The New York Times Op-Ed Who’s Afraid of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop? by Elisa Albert and Jennifer Block is offensive for a variety of reasons.
It’s offensive because it is another example of a prestigious news outlet publishing alternative “facts.” It’s offensive because it sugar coats the rabid consumerism promoted by a profit driven corporation. And its claim that pseudoscience is feminist is particularly offensive to women because it is an insult to the memory of famous women scientists who struggled against the misogynistic belief that science and math are “too hard” for women and they are reduced to relying on intuition.
Women are just as smart as men, as mathematically gifted as men, and as capable of SCIENTIFIC reasoning as men.
This passage in particular devalues the women scientists and mathematicians who struggled against the suffocating misogyny of beliefs about women’s intelligence or lack thereof:
Throughout history, women in particular have been mocked, reviled, and murdered for maintaining knowledge and practices that frightened, confused and confounded “the authorities.” (Namely the church, and later, medicine.) Criticism of Goop is founded, at least in part, upon deeply ingrained reserves of fear, loathing, and ignorance about things we cannot see, touch, authenticate, prove, own or quantify. It is emblematic of a cultural insistence that we quash intuitive measures and “other” ways of knowing — the sort handed down via oral tradition, which, for most women throughout history, was the only way of knowing…
Seriously?
That’s an insult to the memory of Ada Lovelace whose mathematical feats laid the groundwork for the computer industry. Lovelace is known for her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, publishing the first algorithm for use with the machine. She is rightly remembered as one of first computer programmers.
Lovelace encountered prejudice NOT because she resorted to feminine ways of thinking but because she dared master mathematics, a discipline that had been considered masculine.
It’s an insult to the memory of Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel prize, the first person to win two Nobel prizes and the first person to win Nobel prizes in two different fields. She developed the theory of radioactivity, techniques to isolate radioactive isotopes and discovered two radioactive elements.
Curie encountered prejudice NOT because she resorted to feminine ways of thinking but because she dared master physics, a discipline that had been considered masculine.
It is an insult to the memory of Virginia Apgar. She developed the ubiquitously used Apgar score and is considered a pioneer in anesthesiology, teratology and neonatology.
Apgar encountered prejudice NOT because she resorted to feminine ways of thinking but because she dared master medicine, a discipline that had been considered masculine.
It is an insult to the memory of Rosalind Franklin whose pioneering efforts in deciphering the structure of DNA were hidden by men who couldn’t bear the thought that women were as capable of performing ground research as men.
Franklin encountered prejudice — and was nearly erased from the history books — NOT because she resorted to feminine ways of thinking but because she dared master X-ray crystallography, a discipline that had been considered masculine.
It is an insult to the memory of Frances Oldham Kelsey, one of the first women at the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) who subsequently was awarded the Presidential Award for Distinguished Service for refusing to back down from her insistence that thalidomide caused birth defects despite tremendous pressure from drug companies.
Kelsey encountered prejudice NOT because she resorted to feminine ways of thinking but because she dared to used science to refuse the importuning of the pharmaceutical industry, a profession that had been considered masculine.
But most of all, pretending that pseudoscience is feminist is insulting — and harmful — to the rising generation of women. We have enough trouble recruiting women into science, engineering and technology without other women insisting that all three are the purview of men and women should stick to “other ways of knowing.”
When we were children, my generation was told that science and math were “too hard” for women, and girls were steered away from physics and engineering toward professions like teaching and nursing. Women like me owe a deep debt to feminist pioneers who, often at great personal cost, paved the way for acceptance of women into every subject of study and every possible career.
They insisted — in the face of tremendous male resistance — that women are just as smart as men, as mathematically gifted as men, and as capable of conducting scientific research and making scientific discoveries as men. It is deeply insulting to their memories when women like Albert and Block portray science as male and pseudoscience as feminist.
