The environment is feminized in order to justify its domination

First, feminists have provided powerful critiques of dominant Western conceptions of reason, rationality, and rational behavior (Cohn 1989: 129, n. 5; Warren 1989). These critiques need to be extended to show how so-called 'rational behavior' towards women, nature, and nuclear issues, as well as the dominant discourse language associated with each, is patriarchalist. Consider, for instance, the way in which Vance Cope-Kasten unpacks the domination metaphors, sexist language, and sexual rhetoric of standard philosophical descriptions of arguments, good reasoning, and rational decision-making (Cope-Kasten 1989). Good reasoners knock down arguments; they tear, rip, chew, cut them up; attack them, try to beat, destroy, or annihilate them, preferably by nailing them to the wall. Good arguers are sharp, incisive, cutting, relentless, intimidating, brutal; those not good at giving arguments are wimpy, touchy, quarrelsome, irritable, nagging. Good arguments have a thrust to them: they are compelling, binding, air-tight, steel-trap, knock-down, dynamite, smashing, and devastating bits of reasoning which lay things out and pin them down, overcoming any resistance. 'Bad' arguments are described in metaphors of the dominated and powerless: they 'fall flat on their face,' are limp, lame, soft, fuzzy, silly, and 'full of holes." Similar critiques have been provided, especially be ecofeminists, of the language used to describe women, nature, and nuclear weaponry (see, for example, Adams 1990; Cohn 1989; Strange 1989). Women are often described in animal terms (e.g. as cows, foxes, chicks, serpents, bitches, beavers, old bats, pussycats, cats, birdbrains, hare-brains), sexual terms (e.g. as lays, fucks, screws, cunts) and plaything terms (e.g. as babes, dolls, girls, pets) terms which contribute to viewing women as inferior, not fully rational, and child-like. Just as women are naturalized in the dominant discourse, so, too, is nature feminized. 'Mother Nature' is raped, mastered, conquered, mined; her secrets are 'penetrated" and her 'womb" is to be put into service of the 'man of science." Virgin timber is felled, cut down; fertile soil is tilled and land that lies fallow is 'barren,' useless. Language fuses women's and animal's or nature's inferior status in a patriarchal culture. We exploit nature and animals by associating them with women's lesser status, and, conversely, dominate women by associating women with nature's and animals' inferior status. As Carol Adams argues so persuasively in The Sexual Politics of Meat, language which feminizes nature and naturalizes women describes, reflects, and perpetuates oppression by failing to see the extent to which the twin dominations of women and nature, especially of animals, are, in fact, culturally analogous and not simply metaphorically analogous (Adams 1990: 61). Stereotyping through "power dualisms of domination'14 occurs with both women and nature in language that is both sexist and naturist.