Yes, the Washington Post did just publish this…
What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?
…amazingly insulting column by Charlotte Allen…
The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents — is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men’s and women’s brains not only look different, but men’s brains are bigger than women’s (even adjusting for men’s generally bigger body size)…
…So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.
…headlined We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get? If Allen had restricted her analysis to herself and the editors at the Washington Post, I’d be inclined to agree with them.
Thanks for reading that, BooMan, so I don’t have to. I would have been inclined to want to kick some serious ass.
Having a perfectly nice Sunday morning, and all.
but don’t miss this:
Detecting snark in this day and age is truly becoming an artform.
Snark perhaps? Ugh, I guess not.
not a touch of snark to it.
What you mean “we,” white woman?
Dim.
AG
I read that last night and thought … this must be snark. Then I read it again.
When she wrote this:
I thought – just take out the word “female” and you have it. You are mentally deficient. The rest of us, male and female, shouldn’t be have to encounter you.
That’s nothing. Anyone see this month’s special “Women’s History Month” issue of The Beast?
Oh yeah. The Beast is satire. The Washington Post is “Serious Journamalism.” Hmmm…
No, it’s not April 1st. And I don’t think it’s National-Editors-Get-The-Day-Off day. I guess it must all be true.
Seriously, though. The comments on that Washington Post piece are probably the best entertainment of the week.
ho. lee. shit.
That is some pretty wanktastic wanking.
I can’t speak for women in general, but Charlotte Allen is definitely dumb. And if I was a women, i wouldn’t want someone that stupid speaking for me, anymore than I like Larry the Cable Guy as the representative male.
No if you’ll pardon me, I have to open the blinds and get back to cleaning my house. I don’t know whether Ms. Allen has ever lived with a man, but we do that kind of thing once in awhile, even when one of those dumb broads isn’t nagging at us.
Speak for yourself, Charlotte.
That’s one of the most insulting things I’ve read in a while. Since she is so incapable and lacking in intelligence, I think she should give up her job and go redecorate her living room.
Unbelievable. She obviously has never met and doesn’t know the hundreds of amazingly bright, intelligent, competent and feeling/nurturing women I know and have met all over this country.
Makes me wonder why I don’t have a job as a columnist on some prominent national newspaper.
Go figure.
It’s pretty insulting to men too. Viva la sterotypes.
Damn. Excuse me while I go tell my 11 year old high school junior, college physics taking daughter that she’s really a fucking idiot at heart.
Am I the only one who found the Obama/Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton cartoon on last night’s SNL extremely racist? WTF
I daresay that now all the women (perhaps most) who would have read her article will pick Clinton. Dim? Or not? A very interesting dilemna to say the least.
Charlotte went on for a paragraph or two about how Hillary has been projecting the very worst female stereotypes. Are you thinking reverse psychology? Because this woman wrote about Hillary whining, crying, waffling, and being dependent on her husband, you think woman reading this will feel inclined to vote for her?
On the other hand, she said how stupid and silly women are to shriek and faint in the presence of Obama. So maybe the message is, “Stay home, ladies, and let superior men do the deciding.”
Ha, that was my second thought also after wondering if this steaming pile of garbage was actually some outlandish satire from the Onion.
Frightening!
Not fit to wrap up discarded fish bones, either…
This link should get you to the abstract of a recent finding where 10hrs of training on a particular video game removed a prior gender difference in spatial cognition.
Ms. Allen might want to know that women living, on average, longer than men is a pretty recent development, certainly as far as evolution goes.
There’s plenty of evidence out there that men and women are constructed somewhat differently, and heaps of evidence that we can use our differing construction set-ups to be equally competent at all sorts of activities. Nice how she just waves around “standardized testing” blah blah with no specifics. I hope some actual scientists in the field get mad enough to write some primo letters to the editor, not that the Post is worth it these days! I would like to roll up a copy and belabor Ms. Allen with it, given the trouble I go to to convince my female students that they can do quantitative analysis… which they then prove to themselves, maypo-brains be darned!
Please forgive a long quote, but for anyone interested, the whole article is worth a look: (If the link doesn’t work, it’s called “Teaching Boys and Girls Separately” and it’s in today’s NYT Magazine)
Is she some next generation Phyllis Schlafly?
Wow, “amply supported,” wow! I can’t even begin to comprehend what she regards as ample support. I won’t try to address this issue as if it’s intended as a serious commentary. I will, however, recommend the Mismeasure of Man [link below](yes, it is sexist, and Gould explains why in his intro). I also recommend any works by Howard Gardner and the work of Project Zero on the topic of intelligence.
Agitprop crap. My tack would be to call attention to the obvious intentions of the author. There is no basis for her contention — absolutely none. She should be called on her nefarious intent. There is no place for civility with pond slime of this type.
BTW — this argument has been turned on it’s head lately. Currently, there are far more women in college than men. We’ve been hearing the “dumb white male” stereotype a lot lately.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
Gardner: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/index.cfm
well, not that it constrains the individual in any way, there are both morphological, behavioral and cognitive differences between the ‘average’ man and the ‘average’ woman, whoever the hell they are. I’ve never met one. Problem is that you can reliably pick anyone at random and find that they have many traits that vary in the extreme from these ‘averages’.
No duh, right? So why does this sort of specious argument upset us? Because we know a lot of people actually end up believing this stuff, especially if they hold the WaPo in high esteem.
But.. We’re never going to be able to realistically defend dumbasses from falling for bullhokum or prevent it’s production and at the same time keep freedom of speech and press intact.
IMHO, The work that needs to be done in educating is not as much the specific facts to defend oneself against this sort of stuff (info/time overload), but rather how to identify the nature of these arguments and discount them appropriately with or with your own list of test results and studies, etc.
But sometime it’s just nice to get livid and be reminded why we do indeed need the Department of Education.
That could easily be asked of the Wash Post’s editors.
IMHO, just as it is ridiculous to assume the ‘average’ traits of a vast population somehow constrain the traits of an individual of that population, it’s also probably not worth getting too exorcised about a paper based on the work of a columnist, who are journalists only in that their works are found in newsprint and who gain employment not because of their integrity, but their popularity.
I love it when journalists cite “science”. There are some good science journalists out there, but for the most part, journalists — and liberal arts majors in general — are terribly ill-equipped to deal with science. They neither understand scientific method nor have the technical background to evaluate most of the science they report on. It’s a major failing of our educational system that people are able to obtain college degrees without ever having studied, much less grasped, the fundamental knowledge upon which modern civilization is built.
As far as the relative intelligence of men and women go, there are some well-established differences in thinking styles, but I have yet to see any definitive proof that any of those differences are independent of social conditioning. Due to lifelong neuroplasticity, the human brain changes its own structure in response to the uses to which it is habitually put. Drawing sweeping conclusions from examinations of the brains of a handful of people from a single culture — and it’s usually more specific than that: college students are the most common guinea pig for these studies — is a very risky affair. Moreover, scientific studies of female biology have been few and far between. It’s been less than a decade, for example, since biologists actually figured out when in their cycle women actually ovulate. If the state of the art is that rudimentary, I’d take any discussion of something as complicated as brain structure with a grain of salt the size of Manhattan.
All that said, I think we can conclude with a high degree of confidence that Charlotte Allen is — if I may resort to technical jargon here — a fucking dipshit.
Wow. Perhaps some Wollstonecraft is in order?