Brain Fertilizer

From last Monday:

"The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers," reports the Boston Globe:

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers' talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." . . . It was during his comments on ability that Hopkins, sitting only 10 feet from Summers, closed her computer, put on her coat, and walked out. ''It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women [at Harvard] are being led by a man who views them this way," she said later in an interview.

You've just gotta love this Nancy Hopkins, who managed with her little outburst to reinforce stereotypes of feminists as humorless harpies and of women as ruled by their emotions.

This brings up a point I've been considering blogging. I read the first part of a book by a liberal who thinks that his job as a father is to "help his daughters find their voices". You hear all sorts of statistics about how girls lose interest in math and science and need to be encouraged to continue, how girls answer more in class until grade 6 or 7 and suddenly clam up, etc, etc, etc. There's more, but you know to what sort of feminist thinking I am referring.

When I hear stuff like that, I always think back to Shakespeare's admontion of "To thine ownself be true."

What if it is a necessary part of maturation for girls to not talk as much? Introspection is a necessary part of adulthood, so is silence a bad thing? Why should women remain heavily involved in math and science? Just to earn money? Who decided that earning money is the only metric by which a person's worth is judged?

I could vamp on this theme for paragraphs and pages and hours. For instance, sex used to be an obligation for the woman to the man, and in return he wasn't supposed to stray. Now if a man doesn't adopt and internalize a woman's view of sex, discarding his needs to meet only her own, she has no obligation to meet his needs and he's a heel if he doesn't remain faithful to a wife who refuses to have sex with him. Now, obviously 'sex being an obligation from a wife to her husband' isn't good, but is what we have now any better? Why should teenage girls be pressured into having sex by Planned Parenthood? Why should women have to have mid-life crises where they finally discard what the feminist movement has told them they need to be to be a success in favor of what they really want to do/be?

The sexual revolution is pretty much done. Children and men are clear losers in the battle. Women may have won a pyrrhic victory, but even that is in doubt.

That's incomplete and insufficiently insightful, but the topic depresses me too much to spend more time writing something better.

Roe v. Whale "Right Whales having Mini-Baby Boom"--headline, Associated Press, Jan. 14

...well, the are right whales, after all.