Feminist scholarship...

Is there such a thing? Mike Adams has an in-depth look at one feminist paper.

These days, feminists are having a hard time figuring out why the only people who take them seriously are other feminists. But I think I know the answer. I just read an article called “Animals, Women and Weapons: Sexual Boundaries in the Discourse of Sport Hunting.” It has changed my life forever.

The lead author is Michigan State University Sociology Professor Linda Kalof. Kalof’s co-authors - Sociology Doctoral Students Amy Fitzgerald and Lori Barakt – may deserve even more of the blame for this exercise in feminist irrelevancy since they are not tenured and, hence, should have some cause for concern about public exhibitions of supreme stupidity.

These three feminists - who were outraged by the release of a cheap porn video, which featured naked women being hunted down and shot with paintball guns – were inspired to present this recent exhibition of feminist rage as form of legitimate scholarship.

After reminding us that contemporary feminist theory has long connected hunting with sex and women with animals, the authors claim to have found “clear evidence of the juxtaposition of hunting, sex, women, and animals in the photographs, narratives, and advertisements” from a random sampling of “Traditional Bow-hunter” magazines published over a twelve year period. They emphasize “random samplings” in order to remind us that feminist sociologists are real scientists, too.

My favorite part of the paper is its rejection of traditional sociology’s moral relativism as the authors conclude that “moral outrage at the degradation of women might be targeted best at widely read newsstand periodicals that serve as popular culture precursors to videos that celebrate hunting naked women.”

Lamenting the “paucity of information on sexuality in hunting periodicals,” the three authors are forced to review a limited amount of literature on the relationship between hunting and the degradation of women, such as the feminist classic “The sexual politics of meat: A feminist-vegetarian critical theory.”