My girlfriend is aspy she really opened my mind to advanced logic thinking that allowed me to throw out cultural bias that form views on all subject matter,its how i am able to see all the sexism in our culture that most people simply take for granted as how things are.

This subject matter is one that many older DU members have a hard time with and some will respond with harsh words and dismiss it out right so thank you for being brave enough to venture forth.

my son has a "fuzzy" brain. i never got him tested, didnt want to. no excuses. embrace it. and find tools that will help. it works for him, lol. but, i get what you are saying. special. he is certainly special. unique, for sure. and what an experience he has shared with me over the years.

would sit still for a second and think undistractedly about the ways in which society has "othered" them, I do not believe that any kind of ism...sexism, racism, etc...would continue to persist.

But society does not allow men or women the time to reflect on matters like these. It's a perfectly vicious little cycle. Force men to think of themselves in a certain way. Depower women. Create a normal and expect conformity. And offer no time to consider alternative ways of organizing and discharging our power as individuals. Exhaustion trumps revolution every time. When people wonder why feminism seemed to stall out after the ERA failure in the 80s (and I emphasize "seemed" feminism is still out there, even if modern mediaculture doesn't acknowledge it) I usually point to the fact that it's hard to maintain this kind of high profile fight when we're all so exhausted...


BTW, I am sure your son has great and interesting potential. And his mother seems passionate and clearsighted. There is no better start for any kid.

Issues. I seem to remember one of the was devoted to critiques of Iriagary, but maybe it was someone else. I'll have to look. I kind of like her, but what's fun about philosophy is the honest debate. I'm impressed you've read her, cause she's hard to read.

I have one essay I reread every so often, written by Native American women with a doctorate in philosophy degree, who rejects the title of feminism, because in her opinion, her entire culture was stolen away, women and men alike, and while modern Native American males might take on the damage and privilege of patriarchy, it's an imposed social construct that causes even more cultural damage and was nothing they asked for. (She puts it much more eloquently than that)She doesn't want to create a binary in Native cultures that have lost so much.

My point is there's a numbers of ways to look at oppression and objectification. But it does start with otherness. As far as we can tell women were the first other. How and when that happened its hard to say, or rather, it can be traced, but is is complicated, as cultures lived and died, were conquered or subsumed, women became less than human. And from that, it became common to dehumanize others, whether from religion, or race or culture. (Margret Mead notwithstanding, Anthropology is one area that completely male-centric, but good work has been done tracing women's history in the last couple of decades)

As the disgusting idiots who called you 'it' tried to take away your essential humanity.

A very thoughtful post, and since I adore your thinking now almost as much as I adore your user name, I hope to hear more from you.

I'd read a lot of Derrida so I figured I could handle her work. But whereas I thought that Derrida was being clever with his writing style I felt that Irigaray takes this lack of clarity to an extreme I cannot get past. I understand that she regards "clarity" of writing as a symptom of a derridean phallogocentrism...but I really have enough trouble understanding people without an extra (even if well intentioned) layer of obfuscation bolted onto the text.

Just a class or so. So when for a while I was really into reading feminist philosophy, I had the basic jargon down, and I'd take on difficult essays, read them paragraph by paragraph just so I could understand. I agree, the language of philosophy can be very elegant, but it sometimes seems as though the goal is to get as many words crunched into a paragraph as you can get. It makes it difficult. What's fun is to read critiques, though, sometime I understand better though a critique than the original essay or book.

(On a non-feminist note, someone on DU mentioned 'Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, so I thought I should 're-read' that. Now I'm convinced I never read it at all, and just thought I did. Like difficult, but elegant philosophy, it takes effort, and its a journey of the mind)

You might enjoy the book An Unnatural Order. Mason discusses the idea of 'otherness' quite a bit.

This is a case where spelling matters. For anyone like me who knew nothing about Irigaray, the literal-minded computers will cooperate better if you get her name right. Her Wikipedia bio is at Luce Irigaray.

That when thumb typing into a smartphone continental philosophers sometimes come up on the short end of the spelling stick.