “bad pun”. Indeed, if you know enough to detect a pun when you hear it, you know pretty much everything you need to know to expose all of sophisticated theology and all of gender ideology.
I looked up the mentioned essay (The Grand Academy of Theory) and while quite a bit went over my head* I thought this paragraph was apposite. (Transcribed as Google Books seem to try to block copy/paste – assume typos are mine.)
*Is it possible to get a good grounding in this stuff to avoid this kind of effect without spending 2-3 years or the equivalent of a postgrad degree doing all the background reading? I suppose I should be wary of thinking I understand what that paragraph is saying if I didn’t understand some of the preceding material…
Banichi – YES. That’s my favorite passage, so much so that I was planning to quote it in a post.
Jesus fucking Christ, as I (slowly) read the rest of the essay I’m having to resist the urge to quote every other sentence. (mild hyperbole)
I know. Mine is littered with tick marks in the margin.
Fred has been a fan and friend of B&W since it started, by the way.
I am a great admirer of Frederick Crews, too.
Old topic, but: I started reading “Cynical Theories” recently, and I’m finding it illuminating. Thanks for the suggestion.