Brooks’s Gender Agenda

Why would you have a soft spot for Brooks? He’s a liar (often about pretty silly things, too, such as whether you can buy a dinner that costs more than $20 in some place), an appologist for inequality and current (or older!) class structures, and so on. Also, his prose is annoying as hell. I must admit I don’t understand.

“I don’t know whether to side with Laura or her mum.”

There’s no question here. Laura. Brooks is always pushing this mealy-mouthed method of sliming any progress the human race has made.

Brooks would happily print research showing that black people have more melanin in their skin, in order to insinuate with a smirk that they really would be happier down on the plantation. His intellectual dishonesty is beyond the pale.

“Unlike most of you, but I suspect like Laura, I have a real soft spot for Brooks.”

Jesus christ on a crutch, harry. This guy has more blood on his hands, foreign and domestic, than Tom Friedman. He is exhibit A in the despicable state of journalistic affairs, when a sleazy, weasely, two-bit Republican shill can squat on the real-estate of the former Paper of Record and churn out RNC lies week after week without getting fired.

A soft spot? yes–check your cranium.

Isn’t there an intermediate point here that could be made between “Ha!” and “Women should be home barefoot and pregnant!”?

Something along the lines of, maybe, “Don’t assume that studies that show differences in gender outcomes imply sexism.” Every week or two, there’s a news article about the percentage of women associates who make partner, or the wage gap in academia, or whatever.

There is a tendency to jump from “The Studies Shows X” to “X is caused by sexism.” Brooks is merely trying to weaken that mental causal link.

Imagine, in an alternate universe, you read the stories about wage gaps, and they all implied, “Clearly, men are smarter than women, because they earn more money!” You’d be writing all sorts of op-eds amassing arguments about how similar male and female brains are.

You all have subscription to times-select?

Mark Lieberman of Language Log has a series of good posts on the science (or lack of it) here, the latest of which is take on Brooks’ column (and has links to the rest of the series).

For Brooks, I’d look bad to the piece he wrote on Annette Lareau’s book. The message he took away from it was that inequality is now okay because it comes about because the smart are just flat-out out compeating the dumb. It’s hard for me to see how anyone who was honest could come to that conclusion from her book, but this was a pretty typical day for him. So, I think that even though he writes about things we may be interested in, he’s dishonest to his core and this makes him impossible to take seriously. I just see no evidence at all that he does anything except take whatever he reads as evidence for the (quite conservative) views that he started with.

_But in an op ed, shouldn’t you forward an op?_

Yes. And I find it difficult to say anything else, if it’s not possible to read the whole thing.

“Jump all over”, “knee-jerk”, … why do certain people from The Right(tm) like to use such terms? Does the mere dropping of such terms invalidate arguments or something?

I have a better idea: just say,

“The Crooked Timberites Are Wrong…
Because Michael Moore Is Fat!”

Applause please.

…OK, if it’s really as Rich B. describes, then I think Brooks is attacking a straw man, albeit an implicit one. What’s this “political movement” that Brooks is supposedly up against, and how dominant is it?

Harry, re comment 10: If you have a subscription to the Times on Sunday, you can get a free membership to Times Select. (That’s my situation precisely.) Or perhaps you’re refusing to joing Times Select as a blog-solidarity statement, which is also fine.

What’s this “political movement” that Brooks is supposedly up against, and how dominant is it?

Have you ever heard of a guy named Larry Summers?

Gender inequality justified, it seems. This is very damaging, since stereotypes are always bad, since we judge individual people by the perceived average characteristics of their groups.

Your conclusion doesn’t follow from your premise. Judging people by the perceived average characteristics of their groups is, I agree, both morally wrong and foolish as a practical matter. But the solution is not to require everyone to believe dogmatically that there are no differences in the perceived average characteristics of groups, regardless of the evidence.

Or are you arguing that people simply can’t help thinking in stereotypes, if they’re allowed to hear uncomfortable truths about average differences in group characteristics? If so, then you have a lot more in common with Brooks’ human-nature-is-destiny position than you seem to want to admit…

He is exhibit A in the despicable state of journalistic affairs, when a sleazy, weasely, two-bit Republican shill can squat on the real-estate of the former Paper of Record and churn out RNC lies week after week without getting fired.

The kid shows promise.

Imagine, in an alternate universe, you read the stories about wage gaps, and they all implied, “Clearly, men are smarter than women, because they earn more money!”

I don’t know what universe you live in, Rich, but I read plenty of stories like that where I live.

Brook’s column is of a piece with “The Bell Curve”. Resorting to pseudo-science to justify/buttress sexism and racism has been all the rage in conservative circles.

Antonio

In most human societies, the men have lorded it over the women, and sexual dimorphism has surely played a role in establishing and maintaining this domination. Men are larger and more violent than women, and women are handicapped by the burdens of reproduction. Thing is, under conditions where individuals are prevented from using violence to intimidate others and the burden of reproduction is lessened, women aren’t necessarily politically inferior at all. You can’t get a reading on the practical value of a trait without specifying the context in which the trait occurs and that’s true whether you are talking about gender differences in people or bill sizes in finches. In either instance, things depend on what kind of nuts are around.

Speaking of nuts, I think you have to be nuts to want to live in a society that does not promote the equality of the sexes, even if you put a tremendous value on getting your shirts ironed. I think it’s a very good bet that societies where men and women can be equal will outcompete their sexually-chauvanistic rivals. Anyhow, to put things as a philosoph from the 18th Century might have, it’s a great deal more agreeable to live in a world where the ladies aren’t drudges or slaves but friends and lovers.

I’ve always thought one of the areas it would be nice to see that good old ‘womanly touch’ would be transportation. 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. These are the type of people who would actually listen to Schwartzenegger when he asked for a civilian hummer — it was just up their ally. Has there ever been a car, yet, designed by a woman — or at least, heavily influenced in its design by a woman? 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.

roger, just to say you’re being too kind to cars — compared with all transportation systems post-automobile they have a lousy safety record too!

“The idea that gender difference is entirely socially constructed has been known to be nonsense for decades, and I bet the period in which it was an accepted idea was pretty damned short in the grand scheme of things.”
This is simply not true. As recently as two years ago I attended a seminar on women in the military where one of the (academic feminist) speakers explicitly made exactly this claim. I think the rhetoric of “we’re all the same at birth but society makes us different” is a good deal more common than you realise, as is the fall-back position of “let’s change the subject completely” as we see at numbers 6 and 27.
I think the search for Brookes’ hidden agenda would be a lot more reasonable is there was a broad concensus that his basic claim (that there are systematic differences) was universally accepted.

Brizendine and Brooks are flattening out individual differences in personality altogether.

IIRC, the review of Brizendine in the NYT (forgive me if was in the WP) cited her assertion that the average woman uses 20,000 words a day, the average man 7,000.

This is merely the stereotype of the strong and silent man vs. the woman who goes “yada yada yada” all day, without anyone listening, of course.

I work alone, and some days I’d be hard put to have uttered 700 words, not 7,000, let alone 20,000.

I bet Brooks utters 20,000.

A point that several commenters to Laura’s thread made, which I thought was well-taken, is that our culture values “boy stuff” much more than “girl stuff.” Traits associated with the masculine – toughness, aggression, mathematical ability – are valued much more than traditionally feminine traits like caregiving and verbal ability. It doesn’t do much to be fobbed off with being an angelic font of gentle succor when this is so little valued. Conversely, the conservative/gender-essentialist picture of men tends to be very dark – men are natural-born rapists, murderers and all-round bullies. (Sometimes I think there are sociobiology types who hate men even more than Andrea Dworkin did!) Yet these traits are made to seem more powerful and, in a way, valued. Thus, the nineteenth-century idea of Man the Bully and Woman the Patsy gets passed on.

Anthropologist Peggy Sanday has studied the Minangkabau, a matrilineal, gender-egalitarian (and Muslim) society in Indonesia. The Minangkabau value what we might call traditionally feminine traits; gentleness, politeness, nurturing, family-orientation, and caregiving. Being too loud, or too aggressive, or too pushy, is scorned. It is interesting to look at a society where nurturing is exalted, and, as Jim Harrison pointed out above, where no-one uses violence to solve their problems, thus enabling gender equality.

Dan Simon: Isn’t Summers the guy who talked specifically about men and women in tenure, rather than differences in the brain in general?So have you read Summers? Do you still remember his specific arguments?

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.

Men are corrupt bastards.
Russia is to create its first all-female unit of traffic police, in a move to combat corruption.

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.

Folks should really read Mark Lieberman’s posts on Language Log mentioned in #11, especially this one . They clearly establish that “Bobo” Brooks basically does not know what he’s talking about.

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.

Slocum: besides looking at brain from the inside, there have also been lots of studies on gender differences (or the lack thereof) from the outside. You’re saying that we should ignore all those other studies because of this new study with as-yet-uninterpretable results?

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.

I think you’ve got the process backwards.

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?

David Brooks has credibility only among those who prefer their petty bigotries are repeatedly and publicly caressed and lovingly wrapped in the hoary and stolid pages of the New York Times. This is gotta be a disorder covered in the DSM.

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.

come on mq — “soft spot” doesn’t equal “respect for”. Something like this — I feel that he knows what I’ll disagree with, and needles away trying to goad me with a twinkle in his eye, all the while daring me to show him why he’s wrong. Do I respect that? Not really. Do I enjoy it? Quite a bit. I prefer it to commentators right and left who seem to take themselves completely seriously, all the while displaying complete lack of awareness of the holes in their arguments.

Roger-
“Yet we persist in thinking that the average person should be allowed to sit in a heavy metal box behind a glass wheel and enter a stream of similar boxes at 65 miles an hour”

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.