Logical Fallacies, again

I'm always challenged when I teach logic in a composition course. It's not strict mathematical syllogism that the philosophers study/teach; it's the rhetorical syllogism Aristotle lays out for his students -- he calls this the "enthymeme."

I'm thinking of that kind of rhetorical reasoning as I read an article entitled "The Fine Line Between Clever and Stupid," which points out faulty causality. The writer is a smart blogger, Kathy G. of "The G Spot: Politics, Economics, Feminism, Labor, Culture, Ideas." She's responding to a Wall Street Journal article called "Vote Republican if You Want Equal Pay." The writer of that article "looked at Census data on women's pay relative to men's in every presidential administration from LBJ to the present. And lo and behold, he found that women's relative pay increased far more under Republican presidents than Democrat ones."

The cause? Well, you'll have to look at the article yourself, but let's just say that more than one thing can cause a statistic to rise (pay increases can show up in one group because another group's pay *decreases*). Kathy G. rightly points out that men's falling salaries during Republican presidents can make women's salaries appear to rise.

Uh huh. I like smart women.

Backlash is Back (Did it ever leave?)

It's been a while since feminists I know have felt compelled to use the word "backlash" to talk about the current dismal and disturbing misogyny all over the place. The term felt too dated - remember Susan Faludi's book?

But now there's a fabulous article by the brilliant Katha Pollitt in The Nation that brings us up short: she calls it "Backlash Spectacular" and itemizes some of the most egregious messages our culture regularly dishes out about the female gender (teaching pole dancing to children? mass consumption of a video game that asks players to have sex with prostitutes and then kill them to earn points?), not to mention a most recent outrage: white supremacist and anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist and lunatic Phyllis Schlafley being awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Washington University. Makes you think a doctorate isn't worth much, isn't really about intellectual capability if it's awarded to someone who thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre can be blamed on the English department.

Now more than ever, feminism needs to be promoted, taught, insisted upon: the kind that Rebecca West called "the radical notion that women are people." One good source for helping us analyze media messages about many things is Media Education Foundation.