"What definitions shall we, then, propose to identify satisfactorily the female monad and the male monad, and to distinguish between these imaginary entities? None at all. Such an approach to this problem would not be more likely to give a real solution than meditations by Thales and Heraclitus on the ultimate nature of the material world were likely to produce the steam engine, the radio, the jet plane, antibiotics, or air conditioning. I am convinced, furthermore, that at a practical and working level, the average teen-age boy, the factory worker who may just have finished grade school, already know far more in their own feelings and reactions about the femaleness of woman than philosophy can intellectualize. Aside from obvious points of anatomy, he has an excellent, and I think a rather accurate and genuinely felt, awareness of what a girl is like personally, and how she differs from a boy. Even the very unsophisticated know enough, unless their development has been marred by psychosexual disorder, to distinguish the girl at a hundred paces and to recognize her clearly as the uniquely appropriate sexual object."
The definitional games played by the postmodernists don't stop at 'woman'. They've been at this for a while. Their basic strategy is to exploit precisely the intrinsic vagueness of meaning in order to either define something they don't like out of existence, or to redefine a thing as what it isn't.
Thus for example, they will say that "there is no such thing as a European", in order to tactically undermine opposition to mass migration. After all, there are profound differences between the European peoples. Further, there is no sharp boundary between e.g. Europeans and Asians - look for instance at the Kazakhs, who share phenotypical traits of both. Yet at the same time this strikes the sane as maddeningly dishonest, because no one has any difficulty distinguishing an Ethiopian from a Han from a Dutchman.
In essence, they say that a hill does not exist, because no one can point to the boundary separating the hill from the plain or the valley. And yet - there the hill is.
I think many people today are simply incapable of even perceiving the deeper layers of meaning behind many words (and words used in certain contexts). This is the entry-point for the ideological definition games. The natural reaction is to enter these games and argue for the conventional definitions. The reason is that the deeper meaning is very subtle and almost can't be expressed directly, and in any event it won't be understood by those incapable of perceiving it. Drawing awareness to this, it seems to me, is important.
Perhaps the correct way to ask the question is, "Who is a woman?" Pondering such a form tends to lead toward the imaginal and the poetic; more right-hemisphere modes of expression that are the natural allies of the holistic perception capable of receiving the necessary non-verbal information we could call an authentic understanding of woman (applicable to man, too, as Harrison Koehli points out with his comment referencing that excellent pericope of Cleckley's).
Just read this in Cleckley, Caricature of Love:
"What definitions shall we, then, propose to identify satisfactorily the female monad and the male monad, and to distinguish between these imaginary entities? None at all. Such an approach to this problem would not be more likely to give a real solution than meditations by Thales and Heraclitus on the ultimate nature of the material world were likely to produce the steam engine, the radio, the jet plane, antibiotics, or air conditioning. I am convinced, furthermore, that at a practical and working level, the average teen-age boy, the factory worker who may just have finished grade school, already know far more in their own feelings and reactions about the femaleness of woman than philosophy can intellectualize. Aside from obvious points of anatomy, he has an excellent, and I think a rather accurate and genuinely felt, awareness of what a girl is like personally, and how she differs from a boy. Even the very unsophisticated know enough, unless their development has been marred by psychosexual disorder, to distinguish the girl at a hundred paces and to recognize her clearly as the uniquely appropriate sexual object."
The definitional games played by the postmodernists don't stop at 'woman'. They've been at this for a while. Their basic strategy is to exploit precisely the intrinsic vagueness of meaning in order to either define something they don't like out of existence, or to redefine a thing as what it isn't.
Thus for example, they will say that "there is no such thing as a European", in order to tactically undermine opposition to mass migration. After all, there are profound differences between the European peoples. Further, there is no sharp boundary between e.g. Europeans and Asians - look for instance at the Kazakhs, who share phenotypical traits of both. Yet at the same time this strikes the sane as maddeningly dishonest, because no one has any difficulty distinguishing an Ethiopian from a Han from a Dutchman.
In essence, they say that a hill does not exist, because no one can point to the boundary separating the hill from the plain or the valley. And yet - there the hill is.
I think many people today are simply incapable of even perceiving the deeper layers of meaning behind many words (and words used in certain contexts). This is the entry-point for the ideological definition games. The natural reaction is to enter these games and argue for the conventional definitions. The reason is that the deeper meaning is very subtle and almost can't be expressed directly, and in any event it won't be understood by those incapable of perceiving it. Drawing awareness to this, it seems to me, is important.
Yes, I agree - you did a public service with this post, because that is indeed a trap that it's natural to fall into.
Perhaps the correct way to ask the question is, "Who is a woman?" Pondering such a form tends to lead toward the imaginal and the poetic; more right-hemisphere modes of expression that are the natural allies of the holistic perception capable of receiving the necessary non-verbal information we could call an authentic understanding of woman (applicable to man, too, as Harrison Koehli points out with his comment referencing that excellent pericope of Cleckley's).