[FoRK] We Scream, We Swoon, We Generalize Horribly

[Lawnun]

Oy.  There's just so much wrong with this one, I don't know where to begin.
Nothing like a broad generalization to start out the work week!  Hooray!

Given her strong adherence to the philosophy that better spatial
intelligence ipso facto makes a person "more intelligent," I'm willing to
wager she never bothered to read much (okay, anything) on the
subject<http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?ATH=Howard+Gardner>.


And if I have to balance the harm of cumulative stupid acts, I'll take the
merely "embarrassing" over the catastrophic, thx.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902992_pf.html

*We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?*

By Charlotte Allen
Sunday, March 2, 2008; B01

Here's Agence France-Presse<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Agence+France-Presse?tid=informline>reporting
on a rally for Sen. Barack
Obama<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Barack+Obama?tid=informline>at
the University
of Maryland<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/University+of+Maryland?tid=informline>on
Feb. 11: "He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in
mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female's cry of 'I love
you, Obama!' with a reassuring 'I love you back.' " Women screamed? What was
this, the Beatles<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+Beatles?tid=informline>tour
of 1964? And when they weren't screaming, the fair-sex Obama fans who
dominated the rally of 16,000 were saying things like: "Every time I hear
him speak, I become more hopeful." Huh?

"Women 'Falling for Obama,' " the story's headline read. Elsewhere around
the country, women were falling for the presidential candidate literally.
Connecticut<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Connecticut?tid=informline>radio
talk show host Jim Vicevich has counted five separate instances in
which women fainted at Obama rallies since last September. And I thought
such fainting was supposed to be a relic of the sexist past, when patriarchs
forced their wives and daughters to lace themselves into corsets that cut
off their oxygen.

I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and
swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of
course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our
brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and
distraction by the superficial. Women "are only children of a larger
growth," wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been
right?

I'm not the only woman who's dumbfounded (as it were) by our sex, or rather,
as we prefer to put it, by other members of our sex besides us. It's a
frequent topic of lunch, phone and water-cooler conversations; even some
feminists can't believe that there's this thing called "The Oprah
Winfrey<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Oprah+Winfrey?tid=informline>Show"
or that Celine
Dion<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Celine+Dion?tid=informline>actually
sells CDs. A female friend of mine plans to write a horror novel
titled "Office of Women," in which nothing ever gets done and everyone
spends the day talking about
Botox<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Botox?tid=informline>
.

We exaggerate, of course. And obviously men do dumb things, too, although my
husband has perfectly good explanations for why he eats standing up at the
stove (when I'm not around) or pulls down all the blinds so the house looks
like a cave (also when I'm not around): It has to do with the aggressive
male nature and an instinctive fear of danger from other aggressive men.
When men do dumb things, though, they tend to be catastrophically dumb, such
as blowing the paycheck on booze or much, much worse (think "postal").
Women's foolishness is usually harmless. But it can be so . . .
embarrassing.

Take Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Hillary+Clinton?tid=informline>'s
campaign. By all measures, she has run one of the worst -- and, yes,
stupidest -- presidential races in recent history, marred by every
stereotypical flaw of the female sex. As far as I'm concerned, she has
proved that she can't debate -- viz. her televised one-on-one against Obama
last Tuesday, which consisted largely of complaining that she had to answer
questions first and putting the audience to sleep with minutiae about her
health-coverage mandate. She has whined (via her aides) like the teacher's
pet in grade school that the boys are ganging up on her when she's bested by
male rivals. She has wept on the campaign trail, even though everyone knows
that tears are the last refuge of losers. And she is tellingly dependent on
her husband.

Then there's Clinton's nearly all-female staff, chosen for loyalty rather
than, say, brains or political savvy. Clinton finally fired her
daytime-soap-watching, self-styled "Latina queena" campaign manager Patti
Solis Doyle<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Patti+Solis+Doyle?tid=informline>,
known for burning through campaign money and for her open contempt for the
"white boys" in the Clinton camp. But stupidly, she did it just in time to
alienate the Hispanic voters she now desperately needs to win in
Texas<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Texas?tid=informline>or
Ohio <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Ohio?tid=informline>to
have any shot at the Democratic nomination.

What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the
superficial and the gooily sentimental? Take a look at the New York
Times<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+New+York+Times+Company?tid=informline>bestseller
list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to
an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth
Gilbert<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Elizabeth+Gilbert?tid=informline>'s
"Eat, Pray, Love." Here's the book's autobiographical plot: Gilbert gets
bored with her perfectly okay husband, so she has an affair behind his back.
Then, when that doesn't pan out, she goes to
Italy<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Italy?tid=informline>and
gains 23 pounds forking pasta so she has to buy a whole new wardrobe,
goes to India<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/India?tid=informline>to
meditate (that's the snooze part), and finally, at an Indonesian
beach,
finds fulfillment by -- get this -- picking up a Latin lover!

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." This female taste for first-person romantic nuttiness,
spiced with a soup¿on of soft-core porn, has made for centuries of
bestsellers -- including Samuel Richardson's 1740 novel "Pamela," in which a
handsome young lord tries to seduce a virtuous serving maid for hundreds of
pages and then proposes, as well as Erica Jong's 1973 "Fear of Flying."

Then there's the chick doctor television show "Grey's
Anatomy<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Grey%27s+Anatomy?tid=informline>"
(reportedly one of Hillary Clinton's favorites). Want to be a surgeon?
Here's what your life will be like at the hospital, according to "Grey's":
sex in the linen-supply room, catfights with your sister in front of the
patients, sex in the on-call room, a "prom" in the recovery room so you can
wear your strapless evening gown to work, and sex with the married attending
physician in an office. Oh, and some surgery. When was the last time you
were in a hospital and spotted two doctors going at it in an empty bed?

I swear no man watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to.
No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to
spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club." No man
contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all
doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your
skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things,
either -- although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn't some
genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to
the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns
the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female
inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men,
for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of
medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents
per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive
about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that
women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were
only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a
study released by the University of London in January showing that women and
gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving
navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

The theory that women are the dumber sex -- or at least the sex that gets
into more car accidents -- is amply supported by neurological and
standardized-testing evidence. Men's and women's brains not only look
different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for
men's generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the
parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial
skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at
which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for
abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and
philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average
(although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge),
there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very
smart and very, very stupid.

I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female
mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I
don't even know how many pairs of shoes I own. 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. (An
evolutionary just-so story explains this facility of ours: Back in
hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear
trajectories, while women were the gatherers and needed to remember where
the berries were.) I don't mind recognizing and accepting that the women in
history I admire most -- Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth
I<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Queen+Elizabeth+I?tid=informline>,
George Eliot, Margaret
Thatcher<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Margaret+Thatcher?tid=informline>--
were brilliant outliers.

The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants,
chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can
do their jobs and do them well, and I don't think anyone should put
obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even
with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can
provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the
number of men, for good reason.

So I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities
most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in
the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel:
tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a
house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my
Bronx<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+Bronx?tid=informline>Irish
paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was
to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek
and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind
the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.