Life Among the Bedlamites

Previously.

I’m still chuckling at the description of a feminist conference that fractured into a baffling array of tiny, quarrelling sub-groups, each one claiming the greatest possible victimhood, from interracial lesbian couples to feminists with allergies, and all of them howling competitively about their “grievances and healing needs.”

Snork.
As Sommers says, it’s essentially a self-flattering conspiracy theory, a feminist Scientology for credulous, resentful, and often neurotic, women. And the delusional narrative she describes – in which question-begging is a virtue, slogans trump facts, and refutation is a form of “intellectual harassment” – is either ascendant or dominant in most, if not all, gender studies departments in the US. That’s around 90,000 students a year.

a feminist conference that fractured into a baffling array of tiny, quarrelling sub-groups
That made me laugh too, especially the part where Hoff-Sommers explains:

None of the groups proved stable. They kept fighting … There were some black lesbian women, but some of them had white partners – that gave them privilege [so] they had to form their own group.

Even funnier I found was the sequel where Hoff-Sommers brings us up to date on the ultimate outcome of that Austin conference of the National Women’s Studies Association

Well here’s what happened: they’ve united. And they’ve united and they’ve voted for a cause that brought them all together.

I wonder what cause that could be? Something related to FGM or abortion rights, or workpla- oh!:

They voted to boycott Israel.

I wish I had the imagination to make this up, but sadly it is quite beyond anything I am capable of.
By the way, thank you for bringing Gad Saad to my attention recently – he is really quite a find. His interview with Greg Lukianoff of F.I.R.E. is very good too.

feminists with allergies
A good name for a band.

feminists with allergies
That would account for the hive mentality.

I am at a loss to see (a) any valid connection between the things being merged, or (b) any relevance in the aforesaid knitting-fog exercise.
Oh, it’s all very easily explained . . .

“We’ll have to see,” Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. “Potio-section…” He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. “Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no,” he said to Diotallevi. “It’s not the department, it’s a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all under the same heading of Tetrapyloctomy.”
“What’s tetra…?” I asked.
“The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We’re not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it’s the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn’t seem completely useless.”
“All right, gentlemen,” I said, “I give up. What are you two talking about?”
“Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossible courses are given. The school’s main is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.”

A School of Comparative Irrelevance
And so fiction is superseded by reality.

Sommers mentions a feminist conference. This appears in fuller form in her 1994 book, “Who Stole Feminism?” It’s pretty funny. The Jewish group split in two: some of the women accepted Judaism, others were trying to recover from it!
The specific mention about the lesbian group splitting is recounted there. Angela, a lesbian black former dancer, was in a group for supporting lesbians. The group split into two: black and white. Her group then split between those with black lovers and those with white!
She had a white lover, so she was “targeted” and left the group for “self-protection”! (Safe space wasn’t so safe!) Angela described this as an “ouch” experience. “Microaggresion” sounds much more important, doesn’t it?
That section can be previewed at Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=EIUtJziqIqAC&lpg=PP1&dq=christina%20hoff%20sommers&pg=PA29#v=onepage&q=hyATT%20regency&f=false

When I see what is happening with feminism these days I find myself longing for the certainties of the Middle Ages, when these women were known to congregate on the Brocken during the night of April 30th, and if things got out of hand it was always possible to restore order by burning a few of them at the stake.
I guess we can’t do that anymore, can we? The modern world is so complicated.