Talk:Christina Hoff Sommers

The WP:LABEL thing

Hey, regarding this, can we just label her as an equity feminist? It's kinda her thing. Arkon (talk) 19:42, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

The second paragraph of the article more-or-less does that. ~ Röbin Liönheart (talk) 11:46, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

feminist and anti-feminist

I have followed the discussion here for a while. There are sources claiming CHS is a feminist, and there are sources claiming CHS is an anti-feminist. So any attempts to add that she is a feminist, always get reverted. So why, since there is no consensus on her feminism/anti-feminism, is this allowed to be in the article? It should be removed.

"While some authors have called her works and positions anti-feminist, Sommers rejects such claims."

It is clunky language, feels tacked on, and feels like it's not NPOV, especially with no consensus. S806 (talk) 05:32, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Why do you feel this is not NPOV? PeterTheFourth (talk) 05:33, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

I explained it. Because there are sources describing her as a feminist, and an anti-feminist, but the only thing allowed in the article is describing her as an anti-feminist. Since we have sources for both, they should either both be in there, or neither should be in there. S806 (talk) 05:41, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Also, read the past discussion. There was absolutely NO consensus to put anti-feminist in the article. S806 (talk) 05:42, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Here are 3 sources referring to CHS as a feminist.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11527238/Meet-the-feminist-who-is-sticking-up-for-men.html https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/more-mortal/201609/is-modern-academic-feminism-harming-women https://www.bustle.com/articles/131105-19-inspiring-feminists-to-watch-in-2016-because-the-movement-is-just-getting-stronger

I would argue that there should be wording describing this non-consensus S806 (talk) 15:20, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

I haven't seen a source describe the "non-consensus", as each source takes its own stance on the matter. If we tell the reader there's no consensus, we are violating WP:SYNTH. Binksternet (talk) 16:31, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Doesn't matter, you're ignoring WP:BALANCE, which clearly states that both points of views should be described for balance. Hence NPOV. S806 (talk) 04:19, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

She is widely described as an anti- feminist. But the lead and the body of the article seem to treat this rather delicately. The lead describes her neologistic feminism clearly. EvergreenFir (talk) 04:48, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

I agree, my only point is about that specific section. It's clunky in two parts. The first one "While some authors have called her works and positions anti-feminist", yes, this is undeniable, and true, however it is also undeniable and true that some authors and scholars have described her work as feminist, and as a defense of what they claim to be feminism. The larger point with this is, feminism is kind of poorly defined, so it allows multiple people to make claims about what is and isn't feminism. The second part "Sommers rejects such claims", is sourced directly from her twitter. I don't believe (I could be wrong), that this is a valid source. WP:PRIMARY States "Unless restricted by another policy, primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them.". I would argue, that this may not be valid. S806 (talk) 17:24, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

I am wary of misleading the reader with a false equivalence, telling them that the people who describe Sommers as a feminist are as established, respected or numerous as the ones who describe Sommers as working against feminism. In the past on this talk page, I've listed 30+ scholars who have written about Sommers in the context of anti-feminism. (See Talk:Christina_Hoff_Sommers/Archive_7#Antifeminist_references_from_scholars and Talk:Christina_Hoff_Sommers/Archive_8#Hoff_Sommers_considered_a_feminist.) These are top-level sources that strongly establish Sommers as an antifeminist. A very few scholars call her a feminist, so there is an imbalance there, making "she's a feminist" a minor viewpoint. A big concern is that socially conservative political figures and pundits are among those who call Sommers a feminist, for the purpose of driving a wedge between feminists, to weaken the political opposition. If they classify Sommers as a feminist then they can say that feminists don't put forward a consistent narrative. This stratagem is described by some of the topic scholars, so perhaps we ought to put it into the article, that Sommers-as-feminist is a tool for political ends. Binksternet (talk) 20:19, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

I chose one of your sources at random, and started reading. I'll quote it here. "The conclusion that Sommers is an anti-feminist instead of a feminist is difficult to avoid. In the course of denouncing "gender feminism," Professor Sommers accused me of claiming that all heterosexual dating was a form of prostitution and that women would never be truly equal with men until it was possible to surgically implant.....". Clearly this source is not top-level, and may have a personal interest in how CHS is labeled. I can't look through all of them, but clearly some of your sources are poor sources. EDIT: Inserting source listed https://books.google.com/books?id=CdfgMEV3f6oC&pg=PA20#v=onepage&q&f=false S806 (talk) 00:18, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

"Clearly" the text doesn't fit your preferred vision of Sommers-as-feminist. The author is writing from a position of expertise and experience, and the author is a respected scholar. Your dismissal of the source is noted, but it's no less of a good source. Binksternet (talk) 16:11, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Wait, wait, wait... Are you actually trying to accuse me of being biased here? I've read the archives, you have fought harder than anybody to keep any mention of feminist off of this page. Please stop. S806 (talk) 00:40, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

Removal of material

I have reversed the effects of this unhelpful edit. WP:BIBLIOGRAPHY was mentioned in the edit summary, but it leads to a guideline that contains nothing that would justify the edit. The only remaining rationale given was "stick with notable works", but no evidence was offered that the works that were removed are not notable. I did an EBSCO search for material about One Nation Under Therapy, and found it that it produced some 27 search results, which includes more than eighteen reviews, in both news and opinion magazines such as National Review and peer-reviewed academic publications such as Science & Education. There is more than enough material to justify an article about the book. There was rather less material available for The Science on Women in Science, but still possibly enough to justify an article. In any case, the idea that books have to be "notable" in order to be mentioned in biographical articles is a misconception with no basis in Wikipedia's policies. As per WP:NOTE, "On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article." It is perfectly appropriate to list books someone wrote in an article about them even if the books would not merit their own articles. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 06:50, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Removal of material (again)

Regarding this edit, I frankly find it baffling that anyone would remove so much material about Who Stole Feminism?, which is the book Sommers is best known for, while keeping so much material about The War Against Boys, which is a less well-known work that is not so central to her reputation. The edit leaves the article unbalanced and appears unjustifiable. The editor who removed the material compared it to summarizing the plot of Harry Potter novels in the J. K. Rowling article. The comparison is misleading. The material removed was only partially a summary of the actual contents of Who Stole Feminism?; part of it also concerned the reaction to the book. Cutting back the material might have been justified, but not removing all but the barest mention of the book's contents (which is now uncited, which is unacceptable in itself). If the reason for the removal was that Who Stole Feminism? has its own article, I have to point out that there is no reason why information cannot be mentioned in more than one article if it is relevant to more than one article. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 07:18, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

I removed it because we already contain the information in the article linked - we don't have an article on 'The War Against Boys', however. I'd prefer we did have a seperate article on 'The War Against Boys', and contained a small summary here, instead of reproducing the articles in full in this article which strikes me as kind of dumb. PeterTheFourth (talk) 10:08, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

That we "already contain the information in the article linked" is not a reason for removing all of the material you removed. As I said, there is no problem in mentioning information relevant to more than one article in more than one article. You suggest no actual reason why it would be wrong to include a given piece of information in more than one article, and of course there isn't one. You removed material that is obviously of crucial relevance to this article, including the criticism of Sommers from feminist groups and her response to that criticism, and in doing so you measurably lowered the quality of the article. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:13, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

This is an article on Sommers. We similarly don't include reams of material from our article on novels (to explain what a novel is) or our article on polemics (to explain what polemics are). We should only include material where relevant to Sommers. Book reviews are not relevant to Sommers. The inclusion of this sentence 'Melanie Kirkpatrick of the Hudson Institute, writing in The Wall Street Journal, praised the book for its "lack of a political agenda. ... Ms. Sommers simply lines up her facts and shoots one bullseye after another."' does absolutely nothing for the readers understanding of the subject of this article. PeterTheFourth (talk) 09:37, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

I came to this article to get some background on Sommers, and I also thought that the deletion was excessive. This is like saying that we should delete the invasion of Normandy from the Dwight D. Eisenhower article, because the invasion has its own article. If you want to reduce the summary to a 400-word paragraph that would cover the essentials -- if you can do a good job -- and then link to the article on the book, that would be acceptable to me. This is a major book, which introduces me to her thinking, and reducing that book to a one-sentence summary doesn't tell me what I need to know. Wikipedia style, like WP:NOTJOURNAL, require articles to be self-contained; you can't write a Wikipedia article that requires people to click on links to understand the article, and you can't understand Sommers without understanding her books. We do include reviews; reviews are WP:RS secondary sources and are the foundation of Wikipedia. I don't like WP:PEACOCK quotes, but we should have quotes that make substantive arguments. And I disagree with you on the Kirkpatrick quote. Sommers claims to have no political agenda and to be concentrating on facts. I'm not convinced that it's true, but I might want to read Kirkpatrick's review to see how she supports that claim.--Nbauman (talk) 16:29, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

PeterTheFourth wrote, "This is an article on Sommers. We similarly don't include reams of material from our article on novels (to explain what a novel is) or our article on polemics (to explain what polemics are). We should only include material where relevant to Sommers. Book reviews are not relevant to Sommers." Wrong. Of course book reviews are "relevant to Sommers" if they are about books she wrote. The reviews affect her image, either positively or negatively, and they obviously concern her. Despite what you may think, it is normal to mention reviews of books written by a particular author in an article about that author. Try removing all mention of reviews of books by given authors from articles about those authors and you would be reverted and rightly so. There is no case for simply removing outright all mention of how an author's books were reviewed from an article about them. FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 22:14, 9 March 2018 (UTC)