On male public intellectuals of the Twitter age and gender (via Alicia)

7 November 2010 by Gareth Hughes Leave a comment

Alicia’s latest article on her blog Dove Grey Matter touches on Stephen Fry and Farish Noor‘s roles as public intellectuals. Both are well respected for their gentle and humorous elevation of public discourse from dumbing-down. However, sometimes there’s nothing worse than a brainy bloke who has got everyone’s attention. Knowledge is power, and when combined with male privilege is a rich breeding ground for sexism. Obviously, this kind of sexism is a little more sophisticated than a builder’s wolf whistle, but still sees women as objects. Prejudice need not be crude, and can be quite sophisticated, and, just because something, or someone, is clever, it does not stop it, or them, being wrong.

We can trust the public intellectual – the voice of the zeitgeist, so to speak – to be clever, witty, sometimes rather sexy (because they’re clever and witty), and male. Though it seems that lately being male is a crippling impediment to being the voice of the zeitgeist. Recently, Stephen Fry caused the chattering classes to gasp … Read More

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