Christina Hoff Sommers

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers (born 1950) is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute."Christina Hoff Sommers"
American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books ''Who Stole Feminism?'' (1994) and ''The War Against Boys'' (2000). She also hosts a video blog called ''The Factual Feminist''.

Sommers' positions and writing have been characterized by the '' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' as "equity feminism", a classical-liberal or libertarian feminist perspective holding that the main political role of feminism is to ensure that the right against coercive interference is not infringed. Sommers has contrasted equity feminism with what she terms ''victim feminism'' and ''gender feminism'', Hamilton College speech, 19 November 2008. arguing that modern feminist thought often contains an "irrational hostility to men" and possesses an "inability to take seriously the possibility that the sexes are equal but different". Several writers have described Sommers as anti-feminist.

Early life

Christina Hoff Sommers was born in 1950 to Kenneth and Dolores Hoff. She attended the University of Paris, earned a BA degree at New York University in 1971, and earned a PhD degree in philosophy from Brandeis University in 1979."Christina Hoff Sommers." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Biography in Context. Web. February 29, 2016.

Career

Ideas and views

Sommers said in 2014 that she is a registered Democrat "with libertarian leanings". She has described herself as an equity feminist, equality feminist, and liberal feminist and defines equity feminism as the struggle, based upon Enlightenment principles of individual justice, for equal legal and civil rights for women—the original goals of first-wave feminism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy categorizes equity feminism as libertarian or classically liberal. In 2019, Sommers endorsed Andrew Yang's campaign during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

Several authors have called Sommers' positions antifeminist. The feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar wrote in 2006 that, in rejecting the theoretical distinction between sex as a set of physiological traits and gender as a set of social identities, "Sommers rejected one of the distinctive conceptual innovations of second wave Western feminism," arguing that as the concept of gender is allegedly relied on by "virtually all" modern feminists, "the conclusion that Sommers is an anti-feminist instead of a feminist is difficult to avoid". Sommers has responded to such criticisms as "excommunication from a religion I didn't know existed." Sommers views developments of second-wave feminism and later as incoherent and products of a reversion to a coddling culture of outrage, stemming from middle-class upbringing of later feminists. Her criticism mostly focuses on what she sees as anti-male and victimhood positions of modern feminism, with other critics, such as Camile Paglia and Nancy Friday, criticising more regularly what they see as puritanical or anti-sex positions of modern feminism.

Sommers is a longtime critic of women's studies departments and of university curricula in general. In a 1995 interview with freelance journalist Scott London, Sommers said, "The perspective now, from my point of view, is that the better things get for women, the angrier the women's studies professors seem to be, the more depressed Gloria Steinem seems to get." According to ''The Nation'', Sommers would tell her students that "statistically challenged" feminists in women's studies departments engage in "bad scholarship to advance their liberal agenda" and are peddling a skewed and incendiary message: "Women are from Venus, men are from Hell."

Sommers has denied the existence of a gender pay gap.

Sommers has defended the Gamergate harassment campaign, saying that its members were "just defending a hobby they love." This advocacy in favor of Gamergate earned her praise from members of the men's rights movement, inspiring fan art and the nickname "Based Mom", which Sommers embraced. During Gamergate, Sommers appeared at several events with far-right political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos.

Early work

From 1978 to 1980, Sommers was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In 1980, she became an assistant professor of philosophy at Clark University and was promoted to associate professor in 1986. Sommers remained at Clark until 1997, when she became the W.H. Brady fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
During the mid-1980s, Sommers edited two philosophy textbooks on the subject of ethics: ''Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics'' (1984) and ''Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics'' (1986). Reviewing ''Vice and Virtue'' for ''Teaching Philosophy'' in 1990, Nicholas Dixon wrote that the book was "extremely well edited" and "particularly strong on the motivation for studying virtue and ethics in the first place, and on theoretical discussions of virtue and vice in general."

Beginning in the late 1980s, Sommers published a series of articles in which she strongly criticized feminist philosophers and American feminism in general. In a 1988 ''Public Affairs Quarterly'' article titled "Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?", Sommers wrote that "the intellectual and moral credentials of academic feminism badly want scrutiny" and asserted that "the tactics used by academic feminists have all been employed at one time or another to further other forms of academic imperialism."Sommers, Christina. "Should the Academy Support Academic Feminism?". Public Affairs Quarterly2.3 (1988): 97–120. In articles titled "The Feminist Revelation" and "Philosophers Against the Family," which she published during the early 1990s, Sommers argued that many academic feminists were "radical philosophers" who sought dramatic social and cultural change—such as the abolition of the nuclear family—and thus revealed their contempt for the actual wishes of the "average woman."Dwyer, Susan. "Who's Afraid of Feminism?" Dialogue 35.2 (Spring 1996): 327-342. These articles would form the basis for ''Who Stole Feminism?''

Other work

Sommers is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. She has served on the national advisory board of the Independent Women's Forum

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