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The requirements of … correctness in practical judgements and objectivity in theoretical knowledge … belong as it were in their form and their claims to humanity in general, but in their actual historical configuration they are masculine throughout. Supposing that we describe these things, viewed as absolute ideas, by the single word ‘objective’, we then find that in the history of our race the equation objective = masculine is a valid one [George Simmel, quoted by Horney, 1926, p. 200]
In articulating the commonplace, Simmel steps outside of the convention of academic discourse. The historically pervasive association between masculine and objective, more specifically between masculine and scientific, is a topic which academic critics resist taking seriously. Why is that? Is it not odd that an association so familiar and so deeply entrenched is a topic only for informal discourse, literary allusion, and popular criticism? How is it that formal criticism in the philosophy and sociology of science has failed to see here a