As the world suffers through another "Diana moment" (and I think the analogy is apt, though not in the manner intended by those who have suggested it), Germaine Greer, writing in the Guardian, brings some perspective to the death of animal clown Steve Irwin:

What Irwin never seemed to understand was that animals need space. The one lesson any conservationist must labour to drive home is that habitat loss is the principal cause of species loss. There was no habitat, no matter how fragile or finely balanced, that Irwin hesitated to barge into, trumpeting his wonder and amazement to the skies. There was not an animal he was not prepared to manhandle. Every creature he brandished at the camera was in distress. Every snake badgered by Irwin was at a huge disadvantage, with only a single possible reaction to its terrifying situation, which was to strike. Easy enough to avoid, if you know what’s coming. Even my cat knew that much. Those of us who live with snakes, as I do with no fewer than 12 front-fanged venomous snake species in my bit of Queensland rainforest, know that they will get out of our way if we leave them a choice. Some snakes are described as aggressive, but, if you’re a snake, unprovoked aggression doesn’t make sense. Snakes on a plane only want to get off. But Irwin was an entertainer, a 21st-century version of a lion-tamer, with crocodiles instead of lions.

In 2004, Irwin was accused of illegally encroaching on the space of penguins, seals and humpback whales in Antarctica, where he was filming a documentary called Ice Breaker. An investigation by the Australian Environmental Department resulted in no action being taken, which is not surprising seeing that John Howard, the prime minister, made sure that Irwin was one of the guests invited to a "gala barbecue" for George Bush a few months before. Howard is now Irwin’s chief mourner, which is only fair, seeing that Irwin announced that Howard is the greatest leader the world has ever seen.

The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin, but probably not before a whole generation of kids in shorts seven sizes too small has learned to shout in the ears of animals with hearing 10 times more acute than theirs, determined to become millionaire animal-loving zoo-owners in their turn.

The response to Greer has been shrill, as can be expected, and rational… or rather not, falling back to the same old criticisms about her being a "man-hater" (comment on digg), "feminist bitch" (Tailrank), a has-been, etc. Really incisive stuff!

Hmm! What could be the reason for this manner of response? At The Age, Tracee Hutchison takes a guess:

If Steve Irwin’s story was a celebration of the boy who wouldn’t grow up, then Greer’s is a modern equivalent to the witch-hunts of Salem.

The outpouring of grief at Irwin’s death has been matched only by the outpouring of vitriol poured on Greer. It has been astounding. Men, mostly, have lined her up and taken aim with the kind of venom you would associate with the kind of snake Irwin was most fond of handling.

And the message has been heard loud and clear; if you’re a woman of a certain age in this country - and a childless one at that - don’t you dare step out of the shadows and shout out that the emperor might not be wearing any clothes. You will be shouted down and marginalised and your situation will be thrown back at you as a weapon.

[…]

Very little of the anti-intellectual hot air blown about this week has been about what Germaine Greer may or may not have thought about Steve Irwin. It had everything to do with a dominant male power-base telling women to be seen and not heard. Of marginalising a particular kind of woman and reducing us to condition and circumstance. Of reminding those of us who like to speak our mind to watch our step, to remember our place and to shut up and agree with the menfolk. We are all a lot poorer for the unsightly fallout.

Men behaving badly defending other men behaving badly? Nah! Seems impossible!

Von Hoffman gives it to Larry Summers, in the New York Observer. I quote the juicy bit, but read the rest at the link for a pretty decent analysis of Summers' nonsense:

NYU Stern: NYO: Beyond the Gender Issue, What’s the Deal at Harvard?

[…]

So does this pointless blather make Larry Summers an idiot? No, it makes him an economist, which is not quite the same thing. Mr. Summers, of course, has won himself a reputation as a barbarian—that is, one who is both ignorant of and incapable of enjoying what the humanities have to offer—but he is a smart barbarian, and a thoughtful one. Although a lot of people are furious with him, we are not looking at a bad man, only a wild man, backed to the hilt by powerful interests—a man who should be listened to, if only for our own self-protection.

[…]

Below is an excerpt from an AlterNet post on the issue of porn (and stripping, etc), its impact on women and feminist response to it:

Raunch Culture

By
Leanne Shear

[…]

Part of the reason why we took the class in the first place is because my girlfriends and I tend to consider ourselves pretty adventurous and free-spirited. A few months back we started regularly going to (female) strip clubs and getting the occasional lap dance, while the mostly male clientele licked their chops. However, suddenly two things made all of that a lot less alluring for me — and one of them wasn’t that every time I tried to swing around the pole, I got dizzy and my sweaty hands caused me to land in a heap on the floor.

First, taking the strip class put me square in the stripper’s shoes (heels), right there on the stage, under the flashing lights. Second, and more importantly, reading Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy gave insight into the mind of the stripper, and the overall rampant pornification of our culture at large.

Levy writes about the proliferation of “raunch culture,” which, regardless of my self-proclaimed staunch feminism (women can make any choices they want!), I have been unwittingly engendering by doing things like going to strip clubs. Levy says in raunch culture, it’s the norm that “all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual … and the only sign of sexuality we seem to be able to recognize is a direct allusion to red-light entertainment.”

All during strip class, Daphne kept repeating the mantra ad nauseum: everything we were learning was for “[our] man.” To me, empowerment signifies control — and the man-centric philosophy strip class (not to mention the whole stripping industry) seemed to espouse flew in the face of female control, either in society or just swinging around the pole.

Empowerment in my view is also about equality — and if all things were equal, would women necessarily want to be stripping for the greasy dollar bills that men throw at them with the same hand that wears their wedding bands? If my experience is any indication, I don’t think so. Proponents of “female liberation” might argue that some women are really comfortable with their bodies and like what they do with that pole, but as Ariel Levy says so perceptively, “because I am paid to is not the same thing as taking control of my sexuality.” Liberation implies we have broken the chains that have bound us to our status as sexual inferiors, and as Daphne’s sultry intonations suggested, that’s definitely not the case.

Ms. Levy continues, “The vast majority of women who enter the [stripping] field do so because they are poor and have no more attractive alternative” — and they stay poor. It really unsettled me to discover that I, as a “feminist,” would exploit one woman’s lack of power in the name of my own empowerment. This sort of hypocritical “empowerment for sale” mentality strikes me as another layer of conspiracy in the race to keep women down, and indicative of the fundamentally economic nature of the inequality of the sexes.

If we were smart and really empowered, we women would use our economic power to take sex out of the equation. Similarly, Female Chauvinist Pigs quotes Erica Jong as saying “sex is not power — women in decision-making positions — that’s power. When the senate is 50 percent women, that’s power. Sexual freedom is a smokescreen for how far we haven’t come.”

In a perfect world, I’d love to be able to be judged for something other than my physical appearance, and for something other than just my sex. Strip class taught me though that at least for the moment and to the detriment of all women, even the rare few who actually hold truly powerful positions, achievement for us is tied to sex.

[…]

Guardian gives its 2c on feminist blogging: 

The third wave - at a computer near you

Comparative levels of computer literacy and interest mean that younger women do dominate. As Valenti says, "There's always been this sense among second-wave feminists that young women just aren't interested. That's never been true though: they just didn't know how to reach us."

There has also typically been a suspicion that if younger women are interested in feminism it's of a specific variety: what's sometimes called "girlie" feminism. The mainstream media tends to highlight young feminists whose outlook is "sexy". Those, for instance, who frame pole dancing as a feminist act.

Go online, though, and you are immediately struck by the huge variety of outlook and opinions. This is most evident at the twice-monthly Carnival of Feminists, set up by British blogger Natalie Bennett, who also runs Philobiblion, a women's history blog. Each carnival (usually on the first and third Wednesday of the month) is hosted by a different blogger, who invites people to contribute articles on current events or a general theme: "radical feminism", for instance, or "1970s feminism and what it means today". The host then chooses the best pieces, putting links to between 50 to 100 articles up on their site and providing a short commentary on each. This effectively creates a major new anthology of feminist thought every two weeks.

People are always saying the feminist movement is dead, but I've never believed that," says Rebecca Traister, a feature writer for Salon.com, and one of the founders of Salon's own women's blog, Broadsheet, which launched last year. "What I think is that it's taking a modern, technological form, and that, from now on, feminism will be about a multiplicity of voices, growing louder and louder online."

But is it all just sound and fury? The blogs reflect second-wave ideas of consciousness raising and the personal as political (many women write about their experiences of rape and sexual assault), but there's a question mark over how this feeds into grass-roots activism.

Nina Wakeford, a sociologist at the University of Surrey, is cautious about blogging's influence. "I think the way blogs can provoke debate is useful," she concedes, "but it isn't clear how much they feed into activism. In the past, there was a clear role for women's organisations as regards representations to government, but I'm not sure whether women can affect public policy through blogging. Just who are they representing?"

This last question is interesting. As with second-wave feminism, this online movement is open to the accusation that it simply represents privileged white women. "Blogging is still somewhat limited, of course," says Georgia Gaden, a postgraduate researcher who has studied feminist blogs, "because although we take our access for granted, many women, globally, don't have that luxury."

That said, these blogs do redress the balance by highlighting global stories. And the Carnival of Feminists is trying to reach as many women as possible, with the most recent carnival held on the Indian blog, Indianwriting. "That was our fourth continent," says Bennett, "and I'm looking for an African blogger, so that we can reach our fifth."

In an NYT Op-Ed piece, Matthew Pearl talks about the recent Larry Summers eviction at Harvard and ties it to larger historical developments. He starts out normally enough:

How the Liberal Arts Got That Way - New York Times
By MATTHEW PEARL

BEFORE Lawrence Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard on Tuesday, the last upheaval of equal magnitude at the university was 140 years ago. That older drama was perhaps the most consequential episode in the history of American higher education; one that not only created the institution where a Larry Summers could flourish as a graduate student and professor, but oddly also laid the seeds of his presidential breakdown.

Except there is already a hint of the paradox that is about to be manufactured. And that hint is in the insertion of the word ‘oddly’. Which permits Pearl to (after outlining the emancipating liberalism of Harvard’s history) go on to:

In a long-gestating paradox, however, the very changes that freed Eliot to renovate Harvard with a more independent and egalitarian framework also did in Larry Summers by leaving Harvard presidents without an identifiable constituency or a body to which, in the end, he may be said to answer. The president could no longer concentrate on pleasing the finite body of individuals who approved and could censure him. From Eliot’s term onward, each president had to be acutely aware of negotiating between competing and in many cases incompatible demands from the various factions — the administrative governing boards, the faculty, the students, the alumni, the donors and those holding the federal purse strings.

What are the changes Pearl is alluding to (that freed Eliot)? He lists a whole lot in the passages leading up to this one. Student resistance is one. Advances in the sciences is another. Yet another is a law shaking up the Board of Overseers. Let us assume it is all of the above changes that “freed” Eliot, as president, to “usher in large-scale reforms”. Now these same changes, Pearl seems to claim, led to Summers being answerable to all and hence not in possession of the freedom for large-scale reform that Eliot enjoyed. This, I guess, is the paradox.

Except it rests on the question of what the changes were and whether they provided freedom for Eliot to perform arbitrary large-scale reform, or more reasonably, gave him the backing to carry out meaningful reforms? In other words, the “tide of liberalism” empowered Eliot to carry out the very changes that the liberalism rightfully demanded. The case of Summers is quite the opposite, for he was not attempting to create a “renaissance of the liberal arts” but to shout them down into a submissive role (to himself and to his pet notions). His actions were to push back against the “tide of liberalism” and towards more traditional notions, and it is no paradox that he was done in by his regressive actions, which were repulsed by the progressive changes that empowered Eliot.

The laments of the various reductionists in Biology (EP, Sociobiology, Cognitivei science, etc) by appeal to the injustice of suppression of radical new ideas by the establishment is a parody of real anti-establishment ideas that faced persecution. Not only are these ideas anything but radical (one does not need to look as high as Harvard presidents to find negative speculation on the abilities of women), they are no different (in their reasoning) from the twisted usage of the Bush crowd of notions such as whistle-blowing (which they use to defend their man Libby’s leaking of a CIA operative) or supporting the troops.

Pearl reveals his own axe shortly thereafter, in the article:

The Harvard experience had long ago been liberated from politics in its most concrete attachment — that tie to the Massachusetts Legislature — but it has been politicized in a different way, subjected to the realm of public politics and opinion.

Aha! Public politics and opinion we learn is what did old Larry in. Not surprisingly, Pearl seems to employ the same twist of logic I outlined above, for the truth is that Larry’s politics and opinion is what did him in.

Over at K’s blog, she writes:

Bitch responds: Is Cultural Feminism Pomo Feminism?
But, anyway, I’d say that, no, cultural feminism is rather different from postmodern thought. And I will warn you: While I wouldn’t say I’m a postmodernist, I certainly didn’t spend my time studying it and in fact mostly wrote criticisms of it, I do have a big problem when I read dismissive crits of their work.

Since I posted recently about the Sokal prank and the uncharitable (and inconclusive) attack it represents, the above jogged my memory of an interesting paper by Gabriel Stolzenberg, a mathematician at BU, in response to the attacks on postmodernism by various physicists and philosophers (Sokal, Weinberg, Nagel, to name a few). The paper is Reading and Relativism (PDF) and is a wonderful read and includes this section, a quotation from Luce Irigaray by Thomal Nagel, which Nagel then goes on to criticize:

Is E = Mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary tous. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes thefastest….”

Stolzenberger comments on Nagel’s response:

This may send Nagel into convulsions but how does he know that it is her problem not his? How can he possibly know unless he knows what Irigaray means by “sexed” and “privileges” and that her reference to speeds is not an ironic metaphor? If he does not know these things, he is kidding himself. But if he does know, why does he not tell us, so we can join in the fun of mocking Irigaray? Instead of fulfilling his obligation as a philosopher to give us a reason to believe what he says, Nagel encourages us to trust that whatever Irigaray means is refuted by the authors’ “comically patient” observation,

Whatever one may think about the “other speeds that are vitally necessary to us,” the fact remains that the relationship E = Mc2 between energy (E) and mass (M) isexperimentally verified to a high degree of precision, and it would obviously not be valid if the speed of light (c) were replaced by another speed.

This shows especially poor judgement. If Sokal and Bricmont think that something privileged can easily be replaced, there is little reason to suppose that they have any idea of what Irigaray is talking about. And by mocking her instead of giving us an argument, Nagel makes it appear that neither does he.

As Stolzenberger points out elsewhere, a kinder reading of the text might produce other interpretations which make a lot more sense than the narrow sense in which Nagel uses it.

I am reminded of Heidegger’s famous “science does not think” essay. One reading of Irigaray’s text may yield a point similar to the one Heidegger makes.