Thanks for reading that, BooMan, so I don't have to. I would have been inclined to want to kick some serious ass.

Having a perfectly nice Sunday morning, and all.

What you mean "we,"  white woman?

Dim.

I read that last night and thought ... this must be snark.  Then I read it again.  

When she wrote this:

I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies.

I thought - just take out the word "female" and you have it.  You are mentally deficient.   The rest of us, male and female, shouldn't be have to encounter you.

Speak for yourself, Charlotte.

That's one of the most insulting things I've read in a while.  Since she is so incapable and lacking in intelligence, I think she should give up her job and go redecorate her living room.

Unbelievable.  She obviously has never met and doesn't know the hundreds of amazingly bright, intelligent, competent and feeling/nurturing women I know and have met all over this country.

Makes me wonder why I don't have a job as a columnist on some prominent national newspaper.

Go figure.

don't miss ~ Matters of Spirit and Expanded Views

I love it when journalists cite "science". There are some good science journalists out there, but for the most part, journalists -- and liberal arts majors in general -- are terribly ill-equipped to deal with science. They neither understand scientific method nor have the technical background to evaluate most of the science they report on. It's a major failing of our educational system that people are able to obtain college degrees without ever having studied, much less grasped, the fundamental knowledge upon which modern civilization is built.

As far as the relative intelligence of men and women go, there are some well-established differences in thinking styles, but I have yet to see any definitive proof that any of those differences are independent of social conditioning. Due to lifelong neuroplasticity, the human brain changes its own structure in response to the uses to which it is habitually put. Drawing sweeping conclusions from examinations of the brains of a handful of people from a single culture -- and it's usually more specific than that: college students are the most common guinea pig for these studies -- is a very risky affair. Moreover, scientific studies of female biology have been few and far between. It's been less than a decade, for example, since biologists actually figured out when in their cycle women actually ovulate. If the state of the art is that rudimentary, I'd take any discussion of something as complicated as brain structure with a grain of salt the size of Manhattan.

All that said, I think we can conclude with a high degree of confidence that Charlotte Allen is -- if I may resort to technical jargon here -- a fucking dipshit.

---Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?

Snark perhaps?  Ugh, I guess not.

Oh, there you are, Perry. -Phineas -SLB-

AG

Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.-Mae West

That's nothing. Anyone see this month's special "Women's History Month" issue of The Beast?

Oh yeah. The Beast is satire. The Washington Post is "Serious Journamalism." Hmmm...

No, it's not April 1st. And I don't think it's National-Editors-Get-The-Day-Off day. I guess it must all be true.

Seriously, though. The comments on that Washington Post piece are probably the best entertainment of the week.

ho. lee. shit.

That is some pretty wanktastic wanking.

I can't speak for women in general, but Charlotte Allen is definitely dumb. And if I was a women, i wouldn't want someone that stupid speaking for me, anymore than I like Larry the Cable Guy as the representative male.

No if you'll pardon me, I have to open the blinds and get back to cleaning my house.  I don't know whether Ms. Allen has ever lived with a man, but we do that kind of thing once in awhile, even when one of those dumb broads isn't nagging at us.

John Mccain Called his wife WHAT??

Damn.  Excuse me while I go tell my 11 year old high school junior, college physics taking daughter that she's really a fucking idiot at heart.

Am I the only one who found the Obama/Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton cartoon on last night's SNL extremely racist? WTF

I daresay that now all the women (perhaps most) who would have read her article will pick Clinton. Dim? Or not? A very interesting dilemna to say the least.

Frightening!

Not fit to wrap up discarded fish bones, either...

This link should get you to the abstract of a recent finding where 10hrs of training on a particular video game removed a prior gender difference in spatial cognition.

Ms. Allen might want to know that women living, on average, longer than men is a pretty recent development, certainly as far as evolution goes.  

There's plenty of evidence out there that men and women are constructed somewhat differently, and heaps of evidence that we can use our differing construction set-ups to be equally competent at all sorts of activities.  Nice how she just waves around "standardized testing" blah blah with no specifics.  I hope some actual scientists in the field get mad enough to write some primo letters to the editor, not that the Post is worth it these days!  I would like to roll up a copy and belabor Ms. Allen with it, given the trouble I go to to convince my female students that they can do quantitative analysis... which they then prove to themselves, maypo-brains be darned!

Please forgive a long quote, but for anyone interested, the whole article is worth a look: (If the link doesn't work, it's called "Teaching Boys and Girls Separately" and it's in today's NYT Magazine)

...When it comes to education, gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. "On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations." Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys' and girls' locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys' locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls' locker room. What would happen? While you'd end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place. Giedd suggests the same is true when educators use gender alone to assign educational experiences for kids. Yes, you'll get more students who favor cooperative learning in the girls' room, and more students who enjoy competitive learning in the boys', but you won't do very well. Says Giedd, "There are just too many exceptions to the rule."

Is she some next generation Phyllis Schlafly?

Wow, "amply supported," wow! I can't even begin to comprehend what she regards as ample support. I won't try to address this issue as if it's intended as a serious commentary. I will, however, recommend the Mismeasure of Man [link below](yes, it is sexist, and Gould explains why in his intro). I also recommend any works by Howard Gardner and the work of Project Zero on the topic of intelligence.

Agitprop crap. My tack would be to call attention to the obvious intentions of the author. There is no basis for her contention -- absolutely none. She should be called on her nefarious intent. There is no place for civility with pond slime of this type.

BTW -- this argument has been turned on it's head lately. Currently, there are far more women in college than men. We've been hearing the "dumb white male" stereotype a lot lately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

Gardner: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm

http://www.pz.harvard.edu/index.cfm

"..the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. .. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.." - Goering

That could easily be asked of the Wash Post's editors.

Can't hear ya, Peach!

IMHO, just as it is ridiculous to assume the 'average' traits of a vast population somehow constrain the traits of an individual of that population, it's also probably not worth getting too exorcised about a paper based on the work of a columnist, who are journalists only in that their works are found in newsprint and who gain employment not because of their integrity, but their popularity.

Declaring the bottom is the only way back up..

Wow. Perhaps some Wollstonecraft is in order?