Anti-Climacus

Phoebe catches out James Poulos in the act of making dubious claims about the differences between men and women. My own rule of thumb is this: any reference in a conservative-oriented blog post or article (or, heaven forfend, academic publication) to "feminism" or "feminists" that does not contain a specific reference to an actual feminist with whom the argument is supposed to be taking place automatically forfeits the argument. The argument may still fail on its merits even if it passes this test, but you'd be surprised (perhaps not) how many do not make this initial hurdle.

My reason for this rule is not any churlishness about feminism, but the expectation that academics (or aspiring academics) should know better than to think this an acceptable citation practice. One cannot hand-wavingly refer to an entire group of scholarly perspectives--'liberalism,' 'conservatism,' 'communitarianism'--as though it were one indissoluble viewpoint. It would be better, but not by much, to make reference to one specific instance of the viewpoint: claiming Carol Gilligan (apparently referenced obliquely) to speak for all of feminism is like claiming C.B. MacPherson to speak for all Locke scholars, or Alasdair MacIntyre to speak for all communitarians--even if it's close to a representative view it's still not cricket.