> Adams compares women to children and people with mental disabilities.
What was the point he was trying to make with the comparison? If he said "Like women, children and the mentally disabled have been oppressed by the patriarchy" it would mean something very different from what he did say, but your statement would still apply.
What I'm trying to say is that your first point, on its own, isn't sufficient to condemn him.
This is the issue I have with broad statements like "so-and-so compared X to Y" without specifying what the point of the comparison was. That's the point of a metaphor: to compare two otherwise unlike things in order to show how one has the trait the other also has. If I say a boxer has a glass jaw, I'm not saying his jaw is translucent, just that he is vulnerable to blows in a similar way that it would be if his jaw were made of glass.
This is important because I think people misinterpret metaphors on a regular basis.
What was the point he was trying to make with the comparison? If he said "Like women, children and the mentally disabled have been oppressed by the patriarchy" it would mean something very different from what he did say, but your statement would still apply.
What I'm trying to say is that your first point, on its own, isn't sufficient to condemn him.
This is the issue I have with broad statements like "so-and-so compared X to Y" without specifying what the point of the comparison was. That's the point of a metaphor: to compare two otherwise unlike things in order to show how one has the trait the other also has. If I say a boxer has a glass jaw, I'm not saying his jaw is translucent, just that he is vulnerable to blows in a similar way that it would be if his jaw were made of glass.
This is important because I think people misinterpret metaphors on a regular basis.