Both the left and the right have a symmetrical gotcha that fails.
• Right:
“What is a woman?”
• Left:
“Define woke.”
Both are taking their opponent’s inability to define a quickly define a word to prove the silliness of the other’s worldview. But I don't like this. It’s hard to come up with a definition of anything, even a shoe, quickly. Sure you can say things that gesture at a concept, but does your quick definition really capture all the edge cases?
Philosophers have spent hundreds of years debating what “justice,” “truth,” “cause,” “object,” and “art” mean. They have yet to reach consensus. Why is this? I see three main explanations:
- You can refine our understanding of concepts with effort. (When Bernard Suits says, “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” He really is helping clarify our shared concept of game.) But clarifying our concepts like this takes thought and time.
- Our shared concepts are inherently cloud-like when you really turn up the microscope. At the end of the day, our concepts are not clear definite things. They are made of many correlated traits that we smack with a label.
- People differ in how they think about concepts both when compared to other people and compared to themselves at different times.
It’s hard to clarify a concept, and even when you do there will be a limit to how much you can clarify it. So asking someone to define a woman or wokeness on the spot isn’t reasonable.
But foolishly I will try to describe how I define these terms.
What is a woman?
Here is a list with variables we strongly associate with men/women:
- adult personality
- childhood behavior
- appearance at a glance
- what gender a person identifies as or prefers to be referred to as
- clothing
- who a person is sexually attracted to
- levels of sex hormones
- how the body biologically reacts to sex hormones
- genitalia
- sex chromosomes
- social roles
- secondary sex characteristics
If you are on the feminine side of most of these continuums, I will label you a woman.
What is wokeness?
- Belief in racism-as-power
- Belief that all differences in outcome between groups are because of oppression.
- Belief that the world should be construed as a battleground between oppressors and the oppressed.
- Belief that sexism/racism are incredibly common.
- Concern about triggering
- Concern about mansplaining
- Concern about objectification
- Concern about cultural appropriation
- Concern about gaslighting
- Concern about transphobia.
- Belief that language policing is a good idea.
- A belief that these are really important and we should zealously try to change society.
(This is not meant to be exhaustive.)
If you have a lot of these traits, I will label you woke.
But these categories are blurry. You can be more like a woman or less like a woman, more woke or less woke.