Try thinking of cars as a cross between a suit of armor and a wheelchair that can do 90 mph.
Around here (central/southern California) people drive 90 whenever they can.
Traffic fatalities are the single greatest cause of death for people under 30 in the US.
Most kids don’t know that.
If you gave most kids a choice between being in a windowless room with a chain-smoker for an hour, or being in a room with a running automobile, they’d take the car.
In the gender debate I’m with Jim Harrison, though I think the difference would be far greater than simply a better competitive edge.
In an argument with unenlightened chauvinists the advantages to competition of an unhindered distaff would make a good talking point, much the same as the inadequacy of torture for information gathering is in an argument with the morally autistic.
The real gain would be qualitative not quantitative.
As with art – freeing the human spirit – the benefits of equality would throw us further toward the ineffable.

The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space by Wolfgang Schivelbusch has some great discussion about how this played out with the advent of the railway.

I say this, of course, as a woman who likes trains. ;)

This is still a far more “masculinist” than “feminist” culture in all the ways that matter, and the cluster of beliefs and behaviors associted with “masculinism” are a far greater danger to us all (men included) than “feminism” is. This is so obvious that those who can’t see it clearly have some sort of heavy emotional/ideological investment in overlooking it. I say this as someone who believes a lot of classical feminism is hooey, and there are plenty of on-average biological differences between men and women (especially in the ages zero through 35, a life period which I would note is becoming an ever smaller portion of effective adulthood).

In the past Brooks argued that it would be more accurate to refer to the poor as pre-rich rather than impoverished. Brooks is to serious journalism what Annie is to serious theater. A toon loaded with awful tunes.

I find it interesting that some try to cop a curious rhetorical pose: dismissing social constructionism and claiming that science has conclusively demonstrated this or that. And disclaiming one’s impartiality adds a flourish. But science has done no such thing. And it probably never will so long as the effort is frontloaded with politically laden terms.

Biologists, neuroscientists, geneticists, evolutionary psychologists or whathaveyour that have demonstrated the real gender difference of the day are often expressing little more than wishful thinking. Functionalist reasoning always outpaces empirical support – so much so that any impartial and skeptical mind would recognize that this science often sees what people want to see. And thats namely scientific support for inequality. As someone commented earlier, assumptions about dimorphism have a strong tendency to be self-confirming.

While its fashionable to dismiss social constructionism as either anti-science, bad science, or the gods forbid politics masquerading as science, I think social constuctionism is invaluable as nurturing skepticism.

I like the leap you make, Slocum, from throwing a stone to driving a car at 65 miles per hour. I can see how this totally justifies our current system, from the evolutionary point of view. I forgot how ancient man would hop on a spear and ride it into the hide of a mammoth. Throwing a stone and driving a Hummer—the same thing!

But you are right I was unforgivably hasty to suggest we could actually control our technology and integrate half the population into the decisions and designs that affect us all. After all, to change that would interfer with nature’s plan, which nicely leaves in place descriminations that favor white males. Nature was so good that way! Mustn’t interfere with nature as it does its work.

There exists numerous well-studied case where Crystal has it exactly right. Take teaching (in France). Until 1945 or so it was almost exclusively a male activity. During this period, the image of the teacher was one of culture, discipline and hard-work. Since 30 years or so it has become increasingly a female activity and its image has correlatively steadily worsened, to the point that it is now associated with “long holidays”. The interesting fact is that teacher nowadays work longer hours than teacher at the beginning of the twentieth century. The same could be said of the study of Latin or grammar, then a “hard”, “élite”, “scientific”, “masculine” subject; now a “soft” one studied almost exclusively by women (note by the way the redundant terminology).

It is at once amazing and unremarkable that this sort of anti-male bigotry passes without objection.

Bigotry is bigotry. Against women, it was used as a pretext for denying them basic human right. Against men, it has been used, well, at worst to make bad jokes. Is it really amazing that people tend to react more violently to one kind than to the other?

I think you’ve got the process backwards. Once we decide we value it, we start to categorize it as “boy stuff”.

I remember being surprised seeing the Hepburn/Tracy movie “Desk Set” (1957) how the Computer was defined as a prototypical “Girl Thing”—good at filing, and librarian skills, and collaboration (and even had a female voice), in opposition to the rugged computer-independence that was a Boy Thing.

It was only after we decided as a society that computers were valuable that they stopped being Girl Things, and a machine that emphasizing writing, typing, and filing became a “Boy Thing.”

I’m saying that it is virtually certain that there are basic brain differences and that, likewise, these will result in permanent non-balanced gender ratios in some occupations. How signficant are the differences? Nobody knows. But that means we should neither, as social policy, try to enforce gender differences nor try to erase them based on the assumption that discrimination is the only possible explanation for their persistance.

“We evolved to move, at max, 15 to 20 miles an hour. Our senses are hardwired to that motion.”

We also evolved not to fly at any speed, nor to read and write, nor do sums, nor design and build buildings, etc, etc.

As for motion, we very much did evolve to judge speeds much higher than we can run ourselves—as involved in judging how quickly a fast predator will reach us or in hitting an animal with a projectile a distance (which evolved abilities we see displayed in ball sports all the time—and which involve speeds comparable to highway traffic).

Car engineers and the road system have been dominated for about one hundred years by males—and not just any males, but males with a hardcore military bent…Maybe that is the reason that car accidents are the overlooked epidemic, eating up thousands and thousands of people, year after year—a record which, compared to transportation systems pre-car, shames us all. If I were going to look for disastrous effects of testosterone loading in the U.S., the highways—their total design—and cars would be the first place I’d go.

It is at once amazing and unremarkable that this sort of anti-male bigotry passes without objection. Female hormone-drive ‘hysteria’ is bigotry but ‘testosterone loading’ is just fine at CT.

But he’s a pious fellow, isn’t he? Where, in the prison of the brain, is the soul ensconced? Is the amygdala of a hunter/gatherer the wellspring of immortality?

One should ask him these questions and watch him squirm.

I don’t see how anybody can have a “soft spot” for so tendentious a commentator. I get my kicks by reading more idiosyncratic people like Derbyshire, who is a bloodthirsty turd but at least makes no bones about it.

The following passage in particular is relevant to the discussion:

“I should add that there’s another fallacy implicit in Brooks’ use of neuroscience. He writes as if demonstrated group differences in brain activity, being “biological”, must therefore be innate and essential characteristics of the groups, and not “socially constructed”. But how else would socially constructed cognitive differences manifest themselves? In flows of pure spiritual energy, with no effect on neuronal activity, cerebral blood flow, and functional brain imaging techniques?

I ask this as someone who is quite prepared to believe in genetically-influenced cognitive differences. If such differences exist, let’s understand what they are and decide what to do on the basis of the facts. But Brooks appears to believe that measured group differences in brain physiology are ipso facto evidence of innate cognitive differences, rather than different life experiences. If that were true, there would be no point in ever trying to teach anyone anything.”

On another note, the notion that “mathematical ability is a trait associated with the masculine”, whereas “verbal ability is a traditionally feminine trait” is a harmful cliché that somehow is still given currency by a lot of educated people. After a century of metamathematical research we know about the linguistic character of mathematics. That the criteria for arriving at valid statements in mathematics are far more stringent than those of “natural” languages used for general-purpose communication does not change this basic insight.

I suppose that this gets obscured by the fact that basic numeracy is mostly what children learn at school. Boys may or may not be better at number-crunching than girls. At any rate, a number-cruncher does not a mathematician make.

Also: “David Brooks is a man”.

I don’t know. Look at those pictures that grace his columns at the NYT site. With a wig and some red lipstick on that mealy mouth of his, he would make a very convincing homely tranny.

The police chief in the southern city of Volgograd said the move was prompted by research showing that women were less inclined to accept bribes.

I’d like to see a link to that ceremony. It sounds rather dramatic. Elsewhere it has been suggested that other circumstances may just possibly have contributed to his departure.

Men have denigrated women’s intellectual capabilities for thousands of years, yet, whenever women have been availed of the privileges previously restricted to men, they’ve performed rather credibly. Whenever it’s been asserted that women can’t do X, it’s been proven wrong. What sort of man would shrink from extrapolating this trend?

Anyone who claims at the same time that women are no longer subject to discrimination and are not capable of excelling in certain fields should not be taken seriously.

Of course I remember—he observed that for a large class of mental abilities, the male population exhibits a larger standard deviation than the female population, and speculated that this fact may partly account for the preponderance of men among tenured professors at top universities. For this heresy, he was drummed out of Harvard.

Now, it’s true that outside academia, such hypothesizing about men’s and women’s brain-related traits being distributed differently isn’t necessarily a firing offense. Still, to the extent that they exert an iron grip on America’s universities, the inquisitors against such heresies can certainly be said to constitute a “political movement” of the type whose existence you incomprehensibly doubted.