The Political Teflon Of Academic Feminism

James Lindsay's Quillette essay "Why No One Cares About Feminist Theory" could stand an editor, but he makes a vital connection between academic feminism's intentional duckspeak and what he calls its "un-care-about-able" nature; allow me to propose "political teflon" as an alternative. While it isn't quite the same thing (more effect than cause), the net from the outside remains the same: people outside those departments simply do not care what gets written inside them. That is unfortunate, because as Lindsay notes, the consequence is horrible regulation like the Title IX perversion "Dear Colleague" letter. "Like the myriad details describing the island universe of a video game you’ve never played ... feminist theory bears almost every hallmark characteristic of the un-care-about-able:"

• It’s properly esoteric like many well-developed academic disciplines.
• It seems to describe an alternate universe that looks kind of like ours but fantastically distorted in a way that makes it hard to suspend one’s disbelief (and this is consequential).
• It involves tragically two-dimensional Manichean struggles of good (allegedly emancipatory feminism) against evil (human nature, masculinity, men, “patriarchy,” women being themselves, “oppression,” science, pornography, media portrayals of essentially everything, emojis, and so on).
• It sounds like conspiracy theories (because it utilizes several, such as “patriarchy,” “hegemonic masculinity,” “rape culture,” and “hegemonic femininity”).
• It gets presented in obscurantist technical jargon (like that you only disagree because of your “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback”) and its own specialized colloquial language that excludes the uninitiated.
• It’s filled to the brim with confusing turf wars (materialist/Marxist feminist, radical feminist, intersectional feminist, gender critical feminist; liberal feminist).
• It goes almost completely unread, not only by everyone outside the field, but also by almost everyone inside the field too (more than 80% of its papers do not receive a single citation).
• It absolutely refuses to listen to anybody else.

Modern feminism is first a political movement rather than a scholarly discipline; otherwise, it wouldn't be so hot to deny biological causes for behaviors its adherents want to change. This is something they only admit to themselves in the privacy of their own journals, where such matters may go unexamined for years. Its roots, as Lindsay notes, are entirely unfalsifiable, by design; the ghost stories of patriarchy and rape culture are first principles, in exactly the same way that creationists take the Genesis story as literal truth. Engaging their proponents is counterproductive:

Creationists want to debate biologists for the simple reason that some of the imprimatur of biology accidentally scrapes off on the creationist from the moment the debate is scheduled. “See, I’m doing science too! This scientist wants to debate me!”

The only way out is defunding — and demanding actual academic rigor of academic programs in the university. This is unlikely to happen.