I can’t even fisk it. She might as well have typed, over and over, “Women suck, oh my god, women suck, I hate women so much, doesn’t everyone hate women, how can women not just commit suicide they are so intolerable?” I’m sort of stunned. She can’t actually think this about women so thoroughly—the cognitive dissonance between hating women so much and being one would probably send her babbling to the corner, shaking and rocking, unable to form complete sentences. On a certain level, it’s got to be a put-on to get the paycheck. Well, I suppose when you’re an imbecile who can’t think your way out of a paper bag and have no real writing skills to boot, you got to figure out a way to get paid somehow.
Update: No, there one passage I have to quote that shows how intellectually dishonest this piece is.
This is the kind of literature that countless women soak up like biscotti in a latte cup: food, clothes, sex, “relationships” and gummy, feel-good “spirituality.”
The notion that an intellectual piece of work rejects the spiritual, relationships, acknowledgement of sex and sensual pleasures like food is a notion that might actually be held by Allen and maybe her husband and that’s it. Seriously.
By the logic of this argument, Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the guy on “Home Improvement”, and Tom Clancy are intellectual giants next to men with one word names like Proust, Welles, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Thoreau, and Mozart. It makes no sense. Sure, our modern culture has feminized intelligence, but that would mean, by real world logic, that we’ve managed to argue that in the arts, at least, “the feminine” is more intelligent than “the masculine”. By her standard, fucking Hemingway in insufferably feminine and therefore unintellectual stuff, since he had sex, food, and relationships in his books.
106 Responses to “Shorter Charlotte Allen”
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I find it odd that she starts off with people crushing out on Obama but restricts herself to women. It has been difficult to get to Andrew Sullivan’s writing of late simply because of the need to wade upstream against the rivers of excited sweat every time he mentions Obama (mixed with a torrent of bile when discussing the Clintons).
Apparently women are so stupid that none of them have figured out that bashing other women can be an incredibly lucrative career.
What organization does Charlotte run again?
IWF. Independent Women’s Forum. “Independent” means “wants to be an honorary man by going on about how women need to embrace their inferiority”.
This is clearly satire of the highest order.
For example:
“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.”
Nice theory. Unsupported by any actual evidence (in fact, women get into far fewer car accidents than men–hence their lower insurance rates), and clearly an exaggeration to score bonus humor points.
I agree with with Charlotte. Many women are stupid - they often are GOPer shills or fundicrat nuts.
Perhaps we should go back to the good old days when women did not vote because their feeble minds were too fragile to do things like read and write. Charlotte is obviously suffering from the uniquely female illness, hysteria, caused by a wandering uterus. Stop her from writing before she hurts herself!
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.
She’s got a serious case of Imposter Phenomenon going on here. Memory and verbal intelligence somehow don’t count as real intelligence. So, she thinks, she’s been faking it this whole time, and she’s really just a dumb woman, despite her success.
I’m willing to bet that’s the root of this whole piece. I used to talk similar crap when I was in an all-male academic major, trying to prove I was one of the guys rather than one of those outsider woman-objects. And when I was alone and struggling with a quantum mechanics problem set that I didn’t understand, I would definitely start to think that maybe I just wasn’t built for this, and maybe my female brain really was just intended to cook and clean. Of course, this was totally classic Imposter Syndrome stuff.
But yeah. I’m willing to bet this whole piece is expression of frustration with herself, combined with feeling threatened by men who want to relegate her to woman-object-outsider status –combined with, yeah, knowing she’ll sell the piece because sexist crap sells these days.
seeker6079:
So true. Sullivan hasn’t yet managed to convince me to switch my support to Clinton, but every time I read him on the presidential race, I become more favorably inclined to her.
Greg Sanders: Agreed. One wants to murmur quietly, “dude, dial it way down. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
I’m sorry — a novel written by a man and clearly read by men as well as women (how else would we get “Shamela”)…somehow demonstrates that only women are into “first-person romantic nuttiness.”
Well, that shows that Charlotte Allen doesn’t have a head for numbers. If the rate is per million miles driven, it doesn’t matter who drives more.
God, she is self-hating. Absurdly self-hating.
Did the Post forget to put the sarcasm tags at the beginning and end of this piece?
Oh gad, that 1995 article that misquoted some research into accident rates again? Geesh. If you read the real research you would learn that younger men crash cars more than younger women, middle-age people have parity, and (at that time!) older women had poorer driving skills because of sexism and got into more accidents.
Not only is it dated research, the picture for contemporary women who didn’t learn to drive when their husband died or left, and who were as highly trained as the males, had similar accident patterns. The “older women” in the study were born before 1940.
sorry “didn’t WAIT to learn to drive …”
BTW lipstick on a boar doesn’t make it a female human. Women evincing “manly manly masculine” attitudes toward “girly” things doesn’t make you male in fact or in the eyes of the manly masculine men you are trying to impress.
On another blog they mentioned that men and women faint at political rallies all the time no matter who the candidate is. You’re standing for hours in enclosed spaces with loads of other people, for pete’s sake, sometimes outdoors.
Why should I listen to the opinion of some inferior, non-intelligent woman-creature just because they let her write a column in the Post?
And if Charlotte Allen isn’t pregnant and wearing a burkha by the end of this week, there’s gonna be trouble…
(Writing stuff like this gives me a headache. The cognitive dissonance must be excruciating for her. In “Call of Cthulhu,” she’d have a Sanity Score of zero, and she’d be the host for one of the Insects from Shaggai.)
On another blog they mentioned that men and women faint at political rallies all the time no matter who the candidate is.
From my completely anecdotal experience singing in choirs in high school and college, more guys fainted in mid-concert than girls.
Not to mention the fact that the sex that invented the concept that the class of people who are physically weaker are solely morally responsible for preventing themselves from being violently assaulted by the people who are physically stronger automatically fails Logic 101.
I mean, guys, I love ya, but the fact that you as a gender invented the idea that women are responsible to prevent men from raping them, when men are on average significantly stronger than men, obviously proves that you lack in the brains department.
(Okay, no, I am being sarcastic. But really, when MRA’s talk about all the great shit that men have done historically, why does no one ever bring up that men invented systems of analyzing rape and violence against women that make *no* logical sense and have no effect in preventing such crimes? I mean, either the men who created these ideas are stupid as ass, or they were malicious rapists who *wanted* to create a system where rape would be impossible to stop. And you know what humans’ natural response to a predator that’s smarter than they are would be? Watch some sci-fi horror and then get back to me as to why claiming “men are smarter than women” while not refuting “men are more evil than women” should be a bad idea FOR MEN.)
As for that study, I personally think that the people for whom the analysis of risk *directly* impacts their bottom line, and who *have* all the data because accidents are reported directly to them tied to the demographic information associated with the accident-causer, are going to produce a much better analysis of who causes accidents than a single research paper that might or might not have an ax to grind. In other words, given that Allstate loses money if they’re wrong and Johns Hopkins does not, I’ll trust Allstate’s belief that women are better drivers than men, as reflected in my lower premiums, more than a single Johns Hopkins study. In the case of this particular Hopkins study, another thing to note is that men die younger; therefore there are more women on the road who are old, feeble and shouldn’t be driving, simply because old, feeble people shouldn’t be driving and more old, feeble people are likely to be female, as the male people die before getting to be old and feeble. (That being said all the most spectacular and newsworthy incidents of old people killing others with their cars by accident happened to have been *male* old people at the wheel.)
(NB: I am not saying old people shouldn’t drive. I am saying old, feeble people who can’t see and whose reaction time is utterly shot shouldn’t drive. This is a large subset of the elderly and more of the elderly are female than male, so more old, feeble people who shouldn’t drive will be female.)
Whoops, should say “men are significantly stronger than women.”
Jeebus, that was awful. On the bright side, at least on the first two pages of comments most of the respondents rightly called out this sexist crap. And WaPo wonders why their female readership is declining.
If anyone wants to see what a dumb woman looks like, here she is: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/charlotte_allen/
By the way, that Agence France Presse article she starts out by citing is spurious. Google it in English or French: ouside of refs to Vicenich whom she doesn’t mention is a Rush-Limbaugh wannabe right-wing talk show host, and freeper blogs, there’s just a WSJ editorial that uses anecdotal evidence from five count them five Obama rallies in as many weeks to support an overall argument about Obama’s popularity. Rightwing hatred spewing from scared Freepers? Maybe, but they shouldn’t pretend to find things on national wire services that never existed.
And there’s no such university as The University of London. The guy whose research she cites, who is at Queen Mary University, was not working on sex differences either. The Tabloid Press (the Telegraph) gave him quite a spin: 140 people in his research sample and that’s evidence of what?
Ooof!
Good lord, I thought the “Big brain=Big smarts” idea had died out long ago. Apparently, she’s never heard of the 19th cent. study that found the largest brain belonged to an idiot and the smallest brain belonged to the genius Anatole France.
Notice how she manages to get in a swipe at gay men as well as women in the “women get in more car accidents” meme. (By her logic, lesbians should be better drivers than straight women.) And where are the stats that gay guys crash more? Is there something they check on accident reports? Or do they just write down “Subject reports cracked windshield, crushed fender and flat tire-but he’s gay, so that explains it.”?
If I was in a really snarky mood, I’d say “If women really are dim, you’ve just proved your own hypothesis, Charlotte.”
If anyone wants to see what a dumb woman looks like, here she is: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/charlotte_allen/
By the way, that Agence France Presse article she starts out by citing is spurious. Google it in English or French: ouside of refs to Vicenich whom she doesn’t mention is a Rush-Limbaugh wannabe right-wing talk show host, and freeper blogs, there’s just a WSJ editorial that uses anecdotal evidence from five count them five Obama rallies in as many weeks to support an overall argument about Obama’s popularity. Rightwing hatred spewing from scared Freepers? Maybe, but they shouldn’t pretend to find things on national wire services that never existed.
And there’s no such university as The University of London. The guy whose research she cites, who is at Queen Mary University, was not working on sex differences either. The Tabloid Press (the Telegraph) gave him quite a spin: 140 people in his research sample and that’s evidence of what?
Ooof!
It has been difficult to get to Andrew Sullivan’s writing of late simply because of the need to wade upstream against the rivers of excited sweat every time he mentions Obama
That isn’t sweat.
As for this article, other than proving Charlotte Allen is not that bright, and that the WaPo hates women, I’m not sure what else it accomplishes.
She picked a really bad example there, because (at least in Canada) chemical engineering is the only field of engineering in which female graduates outnumber male graduates.
Lord, I am so sick of that. Even if it’s true that men are better at rotating 3-d objects in the mind, that is one skill. That is not “abstract thinking, reasoning, mathematics, science and philosophy”. And I’m saying that as somebody who can’t even picture a 3-d object in her mind, never mind rotate one, but has still gotten straight As in all her math and physics classes from high school through Electrical Engineering.
Yeah, but these kinds of arguments are made every day, tho much more subtly. Remember that back-and-forth I had with Zogby a few months back?
Did the phrase “security moms” appear in the column? Nope, I didn’t think so.
Might I suggest to her also that maybe the actions she so despises are cultural - over here in the UK we have little news of women screaming and fainting at anyone other that extreme acting/singing celebrities, and at events where they are the men act in a similarly stupid fashion, just in a different way. Anywhere else, us Brits must be pretty withdrawn and are allowed to applaud and maybe cheer - screaming at a political rally just isn’t done, we allow sincerity but not fervour. Your massive hyped political rallies and huge election build-ups across the pond, if brought over here, would probably be alienating.
The fact that such OTT behaviour occurs sometimes is practically expected of women (we get celeb gossip and OHMIGOD A NEW DRESS’ stuff sold to us in pretty much EVERYTHING whether we want it or not) whilst men aren’t allowed to do anything but be masculine and stoic. With such expectations, OF COURSE the two sexes will act differently - but I suppose she equates ‘conditioning’ with ‘innate traits’.
Ok, I managed to fisk the whole thing. It took two hours and even then only because I was restricting myself to the obvious stupid.
Sheesh, why doesn’t she just get down on her knees and fellate all her male coworkers while whipping herself for the evil evil dirty dirty crime of being female? Oh, maybe they’ll forgive her if she claims to despise herself a bit more!
I think creatures like this actually do believe their BS. But as Amanda noted, in their minds it TOTALLY doesn’t apply to honorary non-cunts like Charlotte! Now, if she just carves ‘I am the root of all evil’ into her flesh with a hot iron, maybe those godly superior male humans will give her another stale doggie biscuit!
Adding, to be fair …If I were married to Sally Quinn, I would think all women are dumbass bitchez too.
If men drive 75% more than women, and hence practice more, but don’t get into 75% fewer accidents, who’s really worse at driving?
The article’s fundamental category error is appalling. She confuses marketing directed at women with actual women. Who buys the junk directed at notional women? I regard that sort of thing (muffin mixes from Williams Sonoma, Oprah-recommended books, pre-jail Martha Stewart books) as presents for people you don’t know very well. Upscale, soulless products of market research.
As long as we’re judging the sexes based on the marketing of products directed at them, we might assume all men to be ripped, athletic, technology-obsessed James Bond types with superhuman sexual stamina. And who also are rather dim.
The British call that kind of men’s magazines (such as Maxim) “lad” magazines for a reason.
This is the comment I posted at the Washington Post.
“Well, fiddle-dee-dee, I guess I’ll just go do my nails and not worry my little ole mind about that general election. Let big daddy John McCain take care of the world for me.
Sarcasm aside, Charlotte Allen, a National Review writer, does seem to have some trouble with math. More than half of women support surveyed support Clinton. 60 percent of men support Obama. By her own lights, I guess these males are swooning emotional fools. But she seems to ignore that.
And by her implicit assumption that men make rational choices in election, how come these coldly rational men voted for Bush because they’d rather have a beer with him?
Above all, she reminds me of an internet cartoon that just came out. In one panel, a stick figure male says to another male working out a math problem on a chalkboard, “wow, you suck at math.” The next panel shows the same figure addressing a female working out a math problem at the chalkboard:”wow, chicks suck at math.” ”
I’m an Obama supporter, by the way. But she seems to be taking women to task for supporting Obama because he’s good looking or whatever, and it was an absurd argument.
Interestingly, I used to score in the 95th to 98th percentile range on visuospatial skills on standardized tests in elementary and middle school.
Also interestingly, I’m lesbian.
Yes, there are brain differences.
HOWEVER, no, there is absolutely no **value judgment** to be drawn from such differences.
And hey, with the vast amount of people who currently exist on this planet there is a huge HUGE (did I say huge?) number of areas of overlap where straight women, straight men, gay women, gay men, bi folks, trans folks, etc., have virtually the same brain functions so in all likelihood those outlier areas aren’t applicable to every single person in category “X”.
(Not that I know statistics - my mom told me not to take that course. After she took it.)
[And as for Sullivan, his misogyny is showing. I am so very tired of his emotion-laden snarky comments about Clinton. Are there things to criticize? Sure. Could he find a better more effective way to do so? Sure. Why, many posters here have done so, and without resorting to spittle-flecked vitriol. And he’s either bashing a specific woman or he’s basically just ignoring us altogether. We don’t fit anywhere in his hyper-masculinized world view.]
Gah.
I find it interesting that conservatives dwell on the 3-D object rotating thing—which, by the way, is a group to group comparison and certainly some women are better at that than some men. Why do they dwell on it?
They have nothing else.
That’s right. Nothing else.
By the measures of desperate conservatives, the entire scope of human intelligence is in rotating 3D objects in the head. No other skills are necessary, because if you consider any other skills, there’s no reason to believe men are smarter than women.
Lord, I am so sick of that. Even if it’s true that men are better at rotating 3-d objects in the mind, that is one skill. That is not “abstract thinking, reasoning, mathematics, science and philosophy”. And I’m saying that as somebody who can’t even picture a 3-d object in her mind, never mind rotate one, but has still gotten straight As in all her math and physics classes from high school through Electrical Engineering.
I’m so very very sick of that one too. Especially since there was a study a few months ago that found something as simple as playing 3D video games can pretty much erase the gender difference. Women can learn the skill! Why does it matter that men are more naturally inclined to have that skill when women can fairly easily catch up to them?
Er, sorry, the block quote thing worked in the preview, but not in the real post. That second paragraph is a quote from roses.
Working in prepress will very quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that men are overall better than women at visual-spatial stuff: trying to explain to a guy (with a degree in hospital management, no less) that you can’t fit a square image into a rectangular page without either a) stretching the image or b) having white space on either side is just one of my lasting unfond memories of this being objectly demonstrated. “Failed Shapes in Kindergarten” has become my shorthand for this phenomenon, and the impasse I get into when I try to explain the difference between “horizontal” and “vertical” and why they’re not interchangeable to some salesdude who thinks he’s Hot Shit…
(Also, watching your dad try to shove a large desk or a sofa into a room where it couldn’t fit after he refused to listen to a mere girl’s warning opinion on things physical is good for laughs as well as demonstrating that DNA-delivery systems have little to do with the ability to visualize objects in space.)
Just…wow.
That woman is pathetic.
Speaking of the “We Hate Hillary” brigade, here’s this charming exchange between Bill Maher and Harry Shearer.
Now, maybe Bill was joking, but Hitch certainly wasn’t.
How sweet.
But, hey, rejection of Hillary has nothing to do with sexism. Nothing at all, do you hear?
“If anyone wants to see what a dumb woman looks like, here she is:”{link}
Yikes! That photo proves one thing for sure: Charlotte is too stupid to find someone who can use Photoshop.
++
Also, Roses, you wrote: “because (at least in Canada) chemical engineering is the only field of engineering in which female graduates outnumber male graduates.” Is that a typo? ‘Cuz you seem to be arguing the other way, no?
Also, Roses, you wrote: “because (at least in Canada) chemical engineering is the only field of engineering in which female graduates outnumber male graduates.” Is that a typo? ‘Cuz you seem to be arguing the other way, no?
No. Male engineering graduates still outnumber female ones in most disciplines, although the number of female graduates increases every year, and I see no reason to think women won’t catch up eventually. I just thought it was interesting that she singled out chemical engineering, because chemical engineering is the one field in which women have already caught up, completely disproving her point.
I’d just like to say that Oprah, for all her faults, has recommended some challenging books. There are plenty of women who would never have read The Bluest Eye or Anna Karenina without her.
@Blue Jean
That Maher transcript is funny to me because in 2000 and 2004 me and a group of friends would take bets before each question in a debate. Would Bush answer as the angry strident Bush or the “aw shucks I’m just a country boy” Bush or possibly the compasionate conservative “doctors should practice their love” Bush. He was down right bi-polar in some of the debates, especially the town-hall variety.
@anna
Totally agree. I’m not an Oprah fan myself, although I do have some respect for her. But somebody is picking great books for her book club. I can think of 3 of them off the top of my head that I went to purchase on my own and was shocked to find an Oprah book club sticker on them:
The Hears is a Lonely Hunter
Love in the Time of Cholera
East of Eden
All brilliant works of literature.
Um, actually there is such a place as the “University of London.” Right in front of me is my M.A. certificate stating “University of London” and then on the next line, “School of Advanced Study (Warburg Institute)”
“are intellectual giants next to men with one word names like Proust, Welles, Shakespeare, ”
To be fair, I’ve heard people argue that the man we know as Shakespeare was an illiterate peasant, and the actual “William Shakespeare” was Edward DeVere.
There were probably a lot of illiterate peasants who were more intellectual than Hulk Hogan/Arnold/Clancy though.
I’m glad tzs testified re: the University of London — because I remember going on the Underground to a brick building with sign on it indicating it was a branch of the the University of London to talk to a scholar re: feminist playwrights. But the “no such place” sounded so authoritative I began to doubt my own memory.
A better question is why the WaPo put this up. I mean, they’re usually much more hoity-toity and subtle in that department. (To steal a quote from Doonesbury, yes it’s in vogue to be bigoted again, but you must use code words.)
The thing about rotating 3D objects is also dumb as a sack of hammers to bring up, because it’s a skill. A learnt skill. Women as a class are generally not as good at it because women as a class aren’t trained to do it as aggressively as men are (look at the socialisation differences between “boy toys” and “girl toys” for instance). It’s certainly a skill women can develop quite highly given the training.
Interestingly, one of the ways I developed whatever skill I have in it is by sewing, especially since I draft my own patterns based on my measurements. It, um, just doesn’t get much more gendered-feminine than that, I’m afraid.
To further counter her argument, I work in a field which used to be almost entirely male-dominated, and now is highly female-dominated (I’m a technical writer). So not only are catch-ups happening, we’re even edging the guys out of their traditional preserves from time to time…
It would be interesting if Wash post writers, who do the “conversations” with readers, were all asked if they agreed with the editors giving space to an article about how dumb women are, and whether that attitude is reflected in the Washington Post work atmosphere. I’m sure there would be a rush to assure us that oh, noes, the Washington Post management would never ever discriminate against women! They just felt it was time for equal time on the women are dumb front.
What a group of clowns and assholes.
Interestingly, one of the ways I developed whatever skill I have in it is by sewing, especially since I draft my own patterns based on my measurements. It, um, just doesn’t get much more gendered-feminine than that, I’m afraid.
I hope to be able to get to that point. So far I can barely follow a pattern, the idea of modifying one so that my clothes actually fit is a far-off dream.
txs and G.L.Horton don’t exist either. I have it on the most reputable authority.
I’m so very very sick of that one too. Especially since there was a study a few months ago that found something as simple as playing 3D video games can pretty much erase the gender difference. Women can learn the skill! Why does it matter that men are more naturally inclined to have that skill when women can fairly easily catch up to them?
Interrobang kinda beat me to it, but if women can easily learn to visualize 3D objects as well as men by playing video games, doesn’t that prove that it’s not an innate ability but is a learned skill?
My niece has been playing video games for years (I think her favorite is still “Spyro”) so I suspect she can 3D-visualize along with any boy in her class.
Yep, I sent a letter to the editor, after a few weeks of this kind of crap I might have snapped a little.
Oh and incidentally I can also confirm the existence of the University of London - considering I cashed cheques from them I feel confident they exist (that or I got free money from somewhere).
Yeah, I love that “3D rotation” schtick, too. Not only because it’s such obvious bullshit, but also because it gives me another opportunity to relate this joyously delicious anecdote:
A few years ago, I was watching a football game involving Florida State (a bowl game, IIRC), when the announcers focused in on an FSU player who had just made some focus-worthy play or another. When they flashed his name across the bottom of the screen, they also flashed his year, major and hometown.
His major was listed as — I shit you not — “Shapes and Colors.”
Make of that what you will.
mnem:
Yep.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that being a video game junkie and an avid reader — something else that is frequently “feminized” — from day one is the only reason I have such good visuospatial skills. I certainly never played sports or hunted in a pack or worked on cars or any of that stuff that ‘wingers usually point to when they say that boys are so much better at 3D visualization than girls.
I think there’s a direct conflict between the idea that men are better with 3D object rotation and women are better at interior decorating, which is often about picturing what furniture will look like when you move it around.
But of course, that’s why there are always men (or men substitutes, gay men) to help out the little wyminz on those fluff HGTV/TLC/BBC designing shows. Didn’t anyone tell you??? If they just left the women alone, not only would they not be able to lift the hammers, but they would not be able to correctly place the furniture either. The only reason that their ‘feminine’ brains are even allowed on television is so that they can help pick out the pretty fabrics.
Thank god: since tech writing was so abysmal from the start, there’s certainly no way women, or any other group, could do it worse.
OK, I wrote my letter to the WAP ombudsman as well. When you write yours, be sure to remind them that they paid for and published the ramblings of a self-professed idiot, which makes them even dumber than she is.
Kyso, good for you. Tomorrow there will be a ‘discussion’ with Howard Kurz, in which he will defend right wing media in his usual tedious way. I think it would be great to ask him if he believes women are dumber than men, if the editorial department at the Post operates on the assumption that women are dumber than men, or if it is a common comment by the management of the newspaper that women are dumber than men. Feed them back the shit they are spewing out. It is much like Slate publishing that KKK treatise about blacks being dumber than whites. Tells us a lot about the atmosphere of the offices of Slate.
Actually, Mr. Kurz and the editorial department at the Post believes and operates on the assumption that everybody except them is dumb as rocks.I’m actually really good at the “rotate a 3D object” thing. But I suck at math in general. WHERE’S MY PARADE?
This is clearly satire of the highest order.
“Nice theory. Unsupported by any actual evidence (in fact, women get into far fewer car accidents than men–hence their lower insurance rates), and clearly an exaggeration to score bonus humor points. ”
Does that still hold true for accidents per mile driven? Last time I saw the stats, a long time ago mid 90’s i think, men had more fatal or injury accidents and more propery damage accidents overall but women had them at a higher rate per mile driven. doesnt really pertain to this idiotic article but I’d be interested to see if the stat had reversed
just wanted to add on the 3-D object rotating thing, as Amanda said its a group to group comparison, not every man is better than every woman at it. The difference may very well be there but to go from that to automatically assuming men as a group will hold an edge over women in any field is idiotic. I don’t get why some people so quickly dismiss this 3-D object thing out of hand though (aside from savaging people who use it to promote a specific platform) when we generally accept without notice that women as a group may very well have an edge in language.
Somegirls,
LOL. That does sound fun. But imagine if a comedienne (like Lily Tomlin, say, who’s campaigning for Hillary) put together a montage saying “Men are all alike; first they try to bully you-” (shows Shrub doing his “mad dog” routine) “-then they act all pathetic, like lost little boys-” (shows Shrub with his his deer in the headlights look) “-and if that doesn’t work, they turn on the love.” (finishes with Shrub’s “compassionate conservatism” speech.)
She’d be banned for life from every stage in the country, because hey, it’s hateful to judge half the people in the world because of the actions of one person. Right, guys?
James, the study regarding accidents per miles driven found that when you look at all people in all age cohorts, the average woman had 5.7 accidents per million miles driven, while the average man had 5.1. (Or some numbers very close to that.)
But if you broke it out by age what you found was that old women (which, since the study was done in the 90’s, were at the time were all born before WWII), were really really bad drivers, and all other women were as good or better than men. When you consider that women didn’t used to be encouraged to learn to drive, but expected men to ferry them around, and women live longer than men, you have a bunch of people who became drivers very, very late in life, when their husbands died and they needed to learn. Of course they suck. Also, old people in general suck at driving, and there are more old women than old men.
But it’s well known to anyone who has bought car insurance that the insurance agencies think women are much, much better risks. To the extent that when I was growing up in the 80’s in upstate New York, the pattern of “boys drive girls” was completely reversed because none of the teen boys’ parents would shell out for the car insurance. Teen boys cost something like 6 times as much as girls. Men between the ages of 18 and 24 also are considered much, much worse risks than the women their own age; men and women don’t achieve driving parity until at least age 25, sometimes later, according to the insurance companies. And yanno, if they’re wrong they lose money, so I’m pretty sure they’re not wrong.
(Also, even the Hopkins study found that women had more fender benders but men were three times more likely to be in a fatal accident. I’m not sure how anyone spins that as “men are better drivers.”)
Amplifying on the 3-D object rotation riff, I’m not entirely certain that it’s exclusively learned.
For example, until I was 15 just about all I ever did was read read read read read read.
I didn’t cook, sew, work on cars, mow the lawn, or really do much of anything else.
And as this was in the 70s, there were no video games available in my house.
In light of my screech high visuospatial aptitude test scores, when I got involved in theater in college, I discovered I was super great with my hands - I could weld, paint, do mechanical drawings, build wood scenery, etc. And also at the creative stuff - I had a few plays produced at school, I majored in English lit.
Again, though, I’m lesbian. I have phreaky brain I think. But yet again, there is no **value judment** - it’s just the way my brain likes to work - both sides pretty equally, with a bit of excess emotion thrown in so I don’t get cocky. Ok, sometimes.
Seeker6079, I noticed that Jane Hamsher is trying to get responses from any women who work at Washington Post. I hope she succeeds. This goes beyond the usual press contempt for the readership. I would like to see the Post suffer for its wilingness to become a carrier of misogyny.
If, say, Walmart published a “funny” all about how dumb women are, there would be questions about the working atmosphere for women at Walmart. There might even be some nice, juicy court suits. Time to ask those questions about the Post.
Who accepts that women have an edge in language?
a.w.
I’d have to say I don’t, and that no readily identifiable group has an edge in language, only individuals do.
I know plenty of eloquent men.
I know plenty of mechanical women.
I also know the plural of anecdote ain’t data.
BlueJean or anyone, do you have a link to that Maher exchange? Is it on Youtube? I haven’t found it and want to send it around.
Thanks!
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around any thinking person committing this batsh*t drivel to paper/hard drive. It reminded me of the self-loathing Log Cabin Republicans trying to defend John McCain’s homophobic robocalls.
Teac, very true.
Never mind, found it, thanks!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFp5y944tP4
@blue jean
I remember Maher doing a bit on the many personalities of W. I’ve been trying to find it on the internets but can’t…maybe I made it up in my emotional little woman pee-brain. But you’re absolutely right that he didn’t make it about how all men are emotional.
@procrastinator
OMG!! Watching it was worse than reading the transcript. He didn’t even let her talk, he talked right over her. A typical male tactic of debate. Then Hitchens, “Multiple personalities all of them excruciating.”
Yep, feeling a little stabby.
I am glad to see that Amanda commented on this drivel.
What would happen if Charlotte Allen and Michelle Malkin got together and cross-pollinated their germs of reactionary, self-loathing bootlicking? Would it rip open a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum? Would Charlotte Allen’s desperate disavowals, “I do NOT have a vagina, I do NOT I do NOT NOT NOT!” actually come true and she grows a penis and a Y chromosome and becomes a REAL MAYUN?
And, btw, not only did Hemingway write about sex and food, he LOVED CATS. What a big sissy.
Hmm. Which is born out by reality? This:
Or saying a lot of things which actually, you know, ARE sexist, which generally make one a sexist?
He didn’t even let her talk, he talked right over her. A typical male tactic of debate.
Did you see the recent one where the panel was two men, one of whom was Andrew Sullivan, one woman (whom I confess I do not know) and then a fourth guest (some new format thingy) was a Fox guy?
The woman’s voice was completely crushed. She could hardly get a word in edgewise. I could see the men just ever so slightly turning their heads away from her when she spoke, and they would just repeat a few words until she stopped talking.
I’ve seen that before on Maher’s show and it disheartens me to no end. And coupled with these recent bouts of misogyny from him really just takes the wind out of my sails.
@teac
didn’t see that particular one but i can witness to what your sayin’.
it happens on most of these panel shows. i have seen some left wing women who handle it well. rachel maddow for instance.
of course hitchens would tell us that we’re just whine whine whining and then call us “excruciating” when we call him out on his sexism.
I didn’t say there’s no such PLACE as the University of London. I said this: “And there’s no such university as The University of London. The guy whose research she cites, who is at Queen Mary University, was not working on sex differences either. The Tabloid Press (the Telegraph) gave him quite a spin: 140 people in his research sample and that’s evidence of what?”
The person who noted that his diploma says “University of London (Warburg Institute)” didn’t mention what year the diploma was issued, but here are the facts: the University of London is fictional “federation” that enables postgraduate degrees to be awarded (like the writer’s MA from the Warburg) with collaborative examining. It has no campus and no faculty whatsoever but only an administrative building containing a library and a few research institutes. It is also currently in jeopardy of being disbanded or radically revamped, in part because it lacks funding and has no permanent faculty or research labs. Most of the time people call things “University of London” erroneously. In this case, which was my point, Charlotte Allen misidentified the researcher, whose research was funded by the Univ. of **East** London (this institution is not one of the 18 colleges and universities “federated” under the U of London banner). That researcher is today at Queen Mary, which is part of the federation. However, QM would be very displeased if their research faculty were billed as being at the U of London without acknowledging the actual location. It is not the same as saying someone teaches at the University of California and forgetting to mention if it’s UC Berkeley or UC Santa Barbara because all the UC universities are part of the same institution. It’s more like saying of someone who teaches Carleton College that he’s at Minnesota. Carleton would not be pleased.
My point was not only to point out that if Charlotte Allen had actually read the article in Hippocampus she cites (it appeared in late 2007 with the date 2008 and is in Vol. 18, no. 1), she’d have found the researchers’ affiliation. By the way, she’d also have learned the research was done by a man AND a woman! And that the research was not about sex differences in spatial visualisation but about sexual orientation with regard to spatial visualisation. She’d also have discovered, as I noted earlier, that the research sample consisted of 140 individuals in a very limited experiment. I doubt seriously you want the future of women’s training in engineering or piloting airplanes to be based on samples of 140 people. But if you’re going to cite the research, you at least have to read it. Reading it would have quickly demonstrated that the work was not done at the mythical “University of London”: there are no labs there. There are no professors teaching there. There is no research being done there. Reading the research rather than just quoting some tabloid-version of it would also have quickly shown that it doesn’t prove Allen’s point.
Wouldn’t it make sense to try to find out why Allen was given the real estate in the Washington Post? Who is she a friend of?
If you want my guess, her pal is the Ombudsman on the Post. Deborah Howell already knows from dumb.
Anyone have any idea while we’re on misrepresented institutions of higher education, what Charlotte Allen supposedly got degrees from Stanford and Harvard IN and why her bylines in various places on the web represent her as a graduate student in medieval history when she looks distinctly like she was around for the sinking of the Titanic? Not that grad students can’t be over 60, but usually someone that age has something besides “grad student” as a credential from those interim years. Even the longest graduate programs don’t last 40 years. And surely something besides being a moron qualifies her to think she should write about why Larry Summers was right (yes, she wrote that too, for a Dallas paper last year).
I’m always amused at the “women = language” and “men = spacial relations crap.” I was always good at math and spacial relations and whatnot (I played video games and sports growing up! It’s like that helped develop the skill or something!), and not so great at writing (I love to read, but for some reason I’m just a straight up shitty writer). As an added amusement for me, my husband is, and always was according to his mother, a giant giant word nerd. We’re talking eating his sandwiches into shapes of letters when he was two sort of nerd.
I’m also the jar opener and furniture putter-togethererer.
Chemical engineering is also the engineering field offering the highest salaries straight out of college as well as being the engineering field most likely to be picked by people planning to go to medical school.If there are fewer women going into engineering overall, then it strikes me that any given woman would be more likely to go into the field with the best job prospects the day after graduating and the field most likely to dovetail well with the popular post-graduate option of medical school.
The comparative advantages of the other engineering programs are lower, outside of a desire to study those fields because of an intense personal interest.
Generalizing a bit, math is as much about symbolic manipulation (language skills) as about spatial construction. If differences exist, they may influence preferred abstractions or problem-solving techniques. But any tendencies for women to “suck at math” are almost undoubtedly cultural. At most, differences might show in terms of choice of specialty within math (an area of study that is enormously rich in analytical approaches). But not overall level of skill.
Actually quite true. At least if what I learned in a workshop about “library services for teens” can be believed. It has to do with growth spurts, different body parts growing at different rates, and older teen boys growing more in terms of sheer size than older teen girls do.
If that’s true, then I suspect the reason is what immediately sprung to my mind before the other stats were debunked: the difference between driving on the freeway vs. running errands. Everyone is more likely to get into an accident on surface streets than on the freeway, in terms of miles driven, for obvious reasons. And simple physics says that freeway accidents will cause more property damage and physical harm than a parking lot fender bender will.
‘Course, that doesn’t account for the difference in insurance rates for teen boys vs. teen girls.
I don’t, actually.
“She might as well have typed, over and over, ‘Women suck, oh my god, women suck, I hate women so much, doesn’t everyone hate women, how can women not just commit suicide they are so intolerable?’”
I must admit, Amanda, sometimes I find your assessments of others to be hyperbolic, even baselessly bilious (though entertaining). Not this time. You are not exaggerating at all here. The only response that I think could adequately capture my feelings about this woman and her article comes from icanhascheezburger:
“I HAET U SO HARD.” (It is a cat in a foofy cat-dress staring murderously at the camera, for those who are curious about the context).
Did you see the recent one where the panel was two men, one of whom was Andrew Sullivan, one woman (whom I confess I do not know) and then a fourth guest (some new format thingy) was a Fox guy?
The woman’s voice was completely crushed. She could hardly get a word in edgewise. I could see the men just ever so slightly turning their heads away from her when she spoke, and they would just repeat a few words until she stopped talking.
This goes to show that women simply don’t have what it takes to compete in the world of right-wing talk shows.
Fortunately, what it takes can be purchased fairly cheaply at any hardware store. Feel free to apply liberally (heh) until you make an impression.
I think women like Charlotte Allen, Anne Coulter and Michelle Malkin are really displaying a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. Rather than fight their oppressors, these weak willed women pander to them in order to be allowed to work in the big house instead of be mere field hands.
Wearing a short black cocktail dress on a morning show, as Coulter did, or dress in cheerleader outfit and bounce around spouting the patriarchy’s line as Malkin did, are clearly efforts to pander to what they think men want.
“Wearing a short black cocktail dress on a morning show, as Coulter did, or dress in cheerleader outfit and bounce around spouting the patriarchy’s line as Malkin did, are clearly efforts to pander to what they think men want.”
…and in the case of appealing to the sexist Angry White Men segment of wingnuttia, they are probably 100% correct in their assessment of the tools needed.
None of those three women, or any of the dozens of others (feminists in they way they actually live their lives, but anti-feminists to get Reichwing work) want to appeal to a large audience. Their appeal is aimed at a very specific wingnut audience who requires certain signs of submission to accept them. (…although in Charlotte Allen’s case, she probably appeals to an audience that thinks Glenn Miller was the height of popular music…small exaggeration…)
Indeed. I’ve tested borderline learning disabled in visuospatial abilities and I still aced high school math.
Granted, I didn’t go on to university level math, but neither do most men.
“Generalizing a bit, math is as much about symbolic manipulation (language skills) as about spatial construction. If differences exist, they may influence preferred abstractions or problem-solving techniques. But any tendencies for women to “suck at math” are almost undoubtedly cultural. At most, differences might show in terms of choice of specialty within math (an area of study that is enormously rich in analytical approaches). But not overall level of skill.”
Mathematics is much more about thinking about ideas and then expressing them in a clear way than it is about spatial construction. Math is an art more than it is a science; much closer to philosophy than anything else.
I’m trying to think of when I acquired the ability to rotate 3D objects in my head–I used to do those parts of IQ tests by logically thinking it out (”if this bends in this direction here, and the next bend is in the other direction, it has to be this shape because the others have the two consecutive bends in the same direction”), but now I can actually do the rotation.
I never really tried to pinpoint anything that would contribute to it, just figured it was part of the aging process like being able to memorize lyrics much better, or recognize characters on television and in movies from scene to scene and outfit to outfit–but now that I think about it, I really only gained the skill sometime during or after taking all those calculus classes, and I really did have to visualize in three dimensions for those classes to understand some of the concepts. So…skill acquired through practice, said practice being something girls tend to be discouraged from pursuing. Hmm. I guess that explains why the male and female bell curves on that tend to overlap everywhere but a little tiny sliver on each end, doesn’t it?
For the record: female woman still collecting data on her sexual orientation, aspiring math major, voracious reader and was one of those kids known for talking at an adult level at a very young age. (Does that mean I’m bisexual? I can’t really figure out this Sexual-Orientation/Sex/Gender is Destiny stuff.)
Hmmm, if the University of London is having the kibbosh put on it, maybe THAT’s why I’ve been having such a devil of a time getting An Official Transcript from them. (Asked for one back in November, still haven’t seen anything.)
Sigh. Somehow I don’t think law schools are going to take “well, um, the University of London went out of existence” as being a good enough explanation…..
Oh, and Tyro, your explanation is why the percentage of women at MIT majoring in things like ChemE and EE is so much higher than in things like physics.
Late to the party as usual, but…
If women “have an edge in language” but by definition can’t come up with anything meaningful to say, I’d classify that pretty much as a wash, wouldn’t you?
So why write an article about it? (Let alone print one.) What’s the point?
And also, from my experiences with ROTC in HS and College, it has a lot to do with guys refusing to recognize that falling out can hit ANYONE and not learning or doing the basic things that can help prevent it.
It’s not hard to avoid but you DO have to be mature enough to recognize and admit that it can happen to you and respond accordingly.
Most of the girls we had did that, and had no problems.
The boys? They “stood like men” — and fainted like girls.
And they NEVER learned. The same five guys who fell out freshman year fell out Senior year, too.
“The notion that an intellectual piece of work rejects the spiritual, relationships, acknowledgement of sex and sensual pleasures like food is a notion that might actually be held by Allen and maybe her husband and that’s it. Seriously.”
No, no. This is the IWF we’re talking about. You know who comes closest to this description of rejection in intellectualism?
Catholic writing of the Opus Dei school and (irony warning) Ayn Rand.
As the politics of the IWF seem to be a blend of the two, I expect Charlotte Allen is a pretty good representative of the Schlaffly wing of the Village.
“The notion that an intellectual piece of work rejects the spiritual, relationships, acknowledgement of sex and sensual pleasures like food is a notion that might actually be held by Allen and maybe her husband and that’s it. Seriously.”
No, no. This is the IWF we’re talking about. You know who comes closest to this description of rejection in intellectualism?
Catholic writing of the Opus Dei school and (irony warning) Ayn Rand.
As the politics of the IWF seem to be a blend of the two, I expect Charlotte Allen is a pretty good representative of the Schlaffly wing of the Village.
I know how I acquired/practiced my 99th percentile saptial skills: jigsaw puzzles! Loved them as a child, and I still do. I look for difficult designs and always work them without looking at the picture, because otherwise they’re too easy and I’m done too quick.
I never thought of jigsaw puzzles as being gendered, but now that I’m thinking about it, I know several women who do them and not a single man. Does anyone know if there’s an overall gender-skew in jigsaw puzzle aficionados?
(then again, maybe I just have good math & spatial skills cuz I’m a lesbian like teac!)
of course, the typing skills are still a bit lacking — obviously that should’ve read “spatial skills” (not “saptial skills”).
I think a better question is why the Washington Post is giving a platform to Allen, a nutcase who deeply believes that radical feminism is exactly the same as Jew-murdering nazism and psychopathic Stalinistic communism.
Why is it that left wing ideas shared by most of the population are “fringe” in the eyes of the CMSM, whereas right-wing, panicky nonsense like this merits a shout-out from the Post? (Rhetorical question. Depressingly, I already know the answer.)
(Hat tip to “magtured” in the “Lying won’t save your ass” thread for the link.)
Amanda, actual liberals don’t use the word fisk. Act Matthew Yglesias. Perhaps you should get out more, and learn more about the world. Than you could learn what an asswipe you are for using the work fisk, a word that mocks one of the only reporters to get it right.
stormkite - that conveniently explains the different insurance rates as well.
calliopejane - me too!
Late in the game– a friend just linked this.
Perhaps my weak female brain is oversimplifying, but it would seem to me that the only kind of math that spatial skills would help with is geometry. And that’s the only kind of math I’m any good at!
Still, I’m glad there are women like Charlotte Allen about telling me that my degree in philosophy is somehow useless because of my female brain (Funny, though. I remember about half of my professors emphasizing that so much of philosophy is the manipulation of language and words; it’s damn near impossible to get through even a basic philosophy course without picking up a handful of words in German, French, Latin, and Greek, because they describe untranslatable concepts)
And better tell Dad to stop that next tuition check to my law school. Never mind that he (the guy who raised me) believes so much in my capacity to be a great lawyer, that he’s put off retiring so that I don’t have to worry about money and can concentrate on doing my best at school…Nope, this chick who’s never even met me has my number better just because we have the same genitalia.
The “no femmes can do 3D” argument still doesn’t work there, because you have to be able to evaluate the visual impact of the scale of the sofa’s floral print fabric, relative to
- the sofa’s size,
- the size of the other furniture, and
- the rest of the room.
I won’t complicate the issue with the question of where to hang the Escher prints.
Sorry.
Hee.
To the Post and to Ms. Allen:
I would like to know what about this article shown so big and bright that it deserved publication. I see that Allen is well aware of, what appears to me, outdated stereotypes. She is also still attributing quite a lot to some basic and inconclusive science about the relation of the size of one’s brain to their intelligence. In Allen’s world, our worth is based on how we drive a car and marginal IQ tests without addressing very dramatic studies on teachers’ bias toward one gender over another, not to mention the confidence of parents, employers and the press still rubbing their eyes and shaking their heads at the idea of a female American president when the rest of the world is already way ahead of us.
She has ignored studies on how women are more effective as managers, more communicative . . . she has neglected studies on child-rearing and education. Then again, what is the world outside of Allen’s TIVO but romance novels, snacking and the theatrical release of ‘Sex in the City.’ This exercise of self-loathing and undermining one’s peers is simply a symptom of laziness and fear. Women who cower in the face of competition . . . what would Allen do if women grew in leadership roles, becoming more prominent public figures and speakers and scientists, my God, she would have to put down the Lady Fingers, get off her fat ass and do something.
I will admit, as a woman there is less pressure to succeed. When you make a mistake, it is often forgiven if not anticipated by a supervisor. However, when you reinvent yourself, when you discover something new, when you really contribute- that feeling trumps all comfort that comes with acceptance in the face of failure.
Allen feels what a number of women feel, anxiety from what this means about them. They will be asked to participate when all they have been expected to do, up to this point, is look pretty and purr under the touch of their male counter-part. How will they handle this?
I am very excited to see how they will. Succeed or die Ms. Allen.