Normalizing belief in anti-scientific bullshit
Sometimes an unpopular opinion is unpopular because it’s kack. This one for instance:
Unpopular opinion: hating on astrology is masculine distaste for female-coded interest in emotions and psychology which feeds misogyny that denies women access to scientific spaces
Say what? If you’re interested in emotions and psychology talk about them. What’s astrology got to do with it? Also astrology is pre-scientific handwaving. Also defending astrology seems like a pretty inept way to give women access to “scientific spaces”…whatever those are.
The tweets @karenmcgrane was replying to:
Unpopular opinion: your just-for-fun flirtation with astrology apps is normalizing belief in anti-scientific bullshit that undermines important, life-and-death public health and policy debates.
I used to work at a company that sold daily horoscopes as a service, delivered by text message. The underlying system was a text file containing 100 lines of general advice. Every day it would join together 3 at random for each horoscope and send them out. It was very profitable.
A very profitable scam. I don’t think criticism of that scam is masculine distaste for female-coded interest in emotions and psychology.
Uh oh, another area that demonstrates I am really male – and my husband female. He pretends he is only kidding, but he definitely has a fondness for astrology (and other pseudoscientific whack).
Astrology is not female-coded anything, it’s garbage.
This is unfortunately nothing new. In my initial search for a coherent explication of gender identity, I came a across a journal article seriously questioning–from a feminist perspective–whether a feminist can teach logic. Science per se is inherently sexist or something, and it’s only that sexism that suppresses female ways of knowing.
And I feel silly just typing that.
A lot of pseudoscience seems to be framed around the belief that women are “empowered” through the acceptance and practice of occult or “natural” forms of ancient wisdom. Nurses went through ( and may still be going through) a phase where they endorsed Therapeutic Touch (which involves no touching) and other forms of Energy Medicine. It gave them an area of expertise and capability which set them up besides physicians as co-equal practitioners. My own friends extol the “healing” properties of homeopathy and pretty much any other alternative garbage that pushes their soft squishy buttons.
It’s not just science and logic which are supposed to be masculine; so is argument and dispute. In fact, that looks to me like one of the main attractions to feminine-slanted pseudoscience: there’s no testing, no right, no wrong. If it works for you, then that is your experience which no one else can or should take from you. Fair skepticism is treated like bullying… or maybe a form of violence. They know, what they know.
Reminds me of something else, come to think of it.
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book in which she expounded that view – alternative medicine is feminine and works; clinical medicine is masculine, oppresses women, and has no real validation of the results.
Why, oh why, oh why do feminists have to push this garbage? Instead of saying, we women do things differently, and let’s not impose science on us, why not say “We can do science, too, and keep trying to keep us out of the fun stuff?” That’s what I did, it worked (not perfectly – I would love to be more research oriented, and people still talk to me like I’m a learning disabled child), and there are women all over the world showing that we CAN do logic, we CAN do argument, we CAN do math and statistics, and we CAN do science. Now if other women would just stop trying to undermine us.
@Sastra: Yep, it all seems suspiciously interconnected when you look at it in a certain light.
@iknklast: (My phone has started suggesting your username, I’ve typed it so much.) I hadn’t really thought about it, but it does appear to have a sexist core. Science isn’t for women, since they have a different way of knowing. As a woman, you shouldn’t pursue those masculine disciplines, just the feminine, emotional ones over here. Did we mention there’s a loveseat and smelling salts if you should faint from overexerting your ladybrain?
It’s like they take the wrong lesson from the fact that horoscopes used to feature in the Ladies sections of newspapers. They think it’s because astrology is intrinsically feminine and being ignored, rather than a bit of faff to occupy the womenfolk while the men did grown up stuff.
Science is included in philosophy, and is the product of reason, and that alone. Not fashion, fancy or what is trendy in the passing parade. Those who say that science is male, and male only, do not create a problem for reason; merely one of landfill.
Before home computers you had to be a competent mathematician to cast a horoscope. I would have thought that would rule it out for the stereotypical female.
iknklast @ 4 – Barbara Ehrenreich? Are you sure? It doesn’t sound like her at all – not the Barbara Ehrenreich who wrote Brightsided. Could you be crossing her with someone else?
This “woo is for women and women are for woo” thing – this is where I came in, so to speak. It’s one of the items Jeremy and I had in mind when we started B&W. I’d read a fair bit about it and been shocked and annoyed. There’s a section on it in “In Focus” in case you ever wander around the rest of B&W. First one I did, October 2002.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2002/difference-feminism/
Yeah, I did a double take at the Ehrenreich mention. I assume it’s a reference to this book she co-wrote in 1973? Hard to tell from the blurbs whether she was really endorsing alternative medicine over science even then, or just noting that historically, sexism played a role in what practices medical science would study and approve.
Her more recent writings, such as this book and the Brightsided one that Opehlia mentioned suggest to me that if she ever really did believe in “women’s medicine” in the woo-woo sense, she’s changed her views.
Unfortunately, yes, that Barbara Ehrenreich. In two different books I’ve read, one called “For Her Own Good”, in which there are a lot of good and interesting things based on what people have told women, but also a paean to “natural” medicine as woman centered, and clinical medicine as a conspiracy against women. Then, in a recent book, “Natural Causes”, she definitely talks about the fact that we should be promoting more alternative medicine because it works.
I loved “Brightsided”. I had hoped for better from these books.
Huh. Damn. That’s disconcerting.
Re Ehrenreich’s Natural Causes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/books/review-natural-causes-barbara-ehrenreich.html
I haven’t read it, iknklast, but that doesn’t sound like Ehrenreich promoting altmed.
As for For Her Own Good–it’s been over twenty years since I read it, but I recall it as focusing on the history of misogyny and androcentrism in medicine, not as being anti-science or pro-woo. Ehrenreich herself has a Ph.D in cellular immunology (per Wiki–I knew she was trained in a biological discipline).
Are you sure you haven’t been misled? I’ve never known BE to promote bullshit.
Lady M, I did read it. And in both books, she does suggest that alternative medicine is a better option. In Natural Causes, she pretty much says it. I had read the book because I didn’t expect that, either. I was very disappointed.
Oof, just another edition of science being too logical, too hard nosed and obsessed with data and mathematics to be a womanly thing. Peddling woo to women as empowerment is just another side to misogyny, and the end result is indistinguishable from the more naked variety; in either case, women end up de-educated in science and so made incompatible with a career in it.
I mean, yes, astrology is “female-coded” in the same way that libertarianism is “male-coded,” but that’s not a point in defense of astrology or libertarianism, it’s an indictment of how patriarchal gender roles warp intellectual development in different ways for women and men, leading them to embrace different kinds of utter bullshit.
What would the children of astrology and libertarianism be like?
(Probably like the “kill the TERFs” crowd.)