Sophism examplified: The case of "The factual feminist"

Sophism is making a big comeback nowadays. That enchant Greek school of thought, as well as the phenomenon of teachers, hired for a considerable fee by young statesmen and aristocrats to teach them how to win an argument, are flourishing in our polarized and emotionally loaded political and social realm. It became so important for everyone to be right , that reason, fairness and commitment to the truth, are commonly looked at as elitism or just plain annoyance. Yet while everybody seem to just want to have the winner hand in arguments, no one wants to be perceived as ignorant or uncivilized, which leads to a gigantic mayhem, in which the same words can mean all kind of different things, and people don't seem to be able to agree, even on the definition of the word, "fact".

Case in study, Professor Christina Hoff Sommers, a.k.a "the factual feminist". I have never heard of Professor Hoff Sommers, before I've seen this Steemit post, by @skeptic . As I watched the YouTube video in the post, I felt as if I walked into a swarm of Sophist bees. So with a somewhat overwhelmed mind, I wrote in a reply that it's funny that she calls herself "Factual Feminist", while so little of what she says is facts. That led to a discussion in which @skeptic urged me to bring evidence to my proposition. I admit that at first a was reluctant. Making sense out of a carefully crafted sophistic lecture, is like trying to turn a scrambled egg back into an egg. The sophist tactics are so... well... sophisticated, that it takes allot of effort to break them down into specific fallacies, in fact, this is exactly how sophism works. However, since I was planning to write a post about sophism anyway, I decided to use this opportunity, and use "the factual feminist" as an example.

So in that mindset, I set down to watch the videos on "the factual feminist" YouTube channel. The first video I watched, was about gender bias in children toys, and it turned out to be a Sophism classic, with straw men arguments, cyclic logic, conjectures masqueraded as facts, smear towards the opponent's deviance and so on. The whole sophistic show packed into a 6:08 video. But then almost towards the end, it looked like the factual feminist finally gives some real evidence to support her claims. What was it? A research made by Lego that led to the development of their "Lego friends" theme, intended for girls.

Okay, throwback moment.

For me, as for many people who were children between the 1950's and the 1970's, Lego is something with a mythological status. The plastic building blocks, from which you could build just about anything were the source of many hours of enjoyment. I had this huge pile of the most basic building blocks, from which I built models of spaceships, skyscrapers, cranes and even a hydroelectric power plant (I actually used a motor from a broken electric toy car and a small flashlight lamp to show that it really works). And as friends would come by, we would play together in even greater enjoyment. I remember how in the beginning of the 1980's, although I grew up and was already not playing with Lego, I felt a sense of dismay, even of betrayal, when Lego did a shift from the generic blocks to a more thematic approach. I was not paying attention at the time, but as explained here ( part 1 , part 2 ), part of this transition was to specifically target only boys, which was certainly not the case until then.

So either the factual feminist didn't do her research or that she trusts her audience not to do theirs, yet some of us can sill remember when they used to build all kind of creative stuff from Lego, along with their sister, or elementary school female friend, but then of course, maybe it was just us progressive liberals, in a time when it seemed so obvious that gender equality is a good thing. Today, when parents wouldn't dare to let their baby boy wear anything pink, maybe nobody would care to question Lego's research and wonder if it is not just reaffirming the bias that they and others created trough their merchandising, if what the Lego research showed, was that girls, that were not subjected to their boys targeted campaigns, where simply playing with the Lego bricks in the same spirit of creativity and cooperation that those of us who were children before the company's strategy shift remember from their Lego playing experiences.

I don't want to argue with the factual feminist's views about feminism. She is entitled to hold them, although it seems to me that she herself feels somewhat ashamed. Otherwise, why doesn't she call herself as what she really is. A conservative lady who believes that there is something fundamentally different between men and women? maybe it's because she knows that there is a growing body of evidence, that the ways in which this difference manifests itself in a given society is more dependent on this society's attitude towards divisions and segregations, than on things inherited to the difference between genders itself?

The main mantra of the factual feminist, the reoccurring idea in all her videos, is that if given complete freedom to choose how to live, most women will choose to take the traditional feminine position, weather it is in carrier choices, fields of interests and so on. It is becoming more and more difficult to defend this approach, since this is simply what is going on. Take for example my day job of IT support. According to the common beliefs about the differences between men and women, women should have been much more successful in this profession. It requires division of attention, good memory for details and allot of teamwork. I can also tell you that the few women I did have the chance to work with in IT support, were indeed very good at it. So why we hardly see women in this profession? Inequality, in the true sense of the word, meaning artificial and interest based elimination of certain choices, based on arbitrary criteria is never a matter of choice. No one will knowingly limit her or his freedom of choice. True, people may choose to remain in their comfort zone, but even then they would probably want to feel that it is their choice. How can someone call herself a feminist if she is not all for doing everything in our power as a society, to avoid limiting the freedom of choice of people, based on gender?

So the factual feminist is not really a feminist, nor she is factual either. A fact is only a fact if it is true. And when pointing out something as a fact to an audience, Proffesor Hoff Sommers have to know that they may fact check her. Unless of course she trusts them not to, because she is talking to an audience that is already thinking the same way as she does. After all, flattery is certainly in the bag of tricks of sophists.

(Source of image)