Undecided? You might be wrong about that. August 22, 2008

 From the AAAS’s Science,** (ht to the NY Times):  People who declare themselves undecided may have non-conscious biases that are inclining them to a particular decision:

When deciding between choices, people usually feel as if they’re completely in control. They evaluate the criteria and weigh the available information before committing. And when that information doesn’t seem to tip the balance, they report that they are undecided. But psychologists know that decision-making is strongly affected by the unconscious mind. Might the unconscious mind of an undecided person already know what it will choose?

The answer is “Yes.”  By using an implicit associations test, the researchers were able to predict the undecideds decisions with 70% accuracy. 

So is this news to any feminist who has watched supposedly neutral people decide admissions, prizes or jobs?  Probably not.  But there are at least two points here worth noting:  Now when a colleague talks about neurtrality, we can whip out Science!  And it’s strong and recent evidence that the implicit association tests are connected to actual decisions. 

For standard implicit association tests, try here.

(Note:  for accuracy’s sake, I should note that the Times reports the study as principally concerned with the difference between people who could decide on examining the evidence and those whom the evidence left undecided.  I read the report just as I was thinking of how I could convince a group of people to take seriously the idea that they might really be bigots (of the nicest, least conscious sort, of course).  Hence, my take concerns evidence of bias of which one is not aware.)

**This is a press release; an editorial and the actual study require subscription or library access.

The Sunday Boxing Cat revealed August 17, 2008

We (or I) do work to vet (nb) our Sunday cats.  The boxing cat has presented a problem.  The cat clearly deserves support, but not all is at it may seem.  Hence, we decided to post the video and then reveal to our readers the fact that this is a professional cat.  Thus:

An Olympic Tragedy: A Clarification August 14, 2008

The opening ceremony in Beijing was to feature one solo dance, performed by one of China’s top classical dances, Liu Yan.  According to the NY Times:  

But on July 27, during an evening rehearsal at Beijing’s National Stadium, the so-called Bird’s Nest, she leaped toward a platform that malfunctioned and plunged about 10 feet into a shaft, landing on her back, according to family members.

She was rushed to a local military hospital and underwent six hours of surgery but suffers from nerve and spinal damage.

…

Doctors have told her family it is unlikely she will ever walk again.

There are some tapes of her performances on youtube:

Does calling this accident a tragedy mean  that somehow her life  is over or worthless?  I hope no one would advance that interpretation, but since one disability theorist reads it that way, let me clarify.  Liu Yan reached a high stage of professional accomplishment.  That is the sort of achievement many of us strive for, and others certainly admire.  Her achievement took many years of extremely dedicated effort.  She deserved to have the career she was engaged in, and she now cannot have it, at least as she imagined it before her accident, the indications  are. That is tragic. It does not mean her life is over or worthless.

I haven’t read Dan Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness, but I’ve read some of his academic papers and invited him to my university for a talk and workshop.  If you are tempted to think something like “if you can’t walk your life is over,” or “if someone dedicated to ballet can’t dance her life is over,” then I strongly recommend reading his  work.  This also goes for “I can’t live without her/him” (just in case someone might think that).  In general, Gilbert convincingly argues, we have little idea of actual human resiliency. 

Liu Yan has to be a remarkable person, and there are many futures open to her.  Obviously.

(Gilbert, perhaps I should add, is a serious Harvard psych prof, not a self-help guru.)

If contraception is abortion… August 14, 2008

then so are breastfeeding and exercise. William Saletan at Slate draws out the consequences of the proposed definition of ‘abortion’. A sample:

Thousands of people working at hospitals, lactation centers, maternity-product retailers, drug stores, and supermarkets are presently required by their employers to participate in breast-feeding, either by teaching it or by providing products that facilitate it. Those who refuse can be terminated at will. They endure this discrimination despite clear scientific evidence that breast-feeding poses the same abortifacient risk as oral contraception.

Thanks, Rachel!

Contraception is not abortion August 13, 2008

And other obvious truths. Sadly, not so obvious to the Bush administration. Go here to sign a petition reminding them.

The importance of actually looking at statistics August 11, 2008

Pretty much everyone in the UK thinks that youth violence is on the rise, and that knife crime* in particular is reaching newly epidemic proportions and requires a crack-down. But guess what? Looks like that might be totally wrong. Apparently 40 years ago, kids were far more likely to carry knives, and also far more likely to be victims of violent assaults. They also used more drugs. The only “moral panic” issue on which today’s kids rate higher is having sex. (A note: I’ve never heard to the publication that the article is in, and there are many things about the article that would have made me distrust the source. However, it was cited on the BBC’s Broadcasting House radio programme, so that’s at least some reason to trust it.)

*Yes, knife crime, you culture-shocked Americans! We’ve got serious gun control laws here.

“Who do you think you are?” August 9, 2008

Human beings go in for the fundamental attribution error.  Given the task of explaining someone’s actions, we tend to pin it on character, not circumstances.  Sometimes with deadly effects.

Of course, once we decide character is the issue, then shame and contempt are so tempting.  Who does she think she is?  But the truth is that, far from making a deliberate choice, maybe even she doesn’t understand either why things turned out as they did.

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience have discovered a lot of factors in the circumstances that can degrade a person’s ability to perform well or make good decisions.  One of the more  recent ones I’ve attributed to myself and then felt foolish doing so.  Having had recently the daunting task of furnishing some space without destroying my work time, I’d head off for a store with a list of needed pieces, and look at what they had on sale.  Then I’d find myself part way down the list and calling a halt.  “I’ve made enough decisions today, the rest won’t be very reliable.” 

O sure.  I thought I was just joking.  Making decisions uses up your ability to make good decisions?!?  Isn’t the mind immaterial and so…

O wait, I don’t think the mind is immaterial and so maybe it is really possible to use up whatever physical reserves one needs to make good decisions.  And recent research says that is exactly right.  Executive functioning, which is involved in decision making, self control and lots of other things, does draw on a limited reserve.  Spend too much time debating about whether to buy beets or carrots and you may be less capable of deciding well about the curtain rods at your next stop  - or where to send the just finished paper.

Barefoot and pregnant? July 31, 2008

Well, in prehistoric times we weren’t wearing shoes and we - women at least - were getting pregnant a lot, one suspects.  So…

So what?  Well, a new version of the argument that we should be bearfoot and pregnant is in the forthcoming Scientific American Mind.  You can see a free preview, but here are, as they say, the key concepts:

Rates of depression have risen in recent decades, at the same time that people are enjoying time-saving conveniences such as microwave ovens, e-mail, prepared meals, and machines for washing clothes and mowing lawns.

People of earlier generations, whose lives were characterized by greater efforts just to survive, para­dox­ically, were mentally healthier. Human ancestors also evolved in conditions where hard physical work was nece­ssary to thrive.

By denying our brains the rewards that come from ­anticipating and executing complex tasks with our hands, the author argues, we undercut our mental well-being.

The  examples make it clear that the article is best read as about affluent Western countries, and the US particularly. 

We nuke prepared dishes rather than growing our own food and machine-wash ready-made clothes rather than sewing and scrubbing.

Machines for cutting the lawn also among the culprits.  So the idea is that we evolved to wash clothes by hand and hand-mow our lawns?  Hmmmmmm.  That doesn’t sound right.  The species closest to us evolutionarily wash their clothes in streams and hand-mow their lawns?  That’s not quite right either.  Chimps are out there slaving away?  Well, maybe but not in the pictures I’ve seen.

The authors offer as evidence that you can get really zippy rats by making them forage for treats. 

And they look at brain circuits which seem to link physical exertion with feelings of pleasure  and well beings.  OK, I’m actually quite a fan of that stuff, fMRI and all that, you know.  But they seem to have to recognize that for us at least the exertion should be significant and meaningful, as presumably for rats also, at least in their terms.  And that makes all the difference.  And that may be why quite early on the things that machines now do were not generally done by those in a society with the power to avoid them. 

I think the bottom line is that meaningful exercise can add to your sense of well being.  And if you find mowing your lawn meaningful, go for it!  Why I remember how my father used to come in on Saturdays feeling  so happy from mowing…O, wait, that didn’t happen.  

Well, I’m going to get my bowling partner organized.  We now have brain science on our side, in addition to just about every health guru on TV.  Or maybe find a good old-fashioned washing machine, so I can spend a day a week storing up good feelings.  I can remember how my mother felt so happy after using hers… O wait.  That didn’t happen either.

Some Muslim Blogs July 18, 2008

I was looking for advice on how to be a good wife  - though not with the intention of following it, of course - and I came  across Ijtema and then the Indian Muslim Blog.  Since until about 2  hours ago I was totally unaware of these sites, I can’t really evaluate them.  I discovered the second by searching for discussions of the first, and I haven’t gotten any further.

So why mention them?  Well, because many of the views expressed are not ones white Western feminist encounter all that often and arguably we should be aware of them.  For example, we are all happy to combat rumors about Obama being a muslim.  Some members of the muslim community have, as we might imagine, a different take on what is going on.  The perspective motivating the first blog is surely itself important:

Ijtema is the Arabic word for “congregation” or “gathering”. The aim of the editors at IJTEMA is to gather together the best of the Muslim blogosphere in one place, as a showcase of what we truly believe to be, real Muslim voices, and real Muslim talent.

Why are you doing this?

Because we have no choice.

The mainstream media seems to have an agenda: to propagate the idea of a supposed ‘Clash of Civilisations’. The most vocal elements on both sides of the camp - those who are for or against this idea - are mainly non-Muslim; it seems that the Muslim community has lost its ability to reach out. In the meantime, a handful of media moguls gets to choose what the West (or, in fact, the rest of planet Earth) hears about Islam, and our Ummah. And sure enough, the likes of Bin-Laden (who, incidentally, are disliked by most of Muslim World) come across loud and clear.

Another fact is that  these seem to me good examples of the diversity of viewpoints that are excluded from much in our media.  A somewhat startling example of this is the Christian Biblical basis for pacificism that Jeremiah Wright expresses:

The press declared him totally unacceptable before anyone might have this important discussion, one that challenges the ‘Christian’ president’s justification for war.

OK, now it is true that the first blog contains a link to an attack on white Western feminism that none of us will judge accurate.  And what I’ve noticed most about the second are the links to poetry in a tradition I know little about.  But clearly it also has many discussions of global politics, and I expect some of it is  quite different from our daily fare.

So see what you think!

Free Speech and Hate Speech July 3, 2008

There’s a thoughtful discussion in a recent New York Review of Books entitled “Free Speech and the Menace of Hysteria.”  Though he passes by without comment the title’s term  that associates the womb with a mind out of control (groan), Jeremy Waldron does provide an interesting review of a book by Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate.  A later comment by Perry Link summarizes a point Waldron argues for:

In his excellent essay “Free Speech and the Menace of Hysteria” [NYR, May 29], Jeremy Waldron shows how, in the United States over the last two hundred years, the state came to be viewed as sufficiently stable that it “did not need the support of the law against the puny denunciations of the citizenry.” To subject the state to “free trade in ideas” is by now seen as carrying little risk and as having considerable advantages for democratic rule. Next, Professor Waldron argues that the case is not parallel for vulnerable minorities—such as, in our society today, Muslims from Asia or Latinos in the Southwest. Here the hate speech that might appear in the marketplace can bring grievous and irreparable harm, and perhaps should be restricted by law.

Link also argues that there is a serious problem about who employs the restraint.  I hope both the article and the comment are  available electronically.  It could be used to set  up a good discussion.

The second snort: Philosophy, Women and the Problem July 2, 2008

For the first snort, see here.

Some of the recent discussion on this blog has reminded me of an article from the NY Times that was so startling to me at the time that I remembered it well enough to easily retrieve it.  What was so amazing to me at the time was UMichigan’s Mel Hochster’s conversion; he came to see that there are quite pervasive mechanisms operating to exclude women. 

Some of the examples of bias will be familiar to many feminists:

Three years ago, the University of Michigan had 55 departments in the sciences and engineering, only one of them headed by a woman. Today, eight are headed by women. In that time, the university has also tripled the number of tenure track offers to women in science and engineering to 41 percent.

Mel Hochster, a mathematics professor at Michigan, belongs to a committee of senior science professors that gives workshops for heads of departments and search committees highlighting the findings of numerous studies on sex bias in hiring. For example, men are given longer letters of recommendation than women, and their letters are more focused on relevant credentials. Men and women are more likely to vote to hire a male job applicant than a woman with an identical record. Women applying for a postdoctoral fellowship had to be 2.5 times as productive to receive the same competence score as the average male applicant. When orchestras hold blind auditions, in which they cannot see the musician, 30 percent to 55 percent more women are hired.

Professor Hochster said he was not inclined to join the committee until Abigail Stewart, a professor of psychology and women’s studies who is leading Michigan’s effort, made a presentation on sex bias to his department.

“I vastly underestimated the problem,” Professor Hochster said. “People tend to think that if there’s a problem, it’s with a few old-fashioned people with old-fashioned ideas. That’s not true. Everybody has unconscious gender bias. It shows up in every study.”

In the last three years, the mathematics department, regarded as one of the best in the country, has hired two women with tenure and promoted one associate professor to tenure, Professor Hochster said, bringing the number of tenured women to 6, out of a total of 64 tenured and tenure-track professors. Two more women are on a tenure track.

Some universities have put pressure on their search committees to broaden their pools of qualified candidates, especially when it comes to graduate students who could apply for junior faculty positions.

Another range of problems concerns  the network of information and the buddy system for getting work into the public arena:

Some universities have also taken note of the disadvantage that women face in negotiating salaries, laboratory space and money for research, as well as the importance of building a reputation by publishing in high-profile academic journals and getting invitations to speak at prestigious conferences. Men have naturally picked up such crucial information, as well as speaking invitations, from male colleagues and mentors because of their greater numbers and influence. For example, Columbia University is now bringing in retired senior academics to coach women on its faculty in such areas.

And there’s the problem of women the undervalued outsiders:

After reading in a newspaper that a biotech company was awarding grants to M.I.T. scientists, she asked a colleague if he knew how to apply for the money, she said. He told her he knew nothing about the grant, she said, though she later learned that he was urging another man in their department to apply for the money.

Professor Hopkins said she then went to her dean, who submitted her application to the company, asking for $30,000, The company gave her $8 million, which allowed her to expand her cancer research and led to the discovery of a pair of cancer genes.

 Solutions?  The article discusses a number, including very active recruiting at just about all levels.  But completely crucial is that we all become away of our implicit biases and what they are producing.  As I’ve probably mentioned elsewhere, I failed the implicit bias test on women in science, or, more accurately, I showed a significant bias against women.  Grandads, uncles, brothers and calculus?  Fine.  Grandma, aunts, sisters and calculus?  Clang.*!*#!  With that knowledge, it becomes much easier to make decisions based on actual merits.  (Actually, it was pretty evidence to me before the test that I had the bias; people who need to think about taking such tests are those who implausibly think they haven’t internalized the standards of the society around them.)

Who wonders how Michigan’s philosophy department is doing?  Hmmmm.

“Homosexual-led persecution of church” June 21, 2008

A joke, right? We all know the attitude of many Christian churches is too close to persecution of homosexuals; see here and here, for example.  How could such malign actions possibly be going in the other direction? 

And plenty of religious groups opposed even secular “gay acceptance” activities, thus trying to prevent efforts to diminish the cruel and sometimes lethal persecution gays do suffer.

But, no, some people apparently actually maintain that homosexuals are persecuting churches. And the nature of the persecution is quite ironic. Most persecution is at least ostensibly to get rid of something. But homosexuals are persecuting churches in order to join them and to get them to stop their discriminatory behavior.  As NPR, quoted by the blog linked to immediately above, put it:

In recent years, some states have passed laws giving residents the right to same-sex unions in various forms. Gay couples may marry in Massachusetts and California. There are civil unions and domestic partnerships in Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Oregon. Other states give more limited rights.

Armed with those legal protections, same-sex couples are beginning to challenge policies of religious organizations that exclude them, claiming that a religious group’s view that homosexual marriage is a sin cannot be used to violate their right to equal treatment. Now parochial schools, “parachurch” organizations such as Catholic Charities and businesses that refuse to serve gay couples are being sued — and so far, the religious groups are losing.

When suing for your civil rights is presented as persecuting, watch out! You may well be in the Orwellian land of the far right.

Wild Sex May 8, 2008

Sex among members of species other than ours is one of the topics that primatologist Franz de Waal addresses on Freakonomics.  The informative article has comments on a number of subjects, including animal rhythm, animals who won’t cooperate when rewards are unequal and, most of all, bonobo sex, which is plentiful, clearly “bi” and serves a lot of different purposes. 

In addition, thanks to the Neuroethics and Law blog, we have the link to de Waal’s site about elephant self-recognition.  Not many species recognize themselves in  mirrors.  Cats, for example, don’t.  That elephants do may reveal something about the evolution of social animals.

All this is worth reading, and is full of the sorts of useful details for philosophy classes.  It’s also handy for throwing cold water on convictions about what is natural.

 

Feminists destroy the earth! April 28, 2008

No, we feminists don’t hate men. We just hate the stupid arguments that are sometimes wheeled out by anti-feminist men. Such as that provided by Angry Harry. Witness:

Argument for conclusion that feminists encourage traffic problems (this is a reconstruction. His far less well formulated argument can be seen in full here):

1.there is a very powerful group of dysfunctional people - feminists - whose main aim is to encourage family breakdown.

2. By living together - e.g. getting married - people can save on transport … Traffic congestion and pollution would be reduced enormously and time spent travelling would be cut.

C. By encouraging family break down, feminists are encouraging greater traffic congestion.

Introduced to this argument (at the excellent Fem08) by Damian Carnell from NDVF, as an example of the problematic men’s movements out there, Jender and I scoffed heartily. Ha ha! Why stick at that, why not add:

4. Greater traffic congestion means greater carbon emissions.

5. Greater carbon emissions contribute to global warming

6. Feminists encourage global warming.

Ha ha, reductio reductio! What a ridiculous argument.

But we underestimated Angry Harry - you’ve got to give it to him, he follows the premises through to their conclusion, and thus his bold conclusion:

Feminists Destroy the Planet!

 At least he has provided us with an excellent example to use in critical thinking classes (there’s lots more at his site). But perhaps Harry has indeed been too angered by the all those traffic jams. On yer bike Harry!

“We down here have been forgotten.” April 20, 2008

So a 66 year old New Orleans grandmother is quoted as saying in Women in the Wake of the Storm, a report issued last week by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.  (An accompanying press release can be found here.)

The extent of the forgetting, described in Ms online, is shameful:

based on interviews with 38 women from ages 19 to 66 and from diverse ethnicities who lived through Katrina. The study showed women’s lack of access to housing, health care, and child care, putting women and children at risk for abuse and exploitation.

Equally troubling is the reason why women’s needs are left out of consideration in the planning being done. NO ONE IS ASKING THEM.

The report states that many women’s voices have gone unheard throughout the recovery process, so women’s needs are not being addressed. There is limited availability of housing, only one domestic violence shelter that survived the storm, and communities have been shattered. The report calls for a gender-informed relief strategy to end the economic and health problems women face. (MY STRESS)

The situation bring out another facet of feminist standpoint theory that Jender referred to in discussing another, but not entirely dissimilar situation.  (And, most recently, here.)  Standpoint theory draws our attention to the fact that the relatively underprivileged can have important knowledge that the privileged have difficulty discovering themselves.  The current situation brings out why it can be hard to discover the knowledge that the other has.  The problem is not just that those in charge forget to ask, or don’t think to ask.  Rather, underneath that is the fact that disadvantaged women will not be seen as part of the group that possesses knowledge.

“Philosophy as a Blood Sport” March 30, 2008

I thought I had read this paper by now emeritus Prof. Normal Swartz, and perhaps you actually have.  It does more than fill-in the details its descriptive title suggests.  It raises the hugely important question of whether the drawing of metaphorical blood is a turn-off for students, and perhaps particularly for women students.

Another section has readers’ comments that came in over about 7 years.  Mostly they confirm both the facts and the concern of the paper, though a well-known feminist philosopher reminds us that some women are relieved at not having to be nice.

On thinking about this, I’ve started wondering about what seem to me related questions:  Is academic philosophy as it has been known in Anglophone countries over the last 100 years a vital professional field? In being a blood sport, is philosophy just a sport?  Is a field which prizes devastating challenges to its own heroes - and the drawing of blood from acolytes - suffocatingly narcissitic?  Is the increasing engagement of young philosopher with empirical fields in fact a deeply motivated challenge to philosophy’s self-absorption?

What do you think?
 

On letting implicatures do the dirty work March 12, 2008

Geraldine Ferraro has been widely and rightly criticised for saying the following:

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” 

But now let’s look closely. “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position”. True. In the very, very basic sense that one’s racial identity has a huge effect on one’s life, no mater what sort of life that is. And in politics, where one’s personal narrative is part of what one is selling, that is especially obvious. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position.” Again, true, because one’s gender identity also has a huge effect, etc. “He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.” Sure, he’s lucky to be who he is– an immensely successful, immensely talented individual. “And the country is caught up in the concept.” Certainly true for a lot of the country.So nothing false was said.

But– what she conveyed (via implicatures, if one wants to get technical) was that Obama was undeserving of his successes. That his successes were solely a result of his race. And that being non-white is a huge and undeserved stroke of luck in America. All false. And all so offensive and obviously false that nobody would explicitly say them. But all very clearly what she wanted to convey, and what she does convey (to at least many people). And when she is called on her offensive utterance, she can insist that she said nothing false. She let her implicatures do that dirty work.

Misogyny Mishap: Update March 9, 2008

We remarked on Charlette Allen’s mysogynistic indulgence, and the remarkable fact that the  WaPo printed it, here.  Thanks to a comment on that post by Roger, we can call your attention to a reply, which the WaPo has printed here.  And since it’s by Katha Pollitt, you know it is good! The article’s title and subtitle:

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.

A sample just in case the author’s name isn’t enough to send you straight there:

The upshot: we ladies should focus on what we’re really good at — interior decoration and taking care of men and children.

Oh, gag me with a spoon. Sure, girly culture can be silly — but what does that prove? It’s not as though men spend their evenings leafing through the plays of Moliere. Susie whips up doggy treats, Mike surfs porn sites; she curls up with the Friday Night Knitting Club, he watches football. Or maybe the two of them watch “Grey’s Anatomy” together — surprise, surprise, about half the show’s audience is male. If you go by cultural preferences, actually, you could just as well claim that women are obviously smarter than men — look around you at the museum, the theater, the opera house, the ballet, the concert hall. Women read more than men, too, especially fiction, which men tend to avoid. (A story about things that didn’t happen? How does that work?) Women even read fiction by men and about men, further evidence of their imaginative powers — while men, if they do pick up a novel, make sure it’s estrogen-free. Who’s really the dim bulb, the woman who doesn’t see the beauty of “Grand Theft Auto,” or the man who thinks Tom Clancy is a great writer?

And now for an important qualification: In a passage copied below, Katha Pollitt endorses a view close to a problematic one of Gloria Steinem’s; namely, that sexism in the USA is worse than racism. We’ve discussed this claim before; it should be rejected. It does seem to me true that the WaPo would not write a comparably demeaning article about Blacks or Asians, but that does not show that, as KP puts it, sexism is the last acceptable prejudice. There are too many ways in which racism is also treated as acceptable, and arguably more than sexism is. So how do we capture what lies behind the fact that respectable newspapers and journalists are printing and uttering offensively mysogynistic pieces, while the awful racism directed toward Obama does not seem to make the op-ed pages yet? Women are the last joke?

Readers are invited to share their answers/observations.

From KP:

A far more important question is this: Why did The Post publish this nonsense? I can’t imagine a great newspaper airing comparable trash talk about any other group. “Asians Really Do Just Copy.” “No Wonder Africa’s Such a Mess: It’s Full of Black People!” Misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice, and nowhere more so than in our nation’s clueless and overwhelmingly white-male-controlled media.

Trading housework for sex? March 6, 2008

From the AP’s article “Men Who do More Housework Get More Sex”

American men still don’t pull their weight when it comes to housework and child care, but collectively they’re not the slackers they used to be. The average dad has gradually been getting better about picking himself up off the sofa and pitching in, according to a new report in which a psychologist suggests the payoff for doing more chores could be more sex.

The article reports on what sounds like an all-around good trend: more equitable division of household labour and more sex. What’s not to like? Well, one thing not to like is the assumption that sex is a reward for men– a thing that women give to them in exchange for labour. Has it ever occurred to the article’s author or the headline writer that sex might be, well, desired by both partners? Or that if it’s happening and it *isn’t* desired by both partners that’s something *bad*? (Thanks, Jender-Parents!)

Misogyny Mishap at the WaPo March 6, 2008

So the Washington Post decides to print a revolting article about women called, “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get? .”

You haven’t screamed or swooned recently? Well, some women have at Obama’s rallies and so all women are that type of person. That is the caliber of argument we’re talking about. The Washington Post apparently says it was tongue in cheek.  An interesting response, since a common claim of verbal abusers is “I was just joking; she doesn’t have any sense of humor.”

But here’s the nice thing: lots of really smart women AND men have written comments are the article. Going by the comments, many women are way too smart to buy into the denigration and many men don’t want to see it. Here are some representative bits:

On Hilary’s inability to perform well in a debate, as evidenced by her going on about boring policy details:

semitransparent wrote:
Geez, what WAS Hillary thinking in droning on about the boring policy issues that define our country? Man, how stupid can she be to actually take her political stances seriously!  She should just get back to the kitchen and let  intelligent men like George W. Bush tackle the cerebral matters.

cthomas_sf wrote:
We Snarl. We Kill. Why are Men so Dumb?

Would you print that op ed? As a man, I look forward to the day when the
Washington Post will have an equal representation of men and women at the helm
and on the editorial board so that this type pandering essay will find its
appropriate place in the recycling bin.

JennJ99738 wrote:
After reading the transcript of Allen’s “discussion” this morning (I’m in the
Pac time zone), I cannot believe she is a graduate of such a prestigious
University. Someone should really check whether she graduated from Stanford. She
is lazy in her responses and some of her responses were just nonsensical. Humor
is obvious? Obviously not. Or she simply can’t write funny. Women weren’t or
aren’t historically disadvantaged? The more I read, the clearer it became that
this piece was not meant to be funny. It was a serious piece written by an ultra
right wing misogynist.

For all the men screaming that they experience this all the time, please point
me to a WaPo piece, or a piece in any major American newspaper, stating men are
stupid. I must have missed it. Give me a break.

adfeminem wrote:
I teach critical thinking, research strategies and composition. Thank you,
Charlotte Allen & The Washington Post, for completely undermining my lectures
about evaluating the reliability of sources in research. I used to teach
students that articles published in a source with a print counterpart–long
established newspapers like WaPo for example–were held to a higher standard
than those published only on the web. Clearly that’s no longer the case.

somniculus wrote:
I’m curious as to why a successful (sort of) female columnist for one of the
most widely-read newspapers in this country is calling all women back to the
kitchen…is the female talent pool too rich for Ms. Allen to survive in her
current career? Because seriously, satire is not her bag. This column was not in
the slightest witty, amusing, thought-provoking or informative. There wasn’t
even a meaningful comparison between men and women’s differing skills. What was
meant to be satire rather has come across as a disturbing spectacle of
“introspective” misogyny.

and a perhaps too charitable disagreement with the article’s author:

lg3060a wrote:
While I understand and applaud the author’s attempt to identify reasons why
women are seen as the “losers” in business, politics and elsewhere…i think the
author’s article may have inadvertently contributed to that misunderstanding. By
saying things like…men don’t do this, men don’t do [that thing that a woman
does], she’s simply identifying male behavior as the appropriate standard.
Instead of shunning “female behavior” lets try to understand where it comes
from, why women’s values are important, and the influential role WE truly play
in politics, business, and society.