According to a recent article on thecollegefix.com, during a recent online event at Cornell University, feminist ‘scholars’ discussed their concerns about science being too male, too “hetero,” and too “feto-centric.”
Really.
The presentation, titled, “Is Fat Female? Evolution, Feminism, and Getting the Story Right,” featured scholar ‘Cat’ Bohannon and philosophy Professor Kate Manne. (Bohannon is the author of the best-selling book “Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution.”)
During the Cornell Keynotes webinar, Bohannon stated: “The male norm is a thing that we are trying to fix from the ground up right now in biological and biomedical research.”
You’re trying to fix the “male norm?” Can’t have that! Anything most males do can’t be right!
To that end, Professor Kate brought up research that has allegedly been done on elephants’ sexual activities. She claimed that when male and female elephants mate for the purpose of producing offspring, “it’s very fast,” yet when the males are alone together for long periods of time, some will “form these tightly, intimately-bonded relationships and have penetrative sex for up to an hour.” (I don’t even want to know what they are penetrating in the latter example, but it can’t be that good if they can do it for an hour non-stop.)
Bohannon went on to aver that “It’s hard to say whether or not your basic wild elephant is straight,” adding, “Who knows what sexuality is exactly for animal friends, but animals are very queer.”
Objection! Projection! If animals were “very queer” there would be no more animals. There would have been a universal extinction event.
But Bohannon wasn’t satisfied just grousing about traditional, straight human males, no, siree. She also flatly stated that society has been too “feto-centric,” or centered on the fetus.
The Nutty Professor confessed that she worries about the “feto-centric view where our babies matter more than our girls.”
Not done yet, Bohannon bemoaned her belief that society has a poor view of fat, particularly the fat clinging to women, and claimed that new understandings about the different types and functions of fat in the body suggest that fat is actually an organ, ergo removing it via liposuction –- or dieting while pregnant — can be harmful to women and their unborn babies. (Though the latter concern sounds oddly feto-centric to me.)
Bohannon was apparently asked how one could avoid “transphobia while centering female bodies,” to which she replied by saying research should include representative samples of the population in clinical trials while lamenting that “quite a lot” of clinical trials “continue to be white.” Moreover, she said researchers should be specifically studying “transgender females” (biological males).
To recap: males are bad. Straight males are worse. Babies are bad. Fat can be good.
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