...continued

Some of the biggest problems with feminist studies from an epistemological standpoint were not things that feminists said, but what they didn't say. Feminist professors and writing just start throwing around all these terms like "patriarchy," "male privilege", "oppression", "power", "dominance", and "sexism." Yet the conceptualization of these terms was never explained or defended. I view them as a castle built on sand.

Nowadays, you can find some 101 explanations of feminism, such as Finally Feminism 101, but I wonder if anyone else finds the quality of reasoning to be pretty bad. For example, try to figure out why there is no such thing as "female privilege":

Since the concept of privilege inherent in the term “male privilege” expresses a hierarchy (ie. an in-group/out-group dynamic), the placement of men in the in-group (because of the power that their class holds) necessitates placing women and other non-men in an out-group (because of the lack of power). Thus, “female privilege” doesn’t work as a counterpart to “male privilege” because it doesn’t fit into that dynamic.

This argument assumes that there is a linear hierarchy of men over women. This is a persistent claim of feminism. While it is plausible that the people at the top of the hierarchy of a certain type of status are disproportionately male, this doesn't mean that males in general are ranked higher than females in general; there could be more men at the bottom, also: a greater variance of advantage in men.

This argument assumes a metric by which we can discover a hierarchy of men over women, but the metric is unspecified. Another assumption is that hierarchy is unidimensional. To me, it seems plausible that males are advantaged over females on some dimensions of power, while females are advantaged over males on other dimensions of power; who is on top of this hierarchy depends on what dimension we are looking at, or on some way of aggregating measurements on different dimensions. A multi-dimensional model of power is unexplored by feminists, who simply assume that the dimensions of power and status that women rank lower on are the only dimensions that exist or matter. From this biased assumption, feminists declared a hierarchy of men "as a class" (whatever that means) over women "as a class," self-servingly defined "institutional privilege" as only held by the class at the top of the hierarchy, and denied that women have gender privilege.

As far as I can tell, most of feminist theory isn't about rational arguments, it is a morass of biased and self-serving reasoning. Feminist theory is highly foundationalist with its dependence on ubiquitous terms like "male privilege" and "patriarchy" that are loaded with unexplained and unexamined assumptions. If you believe in gender equality, but you don't believe in the concept of patriarchy, and you think female privilege and male oppression exist, then you can still be a feminist, right? Not in the feminist blogosphere or academia you can't, at least not if you argue for these opinions at length. Ironically, many "real life" feminists who haven't been inducted into the higher forms of feminist dogma on the internet and in academia probably believe at least the last two things, because they have not yet been taught to subordinate their sense of fairness and empathy (being open to the idea that the other gender has disadvantages, too, not just advantages) to the convoluted sorts of reasoning that I criticize above.

There are forms of feminist thought that are better than others. Some feminist philosophers, such as Helen Longino, do have insightful ideas and seem epistemically responsible (even though I don't always agree with them). Many feminists are empathetic and interested in learning about men's experiences with gender in ways the broader culture is not, which I view as the human capacity for empathy rising above the limiting conceptual framework of ideological feminist thought (the typical response of blogosphere feminists to male experiences of oppression is "patriarchy hurts men, too" used as a dismissal). For an example of what feminist theory could be (but unfortunately isn't most of the time), see this discussion of a feminist paper that I like.

So magfrump, I do agree that there is potential for learning stuff about applied rationality from feminism. It's kind of a needle in a haystack, but if you've found the needle, I would love to see it, and I look forward to your post on the subject. As I've written, I like a look of the analytical tools developed by feminists, and I wish feminists would use them more often, and in an unbiased and consistent way.

Don't take my word for any of this. Read Finally Feminism 101. Read feminist blogs. Participate on feminist blogs, call out ideas that seem fishy to you (general you), and see what kind of response you get. Read The Gender Knot. Take some feminist studies courses. Then get back to me.