What do we call mandatory sex?
This clip is an oldy, but it’s still interesting.
Yes.
Michael Ann Devito is an Assistant Professor in Khoury College of Computer Sciences, with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication Studies. She works in the areas of AI & Social Justice and Extraordinary HCI. Dr. Michael Ann DeVito (she/her) is a qualitative, interdisciplinary researcher and designer. She studies how users and communities understand and adapt to the challenges of AI and machine learning-driven sociotechnical environments…
Michael Ann most often acts as a member-researcher, employing her own positionality as a neurodivergent, transgender lesbian as a key tool in her grounded theory-based approach.
Such as sharing clips of himself warbling that if you don’t “date” trans folks you’re a transphobe.
Positionality? Is that a word? Really? Miy dictionary says no, but maybe it’s not really into such positionalitorious excesses of language.
I now let y’all return to the discussion of rape, if that is what the post title suggests.
Oh that’s what the hipster academics do, make new words by adding “ality” to the end. It’s “Theory” you see; all the best people buy it.
(From The Counterweight Handbook by Helen Pluckrose)
On the same note:
(In other words, when it says that ” Michael Ann most often acts as a member-researcher, employing her own positionality as a neurodivergent, transgender lesbian as a key tool in her grounded theory-based approach”, it means he gets to tell the rest of us what to think, and we’re not qualified to do anything but agree. Ok, I’ll stop.)
Bjarte: Thanks for your explanation, and for adding yet another possible addition to my already crushing tsundoku. I might prefer to stick with Ophelia’s shorter explanation, all the same.
Helen Pluckrose’s books are excellent. Thank you Bjarte!
I agree. As I keep saying, I don’t think it’s possible to truly understand how we ended up in this mess without a basic understanding of the larger world of ideas from which gender ideology arose, and nobody I am aware of has done a better job at providing such an understanding than Pluckrose. I still think she seriously underestimates the degree to which sexism and misogyny remain a serious problem in the Western world*, and I wish she would drop the ”LGBT…” language, but apart from that most of her arguments strike me as spot on. Although she doesn’t peronally identify as ”gender critical”, she has been very clear that being gender critical is a legitimate position that a person is entitled to hold and express without censored, disciplined, or fired, that biological sex is real and that it sometimes matters, that it’s perfectly valid to think you don’t have a ”gender identity” etc.
It’s probably a mistake to judge Pluckrose’s views by association with James Lindsay (just like it would be a mistake to judge Ophelia’s views by association with Jeremy Stangroom). Indeed, I seem to remember Pluckrose mentioning in some interview that she and Lindsay did have some major differences. Even Lindsay isn’t wrong about everything but that’s about as charitable as I’m able to be.
* Depending on one’s definition it might be legitimate to reject the idea that we’re literally living in a ”patriarchy”.