Sexist Equations

...

I found this priceless:

“In the 1980s and 1990s, some French and American postmodernists infected academia with a fantastically pretentious form of scientific counterknowledge. Having decided that science was just another textual game, they started playing it themselves, with ludicrous results. The French feminist critic Luce Irigaray solemnly described E = mc^2 as a ‘sexed equation’ because it ‘privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us’. She suggested that pure mathematics was biased by its ‘sexist’ concern with closed spaces, rather than the ‘partially open’ structures visible to the subtler female mind.”

(source: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, 1997, pp. 97-113)

Quoted in the book, Counterknowledge by Damian Thompson.

Beyond parody.

To ease the bruised egos of really-out-in-left-field leftist “academics,” I should also note that Thompson devotes a good chunk of his book exposing and attacking some of the more kookier elements of Creationism. This includes the massive, alarming and expanding Islamic Creationism movement (bet ya didn’t know about that global cause for concern! Way to go, brave American media! Keep your spotlight on Kansas school rooms …).

Anyway, I think I gotta put Sokal’s book on my reading list. Should provide a good many priceless quotes.