Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Snorting at the idea of her being a part of your village.  Only if she is playing the part of the village idiot.

I…I just…

:-O

Hyphens and colons have never more adequately expressed my feelings.

Oh, they just ran this to get a reaction.  Newspapers are desperate for readers these days.

And my verification word?  Reaction58.

Well, I sorta have to agree with her on the “Eat, Pray, Love” phenomenon and Oprah. I don’t get it either.

And “Grey’s Anatomy” made it through about 2 TiVO tapings and then it got the boot.

What embarrasses me more, though, are the women who dress like Jerry Springer guests and act like Anna Nicole.

I didn’t think the article was really that bad…and she did admit to men having their own silly foibles.

It’s articles like this that make me shake my head in wonder at the sheer audacity of someone who has obviously benefited from what equality for women has had to offer telling the rest of us we’re too damned immature, silly, and downright stupid to be able to determine our own lives.  I don’t know whether it’s some innate insecurity that makes them want to clear the playing field, some untold depths of self-hatred, or mercenary greed and self-interest that causes women such as this, Laura Schlessinger, & Ann Coulter to make the statements they do. Whatever the reason, I wish they’d stop because they keep getting their stupid all over the rest of us.

~Still giggling that, when I couldn’t think of her name, putting the words “hateful, right-wing, female author” brought Ann Coulter’s name up as the very first entry!

My feeling is that these women think that of course *they would be excepted, ‘cause they’re so special. They *know* every other woman’s place, so that they themselves can sit at the big table.

Over at Dear Author someone brought up the timing of this most recent screed vis a vis the primaries… and I’m sad to say I think it’s not coincidence.

OMG. I hate so much that newspapers don’t even check whether they are running totally contradictory articles. I know we can’t possibly take this nonsense seriously, but still. I suppose I should hate even more that newspapers would run this kind of claptrap, but I don’t think very highly of the people who run newspapers….

*cough* Well, ummmm us guys call each other names all the time.

You don’t want to see me and my friends going at each other over beers at the bar. We are such bitches.

I called Vincent twinkle toes the other day (He’s a retired from mens ballet at the Dance Theatre of Harlem). Nice legs still, but that big old ass of his is getting huge honey!

I think the other guys are gonna make the nick name stick too.

I am so bad.

“I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men.”

Why is having an excellent memory and superior verbal skills considered ‘coasting’? She’s even buying into the “math and science are boy subjects, and better than girl subjects” line of thinking.

Also, the thing about women AND GAY MEN being worse drivers? If womens’ brains are smaller than mens’, why would gay men ‘suffer’ from similar ‘dimness’? Outdated patriarchal bullshit again, sounds like.

What complete drivel.  I know that columnists have a fair amount of play, but still the Washington Post is going to get mega letters for this one (way too many powerful women in DC too overlook).

As for being “dim” as a gender trait, I think not.  I lived with a houseful of women for a year in DC.  We were full-time volunteers for a year, and somewhat addicted to Beverly Hills, 90210.  Let me share with you the career trajectories for these women: 2 social workers (myself included), 2 lawyers, 1 physician’s assistant, and 2 pastors.  Gee, I guess we should have just stuck to making a house a home.

I have to admit I skimmed the article (I have high blood pressure to begin with), but really?  What the fuck was her point?

Sounds like Allen is another one praising the virtues of mindless conformity.

~ sigh ~

And I had such high hopes for this century.

The question I’ve had since I saw the posting on this topic on DA was is this Charlotte Allen actually Charlotte Vale Allen?  Does anybody know?

it’s the inherent self-contradiction that got to me. Charlotte ain’t “coasting” on her verbal skills. That whole screed boiled down to “Women other than me are dimwitted, touchy-feely bimbos. That is BAD. We should encourage women to be touchy-feely homemakers in the classic 1950s mold because that is what women are best suited to.”

Say wha—? Is she trying to say “Women’s stupidy is frustrating but incurable, so let’s just go with it”?

That dimwitted, scatterbrained bimbo needs to make up her mind how she feels about women.

On another note, this line in Sarah’s post caught my eye:
How about owning two distinct levels of clothing: work and not work?

Are you saying that men have two distinct levels of clothing, but most women don’t? Wha? When my new job starts next month, my two levels are going to be even more distinct. Suity clothing at work, jeans at home. Why wouldn’t everyone do that? (Assuming they have a job that requires suity.)

I mean, my current job is casual. I wear jeans. But I have distinctly different “t-shirts I wear at work” (structured, a bit of lycra, solid colors) and “t-shirts I wear at home” (concert shirts, things with art).

Maybe it’s a symptom of more men having jobs that require them to dress a particular way?

I started reading the article thinking that it would be a rebuttal of Linda Hirshman’s opinion or another take on women not voting as a bloc for Hillary—as had been expected.

Instead I read with great a very ill-considered, badly written, misogynistic screed from Charlotte Allen, a women who graduated from Stanford and Harvard. A person from whom I expect more.

There is no real thesis .

She devotes 13 of the 16 paragraphs in her piece to denigrating women. She only spends the last damning women with faint praise when she tells us that, yeah,  there are some very smart women and she’ll give them their due - but they are not the norm.

Shit who needs enemies when you have friends like her? She sounds like the 21st century Phyllis Schlafly (sp?).

At least it was only opinion. I’ll have reservations before reading anything else of hers in the future.

To write to the Post do this: Agree? Disagree? Think this article should never have been published? Send a response to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and put “Smarter Than You Think” in the subject line. We’ll publish a selection online and in the newspaper on Sunday.

To write to her care of her agents, send a letter to:
Writers’ Representatives, LLC
116 W. 14th St., 11th Fl.
New York, NY 10011-7305
phone/fax: 212-620-0023

She wrote a book called The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus. It was published by the Free Press (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in 1998. Anne Rise loved it.

The thing about men having more extremes of “Very Smart” and “Very Dumb”—that is true.

Want to know why?

Because The Intelligence Gene (whatever it is) is on the X chromosome. The GIRL Chromosome.

So, since men only get ONE X chromosome, whatever intelligence he gets, that’s it. It can be off-the-charts high, or off-the-charts low, but that’s all he gets.

A woman has Two X chromosomes, so if one is extremely high, the other has to be high as well, or it brings the intelligence level down some. However, if one is low, the other can bring it up. Hence the lack of extremes.

But it also means that GIRLS carry the intelligence. How does that make us dumb?

I learned this from my daughter, who is a statistics PhD candidate in a cross-discipline program with stats, education, and psychology at Carnegie-Mellon, and who also has an autistic son… So I figure she would know.

Poor Charlotte. So misunderstood. Did her invite to the neighborhood Bunco group get lost in the mail again?

Perhaps Charlotte should be thankful that someone’s reading. I seem to remember seeing a stat that illiteracy is growing in the USA. I might also mention that many of the authors she scorns probably exponentially outearn her.

IMHO, YMMV,
-S

I have subscribed to The Washington Post for almost 50 years.  It is a pretty liberal paper but it does one thing well: That being, other points of view. You generally won’t see a liberal point of view in a conservative newspaper.

As for Ms. Allen’s screed, in the comments I wrote, Hogwash!

I dunno, replace “women” with “Charlotte Allen” and I’d concede the point.

:P

I swear no man watches “Grey’s Anatomy” unless his girlfriend forces him to. [...]  No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of “The Friday Night Knitting Club.”

Wow, she’s never met Mr. Gynocrat.  Or his friends. (>_<)

Allens is an idiot for a lot of reasons, but one is that she can’t even interpret statistics correctly.

1.  How well you drive is in no way related to your intelligence or any sort of male-ness factor.  Instead, studies have shown that it’s largely a factor of how much you drive and exposing yourself to different driving conditions so that you can anticipate what is going to happen and react appropriately.  If women, on average, drive less than men, then it is logical that they will get into more accidents.  Of course, there may be some sort of correlation to men physiologically having better reflexes—but that’s physiology, not intelligence or some supposed superior-ness.  And everyone realizes that there are some advantages that both sexes have over one another physically.

2.  I would be interested to see the IQ studies.  One, we know that IQ tests do not measure all factors of intelligence—but is a fair indicator.  And there are more types of intelligence (like emotional) that the tests do not test for or adequately represent.  Two, memory is one of the biggest factors of intelligence (a new study just came out about this the other day), so if women have a superior memory then….?

3.  The woman completely ignores a whole body of research that finds that a major reason men do better in math and science is because we raise our children to believe that that is a “male” area and that girls should focus on English and “female” subjects.  Women—on average—are highly discouraged from entering “male” fields.  Also, females are encouraged not to act intelligent – which is why women like Paris Hilton have a following.  In fact, the latest figures I have seen show that the only areas where men still out number women in higher education are law schools and technical schools (MIT, et al.).

As a smart, highly educated woman who reads romances, I find Allens to be incredibly insulting.  Sure, Sappho and the other women that she mentions are outliers (and I bet there would be more women from the past that you could point to as brilliant if more women would have been educated like men) – but so are Einstein, Newton,  and the like.  Most of us – men and women – are incredibly average and don’t make any great discoveries or pen incredible literature.  I don’t read romances because I’m some weak, pathetic female.  I read them because I am an incredibly intelligent female that is in a demanding profession, and they are a nice break from all of the intellectually demanding things that I do.  No different from men reading Louis L’Amour or John Grisham (which I read too, by the by).

Perhaps Allens puts down her whole sex to somehow explain her own short comings?

what’s wrong with liking Grey’s? i lurrrrve it. is it so bad to like watching pretty people have sex and drama and sex and drama? most women, i feel, are smart enough to realize IT’S NOT REAL. same with romance novels. i’m a very smart person, sez my GPA and my university and my teachers. fluffy stuff is my escape from reading the Odyssey and studying ancient Jewish texts. i also happen to be pretty darned good at math and science. and i know tons of other girls here and elsewhere who are in the same boat.
and…um…there are women who simply arent mothering or good at making a home. so, it can’t be “innate”, then, can it?
grph.

Because The Intelligence Gene (whatever it is) is on the X chromosome. The GIRL Chromosome.

I’m afraid you are misinformed.  There is no single gene for intelligence, because there’s no single accepted definition for what intelligence is, and how it may be measured.  What is tested in IQ tests is based on a number of different factors, and is very much culturally-determined, a fact that seems to have been lost on quite a number of people in recent years. 

There may well be a gene on the X chromosome that is linked to intelligence: but it is far from the only factor involved. 

In any event, the range of variation within a given sex with regards to intelligence (or any other measurable characteristic) is actually greater than the difference of the medians of the two sexes.  But apparently Ms. Allen missed learning that in any of her many years of coursework.  It is, apparently, beyond her capacity to add two-plus-two, much less remember such a complicated facet of basic human biology.

There’s a quote tailor-made for creatures like Ms. Allen: “I’d call her a cunt, but she lacks the depth and the charm.”

Oh, Brandi—

I am *so* yoinking that one!!

Silly me, I thought feminism was about recognizing that women were humans and not property.

Now I find out it’s about putting down other women to make yourself look witty and urbane.

I’ll just go slip on my apron and heels and cook my husband pot roast naked then.

What’s even funnier is being in a room full of rabid sports fans who are watching a game and, say, cheering on the Chicago Bulls…and deliberately choosing to root for their opponents, like, say, the Utah Jazz. I was told once when I was engaging in this lifethreatening activity, “Shut up! You’re making them (the Jazz) win!”

Apparently, I have amazing psychic powers even I don’t know about. I should start making the bookies happy instead of working for a living. ::snort::

she’s stupid and ignorant

at Gail: That’s not at all how it works.  Besides, the whole point is that there ARE no inherent differences between men and women in terms of intellect.  I’m not talking things like spacial perception vs. memory, I’m saying that if you teach a guy and a girl with the same skill set how to do something, there’s no reason for one to learn “better” than the other.  Biologically we’re different, sure, but whether one person outperforms another is based on the individual, NOT on gender.

...I’m a girl at a technical university and I’m not quite happy about being told I’m abnormal for it.  Go back to 1950, Ms. Allen.

Good lord, where does one begin with the fallacious reasoning?  The whole, “I dislike your taste so you must be stupid?” argument?  Bringing up Hillary’s “bad campaign” as if somehow all her male campaign staff, not to mention a certain way too, male ex-president, have nothing to do with it?

I dunno, but I think my favorite bit is pointing out that she starts a paragraph with the phrase “women are the dumber sex” and ends the SAME FRICKING PARAGRAPH with a sentence containing the qualification, “the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average.”

The woman can’t even cherry pick her own facts right.  But maybe she thought that, being a woman, writing an intelligent well-thought-out article would undercut her premise.

Own those occluded brains, I tell you!  OWN THEM WITH BOTOX-INFLATED PRIDE!

I will arise and go now, and go to be distracted by superficialities.  Dare I eat a peach…or crack open a Nora Roberts novel?

italics begone!

And I started laughing because I’d read

Let’s try this without the HTML wannabe shininess: http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/you_know_whats_stupid

I’m insulted. While she has a few points in there that would be interesting to follow up with (though i want a citation of all her sources), I found that her entire purpose was to simply insult women. The science was thrown in half-heartedly to try to gain credibility.

As if IQ tests and standardized tests aren’t biased towards white males.

I suppose my blood pressure could go up, but really she’s not worth the energy.

Frankly, the section of Allen’s diatribe that gave me the most pause was her list of historical women she most admires: Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, and God help us all Margaret Thatcher. Wow. That’s some list. A classical lyric poet who may or may not have ever been married and had a child, a nun and leader of a religious order for women, a famously unwed queen often referred to as “the Virgin Queen”, a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym and who had a long-standing relationship with a married man, and the first female to serve as leader of the Conservative Party and as British Prime Minister—fondly and sometimes not so fondly known as the “Iron Lady”. Do any of these women strike you as either stupid or without personal weaknesses?

Yes, Allen professes to admire these women, but she then quickly dismisses them as “brilliant outliers” who are apparently, in her view, completely uncharacteristic of the female sex. WTF? Are we to dismiss all brilliant historical figures, of either sex, as freakish mutants?

In the end, Allen’s piece makes little sense to me except as thinly disguised political axe-grinding. And as silly as I find grown women shrieking at anything, much less a political candidate, I find Allen’s misogynistic political doubletalk a hundred times more hateful. After all, presumably the silly shrieking is both spontaneous and innocent.

The only female idiocy Allen proved was her own—she can’t even construct a coherent paragraph.

Yeesh.

Um yeah.  I can’t stand it when some women and girls seem to think that if they repeat all the sexist crap we all hear, then the Menz and Boyz will like them.

And on intelligence… from what I’ve heard only about half of it (whatever it is defined to be) is genetic.  So just as much of it depends upon environmental factors as it does on genetics. 

And how does she jive this deranged concept of her’s with the supposed ‘boys’ crisis’, you know that involves how apparently girls are academically outperforming boys…

Heh my robot-stumping word is ‘evidence33’.  Now that is exciting.

Kind of an outside point, but it occurred to me that, what with all of the huge crowds at Obama rallies, the long waits, heat, stuffiness and probable lack of good refreshments,  as well as whatever health problems (diabetes, heart issues, etc.) it is no wonder that 5 people have fainted during his speeches.  I imagine there have been other medical incidents as well.  How silly to assume it’s due to some sort of “hysteria.”  Oh, and while George Eliot is certainly someone worthy of admiration, her personal life was not the most successful, either.  We’re all brilliant, we’re all goofy, we’re all in this together.  Chill out, Char….and I hope you don’t have daughters.

spaminator—done32…yeah, girl scout cookies.  thin mints. tonight.  really regretting it.

Wow. Combine that with this column from the LA Times—http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-stein29feb29,0,3354996.column—and you might give yourself a heart attack. At least the Times piece seems like it was meant as satire. Badly written satire, but still.

Jen,

Just read Stein’s little noise, and this last bit is really something:Will a female vice president really satisfy women? Of course not. But what does?

“But what does?”

Not him, evidently, if he has to ask that question.

I will admit to finding it a little bit funny, mainly because I don’t get the whole Grey’s Anatomy thing (I think Sandra Oh is probably a lovely person and I wish her well, and several of my female friends are Grey’s addicts, but… not for me, is all) and because I am a pretty crap driver.  Also, the part about “coasting” on verbal skills and quick memorization?  I still feel that way, and I’m in my third year of graduate school.  At a technical university.  So I could identify with the rant, even though I wouldn’t have written it.

Not sure why it ended up on Arts & Letters Daily, though.  (If you’re messing around with AL&D today, the piece on European ethnonationalism is *much* better.)

Anyway.  It is not worth giving poor self-hating Charlotte Allen any further publicity, I think.

‘Twas a joke, I believe.

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=138827

Wow, I can’t believe she resuscitated the hoary “women have smaller brains than men and therefore must be dumber” argument.  I thought that went out with eugenics - and to see it in a “reputable” publication really saddens me.  Someone needs to school her in how brain measurements were used to keep not only women, but also people of color, down for about 100 years.

Charlotte Allen is a cow. Read other articles she’s written and you’ll find further evidence of her cowishness.

This just makes me really, really miss Molly Ivins. You know if she were around, she’d write the most brilliant response. Sigh.

I don’t believe it was a joke, Rebecca. Like the commenter at Romanesko, I think they thought it would engender controversy, but now that it’s blown up in their faces they’re claiming, falsely, that it was meant to be funny all along.

Another point that struck me while reading the article was Allen’s take on men’s mistakes. It seems that men are either perfectly justified in their odd quirks and habits, or manage to fuck up in a large way. But all the behaviors of modern-day women are detrimental to our gender.

Most of the men of my acquaintance do stupid, silly things. I don’t judge their entire genders for that. I don’t even assume that they are stupid or ignorant because of their behaviors. But they generally don’t do “catastrophically dumb” things either.

Most of the women of my acquaintance do stupid, silly things. Must I judge our entire gender because of that. These women also avoid catastrophically dumb behaviors. Why is she making excuses for men being human, with varied tastes and foibles, but she’s bringing down an entire gender when women do the same thing?

I’m a noob to this blog but I’m loving it!

Bec, thanks for posting the Poynter link.

The piece is good. Did you read any of the comments below?

Apparently, it was meant as a tongue-in-cheek comment, but as poster .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) wrote,“Do you even know who Charlotte Allen is? That’s like David Duke asking to write a tongue-in-cheek article about the inferiority of African Americans.”

Teresa posted this on Poynter,“Hey Micheal—Jay Newton-Small a female reporter at Time Magazine posted this yesterday in responce to the Allen piece: “And five women fainting at rallies in six months is hardly empirical evidence ? I?ve seen nearly that number of men collapse in that time of heat exhaustion or just from standing on their feet for the hours it sometimes takes when a candidate is running late. Also, covering Bush?s reelection in 2004 I saw plenty of folks in the Bible Belt who actually did faint, male and female alike, from the near-ecstatic religious experience of George W. Bush. Hell, when I was in intern at NBC I saw women faint when they got to see the Rosie O?Donnell Show live ? how sad it that? So to use five women fainting as an example of hysteria for Obama is just silly. Look at the polls: there?s more MALE Obamamania than female. Does that make them dumb, too?” http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/03/outrageous.html#comments I think she makes some great points—points that would make a great Politico article. Why is fainting at Obama events being used to push a story about hysterical women when it is a frequent occurence at many political events?”

There’s more good comments as well as links to the Jezebel rebuttal, and more rebuttals and excoriations

We should all write in to WaPo. I think that WaPo needs to get buried in mail for this stupid, stupid editorial decision. The WaPo opinion editor is being completely disingenuous about his decision to run it.

I agree with another poster on the Poynter page, if that had been a screed on Blacks, or Christians, or Muslims, or any other minority, it would Never have been run.

I posted Charlotte Allen’s rep’s address and fax as well as the Post’s comment invite in a previous post.

Here’s how the WaPo Ombudsman feedback page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/opinions/feedback/

I think Allen wrote a poorly written article on an interesting and certainly valid subject. I read it and fail to see what shocks everyone. Rather, I think that she brings up some good points (Grey’s Anatomy, really? It’s a bunch of selfish morons sleeping with each other like that’s their job and not saving people’s lives) and they are definitely worth discussing.
One problem is that Allen focuses too much on women being dumb, rather than them being different. In my first Psychology class, I learned that intelligence testing doesn’t work because there are SO MANY DIFFERENT forms of intelligence. For example, creative genius isn’t measured on an IQ test. The idea of Allen “coasting” on her skills is stupid. Why should memory and verbal skills be worth less than whatever men have? They are just different.
And I really -don’t kills me, please!- applauded what she said about women enjoying our innate abilities. One problem I see with modern feminism is that it often consists of women trying to imitate men, to take on the roles and traits that men once had (to be aggressive and often emotionally detached) rather than celebrating what makes women women (true feminism). Sure there are women who don’t like kids and can’t home-ify anything, but more women can than men. And although yes, Sarah, men are often wonderful fathers, their fathering is different from women’s mothering.
The main problem with Allen’s article (apart from the anger and hate, of course) is that she reviles our differences rather than celebrating them. That is ALWAYS a problem. I’ll point out, though, that at the end she does say (I think ??) that we should enjoy these differences and NOT be embarrassed to read romance novels. Which would be sweet…

My biggest problem (of several, most of which have been covered by some other smart bitches already) is that I don’t see what point Allen’s trying to make. 

Women make themselves look dumb, or are dumb, because of what some of us read, or watch on TV, or how some of us drive?  But wait, we ARE dumb, so we should relax and enjoy it and read those chick-lit books? 

Women and men are different, and mostly that means men are better, and while we shouldn’t stand in the way of the occasional woman who is good at that “man stuff,” we shouldn’t expect or press for equal numbers, because we’re just too different?  Oh yeah, and gay men have the same brains as women?

WTF???  I’m a writer, and an editor, and a teacher of communication, for F’s sake, and I can’t tell what this woman’s thesis is, at all.  If she’s trying to make me feel “kind of dim” because I don’t understand her poor writing, it’s NOT WORKING.

Whew.  Rant over.  Gee, you were right about the blood pressure warning….

I’ve got one thing to say and it’s not pertaining to the article, though she’s a moron….

Jackass has NOTHING.

You haven’t seen anything until you’ve watched a couple episodes of Dicking Around. It’s this small group of guys living in a small village in Scotland and these guys do the weirdest stuff to alleviate their boredom and to show off to movie execs for the hope of becoming stunt men. No kidding; I watched them as they reenacted that one scene from Thelma and Louis and hurled themselves over a cliff/hill as the guys on the top threw eggs at them and whatever else. Another instance was when they built this box from wood or particle board and each took turns sitting under it as the guys set it on fire. Another instance was where they set up a bunch of cardboard boxes and one guy had to tackle and jump at each box until he landed on someone.

This is outside of the other stuff they’re shown doing, such as throwing darts at each other’s butts or something, or using a stapler gun on each other. @.@

Oh, by the way, I think that Sarah should take another look at Morgellon’s disease. It’s, how can I put this, not a real disease. Most likely, people who claim to have it are suffering from some other condition that makes them itch, and focus on the “fibers” they find on themselves to the extent that they don’t let the doctors treat them for whatever they really have.

Sigh. I don’t know.
I feel as if this article should provoke me to rage, but I kind of feel like patting the author on the head and maybe giving her a cookie. I can’t even take her seriously enough to work up a reaction.

Then again maybe I should stay home today and cook something nice before curling up with some chick lit.
The Maths doctorate I’m working on can surely wait.

The brains of Neanderthals were larger than those of modern men. I’m just sayin’.

“Sure there are women who don’t like kids and can’t home-ify anything, but more women can than men. And although yes, Sarah, men are often wonderful fathers, their fathering is different from women’s mothering. “

Right, and that’s all totally “innate” and not at all due to socialisation. *eyeroll*

Here we have a perfect example of someone who is trying so hard to sound smart that she forgets to use that lump of material between her ears and actually BE smart.

Oh, and I will go ahead and solve the mystery about why women get into more car accidents than men right here and now.  It is because we generally are more likely to be driving the kids around than the men are and those little fuckers are distracting (I say with a heart full of maternal love and pride.)

Don’t you make me stop this car or I’ll…

Wow, she’s one unhappy woman.  But she doesn’t know it yet.  Maybe she should read a nice book and let her overworked brain relax…

spam blocker: hell53
No wonder my life’s been so difficult lately - I’m in the 53rd layer of hell.  (I was in the 52nd layer until I read that article.)

Dude, Sappho couldn’t have been that smart - I hear she hung out with a lot of women…
Do any of y’all remmeber the talking barbie doll? You pressed a little button on her back and she said, no joke, “Math is hard. Let’s go to the mall.” I know this because many years ago, I saw a girl of maybe five playing with her. I’m sure that girl now watches Grey’s Anatomy and shops compulsively and can’t do math. Because, you know, she’s just wired that way. That shit’s INNATE.

*is speechless*

That article is wrong on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin. I’d tear it apart, but it does that very neatly on its own…

Just wanted to completely agree with Grace, about socialisation. I also agree that men and women are different biologically, but hang on, the meaning we ascribe to that is socially constructed, as is the whole process of researching it. You go looking for something that sparked your interest, and then draw conclusions from it, which are always heavily informed by your socialisation and knowledge.

As far as I remember one of my anthropology professors once claimed mitochondrial DNA was discovered by Jewish scientists because within the context of Judaism, faith is inherited via the mother, so it made perfect sense to go looking for genetic material only passed on via the female line (please, by all means do correct me if I’m wrong). My professor used that to illustrate how research is influenced by social environments and beliefs, but the meaning depends on the context in which one wants to see the findings.

So, men and women are different, great observation! So? It’s a bit of a stretch of the imagination, in my books, to go from that ground-breaking observation to ascribing anything. Sorry, and far as I can see, men and women are a lot more similar than they’re different anynway, so I don’t buy it…

...or is that because I’m a woman and hence too dumb, to get the wonderful connection between my x-chromosomes and my dumbness? I should find a man to explain it all to me, and stop getting my knickers into a twist. ;-)

Alice,

The reason this sort of thinking is so pernicious (besides the fact that it’s wrong) is because it’s in service of nothing less than maintaining the ages old oppression of women.

Yes, women are the only sex who reproduce. But if you look at various primitive communal societies you see that while women played a different economic role (gathering instead of hunting for example) they weren’t seen as inferior, weaker, stupider, whatever – women held leadership roles and, in matrilineal societies, most group leaders *were women,* believed to posess all the qualities necessary, including intelligence!

The important thing to understand is *why* do different cultures promote different views of people? Look at racism – it’s obvious that, in a system based on the exploitation of a group of people, certain philosophies arise, either consciously or unconsciously, to justify that exploitation. Or religious persecution – when religion is one of main the ways a ruling class justifies and enforces its rule it’s going to persecute people whose differing beliefs undermine that method of control, that religion.

The history of the oppression of women goes back even further than slavery, back to when property first became an issue. In primitive communal societies people basically have just what they need to survive – there’s no property to speak of, nothing for men to pass on to “their” children. It was only technology had advanced enough for people to accumulate “stuff” that it even mattered who a woman’s child was – until then, children “belonged” to the tribe (not that there was even a concept of people being property, similar to how some Native American groups couldn’t conceive of land as some individual’s property).

Once it became important to ensure that men were passing on their property to “their” children the legal and social culture of these new property based societies had to change. All the ideas promoted – that women are stupid, weak-minded, emotional, whatever – are just this society’s way of justifying the world’s oldest, and most obstinate, form of oppression. Let’s shake ourselves free from all those old, enslaving lies.

One problem I see with modern feminism is that it often consists of women trying to imitate men, to take on the roles and traits that men once had (to be aggressive and often emotionally detached) rather than celebrating what makes women women (true feminism).

I don’t see that as the definition of ‘true feminism’.  First, because my view of feminism is that it’s about treating women equally to men, and it’s about not buying into false distinctions between men and women. 

Second, because it’s too subjective to convey much meaning (aside from biological differences, what does make women women?).  Also, I’m suspicious it could lead to a kind of faux-feminism, where I’m encouraged to celebrate having babies because it’s ‘womanly’ and therefore ‘true feminism’ but where I’m not encouraged to celebrate being seriously fucking furious at discrimination because that’s ‘aggressive’ and therefore a ‘manly trait’.

I realise that no one on this thread has said that, but it is what I’m suspcious of the moment I see phrases like ‘women being women’.

And that’s as articulate as I can manage right now.  Mostly because I read that article on Morgellon’s and am now itching all over.  Yes, I am overly suggestible.

I have to post this, and I’m not even done reading the whole article yet:

If she thinks women are some sort of degenerate humanity because we scream and swoon at Obama (or insert male of personal preference), obviously she’s never witnessed a man rendered speechless and drooling by the sight of a large pair of breasts on a random female. :-p

How Victorian of her, to assume that if the woman isn’t heartlessly, militantly prudish and/or uptight and ruthless, she’s the weaker of the sexes! Men are allowed their freedom to be stupid around beautiful women, why can’t women get goofy around beautiful men? Unfair!

My spaminator word: freedom49. Yes, freedom!

And am I the only one itching after reading that Morgellons article?

Whether or not you regard it as a disease is dependent on how you define disease—is it a figment of their imaginations? Maybe. But having constant hallucinations and chronic itching (which can drive one mad—I had a friend who had all over itching with no cause for a year, and she almost killed herself) is, forgive me for being pedantic, a disease of some sort, even if only a psychiatric disease.

Yes, it may only be in their minds, but if the mind is malfunctioning enough to create such dis-ease in the body, why is that less important/valid than an infection or a bug or a parasite that you can find absolute, cold, scientific proof of?

If there is something in your person malfunctioning enough to make you stop sleeping, you have a disease. It’s all a question of where it is coming from, and how it can be stopped.

Kaite- if you’re a man, hence reasonable, you’ll realize that if there is no solidly identifiable reason why you’re itching, so you’ll deduce that the itching cannot possibly be, and will stop itching immediately ;-)

At least that’s how I understood Ms Allen’s take on it…

Talk about a throwback, why doesnt she just come out and say that all women should be at home barefoot and pregnant since it seems thats all we are good for.

o_O
Oooookay. One gets the feeling she has issues dating from grade school here. 

Hey, my Bot Defeating Secret Password is COMES64!
LOLOL!!! The blog said “comes”
[/12-year-old moment]

Me too, Kaite.  Hours later, and I’m still itching.

I don’t know, the fainting thing makes me think WTF?  It does feel like a throw back to the Beatles or Elvis.  Maybe people (and not just women) are fainting at rallies for other candidates and it’s just not being reported. Either way I think it does make women look silly when reported as it is currently.

Charlotte Vale Allen she ain’t.  According to her website

(http://www.charlottevaleallen.com/),

it seems unlikely, and not only because of the difference between the photos.  Also, CVA’s not writing these days because publishers aren’t interested; and one of her books (and a companion workbook) deals with being molested by her father as as a child.  Doesn’t sound like she’d have the kind of opinions expressed in the op-ed piece.

NOTE: YOU CAN HAVE AT CHARLOTTE ALLEN LIVE ONLINE!

Agree? Disagree? Think this article should never have been published? Send a response to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and put “Smarter Than You Think” in the subject line. See here for several letters published in the paper on March 4. And click here to submit a question to Charlotte Allen, who will be online to answer questions on March 5 at 2 p.m.

Charlotte Allen is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard, where she held a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. Her articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Monthly, Commentary, The New Republic, City Journal, and The New York Observer. She is a contributing editor of Lingua Franca. 

It was “tongue-in-cheek”?  This reminds me of the nasty old sexist joke about the woman who didn’t know she’d been raped till the check bounced.  If only words of praise had poured in, would they still have claimed she was just kidding?

Check this out, for how men behave around a woman who happens to have (natural) large breasts:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=443855&in_page_id=1879

When my father was deputy commander of Fort Benjamin Harrison, we lived in a set of quarters facing the parade ground, which was handy for him to practice his golf shots.  Sometimes they would actually parade the troops there; and in hot Indiana summer weather we’d see the soldiers (well, clerks) dropping like flies.

Must go now—I have to bake cookies, knit an Afghan (or possibly an Iraqi) and acquire 50 more cats.  ‘Cause I’m a WOMAN—D-I-M-W-I-T..

WV—power93 Right on, sistahs!

One problem I see with modern feminism is that it often consists of women trying to imitate men, to take on the roles and traits that men once had (to be aggressive and often emotionally detached) rather than celebrating what makes women women (true feminism).

I’m a butch dyke, and I truly enjoy celebrating what makes women women. But I suspect, Alice, people like you would consider people like me to be “imitating men” (no thank you, I think they have more screwed-up social expectations than women do these days), and that in my job as a systems administrator, and pleasure I get out of being with my gorgeous girlfriend (but not watching sports!), I “take on the roles and traits that men once had”. Actually, no, I am engaging in productive work, and paying for the roof over my head without depending on anyone to do it for me. I value the people in my life for who they are, not the fact they can provide me with a paycheck.

I also don’t think “what makes women women” is about popping out sprogs (although parenting can be part of what makes both men and women… men and women) or making a nice home or wearing skirts. That’s great if you want to do it - but it’s about wanting  to do it. People like me, who don’t want to do those things, and who would look bizarre trying, should not be forced to do so, or to be told they are not true women (which was implied).

Just the other day, I was thinking about my writing experiences (romance (sold), mystery (agent hasn’t even seen it), and thought, “Romance is the hardest thing hard to write.” Take away the requirement to focus on the developing relationship between two people, and you are free to frolic through the gardens of random plot points and umpteen secondary characters. Stuck? Have a bomb go off! Need a reason for your character to do something? Have his father show up unexpectedly and take up a whole chapter. You can’t get away with any of that in a romance. Your characters must be on the page, moving the lurrrve forward while dealing with external plot points.

It’s hard.

Jamie…don’t get me started on the subject of male/female disparity in colleges.  Generally, university students tend to be female, some campuses by as much as 70 - 80%.  And it has nothing to do with intelligence.

There was an old inscription at the entrance of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery that read: A thousand monks, a thousand religions.  I’ve always taken that to mean ‘one size does not fit all’, and that with was recognised, accepted, and respected - even within the framework of religion.  And I see feminism the same way -

- it isn’t a life-style.  It’s a one-size-does-not-fit-all personal belief system that one adopts and then adapts in order to have a richer and freer life experience.  Not everyone needs the same things from feminism, and not everyone will contribute the same things to feminism. 

To my mind, true feminism advocates that each woman live her own life as she wants, not what anyone else expects or demands of her, including other women.  Maybe that sounds selfish - but it’s no more selfish than what most men* demand from their own lives.

It’s more than what sex body you’re living in, or what gender you’re presenting to the mirror and the rest of the world.  I don’t see feminism as a political construct, I see it as a philosophy that buttresses my life.

And what the hell is it with that human propensity to want to shoe-horn everything into pigeon holes, and then allow no wiggle room for individuality?  If I had to define feminism, I’d define it as ‘inviolable personal sovereignty’ - for everyone, regardless of gender or sex.

I’m one of the original bra-burners, who got sent home from grammar school, and then high school, with nasty notes scolding me for wearing pants or jeans to school instead of skirts or dresses [hey, I like pockets but I hate purses].  All this coming from an androgynous, heterosexual, middle-aged tomboy, hippie, lover, wife, mom, mom-in-law who refuses to live her life by anyone else’s dictates.

When I dress in jeans, boots, and blazers - wearing a wallet instead of a purse - I’m not imitating a man.  I’m being me.  Those who are offended by that may cross the street to avoid me, if they so wish - if they’re that petty, I don’t need them in my life experience.

Why should I let anyone living outside of my skin define my reality?  [And I’m uber pissed off by the swelling cancers that are ‘micro-management’ and ‘political correctness’ within the US.]

^^^^^ gnashing of teeth ^^^^^

I *so* need Annie Lennox to do her version of “My Way” for my personal anthem.

. . .

Whew, off on another tear - think I’ll put some of this on my blog, just to remind myself.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
*Of my personal acquaintance,that is.

I looked in upon Charlotte Allen’s live chat at WaPo.  Most of her responses are glib, Magic Anti-Feminist 8-Ball responses.  However, her response to the question of “How can you not understand why women would be upset?  What if it had been We Scream, We Swoon.  How Dumb Can African-Americans Get?” caught my eye:

Women aren’t a historically oppressed minority; they’re half the population or more!

I guess the sticking point is the word, “minority”, as opposed to “historically oppressed”.  Or perhaps she doesn’t consider having no right to work, no right to vote, no control over your own body, no property rights, no parental rights in case of divorce, no choice in whom you marry, rape, and genital mutilation as examples of “historical oppression”.  Of course, depending where you live and what religion you’re raised in, these things aren’t so historical.

What a tool.

XKCD did this one a few days ago…

http://xkcd.com/385/

Unfortunately, that really is how it works.

Oops. I didn’t realize when I wrote a couple days ago that my argument was based on something about which not everyone agrees with me. The thing is, I do think many differences between men and women ARE innate. Not all… skirts no, the color pink probably not. But the nurturing and the nesting and all that: I think it’s based in biological sex. That doesn’t mean that it is true for ALL women… environment factors into that, and other genes and about a million different things. I do think that many things are biologically linked to sex.
It’s just a different opinion and I respect that some people believe it’s socialized, even if I disagree. I just believe it so deeply that I took for granted that other people thought so, too. My apologies. But rather than rolling eyes, perhaps an “I do not think that those things are biological” would have been in order…  Perhaps?

“As far as I remember one of my anthropology professors once claimed mitochondrial DNA was discovered by Jewish scientists because within the context of Judaism, faith is inherited via the mother, so it made perfect sense to go looking for genetic material only passed on via the female line (please, by all means do correct me if I’m wrong).”

Sorry, but it was a Swiss scientist, Gottfried Schatz, who discovered mitochondrial DNA, and he himself says “it was prompted by a wrong hypothesis” that he was actually trying to prove correct.

And Alice, you might examine your beliefs from the standpoint of mythology. I know plenty of women who kill houseplants and don’t care for children, puppies, and kittens any better than men do, and they hire cleaning women to boot.

In the animal world, new mothers often lose babies because they don’t know how to mother, which implies that nurturing is a learned rather than an innate ability.

For myself, I would have 10 times rather gotten a chemistry set or Tinkertoys like my brother’s for Christmas than all the dolls I got stuck with as a child.

Now I am partnered with someone whose mother never taught him how to take care of himself because OF COURSE he’d find a wife to do it for him, so he can’t sew a button or cook worth sh*t (except as far as I’ve taught him).

All you ladies with sons, please teach them basic skills like sewing and cooking, and teach your girl children how to hammer a nail and change a tire. All that stuff is Adult Life Skills, and everybody needs them.

Mythology—an excellent point.  But, wow, remember Medea?

Alice, many behaviours are indeed linked to the person’s physiological sex.  Many of those can be overridden, though, not only by early environment, but also by the brain’s hardwiring of the given individual. 

And let us not forget the strength—and stubbornness—of self-determination.  The rocky road to full selfhood often begins in rebellion against an offending and oppressing status quo.

For year [and years] I felt like some kind of freak for not being a ‘typical woman’ [whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean].  And then I discovered I’m an eNtp personality type, and within that context I’m ‘perfectly normal’ [whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, too].  The females of this personality type—regardless of her sexual orientation—tend to exhibit behaviours and/or modes of thought that most folks feel rightfully belongs to the domain of males. 

Some, men and women alike, feel threatened by this—why?  I don’t frakkin’ know.  My guess is that they are labouring under preconceived notions, and they don’t like having their safe and comfy paradigms challenged.

evidence19—hurh!

There is an apparent trend in which newspapers and news shows hide their misogyny behind skirts. They publish and air the most sexist and disgusting tripe. But it is okay, because a woman said it.
The most outrageous is this opinion piece printed in the Wall Street Journal.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008237

Here is a great response.
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/35514/

Dont forget to buy your
http://hillarynutcracker.com/

The Washington Post has a new opinion piece up, answering the Allen piece.

Dumb and Dumber: An Essay and Its Editors

The question is not why Charlotte Allen wrote her silly piece—it’s why The Post published it.

...

As to ‘womanly’ traits and ‘manly’ traits, I’m reminded of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s observation on this.

“Men may cook or weave or dress dolls or hunt humming-birds, but if such activities are appropriate occupations of men, then the whole society, men and women alike, votes them as important. When the same occupations are performed by women, they are regarded as less important.”

Half the defense against sexist bigotry is to point out the obvious truth that both males and females can be brain surgeons.  But the other half is to claim status and prestige for traditional ‘woman’s work’.

Pedantic of me, I’m sure (and late, too), but mental illness of any kind is a real illness - the brain breaks down just like any other organ, and damage at any level, from gross to subatomic, may be responsible for so-called “fake” illnesses.

Societally, we are uncomfortable with people who behave outside the norm, so mental illness has far greater stigma than, say, diabetes, but calling an illness fake simply because the cause and the cure have not been found yet is incorrect.

I’m a statistician for a brain-injury research foundation (yay!  Math!  Yay!  Brains!), and see the result constantly of the prevailing notion that mental illness is not real - people afraid to talk about real issues that are life-altering for fear of losing jobs, losing family, and being labeled negatively.  We can’t help people who won’t come forward, and labeling mental illness as “faking” (as Allen does) discourages more people from trying to get help.

...and if people won’t get help, then I don’t get grant money (joke).  :P

Okay, I’m done now.  :)