The main problem with it is the glaring omission about the poor record of science in being used to prop up and lend legitimacy to discriminatory sterotypes. I'd even go so far as to say that you can't really have a sensible discussion about the taboos around this subject unless you acknowledge this history and take some lessons from it.
Thanks, Lurid, for this response. I sat down last night and very nearly wrote an aggressive posting to all this (i.e., prior to Lurid's response), but then my reasonable, empathetic female mind kicked in and I closed down my computer....
Still: Fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. fuck. Jesus guys, I get tired.
Some of you may be aware that most of my free time in the past few weeks has been devoted to this thread in the Switchboard, wherein the claim is repeatedly put forth that feminism has, pretty much all by itself, created "a flawed system in family courts that values female nurturing over male nurturing and male financial responsibility over female financial responsibility." (I'm jumping you to page 6, where I enter the fray, purely out of an aggressive self-promotion that must be some evil male portion of my brain...)
I pointed out to that poster here that part of my problem with his claims is that, in his world, feminism is always the overpowering, active agent in society. Anything that's actually 85% male dominated--little things like the judiciary system, the political system, (and I had actually also included the scientific establishment in my litany, but decided that was largely a separate issue)--all these little things are somehow just puppets of some powerful feminist force operating behind the scenes.
I went through what I believe to be a representative paragraph showing how he, without actually providing evidence, implies this overpowering agency of women and corresponding victimhood of men through the strategic use of active and passive verbs. (Which apparently the male, obsessive part of my brain gloms on to. There may be 100,000 different species of beetles in the world, but there are 1,000,000 different words in the English language, and [she rubs her knuckles on her shoulder, blows on an imaginary gun] I happen to know a bigger percentage of 'em than yer average bear...)
So, I had started writing another response to that thread, but decided to heed Kit-Kat's suggestion that we all should cool our jets for a bit. I come over to headshop, and read this thread.
Wherein, sigh, it's all "political correctness gone maaaaaaad," and, voila, handily enough, it is once again: all feminism's fault! Gosh, feminism is so handy sometimes. Someone call WPC Hell and make an arrest!
Yippee.
That is, not only does the newspaper article suggest (using, an email FROM A WOMAN SO IT'S OK!!!) to say, "the men who want to avoid the issues the article raises 'are simply running scared of getting lynched like Larry Summers.'" [The article does not note that that email must have been provided BY MR. LAWRENCE to the paper....]
When women do "aggressively" argue a point against a prominent male figure, who says women just might not be smart enough in math and science to compete with men, it's a "lynching." A lynching.
[There are several websites that show photographs of lynchings in the United States. I urge you to seek them out, if you are inclined to be sympathetic with this argument, and then come here and explain to me how these two events are at all comparable. Fucking helll. Ah, but see it's a WOMAN saying it, so it must be a) "unbiased" and b) true.]
And then, in the article itself:
About 100 years ago, Ibsen shed light on the secrets of contemporary life, and in doing so, championed women's rights. But since then, the feminist campaign for equality has helped build the belief that men and women, on average, have exactly the same aptitudes.
This juxtaposition is irritatingly evocative of what I was getting at with ShadowSax's argument, although this is much more subtle, of course. And, I don't need to point out that the argument runs in exactly the opposite direction: in ShadowSax world, feminists are directly responsible for the myth that women are more nurturing than men, and in Lawrence-world, feminists are directly responsible for an evil bland soviet-style sameness being imposed on the common sense "fact" that women are on average the real nurturers and men are on average bean counters.
I should be jumping for joy, I guess. Just link ShadowSax to this article and say: "gosh, see, here's a man saying that you should just stop yer complainin' 'cause it's biology."
But note: Once again, in the passage noted above, brave, lone male Ibsen, gets slyly credited as being, essentially, the first one to "shed light" on "the secrets of contemporary life." I.e., he doesn't state but very nearly implies that poor women might never have noticed their own oppression or even spoken about women's rights if Ibsen hadn't noticed for them. Or maybe they'd have just been too empathetic and kind to say anything...too "gentle" to have been, say, demanding women's rights for 50 years! (First Women's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, NY, 1848.)
Then, awakened into life by our reasonable, insightful friend Ibsen, the women's rights movement goes all wacko and irrational (Women! what ya gonna do!) and takes over the culture and insists on equality. Which we all know means exact sameness at least when women state it. Ok, in this case, pardon me, "helps build the belief that...."
Ok. I needed to get that out of my system. Look, sincerely, I do believe that this PA Lawrence fellow has some interesting ideas. Lurid has pretty well summed up the argument being made by the calmer part of my brain that was actually expecting much worse after the first few sentences and his persona in the news article.
I don't dispute that testosterone, in the womb and after, has a huge effect on human behaviors. For example, I partly find the ShadowSax thread interesting because although I took out the phrase "male posturing" from one of my responses, for good reasons, the thread as a whole does seem suggestive of pretty strong gender differences in argumentative styles and approaches. (By page 10, ShadowSax feels positively oppressed by the idea that his stance might be strengthened, particularly on the topic of male parenting skills, if he could demonstrate any level of empathy for anyone!)
But, once again, this Lawrence argument, and many like it that I have seen coming from the scientific establishment are framed with such a complete and utter ignorance of the history of the fight for women's rights, that it utterly trivializes what's at stake and women's roles in it. At the very least I really would urge ANY scientist working in this area to read someone like Anne Fausto-Sterling, who is is professor of biology at Brown University.
[The above link is an attempt at a Barbelith-income-generating link. If it doesn't work, you can just go here, for Fausto-Sterling's book.]
Like ShadowSax, but with far less excuse, Mr. Lawrence shows no sign of having read anything written by feminists or historians on this topic, writes an article for international publication in one of the most prominent journals on the topic, that speaks remarkably duplicitously and utterly ignorantly on this topic. Then he races to the press, shocked and angered by a very reasonable and polite explanation that "So much has been written on all sides of this problem that it sets a very high bar for novelty and persuasiveness, and although we liked your essay we have had to decide to reject it."
It's possible that the answer was too polite, and, in fact, that the editors themselves couldn't fully articulate the issues that I'm laying out, but seem to have some level of awareness of them. ("Novelty," in particular, is a little grating, and strikes me as rather opposed to the argument I'm suggesting: it's not "novelty" that's the problem here, unless it truly would be a novel idea in this discourse community to actually READ WHAT SMART FEMINISTS THEMSELVES HAVE TO SAY and RESPOND TO THE BEST OF THEIR IDEAS RESPECTFULLY, rather than creating straw men out of the worst-articulated arguments, at best, or not really reading them at all....)
The timing of the rejection may have been unfortunate, given the persecution complex that Lawrence seems to share with our friend ShadowSax, but there's no doubt in my mind that Science made the right decision.
Scientists are reasonably angered by cultural studies of science that oversimplify or ignore critical parts of the scientific argument in order to make a case that fits their beliefs. The reverse is also true.
(...although we lit types are on average too female and empathetic to comment on it...Ok! Ok! I promise that's the last snarky use I'll make of his annoying argumentative style.) |
) - and everyone should be treated on merit and the broad generalities should be taken seriously as 'indicators' of type, not prescriptive of type...