Is Peter Boghossian What Sexism Looks Like?

Or How Does One "Know Better"

Photo by Roksolana Zasiadko on Unsplash

Today, somewhat belatedly, I came across a piece by Julie Bindel entitled: “The arrogance of (not all) men: Peter Boghossian appears to think he knows better than female experts in the field about how to prevent and avoid male violence.” I was disappointed to read such a piece because it was riddled with errors and sloppy thinking, not only about Peter (whom after all, Bindel does not know well), but about what constitutes knowledge. It confuses Socratic questioning with a claim to knowledge and using a form of standpoint epistemology that does not work even on its own terms. Unfortunately, and despite its “(not all),” running through the entire piece as well as many of the comments, there was a clear prejudice against men and an assumption of negative traits of arrogance, entitlement, ignorance, misogyny and so much more with the sex by default.

This form of misandry has always undermined the radical branch of the feminist movement. It is not only that it risks alienating the male half of the population to whom, in the vast majority of cases, it does an injustice and whom women need to support their rights. It also undermines its own credibility with most of the other half whose observations of social reality (not to mention their own partners, fathers, sons, brothers and friends) reveal it to be unfounded in truth.

This attitude has long been a point of contention between the liberal feminists (like me) and the radical feminists. My mother left the radical branch of the movement in 1978 after being berated for having left four-year-old me with my father to attend a feminist retreat and thus, allegedly, practically ensuring that I would be sexually and or physically abused. The idea that my father rearranged his own demanding work schedule to care for me and enable her to attend the week-long retreat (as he should), not to mention the fact that he married a highly politically-active second-wave feminist in the first place because he genuinely cared about the rights of women did not seem to occur to any of them. My mother’s feminism was ultimately liberal and this is the tradition in which she raised me. She felt, as do I, that the dividing of the species into people who want women to be respected and valued and to thrive in every sphere of society (and are defined by having XX chromosomes) versus people who want women to be subordinated as lesser beings and confined to narrow spheres of domesticity (and are defined by having XY chromosomes) to be somewhat lacking in the social reality department.

Instead, the battle we have always had on this score is between people who believe in highly socially conservative gender roles and stereotypes and seek to uphold them as a social norm using both political and social pressure and people who oppose such unethical (not to mention unrealistic) restrictions as oppressive and bad for both sexes as well as society. These different sets of people do not break down into “men” and “women.” Attempts to ascertain the views of women and men on the rights of women have become somewhat confused in recent years due to the rise of Critical Social Justice and associated confusion about what a woman is and the allegedly dangerous nature of white women, which I discuss here. However, a sizable survey in 2016 on the attitudes of British men and women found that:

When split out by gender, women were more likely to identify as feminist, with nine per cent using the label compared to four per cent of men.

But men were more supportive generally of equality between the sexes - 86 per cent wanted it for the women in their lives - compared to 74 per cent of women.

That most people of both sexes want equality for women certainly matches my observations and progress on this score since I entered the workforce as a baby feminist in 1993 has been equally apparent to me. Nevertheless, people who do not want this continue to exist and there is reason to fear that authoritarian forms of social conservatism are on the rise again. Feminist arguments that the reason that some of the drivers of this are women is because they have been brainwashed by men rather than because women have their own minds and views on society has always struck me as distinctly misogynistic. I’m afraid we have to accept that some of the people who use their own minds to form their own ideas and come up with terrible ones will be women. We then have to do those women the respect of recognising them as autonomous human beings with the same power of ethical reasoning as men and try to convince them to change their ideas on the roles of men and women or, at least, apply them to their own lives while leaving everybody else alone.

This largely encapsulates the core difference between liberal feminist thought and radical feminist thought. Liberal feminists tend to believe we are dealing with bad ideas held by individuals and groups defined by political, religious or philosophical beliefs while radical feminists tend to see society through the lens of class interests with men and women as sex classes and women fighting for their interests as a class against men defending their own class interests which require the subordination of women.

So, what does any of this have to do with the accusations against Peter Boghossian? It’s necessary to understand that it is the liberal position that I will address them from. That is, I will be considering Peter as an individual with ideas and not a representative of the oppressive sex class - men. Full disclosure: I know Pete very well and have spent considerable time staying with him and his family. Is Pete an individual who has bad ideas? God, yes, hundreds of them. I tell him I think so often, at which point he generally gets quite excited and wants to discuss this at length, often publicly. There are few things Pete likes more than people disagreeing with him. There’s a reason he became a Socratic philosopher. This is why he travels the world seeking people to disagree with, invites people who disagree with anything he’s said to ask questions first at events and has been known to do some really inadvisable things like try to initiate conversation with a frankly terrifying Antifa activist until the latter explained “I don’t want to talk to you. I want to hurt you.”

But is Pete guilty of the bad ideas he is being accused of by Julie Bindel and the feminists in her replies. Not remotely, no. I’ll take three of them and address them on my admittedly anecdotal but nevertheless deep knowledge of Peter Boghossian but, more importantly, on the level of fallacious knowledge claims:

1) Peter Boghossian is sexist and assumes his knowledge to be superior to women’s.

Bindel wrote:

The moral of this story is that sexists come in all shapes and sizes, political persuasions, and all it requires to fit the bill is to be a bloke who thinks he knows better than a woman who TRULY does.

and

Peter Boghossian appears to think he knows better than female experts in the field about how to prevent and avoid male violence.

Firstly, if Peter is sexist and assumes men know better than women about everything, he hides it exceptionally well. My first meeting with him was when he called me out of the blue requesting my assistance with the Grievance Studies Project on the grounds that I was the person he considered most knowledgeable of the relevant theories. He continues to defer to me on subjects on which I am more knowledgeable as I do to him on subjects on which he is and this is his modus operandi generally. On my first stay with him, we were preparing for a panel which included Heather Heying. During the first discussion of this, somebody referred to her as “Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein’s wife” at which point Peter immediately intervened with “No, Heather Heying, the evolutionary biologist” before just continuing with the conversation. I remember this well, because at this point, I was still assessing Peter and that struck me favourably. Pete has no memory of having said this, because he was not consciously making a political/feminist point. He was just giving a scientist her due recognition. It is possible that he has some sexist beliefs lurking somewhere in his psyche that I have never seen despite working closely with him for three years, staying in his home for weeks at a time and speaking to him at least once a week ever since, but I’ve met a lot of men with sexist assumptions and if Pete were one, I am pretty sure I would have noticed.

Secondly, the matter of whether Peter knows better on any area of expertise than anybody else has nothing to do with his sex and everything to do with how much time he has spent studying it rigorously. Standpoint epistemology might work in some limited ways - e.g., I definitely know better than him about what giving birth feels like - but not on matters of professional expertise where objective truth exists. I don’t think he’d consider himself an expert on self-defence or martial arts but he certainly has a strong interest in this subject and reads and speaks to many experts in the field to learn from them. Why does Bindel seem to assume that none of them are women? They certainly are. Female martial artists, self-defence experts, fitness trainers, body-builders etc. absolutely exist and are part of Peter’s network in this area. Women are among the people who have trained him in self-defence and martial arts and also beaten him in contest which he has openly posted about, extremely non-sexistly. You can find an interview with ex-professional bodybuilder, Cindy, at the bottom of this post which demonstrates both this reality and also offers some challenge to perceptions of him not caring about women. I suspect that Bindel wishes Peter to defer to the female experts in the field or in different (feminist) fields who agree with her rather than the female experts in the field of self-defence and martial arts who agree with him. Therein lies the problem with standpoint epistemology. Women stubbornly insist on having their own minds, own areas of expertise, own opinions on pretty much everything. Anybody who wants to argue that one woman’s stance on an issue is more worthy of respect than another’s opposing view will ultimately have to justify this on the grounds of her arguments and the evidence for them and not her sex.

2) Peter’s fascination with ideas is “faux” and motivated, in this case, by a victim blaming mentality.

I will have to assume that this is what Bindel meant as she actually said,

I am not going to hit you over the head with why many women found his style of interrogation offensive and inappropriate.

This did seem to be why some feminists found the question of why those who fear themselves to be in constant danger of male violence did not take self-defence classes offensive.

On a personal level, I can confirm that there is nothing “faux” at all in Peter’s fascination with understanding why people think the way they do. He didn’t spend years becoming a Socratic philosopher on a whim. He is forever asking questions and people are forever reading agendas into this. Overwhelmingly, however, the reason that he asks any question persistently is because he is interested to know the answer. “Help me understand…” is a particularly common Boghossian refrain. This can be rather trying at times. I doubt I’m his only friend who sometimes feels like they understand why Socrates got poisoned. He also doesn’t tend to care if people find his questions offensive or inappropriate. (Remember, he came to public attention for questioning religion). That is on a public level, though. On an individual one, you can simply say “I am not interested in answering this question” and he will go away and ask someone else. He wasn’t trying any kind of ‘gotcha’ with Kara Dansky. He reassured her they could edit that part of the conversation out. He just really wanted to understand her thinking.

On the level of knowledge, it is fundamentally wrong to confuse Socratic questioning with knowledge claims. Someone asking questions may well think they know the answer, but the act of asking them is not a claim to do so. They are seeking to understand a different answer. Even the sentence cited which is not literally a question, “The fact that you have not taken steps means that you must think…” is still a request for an explanation of why a certain fact does not, in fact, indicate a certain belief. This is clear from the context of the surrounding sentences. It is not a claim of greater knowledge that one’s interlocutor. It’s setting out a difference in reasoning and seeking to understand the other one.

Of course, one can be annoyed that somebody would ask any question in the first place and think it denotes ignorance or insensitivity, but this is a different claim to the question being insincere or that asking the question is a claim to ‘know better.” This error, I think, comes from ideological blinkeredness. In some radical feminist circles, it is firmly believed that to suggest ways in which women can protect themselves from violent men is to blame women for being attacked instead of the male attacker. Someone who accepts this as true may well have difficulty recognising that anyone else could ask a question that breaks that rule sincerely. (Note again that Bindel does not tell us why the questions were offensive as she assumes we all know). As “it is known” that asking such questions is victim blaming, the questioner must be insincere and really be making an alternative knowledge claim. In reality, it indicates no such thing. People can legitimately hold different views on whether or not it is acceptable to discuss ways in which women can protect themselves from violent men and both of them think the only person to blame for the violence was the person who committed it. I’m sure everybody involved in this conversation does think that.*

Radical feminists are completely within their right to find ‘this style of interrogation” (the Socratic method) offensive and inappropriate but those who do cannot reasonably expect Socratic philosophers to agree and just accept that some things are known and that questions should not be asked about them. That is not how they understand knowledge to work.

3) “Peter, like other men, fundamentally do not understand what it is like to be under constant threat of violence.” (Commenter)

On a personal level, I can confirm this to be utterly untrue of Peter. At no other time in my life have I had to take such stringent security measures as when staying with Peter. Threats of violence are something that all of us who criticise Critical Social Justice publicly face, but doing so while being someone who asks all those “offensive and inappropriate” questions at Portland State University puts them on another level altogether. During my visits, threats we needed to discuss with the police included everything from beating him to death with a brick to blowing him up with grenades. Police escorts and bodyguards were required to have a conversation about whether men and women differ in any way. Peter was frequently threatened directly with violence on a regular day and walking about his own university campus or even his town was fraught with risk.

Aside from Peter as an individual, however, the belief that men don’t know what it is like to be under constant threat of violence is another false truth claim. This error, I suspect, is result of viewing the world only through an “own sex class interests” lens. Feminists who view social reality only through the lens of what poses a threat to women risk having no understanding of what the other sex experiences at all or of crime statistics showing which sex is at most risk of violence. Some feminists who regard the world this way do know how much more likely men are to become a victim of violence but respond by pointing out that perpetrators are also nearly all men as though this cancels out male victims of male violence. This is another problem with regarding men and women purely as sex classes rather than as individuals. The vast majority of violent criminals are men, but the vast majority of men are not violent criminals. Any ethical and practical way of addressing the problem of violence needs to take in both those sets of statistical realities. We cannot hope to reduce violence if we stop analysis of who is most likely to commit it at “men.” We need to know which men are most likely to commit violence and what risk factors increase a boy’s likelihood of becoming a violent man if we are to have any hope of detecting and intervening on offenders. It is in the interests of both sexes to acknowledge this reality because members of both sexes become the victims of violent men, albeit different kinds of violence and in different scenarios.

Julie Bindel’s accusations against Peter Boghossian were an unjust assessment of him as a person and of his mode of engagement. I care about that because I care about him
but I also care about what is true and how we determine what is true. Collective blame, standpoint epistemology, unquestionable “knowns” and blinkered ideological thinking do not help us determine what is true. Feminists who take this stance shoot themselves in the foot, and advocacy for women suffers. Absolutely zero women were made safer by calling Peter Boghossian a misogynist for asking the wrong kind of questions in the wrong kind of tone about women using self-defence. This is not how to “know better.”

*(I personally would argue that victim blaming of women who have been sexually assaulted is something that happens and often involves invoking what she was wearing or whether she had been drinking as though either of those can possibly justify sexual violence. It does not include practical information/advice/opinions on ways to minimise one’s risk of becoming a victim of violence and I consider feminists who make it taboo to discuss how to protect oneself if female extremely misguided).