There are many aspects of post-modernism. But I would say its over-arching belief is that there are no absolute truth claims. Feminists operate under this assumption. When it’s convenient.
Nothing is really what it seems. Since everything is ultimately ambiguous and/or absurd, you can extract any meaning you like from any text, object or phenomenon.
When you apply a left-wing perspective to post-modernism, it results in construing undesirable situations or statements as forms of oppression.
Anything and everything can be construed as oppression. Just to take an extreme example—consensual heterosexual sex is considered a form of rape. Of course, not all feminists agree with that. But it’s representative of the kind of bizarre beliefs that can be taken seriously in MSF.
What this ultimately means is that feminism covers its butt to make sure that objective evaluations of its beliefs are never allowed. Since post-modernism admits of contradictions and ambiguities, holding it up to the light of any standard is fallacious—not just the standard itself, but the act of critiquing it in the light of a truth is wrong.
Suppose, for instance, you wanted to critique feminist beliefs about economics. You research, get statistics and studies, make an analysis, argue, etc.
In the post-modern mindset, that’s fallacious, because of the underlying assumptions, which are not post-modern. Economics to some degree is a science. But science is linear, and a cultural product, and it is created by fallible human beings with their own agendas. So the whole exercise itself is absurd in the post-modernist mind.
“But” the sensible person might argue “I have facts to disprove what feminists say.”
That is irrelevant. Because facts are not absolute. And even if feminists contradict themselves, that kind of contradiction is admissible because the nature of reality is such in their minds.
In other words, the inability to falsify any statement put forward in a feminist light means that the feminist is never wrong. Or at least, there is no proof that is she is not right.
Now the sensible person might ask: isn’t this another way of saying that feminism is relativistic.
Yes, it is relativistic. But there is a difference between relativism and post-modernism.
Relativism can posit a logical, coherent and meaningful reality. What it says is that perceptions are distorted and not always reliable, therefore the perception is subjective. You can be a relativist and still understand that the laws of science are applicable, or that human beings are predictable in their behaviour.
Post-modernism does not posit a logical, coherent and meaningful reality. Reality is absurd—meaning there are no rules governing it. Reality is “complex”—meaning that it is not coherent and predictable. The principal of non-contradiction does not always apply. There are no rules to reality, or if there are, they are broken.
Post-modernism also invokes a plethora of linguistic, philosophical and literary gobbledygook to demonstrate the soundness of its views. I know that sounds contradictory, seeing as there are no absolute truth claims, but again post-modernism is capable of embracing such contradictions. To say that there are no absolute truth claims, then make an absolute truth claim, to dismiss facts as fictions and to accept opinions as facts is the nature of post-modernism, and by extension, feminism.
Since reality is “complex” and there are no “rules”, and feminism is based on this intellectual current, what it boils down to is that you cannot evaluate feminist beliefs based on any standard.
Because they say so.
I almost spent four semesters studying this crap at the grad level, but luckily I dropped out in my first semester of my master’s in English.
