Sandra Harding -- can anything more be said?

After my last post about Obama and the Denver convention, it followed a tortuous path through cyberspace and wound up at the Wikipedia article on Sandra Harding, a feminist theorist. The article ended with the following controversial statement by Ms Harding:

One phenomenon feminist historians have focused on is the rape and torture metaphors in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and others (e.g. Machiavelli) enthusiastic about the new scientific method. Traditional historians and philosophers have said that these metaphors are irrelevant to the real meanings and referents of scientific concepts held by those who used them and by the public for whom they wrote. But when it comes to regarding nature as a machine, they have quite a different analysis: here, we are told, the metaphor provides the interpretations of Newton's mathematical laws: it directs inquirers to fruitful ways to apply his theory and suggests the appropriate methods of inquiry and the kind of metaphyiscs the new theory supports. But if we are to believe that mechanistic metaphors were a fundamental component of the explanations the new science provided, why should we believe that the gender metaphors were not? A consistent analysis would lead to the conclusion that understanding nature as a woman indifferent to or even welcoming rape was equally fundamental to the interpretations of these new conceptions of nature and inquiry. Presumably these metaphors, too, had fruitful pragmatic, methodological, and metaphysical consequences for science. In that case, why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton's laws as "Newton's rape manual" as it is to call them "Newton's mechanics"?

This is a woman who has spent a lifetime in academia, writing books, holding important posts, evidently generating widespread if not universal respect. I ask you to consider what any freshman, at any university in America, would be told if they wrote something like this in a paper and turned it in to a professor? An "F" certainly, and perhaps a request to enroll somewhere else. But Ms Harding is in fact Sandra Harding, PhD. That means she must be taken seriously.

Wikipedia, with its usual deference to objectivity, commented:

This article or section may be inaccurate or unbalanced in favor of certain viewpoints. Please improve the article by adding information on neglected viewpoints, or discuss the issue on the talk page.

I gave it some thought, but in the end, if this is an accurate quotation, what is left to say? Apart from editorializing, as I am doing here, I don't know what could be added that would not dignify an absurdity.