Women Aren't Very Bright --- Wash Post's Charlotte Allen

original wapo story

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

By Charlotte Allen
Sunday, March 2, 2008; B01

Here's Agence France-Presse reporting on a rally for Sen. Barack Obama at the University of Maryland 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 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 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 Show" or that Celine Dion 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.

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'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, 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 or Ohio 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 bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert'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 and gains 23 pounds forking pasta so she has to buy a whole new wardrobe, goes to India 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" (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, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher -- 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 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.

Amazing that no one has a reaction to this sexist crap.

That's because it has already been discussed to death in three other threads.

Re: Women Aren't Very Bright --- Wash Post's Charlotte Allen


Seems like someone could have answered my question then.

I read it days ago and thought it weak. Why the vitriol? Does such a simple question trigger acid?

I just saw it (somehow I missed the other threads).

I hate to say it - but I agree with a lot of it. I've always been bored with what most women find it interesting to dissect in detail and discuss- always. Since I was eight years old, my best friends have been male (except for Jenny and Margaret- and in a lot of ways they exhibit more masculine personality traits).

I love my mother and sisters - but when the dishes are done, and the discussions start - I hang out with my father, brother, brothers-in-laws, and nephews. I just don't have much to say about what was on Oprah (I don't watch it) or what the catty bitch at work did to and said about so and so.

That's the only part I think she left out of this article - how incredibly catty and mean women can be toward other women. I see it in my students. I had to tell this girl today, "Look, I KNOW you can out-bitch me...okay...no contest....you're the queen. Can we stop this now and do some math?"

There are wonderful women everywhere - but as a gender as a whole - we sometimes don't present very well. And there aint no denying that.

(I should tell Chumly about the spacial memory and theory of men calculating spear trajectory while women remembered where the berries are - that's what I was trying to express on his "Where are all the babes in the mechanical and technical fields" thread)

I thought the same when I was fifteen. Get to know some more women, Aidan.

I do - as I said, I know a lot of great women. And I know there are a lot of great women that I don't know.

But as a group - maybe especially as presented by the media- this is not that far off from how women present themselves (in this country).

and YEP- YOU can outbitch me too Osso...have a great day.

This is what I actually said:

Why would evolution make women "bright" in the same way men are bright?

It would be a waste. If men are judged on female criteria they are not very bright. In fact they are saps.

Ms Allen is judging women on male criteria which is pretty misogynistic.

Maybe she was brought up to be masculine.

The problem is that women brought up like that get jobs more easily in media and from there distort everybody's perceptions.

Feminists are the real misogynists. They hate women so much they want to be men.

Hardly to death. In those cases, it was briefly and shallowly alluded to merely as an exemplar of blatant sexism yet appearing in the mainstream media (with some weighing or comparison with racism).

But Hamsher's piece here brings up some important issues regarding very purposeful contributions towards sexist language and conceptions in american culture. I really ought to have caught this, but I didn't think to find out more about the author of that Wash Post piece.

As Hamsher points out, Charlotte Allen's views are happily received over at the conservative movement outlet "Independent Women's Forum".

The funding for them? Precisely as we'd expect...
link

Who's involved?


Let's take Midge
link

That's how it works Bernie. Business as usual.

Nothing to get excited about. In fact that's the simple stuff.

Odd to find us disagreeing like this, spendi.

I assume Bernie that you have given Gibbon the go-by.

It is wearying I'll admit. But gold has to be prospected for.

Anything easy is a waste of time. It's already been picked clean.

Well, that's very interesting...this is the first time I've ever found myself in the conservative camp.

But I have to say that as a woman who has sat in the bleachers say, at thousands of little league games, or soccer games with other mothers in my time (all of whom are women ), I have heard and seen all of this behavior and dialogue over and over and over again - to the point that I was always SO HAPPY when the game was over, and I could go somewhere else and be around other types of people.

She's not making this up out of thin air. That's all I'm saying.

And I don't hate women - I'm so HAPPY I'm a woman- and I don't consider myself to be a conservative woman.


But what I don't understand is this tendency to deny truths instead of accept that, "Hey, yeah, that might be the way it seems for people looking on." And maybe we female mothers could work hard on raising our daughters to be, or at least give the appearance of being, less concerned with trivia and cattiness and one-upmanship among our gender and more concerned with other things - even if it's just to lighten up - give up the grudges against men and other women-and have more fun in life

What was it James Baldwin said: "Not every problem that is faced can be overcome, but nothing can be overcome until it is faced." (paraphrased)

I don't completely disagree with your post -- I just find the article to be an example of the very kind of "cattiness" that you deplore.

It got such a strong negative response that the editor tried to imply it was just a joke -- then Allen came back and stated no, she meant it.

I have to admit - I DID think it was a joke...thus the cattiness was just part of her jokey little style from my reading- kind of a clever juxtaposition of her abhorrence of the very behavior she was exhibiting with a pretty realistic fascimile of it.
Or maybe that's why she didn't mention the cattiness- maybe she doesn't even see it or it doesn't bother her- because she's so good at it.
Who knows?

The parts about not being able to add 2 and 2 and that women should stay home and decorate...hmmm....now I see why the conservatives loved it.

Well, I still think her observations hold a kernel of truth. And I don't think truth is partisan or liberal or conservative.

If women want to be taken seriously - maybe we should insist the media portray us more accurately. But again, I think average women need to take responsibility for their behavior and conversation- especially in front of their daughters and other young women.

Each of us is responsible for our own image. If each of us wanted to portray a more serious and intelligent image - and did- our group image would evolve and emerge differently.

aidan said

It is the "kernal of truth" that catches us in so many of these arguments. The neoconservative notion that we ought to feel some moral obligation towards alleviating injustice or oppression in the world outside our borders (thus inside someone else's sovereign borders) tempts any of us with a moral conscience. The Bush administration notion that we'd be imprudent to avoid opening anyone's mail or electronic communications is equally compelling.

What we have to be alert to are the clods of bullshit that can surround that precious kernal.

Here's Katha Pollitt on Allen's piece...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/06/AR2008030603240.html