Carbon fibre as a prosthetic form of masculinity
Lots of people are passing this around, and I think the original spark for the passing around may have been Dawkins, but all the same, I’m going to pass it around too, because it is just that whatever it is.
Carbon Fibre Masculinity: Abstract.
This article examines material economies of carbon fibre as a prosthetic form of masculinity. The paper advances three main arguments. Firstly, carbon fibre can be a site in which disability is overcome, an act of overcoming that is affected through masculinized technology. Secondly, carbon fibre can be a homosocial surface; that is, carbon fibre becomes both a surface extension of the self and a third-party mediator in homosocial relationships, a surface that facilitates intimacy between men in ways that devalue femininity in both male and female bodies. Carbon fibre surfaces are material extensions of subjectivity, and carbon fibre surfaces are vectors of the cultural economies of masculine competition. Thirdly, the article gives an account of Oscar Pistorius as an example of the masculinization of carbon fibre, and the associated binding of a psychic attitude of misogyny and power to a form of violent and competitive masculine subjectivity. The paper unpacks the affects, economies and surfaces of “carbon fibre masculinity” and discusses Pistorius’ use of carbon fibre, homosociality and misogyny as forms of protest masculinity through which he unconsciously attempted to recuperate his gendered identity from emasculating discourses of disability.
Let’s see…
One, what does it mean to say “carbon fibre can be a site”? Why call it a “site”? I know it’s theory jargon, but why use it? Carbon fiber is a material. What is added by calling it a “site”? Other than obfuscation?
Two, why call it “masculinized technology”? No doubt this is explained in the paper, but it’s taken to be self-evident enough to work in the abstract, and I wonder why.
Third, how can carbon fiber be “a third-party mediator in homosocial relationships”? That obviously will be a big part of the article, but on its face it looks desperately arbitrary. Women can make use of carbon fiber prostheses too, surely?
Then of course I wonder how carbon fiber can be a surface that “facilitates intimacy between men in ways that devalue femininity in both male and female bodies.”
The rest – well I can see the drift. Oscar Pistorius may have felt less of a man because of his missing leg. I would guess that most people feel less of a human if they lack a major limb, but whatever – maybe Pistorius felt it especially acutely. But the special carbon fiber aspect…?
Oh well. I prefer clarity to deliberate obfuscation. So it goes.
Carbon fibre is magic, evil misognynistic magic. It has no place in a civilised society. It should all be gathered up and propelled by a rocket into the sun. While we are about it we should get rid of all the rest of the carbon on the planet so that never again can another strand of carbon fibre be made. We can then return to using gener-neutral wooden legs as prosthetics – Er…, no we can’t because wood contains carbon too.
For what its worth, I’m not PatrickG, so don’t hit him with any tomatoes aimed my way.
I read through as much of it as was available online without registration.
The article is fairly standard feminist academics, by my read. It starts with the idea that potency and capacity to go out and “do stuff” in the abstract is coded by society as masculine. Reasoning either by assertion or by dialectic, the authors treat the inability to “do stuff” as society as feminine. People tend to think that the ability to go out and do stuff is good and the inability to go out and do stuff is bad; this allegedly shows how society connects masculinity with good things, and femininity with bad things.
Carbon fiber is a material that allows people who normally couldn’t go out and do certain stuff (because they have a disability) to go out and do that stuff anyway, because you can use carbon fiber to make prosthetics. Using the above, this means that carbon fiber is acting as a sort of prosthetic for their masculinity. Some of the stuff people go out and do is sports. We all know that feminism long ago established that sports and so on are activities in which men instantiate their socially constructed violent masculine roles, so, obviously prosthetic limbs, by allowing people to engage in sports, are furthering and acting as a locus for the fundamentally “problematic” traits of toxic masculinity. In fact, to the extent that disability feminizes male bodies, carbon fiber prosthetics eradicate that feminization, and reinstantiate masculinity.
“One, what does it mean to say “carbon fibre can be a site”? Why call it a “site”? I know it’s theory jargon, but why use it? Carbon fiber is a material. What is added by calling it a “site”? Other than obfuscation?” That part is pure jargon.
“Two, why call it “masculinized technology”? No doubt this is explained in the paper, but it’s taken to be self-evident enough to work in the abstract, and I wonder why.” It means that the author thinks that society thinks of the technology in question as masculine, because its a “go out and do stuff and bang things together and make things and assert yourself and impose upon the world and accomplish things” kind of technology. This sort of assertion is a time worn trope of the genre, because the genre is terrible.
“Third, how can carbon fiber be “a third-party mediator in homosocial relationships”? That obviously will be a big part of the article, but on its face it looks desperately arbitrary. Women can make use of carbon fiber prostheses too, surely?” This is a fancy way of saying that two people who can’t do sports with each other because one is disabled might be able to do sports with each other if the disabled person obtains a prosthesis. The term “homosocial” is in there as a reference to the idea that the author is concerned with Teh Menz doing Teh Sportz with each other.
“Then of course I wonder how carbon fiber can be a surface that “facilitates intimacy between men in ways that devalue femininity in both male and female bodies.”” Doing Teh Sportz is “intimacy.” It devalues femininity because disability, e.g. the inability to do Teh Sportz, is allegedly socially coded as feminine.
Its all crap, obviously, but its fairly common, fairly well respected crap. There’s nothing here that’s any less idiotic that anything I generally see in feminist media criticism. The only really unusual part is that insistence on acting like the article is about “carbon fiber” when its specifically about prosthetics made out of carbon fiber.
“Firstly, carbon fibre can be a site in which disability is overcome, an act of overcoming that is affected through masculinized technology.”
Hear that, amputees? When you get a prosthetic limb, THE PATRIARCHY WINS.
In a way I think this dovetails nicely with the revival of public mania for Mother Teresa, who preached that “it is very beautiful for the poor accept their lot.” Accept your poverty, accept your stumps. Isn’t it all so terribly beautiful?
Ahhh, good catch. See Frederique Apffel Marglin, “Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge.” Also see what Meera Nanda and Martha Nussbaum (separately) had to say about her and it.
I mean you probably thought that was a joke, but it isn’t. Marglin was serious.
Patrick, thanks for the explanation. I had not one single clue what the authors could possibly mean.
My first assumption (and I still think maybe it’s right!) is that the whole thing is a prank paper generated by one of those automated-article-generating-thingies to see how stupid they can make journals look.
If this is really what passes for scholarly analysis in feminist academe, it’s time to dump them all and start over with women who are capable of finding their butt with both hands.
Upfront, I haven’t read the article in question. Also, have spent no time formally in the social sciences/liberal arts, so I am ignorant of a great many things.
Patrick: “The only really unusual part is that insistence on acting like the article is about “carbon fiber” when its specifically about prosthetics made out of carbon fiber.”
Well, from my time in academia (biological sciences), this strikes me as completely unsurprising. From what I saw, this kind of stuff was common. That is, someone is studying something that has already been written about by lots of other people. To get grants/ get published, they amp up whatever is ‘novel’ or tenuously ‘original’ about their work, even if these aspects are really not all that central to to the findings, or the findings about the novel/original thing were badly supported or really in the plain light of day not that useful.
Brings me to my next point. I realise that what I am describing may not apply to all biomedical science research ‘cultures’ or institutions around the world, and I’m describing my perceptions of my own experience with no peer reviewed papers etc. to back it up. From what I saw in my time in the lab., SO MUCH CRAP is published by many – not all – biomedical science researchers who are trying to survive in the ‘publish or perish’ ecology. Useless crap **replete with jargon.** (Worse than useless actually, but that’s another story (oh, yeah, ‘stories’, because apparently that is what scientific publishing is all about).
Thing is, while feminist criticism/social sciences output that is close to useless and full of jargon seems to be a popular thing to mock and kick around, way moreso than useless (and probably much more expensive) biomedical science output.
Seems to me that feminist criticism that uses the terminology of the social sciences is almost automatically considered to have a ridiculous vain pretentiousness to it that is worthy of mockery (not saying all people feel that way about feminist criticism, but it is my impression that this sentiment permeates much of the lay response to feminist criticism.).
Biomedical science research (BMSR) written in the language of the field, could also be rewritten in the following style (Patrick): “Carbon fiber is a material that allows people who normally couldn’t go out and do certain stuff (because they have a disability) to go out and do that stuff anyway”. But non-scientists reading BMSR papers don’t seem to have the same almost reflexive urge to dejargon these papers. I have the impression that the use of jargon in such articles (sites? IDK!) actually lends credibility, rather than inviting mockery.
TL;DR – IMO, wetlab research and feminist criticism ought to both be under scrutiny, because both are important. However, it seems one field gets much more of a free pass than the other.
In my case at least this isn’t specific to feminist theory-speak at all. As far as I’m concerned what’s wrong with this abstract (and probably the article it abstracts) is the theory jargon and the emptiness it papers over, not the feminism.
This reeks of the Sokal incident.
Surely this is a parody.
I hope this is a parody.
Patrick, thanks for the context.
I had pretty much figured this was some lit major forced to write about some science report on carbon fiber technology, who, unable to think of any way to write about the technical aspects, decided the best approach was to take it as *allegory* and write about carbon fiber as a metaphor for masculinity. Homosocialization is represented by the homogenous bonds between carbon atoms, and is represented at a higher level by the masculine work environments where scientists create and explore uses for carbon fiber.
I don’t like the use of mathematical terms. You can’t describe sociology with equations, so why do this?
@12. There’s a lot of math in sociology, includeing the whole subfield of demography, though the models don’t necessarily reduce to one or two simple equations.
But what mathematical terms are you seeing hear. I see a lot of stuff that looks “science-y” like “homogeneous” and “vector” but those are not be used with the mathematical meanings here.
justinr: I do like the use of mathematical terms, but only when used appropriately, of course. (I am a mathematician by trade, that is why.) But I fail to see the mathematical terms that you complain of. Of course, much academic bullshit is packaged in a pseudo-mathematical wrapping, but again, I don’t see it here.
The abstract is full of pseudo-jargon, which is a branch of jargon that I despise even more than real jargon.
Pseudo-jargon; that is a good one. Let me try to unpack what I think you mean by that. Whereas real jargon is shared by a number of people and can be used to communicate efficiently within the the group while excluding outsiders, pseudo-jargon is shared by nobody. But it sounds jargony, making the reader believe there must exist a group of people who can understand it. Thus, everybody feels excluded from the imaginary in-group. Unless, of course, they see through the charade.
Did I get that right? Sort of?
You did, except that the pseudo-jargon I have in mind is shared. The reason I call it pseudo is that it’s not really needed for efficient communication among colleagues. It makes rather simple observations look profound and difficult, and that seems to be its chief function.
After the first sentence I assumed it was Markov chain gibberish seeded by papers on feminism and materials science.
Ah, “sort of”, then. But I wonder if it doesn’t actually hinder efficient communication, even among the insiders? To my mind, it seems to even hinder thought, which in turn gets in the way of communication.
Well, yes, I think it does, but then I generally don’t think they have much of significance to communicate. There might be a mildly interesting idea buried in the pretend-jargon of the abstract – something about the way physical disability is seen as especially demeaning for men because men are expected to display physical prowess – but it’s not so complicated or abstruse as to need more than a paragraph or two to state. So yes, I do think inflating a minor thought into a cloud of verbiage hinders thought, but I’m not their target market. (Who is? Other people who are impressed by pseudo-jargon. Who are they? I don’t know. I don’t understand the taste.)
The rule that was hammered into me (and which I have since hammered into younger academics) is that the general idea/hypothesis of a paper should be more or less accessible to anyone reading the abstract, even someone not a specialist in the field. The details that elucidate and propose to prove the idea can be dense and difficult to understand, of course, and the hypothesis itself can be expanded with technical detail as well. But the basic idea should be relatively straightforward.
This paper seems to fail on both counts (the idea is unclear, and so the elucidation is murky). Patrick @2 does a reasonable job of clarification, which with a little effort could have been an abstract-length paragraph by the author if she’d tried, so it’s fairly obvious that clarity was not something of interest to her. It’s an easy trap to fall into. If your language is jargoney and dense, then it is difficult for anyone to challenge your assertions because you can always hide behind authority and claim that detractors just don’t know what they’re talking about. Also, too, people make themselves feel better by sounding authoritative through jargon. It’s much more difficult to lay out the bricks of your hypothesis one by one, clearly describing them, before slowly building up the edifice of the argument with reasoned explanations about why this brick went here, and that brick went there.
I’m not at all surprised that this paper is the result of a “laboured and slow process” to come into the world (as stated by the author in her thanks). Unclear, wishy-washy intellectual concepts are often very difficult to pin down with exactitude because of their vaguely stated nature.
And that’s exactly why this kind of thing is so infuriating.
As the real PatrickG (and Patrick, I damn well earn my tomatoes. Also, I’m curious why I got cited there!), I’ll just leave this here:
Zeros, zeros, zeros all the way down.
So, yeah, mock it, but … y’all are whaling on a piece that isn’t even stuffed with feathers. By no means am I saying you shouldn’t do that. It’s rare you get such a fun target! :D
Sorry, for above.
Have to add: Patrick citing me gives me more of an impact factor than Angelaki Journal of Theoretical Humanities. Thanks, Patrick!
From physics, we have the expression “not even wrong”, which seems quite relevant here. Thanks for giving us that, Pauli.
I noted that I wasn’t you because I worry that my not very distinctive pseudonymous name will cause confusion with other nearly identical pseudonymous names. And since my comments included some criticism of feminist academia (I was less bothered with the jargon, which I’m ashamed to say I basically understand at this point, than by the underlying reasoning) and was being posted on a feminist blog, I wanted to be sure that any distaste anyone felt for me in return did not result in collateral damage to a more well known comment thread regular.
I happen to follow all this Dawkins-Moddy twitter affair out of curisioty. Firstly, I must admit that I am completely untrained in philosophy, and am just a lowly software engineer with a bachelors in CS. Secondly, I must say I find Dawkins is a briliant biologist and popularizer of science, but an obnoxious person, and he’s getting worse(he should really take a break of twitter IMO).
However, I have read the paper, and many thanks to Patrick for making it much clearer for me. From what I can personally see, the paper argues that there is some link between carbon fiber and (toxic) masculinity, and obviously the author then attempts to argue that point. Mainly by quoting several other authors, drawing some parallels, or keeping coming back to a single(N=1) well-known instance of a male athlete that did use carbon fiber prosthetics to enhance his performance, and was abusive to his partner, eventually leading to her murder.
Now, what seems interesting to me is the way the author defends her work and theory against Dawkins. The gist of this seems to be “You’re from the hard sciences. I’m not. An ample amount of evidence, carefully constructing reasoning, etc, might be essential to *your* discipline, but my discipline is different, and evidence/experiments/falsifieable hyptheses/propositional logic is not the way, or the only way, to find the truth of a statement in my field”.
This just got me thinking. Somewhere in the paper, the author claims that carbon fiber is a “toxic surface”. Now, of course we all know she doesn’t mean “toxic”, as in chemically toxic, that would hurt people which wear carbon fiber prosthetics or ride carbon fiber bicycles. However, toxic still means it’s in some way harmful, or part of something harmful(misogyny). And if you make the statement “this surface is toxic”, I think even the author will admit that the statement could be truthful or not, and her job is to argue and convince us of why it’s truthful.
But now let’s imagine a paper that made the argument that carbon fiber *was* actually chemically toxic, as some materials can be. Not harmful in the way Hickey-Moody means it, but harmful to the physical health of those that come in contact with it. Now *this* argument(the “carbon fiber is chemically toxic” one) suddenly becomes the domain of hard science, and, as such, it needs ample evidence, data, reasoning in order to determine if it’s true or not. You simply can’t do otherwise, because the stakes of the hypothesis(whether the material is toxic in the chemical sense) are too high in order to trust *any* other method of examining whether it’s true or not: People’s health literally depends on it.
So, when the author of “carbon fiber masculinity” claims that the methods of “hard sciences” do not apply to her discipline, what does she essentially say? Why does the “carbon fiber = chemically toxic” hypothesis needs the hard sciences methods in order to be argued, but the “carbon fiber = gendered toxicity” does not? The author herself says it does not. I can’t help but think she’s simply saying “okay, guys, chill out, I made the argument that carbon fiber is toxic in a gendered way, but people *won’t die* if I happen to be wrong here. Whether I’m wrong *is not that big of a deal*.”
And now I can’t help but think of my own field(I’m a videogame programmer, specifically, at least at the moment). Some people might think you couldn’t get more “hard science” than this(you’re writing text that is going to be interpreted by a completely dumb machine; literally one variable having the wrong value can cause the whole program to stop working), but actually it’s not like that in practice. Writing code for such things as a videogame is a mixture of reasoning, practical experience, intuition, *some* testing. Most programmers aren’t really able(or bothered to) reason about the entirety of their code, or rigorously prove its correctness. *Some* are though, the ones that write programs that run nuclear reactors for instance. If I were to have a discussion with such a programmer, he might ask “have you actually proved this algorithm is correct? Have you actually proved the program won’t crash”? And, no, I haven’t. I know the code I’ve written is syntactically correct, I have *some* idea about how the game will perform and function, but I haven’t rigorously proved it will keep working correctly(not “crash” for instance) under all(or at least the vast majority of) circumstances. The intellectual effort and time that would be required for that is necessary for a program that controls a nuclear reactor is just not worth it for the program *I*’m writing. In other words, my response to that person that would accuse me of poor reasoning about the correctness my program(which is a text in some language, after all) would indeed be “Relax, dude. It doesn’t matter if it crashes on some people’s PC once every week. *It’s just a game*”. :)
Very nicely said. Could you find and quote the bit where the author claims that carbon fiber is a “toxic surface”? I’d love to see the verbatim claim.
Random observation: if you do a Google search for carbon fiber toxic surface, you don’t get literary essays.
Sure, page 11/17(or 147 as it appears at the bottom, apparently the page of the journal).
“”
Carbonfibre is a homosocial technology for Pistorius in the respect that it allows him competitive intimacy with other men, but it is also a homosocial technology of late capitalism that exploits feminized “natural” resources in inefficient and abusive ways. It is a toxic surface.
“”
Like, I said, you claim something is severely harmful, in some way, but then claim the way to know the truthness of that claim is not as much data/evidence/propositional logic/reasoning as you can possibly gather, because that’s not how your discipline works. Fine. But you *would* expect from your doctor to know if the drug that’s administered to you is harmful in any way by doing exactly what you claim is out of *your* discipline. Why exactly this assymetry here? A lowly programmer like me can’t but assume it is because, well, if *you* are wrong, it’s not *that* big of a deal. :)
As an aside note, I really do find Dawkins obnoxious, especially after his “clock boy” obsession, and when people, based on the current twitter fight, call him a jerk and a bully, they’re not *that* far off. Essentially he’s correct(IMO), but imagine if Lebron James browsed the net and found some footage of a game in some god-forshaken amateur division, and went “lol look at how that guy dribbles” on twitter. Would he or wouldn’t he be a jerk about it, even if the poor guy did actually suck? :P
Thank you. And oyyyyyyy. I get what she’s doing – it’s all metaphors, and one leads to the next. Natural resources aren’t literally “feminine” but of course they are exploited, so that means they’re “raped,” and that makes them “feminized”…and on we go from there. Such metaphors have their uses, but if you beat them to death you end up with this kind of blather. It’s not a big deal, just as you say, but I do share Dawkins’s irritation at it. It’s arranged to look like proper academic argumentation, but it isn’t.
And @ 32 – yes exactly. RD’s “clock boy” obsession was revolting to watch – he sounded like Bill O’Reilly. And he’s getting steadily worse.
Let’s be honest though, the paper might not be academic argumentation, but I bet David Cronenberg could make it into a pretty trippe movie(at least in his good days). Pistorius falls in love with cirbon fiber that gave him his masculinity back – cirbon fiber gets jealous and instructs him to murder his girlfriend – end with Pistorius transforming into a complete carbon fiber cyborg inside the court. Someone pitch that to him! :P
I think that’s an episode of Dr Who.
The thing is(because I actually read the paper), at some point she comments on the “modded car community”, and I think “well that’s at least something interesting and an actual thing, investigate how those sorts of communities of mostly young males form in order for men to bond over ‘pimping their rides’ and a kind of obsession about getting raw brutal performance out of their car”. But no, let’s go back to carbon fiber I guess? I don’t know. Boys do bond over a ball, for instance, that allows them to do sports, does the actual material matter? Is the ball a homosocial shape? Is kicking the globe a metaphor of how patriarchy and capitalism(which I believe they exist, by the way) abuse the planet? Does its similarity to testicles come into play? Who knows :P
My rather cynical, but I think well substantiated, reading of this entire genre of humanities writing is that what it actually does is this: The author takes a topic, usually a book or movie or something, selects from it what interests him or her, recontextualizes it, and uses it as the building blocks to tell a new story about society.
The conceit is that something about the material purportedly being discussed is being elucidated.
The reality is that the thing purportedly being discussed is just being used as a jumping off point for an often strained metaphor.
The rhetorical technique is powerful when your audience is predisposed to go along with it. It’s also occasionally powerful when used as a stealth method of selling the interpretive lens itself without drawing attention to it. But it’s ultimately empty if you dig into it analytically.
There’s a reason this rhetorical method is in ubiquitous use in religious sermons. You literally can’t escape it in that context. It’s everywhere.
What’s rather also interesting to me is this whole exchange that’s being going on.
“- Your discipline/paper/theory is basically gibberish.
– No, you’re just not trained in it so it *seems* like gibberish to you. Exactly like theoretical physics make no sense to the untrained. It’s the same thing”.
First of all, it reminds me of conversations I’ve had with proponents of astrology. Exactly the same arguments. I can’t say astrology is bullshit unless I devote time to study it, right?
But besides that, this makes you think…imagine a 18yrold trying to decide if they’re going to pursue theoretical physics or continental philosophy. At the moment, Einstein’s General Relativity and Derrida’s work seem equally nonsensical to them. How are they going to decide if it’s worth spending several years of your time studying them? What if you spend 5 years only to realize General Relativity was gibberish that theoretical physicists only *pretended* to understand?
Obviously the crucial difference here, at least to my eyes, is that it is very much possible to both not understand *anything* about GR, and be relatively sure that what it says is correct, at least in some significant capacity, and worth studying. How? Well, the people that claim to understand it can predict the orbit of Mercury, and can predict how much the sun’s gravitation pull bends light coming from a star! Not just that it *does* bend light, but *how much*! MAGIC! They’re actually able to use that gibberish to perform miracles like that!
I’m going to go back to my own field(it’s getting annoying, I know), and say that when I was 10 was completely untrained in computer programming, and couldn’t say if the text that is the source code for Super Mario is gibberish or not. Again, the difference is, I don’t need to take the word of people with Phds in order to know if that it’s not gibberish. I just plug it into my NES and cool stuff comes out!
I kinda feel like this is the point; people saying “you’re not qualified of saying that my paper about carbon fiber masculinity is nonsense if you don’t spend years reading on continental philosophy and similar disciplines” are inevitably going to get the same answer astrologists get : “My time and the amount of books I can read in my lifetime is limited; I’m not going to waste it on a discipline that can’t convince me it’s worth investing time on it *before* I actually invest said time on it. Theoretical physics can. Your discipline can’t. That’s the difference, and end of story”.
Based on past experience, the official response is “So you’re rejecting the academic consensus of an academic field that has devoted itself to studying this issue? You’re just like a creationist, or a climate change denier!”
That response isn’t actually valid (the difference between those fields and this one is exactly the salient point of your argument), but if you understand all of this as political rather than academic speech, it makes sense.
The other typical response is to note that several features of your post strongly suggest that you’re a white male atheist working in a male dominated field, and to attack you on those grounds.
“””
The other typical response is to note that several features of your post strongly suggest that you’re a white male atheist working in a male dominated field, and to attack you on those grounds.
“””
See, that’s why I don’t have a twitter account and just usually hang out on specific forums or irc chats(mainly CS/gamedev-related), and that’s why Dawkins, which at this point is addicted to twitter and does have 1.5 M followers, should learn that “you’re an old white privileged guy” is not an argument, but it is what it is, and very common on social media; people are going to reach for it in lack of better ammunition. So, pick a privileged white straight guy the next time you want to attack pseudo-intellectual nonsense. I’m pretty sure there are plenty of them in those circles too. This suggestion would probably irritate him to no end, and he’d respond with something like “why do I have to take such arbitrary precautions when I only attack ideas”, but the rules of the “game” right now on social media are what they are.
Though, like I said, I always found him a bit of obnoxious person(but of course a brilliant science writer), but after the Ahmed incident I’m bordering on disgusted, and at times genuinely wondered, as awful as it sounds, whether he genuinely has started to turn senile. The *one* thing that Dawkins did and can never be taken away from him is that he wrote great books on science, in simple language, that any working class family can pick up for a relatively cheap price as a great gift for its kids and have them learn how fish and turtles and bees and flowers came to be – as a kid of a working class family myself, in my mind that is how true liberation comes, not from ivory-tower critical theory papers. But apparently the 14yrold Ahmed is not amongst those kids that Dawkins wrote “The Magic of Reality” for? How sad. Incredibly, incredibly sad.
EXACTLY. And that’s why it’s so sad and infuriating that he’s throwing mud at that by being such an awful bully now. The one thing can’t be taken away from him, but sadly he can do a lot to make it less appealing in future.