The case of women in a gynocentric culture is really interesting. It's as E. Belfort Bax said: when it's to women's advantage to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When it's to women's advantage not to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When women commit certain horrible crimes (killing children, killing their male partners), the machinery k…
The case of women in a gynocentric culture is really interesting. It's as E. Belfort Bax said: when it's to women's advantage to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When it's to women's advantage not to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When women commit certain horrible crimes (killing children, killing their male partners), the machinery kicks in to say that women have special needs, women are subject to certain mental illnesses that lead away from accountability for their deeds, that women are more sensitive to certain external stimuli than men; but when it's a debate about why there aren't equal numbers of female airline pilots or high-level surgeons, then suddenly you're not allowed to say that women are in any way different from men.
As a woman, I try to think honestly: would I be comfortable studying under a professor whose main area of research interest was to prove that on the whole, there are far far fewer female geniuses than male: that women are not represented at the genius level of the Bell Curve, that women are not as driven as men, that women are not as interested in abstract math and other very high-level sorts of thinking, and so on. As a result, he would argue that (as Larry Summers famously and suicidally did back in 2006 at Harvard) that we should not be doing anything at all to help women advance in areas of endeavor where women seem to be under-represented at the present time.
I would not have any problem studying under him at all, so long as he believed that some individual women might indeed achieve at the highest level.
If he believed that no woman ever could or should, that would be a more thorny issue.
In the case of Wax, she has certainly never said that no black student can excel at the highest levels. But she has said that many black students accepted on the grounds of racial preference into the Ivy League schools are not intellectually equipped to be there. She may have said the same about some female students. If her position is correct--or even if it isn't, but is based on credible research--it needs to be discussed, and black students will have to get over their outrage.
If only society had listened to Bax, or the author of Towards a Sane Feminism.
I'm glad we could agree on the need to tread carefully with these topics.
I appreciate your willingness to put yourself into that kind of mental space. Shows a level of intellectual honesty and courage that a lot of academics, retired or not, don't have.
As for Wax's comments, I'd agree that she has a point about affirmative action resulting in less-equipped students ending up in classes they're not qualified for.
Thanks again for giving us such thought-provoking stuff Janice!
Towards a sane feminism was misguided. It was written by a woman who simply couldn't bring herself to admit that feminism would always be bunk. It started as bunk and would stay bunk.
The case of women in a gynocentric culture is really interesting. It's as E. Belfort Bax said: when it's to women's advantage to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When it's to women's advantage not to be equal, that is the orthodoxy. When women commit certain horrible crimes (killing children, killing their male partners), the machinery kicks in to say that women have special needs, women are subject to certain mental illnesses that lead away from accountability for their deeds, that women are more sensitive to certain external stimuli than men; but when it's a debate about why there aren't equal numbers of female airline pilots or high-level surgeons, then suddenly you're not allowed to say that women are in any way different from men.
As a woman, I try to think honestly: would I be comfortable studying under a professor whose main area of research interest was to prove that on the whole, there are far far fewer female geniuses than male: that women are not represented at the genius level of the Bell Curve, that women are not as driven as men, that women are not as interested in abstract math and other very high-level sorts of thinking, and so on. As a result, he would argue that (as Larry Summers famously and suicidally did back in 2006 at Harvard) that we should not be doing anything at all to help women advance in areas of endeavor where women seem to be under-represented at the present time.
I would not have any problem studying under him at all, so long as he believed that some individual women might indeed achieve at the highest level.
If he believed that no woman ever could or should, that would be a more thorny issue.
In the case of Wax, she has certainly never said that no black student can excel at the highest levels. But she has said that many black students accepted on the grounds of racial preference into the Ivy League schools are not intellectually equipped to be there. She may have said the same about some female students. If her position is correct--or even if it isn't, but is based on credible research--it needs to be discussed, and black students will have to get over their outrage.
If only society had listened to Bax, or the author of Towards a Sane Feminism.
I'm glad we could agree on the need to tread carefully with these topics.
I appreciate your willingness to put yourself into that kind of mental space. Shows a level of intellectual honesty and courage that a lot of academics, retired or not, don't have.
As for Wax's comments, I'd agree that she has a point about affirmative action resulting in less-equipped students ending up in classes they're not qualified for.
Thanks again for giving us such thought-provoking stuff Janice!
Towards a sane feminism was misguided. It was written by a woman who simply couldn't bring herself to admit that feminism would always be bunk. It started as bunk and would stay bunk.
Thank you for this. So well said.