women are stupid?

Really, Charlotte Allen, what were you thinking? hilzoy put it nicely:

Note to Charlotte Allen: if you find yourself having to argue that you are an idiot in order to make your case, you might consider the possibility that an idiot like yourself is unlikely to get much right about women, or for that matter about anything.

Two things really bug me about the fact that this piece of shit got published:

1. You know the Post booked her because they wanted controversy for controversy's sake. When an article can be summed up as, "Women are dumb. No really, they are, myself included!" it pretty much has no redeeming qualities. There will be a huge number of letters to the editor over this piece, and then the Post will congratulate itself on addressing such a hot-button issue. Look at the huge volume of reader response! It's sleazy.
   
   I get that papers make all sorts of questionable decisions to increase circulation. (The creation, a few years ago, of an entire section of the newspaper where no news is allowed to appear jumps to mind.) Generally, I don't care that much. (Hey, I like doing the Kakuro puzzle on Sunday mornings.) But, I think the line should probably be drawn at completely illegitimate, factually unsupported, offensive opinions expressed solely to marginalize an entire section of society. Because the thing is, as illegitimate and ridiculous as what she said was, she said it in the Washington Post. And that lends a veneer of credibility to it.
   


2. Which relates to the other reason I'm so pissed off about this. People will believe the most ridiculous, outlandish, obviously false things if you repeat them enough. Politicians do it all the time (Bush is a master at it); If you say the same lie enough times, it starts to sound familiar, and if something sounds familiar, then surely there's at least a *little bit* of truth to it. This is why, for example, some ridiculous percentage of the US population thinks Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11. It's why a lot of South Carolina voters in 2000 thought that John McCain had an illegitimate black daughter, and a lot of voters in 2008 think that maybe Barack Obama might be Muslim. Even though almost everyone who comments on this article will denounce it as nonsense, it still adds to the background noise, and it makes it incrementally more acceptable the next time someone decides to recycle 19th century notions of how women are the stupider sex.
   
   And what's worse is, there's nothing anyone can do to stop her ideas from seeping into the culture. If you address her idiotic arguments point by point, you legitimize them. You concede that what she had to say is worthy of debate. But if you refuse to address her arguments because they're beneath your contempt, then they just stand there, unchallenged.
   

Way to go, Washington Post!

hillary clinton/gloria steinem

So this is a little stale now that Clinton's won the NH primary, but I wanted to talk about Gloria Steinem's op ed endorsing her.

I alternate between liking it a lot and being incredibly frustrated with it.

First she talked about how women need a lot more experience to be considered qualified than men do. She invented "Achola Obama," someone with Barack Obama's experience who was female, to prove her point. I agree that often women do need more experience to be considered qualified than men do, but I don't think either candidate actually has a ton of experience, so I'm not sure it's a relevant point for this race. The example did imply that being a mother with young children would hurt a candidate (why isn't she at home raising them?) while being a father with young children helps him. (aww, isn't his family adorable?) This is completely true. Still not relevant to this particular race, but interesting to consider.

Next she talked about how this election is following the same old pattern. For a while, blacks and women are allies, but then black people break barriers before women do. In a very qualified, wishy-washy way, I agree with her. It's a lot more complicated than that, but it's unquestionably historically true that, for example, black men and women, and white women all worked for suffrage together, but black men got the vote before any women did. But the reason black people achieved those legislative victories first is because they were demonstrably worse off to begin with. Women were not, for example, getting lynched. Discrimination against black people was violent and overt, whereas discrimination against white women was much more subtle and muted, and therefore easier to ignore.

Next she said "sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was." I agree SO MUCH with this. People in the mainstream LOVE to talk about inherent differences between the sexes. Major American newspapers feature stories claiming that women talk more than men, that they have a worse sense of direction than men, that they're worse at science than men, or any other number of poorly supported worn out cliches. Outside of the James Watsons of the world, you do not find people talking about inherent differences between the races because it's offensive and stupid.

She started to lose me when she essentially talked about the ways that sexism is supposed to be worse than racism, though. She said anything that affects males is seen as more serious than things that affect females. I think there's a grain of truth to this, but she's seriously overstating her case. She went on to say powerful women make men regress to childhood, whereas black men are stereotyped as "masculine" so to other men they are masculinity-affirming. When I was writing down my initial thougts on her piece, next to this I wrote, "omg, shut up with the pop psychology, gloria steinem!" It's such a bullshit thing to say. It's a deeply weird argument. The ways that black men have historically been stereotyped as "masculine" are very dehumanizing. They also don't apply to Barack Obama who's a major intellectual (hello, editor of the Harvard Law review). Intellectuals are pansies. we all know that. It's kind of why George W. Bush got elected.

Next, she started to sound like she worked for the Clinton Campaign.

She talked about how abolition and suffrage worked well togetherm so Clinton and Obama have to keep working together. (how DARE he challenge her. he should wait his turn!)

She said Clinton had more experience: look at all that "on the job" training. This is totally overvalued. no doubt, she's been thinking seriously about political issues for a long time and she has the years in the white house to prove that, but you don't need to live in the east wing to think seriously about the issues. the things she actually *did* in the White House after the republicans steamrolled her health care reform are insubstantial.

She said, "What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations."
Okay, maybe. except obama is *very careful* about how much he brings up civil rights. Clinton's trying to be fairly careful too. The "old boy's club" comment, I think was at Wellesley, which means she carefully chose her audience, but I think she's alluded more to how the patriarchy (to use a Smith Scrabble(tm) word) has hurt her in other contexts too. and it has hurt her. but racism's hurt Obama. he's just been savvier about not mentioning it.

Then we get to the weird, unfortunate conclusion:
"What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system."
What a poorly constructed sentence. I had an email conversation with my mother about this line yesterday and we decided what she meant by "deny[ing] or escap[ing] the sexual caste system", to quote my mother is, "the attitude that “This doesn’t apply to me. I will be able to escape this prejudice because of my education, competence, intelligence, good looks, savvy, whatever.” Most young women have not faced overt sexual discrimination and don’t realize how insidious it can be." I get that. I think there is a tendency to either overlook sexism or think of it as an inherent fact of life, not something that can be fought against. but come on. the whole *point* of feminism is ultimately to "escape the sexual caste system."

As is obvious, I'm still not really sure what I think. But it did get me thinking. I recommend it as interesting reading.

women in math and science

3 related things I've been thinking about lately (i.e. they're showing up all over the blogs I read):
1. Why are women underrepresented in science and math? (is there an IQ distribution issue?)
2. Why are black people underrepresented basically everywhere where high academic achievement is important? (again, is there an IQ issue?)
3. Why are republicans underrepresented in academia? (okay, no one's seriously brought up the IQ issue here, but maybe it's because the people bringing up IQ in the other 2 cases are republicans, and they can't be the dumb ones, can they?)

There's way too much here for 1 blog post, so I'm going to focus on females in math and science (obviously the one that relates most to my own life) and maybe, hopefully get back to the other two in later posts.

The IQ issue everyone raises with females in math/science is that IQ testing shows slightly different bell curves for males and females, with slightly more males on the tail ends (in the "genius" and "retarded" categories, basically) and slightly more females clustered around the middle (in the "normal" category). And maybe, since you have to be really really smart to become a math or science professor, and there are just more really really smart males than females, that explains the disparity.

This explanation really makes me uncomfortable. I guess people should be allowed to bring it up as a possible explanation,because it would be pretty closed minded to summarily dismiss an entire avenue of inquiry. On the other hand, it strikes me as too pat, and I deeply suspect that most people championing it are latching on to convenient, plausible "just so" story about why men are superior to women, and that's just the natural order of things, feminists be damned. (On another note, I think this is part of an overall resurgence in the popularity of social darwinism, at least among the republicans who believe still in evolution, to levels that haven't been seen since the late 19th/early 20th century. I think someone could do really well writing a book or an article about this trend.)

Part of it is that I am a smart female seriously considering going into academia in science or math. Even though I went to a women's college, I have in fact, been pre-judged as not quite as smart because I'm female. (Not at Smith, obviously, but at one godawful summer internship at an Ivy League school, for example.) So it really irks me that a theory that basically amounts to, "Hey, maybe we have all these stereotypes about men being smarter than women because men really are smarter!" gets taken seriously. It's not true in my case, so I'm naturally disinclined to think it'd be true in the general case.

Beyond that, it just seems to be the least verifiable theory. Essentially, I think it's what you're left with after you've ruled out all the other possible explanations. And there are a ton of explanations you have to rule out first. An incomplete list:

What does IQ even measure anyway? Arguably, no one really knows. We think it's good at measuring intelligence, but we're not quite sure what intelligence is, and we're also not sure if we're introducing subtle biases into the testing.

What factors other than intelligence affect IQ scores? There's a really interesting blog post explaining a recent paper on the stereotype threat, which we know does affect test scores here. But we also know things like prior education affect IQ scores. So do things like nutrition. And nobody's satisfactorily explained the Flynn effect which is that everyone's IQ scores the world over seem to get higher over time for no apparent reason.

What about other factors that keep women out of academia? That stereotype effect blog post talks about one of them, the self perpetuating stereotype effect that makes women feel less welcome and less capable simly because there are fewer of them. But what about asshole professors and grad students like the one I encountered at my internship? Or what about subtle messages from teachers in the lower grades who encouraged boys more than girls in math class? There are a lot of other things that could be going on.

And the thing is, even if you think IQ is actually good at measuring intelligence, and even if you think it's good at measuring the type of intelligence you need to succeed in science and math, and even if it is true that there are more genius males than females, you still haven't shown that there should necessarily be more men than women in the math/science fields. What if there are diminishing marginal returns for additional intelligence? Maybe having an IQ over 135 is absolutely vital to being able to understand the science you need to succeed, but beyond that, having an IQ of 142 doesn't help you much, while having something like creativity, or enough social skills to collaborate with your peers really would help?

It's hard to know what the real explanations are. I just really hope the IQ determinists are wrong. Luckily, that seems likely.

feminism

So I was going to ridicule this NYT review of a show of feminist art. It starts out pretty terribly. What kind of sentence is this:

The false idea is that there really is such a thing as feminist art, as opposed to art that intentionally or by osmosis reflects or is influenced by feminist thought, of which there is plenty.

You know what I call art influenced by feminism? Feminist art. easy to say, easy to understand, very straightforward.

Anyway, I had a lot more to say on it, and of course I wanted to mention this lovely little sentence,

Study “The Dinner Party” close enough and your bra, if you’re wearing one, may spontaneously combust.

Yes. because feminists burn bras.

But slowly, throughout the review, she started to redeem herself. Don't get me wrong, I still think her writing is unclear, and she did a poor job of articulating any central idea. Still, I couldn't stay too mad, because I fell in love with her last sentence:

The word feminism will be around as long as it is necessary for women to put a name on the sense of assertiveness, confidence and equality that, unnamed, has always been granted men.

First post ever. Maybe the last?

I fully suspect this to become one of the millions of abandoned blogs that now litter the internet. But maybe that won't happen for a while.

To start out with, two public radio-related things that have been bugging me:

• Capitol Steps New Years Show This year one of the local broadcasts of the show got interrupted for the breaking news that Saddam Hussein was about to be hanged. That was freaking annoying. Still, before the broadcast got cut short, they had a parody of "Love Potion no. 9" where Vladimir Putin was singing "Polonium 209." Extremely funny song, but I was wondering this: All the news reports I've seen say that Alexander Litvinenko was killed by radiation from Polonium 210. Was the CapSteps' use of the number 209 simply poetic license, or did their lyrics choice have any scientific merit? I vaguely remember learning about radioactive decay and half lives in high school chemistry. It seems at least plausible that Polonium 210 decays into Polonium 209 and that the radiation that made him sick was simply the emission of whatever subatomic particles are let out in the process. But is this complete bullshit? Probably, but still, I'd like to know for sure.


• Bob Edwards Weekend One of my local stations recently started carrying the show, and I was just listening to it. He's a smart guy, and he interviews smart, interesting people, and he's got a very soothing voice, so it's a great program to have on in the background. Today he had on the author of This Book. As I was half listening to the show she said something that made me yell at the radio. To paraphrase, she was talking about Louisa May Alcott (or Margaret Fuller. like I said, I wasn't paying too much attention.) and saying how much she charmed Thoreau and Emerson with her intellect. Because this was the first time they'd met a woman this smart--one who could talk to them like a man. Nowadays, apparently, there are a lot of really smart women like that, but back in the 19th century, there weren't.
  
  I'm going to give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume she misspoke, but to state the obvious, of COURSE there were plenty of intelligent women in the 19th century. There just weren't too many of them hanging around Ivy League universities, feeling comfortable enough in their own social standing to risk societal ostracism (with likely dire financial consequences) by engaging in arguments with their male intellectual equals.
  
  What pissed me off so much though, is that I think people actually believe what the author said. I think people actually accept that the reason the vast majority of "Great Books" we read in schools are written by dead, European males is because they were the ones doing all the important thinking of the time. Maybe now things have changed and women and minorities can be intellectuals, but before, they just. weren't. smart. enough. And the fact that this obviously intelligent woman had unconsciously internalized this absurd misogynist nonsense has me a little worried.