Our Women's Week debate highlights how difficult feminism can be

I left with a glimmer of hope that maybe she'd shut up for a while on the subject of feminism blame. Hah! The next day her column was a near replica of what she had said during the debate.

Perhaps it's just mid-semester exhaustion but I found it profoundly depressing that such a prominent public voice is incapable of shifting or opening up her opinion in the slightest. It also started me thinking - dejectedly - about teaching a subject about which anyone can have an opinion. What is the point of reading through dense texts, conducting research and trying to formulate decent arguments about gender issues if it's the loudest, most publicly voiced opinion that gets to count?

I'm old enough to know that it's a bad idea to take such things personally. But the current culture of opinion really gets to me as a teacher.

Increasingly, opinion seems to have totally eclipsed what used to be known as critical judgment - and what is still held as a core mission and objective in the teaching of the arts and humanities.

So students feel entitled to have opinions about what we're teaching and seem genuinely shocked when they have to argue the point on the basis of having done some research, or at least having done the week's reading. They're also put out when I tell them bluntly that you cannot write "Foucault believes . . ." No! He argues - you can't know what he believes.

That sounds harsh and I don't want to blame students who are only repeating what our general culture tells us - that it's fine to opine about the social aspects of human life. Hey, Devine can blather on about gender and feminism on the scholarly basis of degrees in mathematics and journalism, and get much better paid for it than I do.

Much as I'd like to pin all the blame on Devine, ours is a culture of beliefs where no one actually believes in much any more.

"I believe in equality" has been replaced with "I believe men and women are equal, so I believe women should shut up". While the first statement is ideological, the second needs to be backed up with arguments about how equality between the genders is, or could be, measured.

It's much easier to have opinions than to actually argue the point - graphically demonstrated in Devine's columns. The week after our debate she aired her belief that absent parents - "the fault of old-style feminism" - have created an epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder children. It's opinion, belief, but not argument.

Ranting against opinion in an opinion piece - it won't have escaped notice that I'm on slippery ground. What the heck? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.