DaveDodo007 wrote:Now we do have a body that can examine these claims and they are social science departments, they are not as good as the physical science departments but they can produce some good studies and if their papers are properly peered review by departments across the political spectrum should hopefully weed out the left leaning bias of the social science departments. At the moment the terms above are very ill defined, I normally don't have much time for philosophy in general but they are good at defining terms, should make the 'sorting out the mess of my definitions' below well within their level of expertise
They have, in two of those cases. Trouble is, nobody noticed. See, the terms were pretty well defined back in the late 1970s.
"Patriarchy" referred to the feminist theory, starting with a sort of weird interpretation of Engels, that oppression based on sex was the first and is the most basic form of oppression, and everything else (racial oppression, classes, etc.) was secondary and derivative. It's always seemed to me pretty self-serving for white people, a bit like, "oh, so some of your relatives got lynched? Well, it's all just a reflection of the horrors that upper middle-class white women have to deal with when they are whistled at by construction workers. Oh the humanity!" (This is not really an exaggeration. Read Susan Brownmiller on Emmet Till and the Scottsboro case some time. Or don't. It isn't very pleasant.)
"Rape culture" referred to the feminist theory that rape is normal heterosexual relating as the culture defines it. Now, this has often been described as the idea that all sex is rape, and of course one can find proponents of this idea. However, that really isn't it. It's the idea that rape is normal and consensual sex isn't; it's something to be enforced, doubtless by some feminizing influence. This quite resembles what John Gordon called the "Montagu Doctrine" after Ashley Montagu, and of course it's just Victorian sexism rebranded.
Social studies people have dealt with these ideas, long ago, with the general result, of course, that they are just so much pablum down the bib. The words didn't go away, though, because they are useful as spitting terms. They don't really mean anything any more, except that they give some sort of general impression that whatever it is that's bad, it's because of men, who like to go around raping a lot. There's no point in listening to people who
"Privilege," however, is somewhat semantic and kind of important. Taken seriously, it's been dealt with a lot, at least back to Nietzsche. It's very much an attempt to frame things according to
ressentiment and slave morality. Let's say there's group A and group B, and because of some active effort, group B usually gets the crap. You can always frame it in two ways:
1) Group B is discriminated against, or their rights are being violated.
2) Group A has privilege.
Number 1 is, I think, the mentally healthy one. Most people seem to agree, which is why we talk about civil rights rather than civil privileges. It embodies the idea of making the world better by bringing the underdogs up rather than knocking people down.
The popularity of the "privilege" concept in feminism might have to do with the numbers involved. It always struck many people as odd to say that women were a minority group, because there are plenty of women. There's some pretty interesting verbal sleight of hand going on. You might notice that working class men do not appear in feminist demonology, except as the occasional thug. The desired impression is more along the lines of Marxist rhetoric, huge masses of women oppressed by male privilege painted as going to the executive washroom to brag about their rapes. (The washroom bit is an actual example, from a panel of women who wrote
Women Respond to the Men's Movement on the Phil Donahue show back in the 1980s). Of course, the mud is supposed to stick on all men, which is why working class men do not appear. (Is there such a thing as an executive washroom any more?)
Tricksy Nazises. 
