A certain strand of Rational Internet Thinker
Helen Lewis has more sympathy than I do for the fired James Damore.
But the conversation around this is heading in such an unproductive direction (do women suck at maths?) that I can’t resist wading in.
I agree with the writer that these issues are hard to talk about, but that pushback comes from both directions. Look at the crap Mary Beard is wading through for trying to inject some facts into a discussion about the racial composition of Roman Britain. Nicholas Nassim Taleb keeps honking about “diversity genes” and refusing to listen to evidence that contradicts him. But in his mind, he’s Mr Science – sorry, Professor Science – and she’s Madam Arts-Subject.
We kind of want these issues to be hard to talk about. We kind of want it to be not all that easy for dudes to say women just aren’t right for this particular job, unless the job is, say, modeling male bikinis.
This matters, because when it comes to diversity, there are fact-based positions on both sides. Yet there is a certain strand of Rational Internet Thinker (let’s be honest, mostly men) who solemnly tells everyone that we Must Stick To The Facts while advancing deeply ideological stances, which only happen to look “natural” because they are so embedded in our culture.
And that very much describes Damore’s ridiculous memo.
Here’s the recap: the memo was headlined “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” and its writer’s firing will be taken as confirmation that his thesis was true. Ironically, this will be done by the same section of the right which usually has no problem with firing at will and normally thinks that HR should be a brutally Darwinian process. (Looked at from that perspective, of course Google would fire someone who brought such criticism on the company.) But now there are Principles involved. Probably Free Speech is under attack. Political Correctness may even have Gone Mad. Social Justice Warriors are on the march.
It’s amusing/exasperating that Damore doesn’t think his own very stale views do not issue from an Ideological Echo Chamber.
Also, while we’re on the subject – what’s the thinking here? That all ideas should be unique, personal, incommunicable? That any idea held by more than one person is an Ideological Echo Chamber and a Bad Thing? I trust it’s obvious how impossible it would be to have any kind of civilization and culture at all if we’re forbidden to hold ideas in common.
Lewis cites several of Damore’s Grand Generalizations about women.
Well, SOMEONE has been reading their Simon Baron Cohen. The first point is a distillation of Baron Cohen’s argument about “male brains” being better at understanding systems, and “female brains” being better at feelings – which he extends to say that autistic traits might be an “extreme male brain”. Unsurprisingly, there are other scientists in the field, such as Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-Young, who find a lot of the neuroscience of sex difference quite flaky.
I’m not a neuroscientist, but from a lay perspective, my take is that yes, there are some biological differences between the average male and female brain, but that these pale beside a) the way our brain architecture is shaped by stimuli (like years of being told you’re rubbish at maths) and b) the overall effect of culture (eg companies which value presenteeism, or make it hard for women to return after having children, or cover up for senior men who are repeated sexual harassers etc etc).
Our brain architecture is shaped by stimuli like people like James Damore telling us what our brain architcture is (and how it’s not suited to work at tech companies).
The “higher agreeableness” point was dealt with by Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In. Women aren’t stupidly not asking for raises or being assertive in the office because they are delicate little flowers. One of the reasons they are more agreeable at work is because they face heavier penalties if they are not. As Sandberg formulates it: “Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.” Women are nicer because there are more negative consequences for them if they are not nice.
And we can’t even do anything about that. We can up to a point do something about perceptions that women are stupid, women can’t do math, and the like. But other people’s attitudes to our being assertive? Out of our god damn control, innit.
She quotes Yonatan Zunger admiringly, concluding with
It’s true that women are socialised to be better at paying attention to people’s emotional needs and so on — this is something that makes them better engineers, not worse ones.”
As I said on Twitter, this is a pattern we see again and again – a high status job is coded as “male”, requiring “male” traits, to justify men’s dominance of it. The same thing happens in politics: we are assured that politicians need to be “strong” and “decisive”, when many of the most successful male politicians today have incredible people skills. Jeremy Corbyn makes time for everyone he meets, hugging them and posing for endless selfies. Sadiq Khan has that Queen Mum ability to remember your name and a key fact about you. What’s the real difference between the Clintons? Bill demonstrated huge empathy and made people he was talking to feel special; Hillary didn’t. But still, maybe men dominate politics because they are just more aggressive and ambitious. Yeah, OK.
Tech suffers from a similar silent rewriting of core competencies to flatter its mostly male leaders.
We have all these conversations about how hard it is for Mark Zuckerberg to make the leap to being a frontman CEO because he’s a maths guy, not a people guy. We treat this like he’s doing an amazing project of personal growth. We don’t go, “wow, they really lowered the bar for CEOs to let someone without some of the key skills have a go at it”. Or, “his poor colleagues, having to make up for the stuff he’s not naturally gifted at”.
…
So this, for me, is the most interesting takeaway from the Google memo. “Do women suck at maths” is a complicated question, and I’m not sure how far answering it will move the conversation forwards. “Have we structured society so that those competitions between the sexes that men can win are deemed to be the most important competitions?” is a better one.
Easier to answer, too.
I’m not sure it’s as complicated as all that. The reality is, some women do suck at math, but certainly not all women do, though maybe it’s a majority of women. The thing is, the same pattern shows for men. Very few of the men I know are good at math, though some are very good (but only a very few). I hear men complain about math being hard at least as often as I do women, so….the question maybe should be reworded. Why do we think women suck at math, when there is a lot of evidence that most men suck at math, too?
This is a simple statistical question, and the only reason it is complicated is that we have to get to a position where we are raising women in such a way that they don’t hear Barbie say “Math is hard” and hear people like Simon Baron Cohen speak very authoritatively about how much they suck at math, and where women are encouraged at the same level as men in math. Then we could answer the question. So the question itself is not complicated; the society we are brought up in is complicated. And most people are brought up to believe that math is hard, maybe that it is too hard for them. Women are given this message much more forcefully, and from every single direction, even when they have demonstrated that they are not, in fact, bad at math and may even be good at it (I speak from experience – having been told I was bad at math. I am now aware otherwise, but it took many years, and a frightful shaking entry into college Calculus to demonstrate otherwise).
It’s also, I have read in books on comparative education, a matter of national attitude or beginning assumptions. In Japan, the claim goes, there is no truck with this “Xs are bad at math” routine; there’s just working your ass off. It’s taken for granted that it’s difficult and takes hard work and you just have to do the hard work.
I like to hope – albeit with reservations – that this may be something male feminists (we exist!) may be able to help. We can know better than to object to assertive women, which can give you some foot in the door orienting a group consensus around your proposals.
One of the reservations is that it shouldn’t be necessary – duh – and that it may even suggest to some observers that a woman’s ideas don’t count til a man backs them up. And there’s the “white knight” BS line poisoning the well too.
I’d welcome suggestions for anything that can be done to help from over here.
Even if there is (under present conditions) a statistical fact that women on average are worse at math than men, that would not justify discriminating against them. It’s perfectly obvious that some women are better at math than most men (see Emmy Noether, one of my heroines) and any policy that prevents those women being employed is crazy.
I present to you some evidence from my own little corner of the universe that women do not suck at math, either in general or compared to men.
I’m in a small niche area of science, and our numbers are small enough that I know a great many of the practitioners worldwide. The field is very mathematical and statistical, but in our professional society membership, women outnumber men by roughly 2:1 (and in the past I hear it was as high as 80% women). I believe (and it is a belief, mind you) that the reason for this is because it outgrew from biology and public health, both of which have always been regarded as softer, ‘girlier’ sciences. So it was a safe space for women (albeit unintentionally so) with a mathematical/computational bent compared to other older, male-dominated disciplines. We’re seeing more men coming into the field now from math, stat and computer science, and they sometimes find themselves taken to the woodshed when they try to impose the attitudes they brought with them.
So when people ask ‘do women suck at math?’ my answer is, no, not if they’re left alone to bloody well get on with it free of people asking if they’re even capable of their own areas of research.
This guy would presumably have been fired had he said something purely racist and not just sexist, like “Blacks are just dumber or worse at math” (or whatever).And it would have happened right away, instead of days later. Instead some people are choosing to argue the merits of his sexist arguments. It is somehow still acceptable (in some quarters) to argue that women are inherently worse at some things (math, science, engineering). Their lack of success at those endeavors is due entirely to social factors.
The other thing that rarely gets mentioned is that by posting his drivel on a workplace message board, he was effectively creating a hostile workplace. Or maybe he was just revealing his own attitudes that other people already knew. But the point is, this isn’t a matter of speech. Doing things that create a hostile workplace for some SHOULD be a firing offense, especially if it is pervasive and ongoing. So Google is well within their rights and it has nothing to do with free speech, since he posted it on a workplace board and not on, say, Facebook or Twitter.
Jeff @ 3 – yes, I think it probably is something male feminists can help with.
I didn’t exactly mean nothing can ever be done about it…I meant nothing can be done about it in the moment, by just putting your head down and persisting. It will take a massive, profound, long-term change in thinking. Will climate change leave humans enough time to make the change? Will Trump v Kim? I don’t know.
Great idea. Only problem is, most of my male feminist friends are just as bad as the anti-feminists at thinking that women are, and should be, sweet and nice and pleasant [and in fact, Michael Moore’s movie (Who Shall we Invade Next? or something like that) attributed Iceland’s successes to the fact that the women running it are by nature nicer, more peaceful, etc). Most the male feminists I know (or read in magazines) still manage to note that women are “strident” or “aggressive” or just plain “mean” when they fail to be sweet and submissive. Why can’t you just be like her? That’s the line we hear whenever we step out beyond the line that’s been drawn.
Claire, I’m not in a small niche area (Ecology), but it is heavily dominated by women, and although most people don’t realize this, it is also very mathematical and statistical. In fact, without math, Ecology would be worthless.
We are now seeing an unfortunate pattern in Ecology and Environmental Science of assuming that it is possible to do these fields with no background in either math or science. It’s all really just about recycling and planting native species, right? I suspect part of the reason people think this is that both fields are very heavy in female practitioners. If women can do it, how hard can it be, after all? So now these very important fields are being diluted and corrupted by the Gwyneth Paltrow-type “science” that is all about how one feels. Several schools I am aware of have instituted a version of Environmental Science that requires no math or science (they give it a slightly different name, but most employers don’t yet seem to realize what has happened, and happily hire these graduates for jobs they are ill-equipped to perform).
Playwrights are notoriously liberal, and yet the vast majority of plays still manage to perpetuate the image of women as the “fairer sex” in more ways than one. They still show women acquiescing or else being the “villain” of the piece. Even a prominent feminist writer such as Wendy Wasserstein had the unfortunate tendency to show hard working, hard driving women as being somehow not really women, or being totally unhappy if they didn’t have anyone to take care of.
So, back to the drawing board.
Oh, sorry, I’m not sure what happened, but the last sentence above was supposed to be BEFORE the second blockquote! Computers. How do they work?
@iknklast Ecology huh? Cool. I’m a genetic epidemiologist/statistical geneticist. I don’t bother to tell many people that because it mostly generates blank looks. But given what you just said about peoples assumptions about ecology, maybe that’s not a bad thing. :-D
I wanted to address your other point about playwrights which by extension is also true of screenwriters. With the exception of Shondaland and a few other notables, there are too few roles for women to be anti-heroes or even straight-up heroes who are not sweet and nice. Even the tough woman cop archetype in police procedurals seems to need to have some softening characteristics they’d never put on a male ‘tough cop’. I do wish someone would write one where all the tropes were inverted so that the maverick cop who doesn’t play by the rules was a woman and the hard-ass boss was a woman (and respected for it) and all the men were useless eye candy constantly getting shot and kidnapped. :-D
Also, imagine Die Hard with women in all the major roles. That could be awesome.
Claire, I have been working on writing plays with that sort of turn around; unfortunately, the key isn’t getting them written, but persuading anyone to perform them. Most people respond “Your woman characters aren’t believable. Oh, and your men are sooooo 2 dimensional!”
Meanwhile, as long as you follow the women that are currently seen on TV or in the movies, people will ask (if you’re a man) “How do you write women so well?” Never mind that the person saying that has probably never met a woman anything like what they’re seeing on stage; it fits what they see on TV and in the movies, so they assume most women are like that. Oh, and when a woman writes men (like I do a lot)? You never get “How do you write men so well?” It’s just assumed you can write men, because they are the default people. It’s also all too easy for people to accept stereotypes of: people of color, LGBTQ, Mexicans, Arabs (which of course is a term used to account for anyone to the east of western Europe), and most professions, especially science. If a scientist doesn’t have on a lab coat, or doesn’t have wild hair, or has a strong, stable relationship and is likeable, the director is sure to ignore all that and turn them into some sort of Einstein parody. But men? You can put them in any field, any sort of situation, you can allow them to be sensitive and cry, or you can make them macho and blustering and tough. As long as you don’t show them changing diapers, you’re probably okay, and people will accept it (as long as they’re white).
It’s laziness. It takes real work to write a character that doesn’t meet the accepted stereotype and get people to accept it, and most people would rather just get produced as easily as possible than they want to change the stereotype and allow their characters to be as rich and full as that group of people in real life.
I’m really irritated because whenever this sort of discussion comes up, even in what I feel are the more enlightened circles, like here, for instance, there’s a “usual” way for it to go, and some “usual” points that get brought up. My irritation doesn’t stem from disagreement (I don’t disagree with most of the points being brought up), but from what seems like the “negative space” of the discussion: points that either don’t get brought up at all, or only very rarely.
There’s the “women suck at maths” trope of course (often along with “women are just not assertive/aggressive/leadershippy enough”) which gets brought up and usually rebuffed with citations of studies or books showing how that’s not really the case, and all the evidence we have is the slight sex difference on the mental rotation task, etc, etc. We also talk about how there’s a large cultural element to people (both men and women) feeling that the math thing might be true, and about how the assertiveness thing is socialized through upbringing and constantly reinforced through dislike/punishment for the women who buck the norm. These are all valid points and they certainly need bringing up (if anything, they need more bringing up, not less, but that’s not my current complaint).
Here are, however, some points that never do get brought up. How come the measurable performance edge on verbal competency that women have over men is never used to question the male dominance of the domain of literature? It sure gets brought up to bolster the “women talk too much” trope, which turns out to be factually untrue. But how come we can both acknowledge that on average women are slightly better with words and manage to agree that the literary achievements of male luminaries in the field were made by exceptional individuals (by definition!), yet still feel the need to explain again and again that a similar sex difference on the mental rotation task says just as little about the possibility or the prevalence of better-than-average or exceptional mathematical talent among women?
And, while I’m really not a fan of the (benevolently sexist, though somehow never challenged as such when brought up by self-proclaimed “feminists”) trope of women being “naturally” more agreable, and nurturing, etc, etc (and how, if women were in charge we’d live in a war-free utopia), I do wonder why, when these discussions don’t invoke the natural-earth-mother stereotype, they head straight for the “women need to be more assertive” and “people need to stop punishing women for being assertive” prescriptions. Again, I don’t disagree, especially with the latter one — people really do need to stop expecting women to always take the smaller piece of the pie AND deliver a graceful quip about how they wanted the smaller piece anyway, because they are watching their carbs. But again, not once have I seen anyone launch into a discussion of how men are NEVER expected to be consistently agreeable, cooperative, eager to please, polite, self-minimizing, deferential to authority figures, helpful (in a careful way that doesn’t bruise anyone’s ego by suggesting they needed the help), and considerate (in a near-supernatural way that identifies and serves a need before one is even fully aware of it). Occasionally, when men do display some of these qualities, they either get punished by people who believe in strict adherence to gender roles, or given disproportionate acclaim by people who are so tired of the status quo that any departure, however slight, is cause for great joy and celebration. Some people occasionally gripe about these enthusiastic cookie-givers for basically reinforcing the current low expectations (though notably, I almost never see the gender-police being rebuffed). Still, what small noises are made in the direction of men, as a general rule, needing remedial courses in theory of mind, empathy, politeness, growing a thicker skin and worrying less about their ego, and cooperating with the group even after said group rejected their idea for optimal course of action, remain very small noises indeed. And, although I CONSTANTLY see the “let’s attract girls to STEM” and “let’s make STEM friendlier to retain more women” initiatives, I’ve yet to see a group talking about coursework, or after-school clubs, or learning toys for boys to improve emotional intelligence and empathy and cooperative problem solving, or to boost their interest in nurturing and creative self-expression. Just to clarify my position here, lest I sound too sarcastic: I genuinely believe that the discouragement girls and women currently face regarding their mathematical and technical abilities is detrimental (to everyone, not just the female people being discouraged) and that we all stand to benefit from reversing this cultural trend; I also genuinely believe that just as much, if not more, benefit would be derived from teaching all of the skills I just mentioned to boys (though not JUST boys, these are skills everyone needs), in just as systematic a way. Also, I would really love to see “Caretaking and Emotional Labor” and “Agreableness and Conflict De-escalation” seminars being offered to men in the same way that “Leadership and Assertiveness” and such training is being offered to women (and, most importantly, selling just as well).
It’s been many years since I’ve read the article, and I’m too lazy to try to dig it up right now, armed with none of the specific key words, but I’ll mention it anyway – it discussed NASA and astronaut training in the context of sending a manned mission to Mars. The author or authors were pointing out that one of the biggest hurdles to this ambitious undertaking was psychology rather than technology, and that the ability of the crew to effectively function under conditions of prolonged isolation from the outside world and enforced closeness to each other all while under extreme stress has so far not been demonstrated by any simulations attempted to date. They further speculated that perhaps NASA’s emphasis on leadership abilities in its recruitment and training was exacerbating the problem, because groups made up exclusively of take-charge individuals end up focusing too much on the interpersonal tensions and not enough on the task at hand, and suggested that perhaps NASA would be better served by a much heavier emphasis on its astronauts’ ability to get along and cooperate rather than take the lead. The reason I bring up this little anecdote is that, while I see occasional lip service being paid to women’s “naturally superior” “softer skills”, often as a marketing pitch to employ more women in more important roles, right alongside calls to stop expecting women to always display said skills and traits and punishing them when they don’t, again, right alongside calls to women to stop being so soft and just act like men if they want to succeed and be paid like men (and to stop whining), what I don’t see are any calls to men to be less competitive, less aggressive, less assertive, (and more cooperative, agreeable, and empathetic instead) or any serious discussion about just how wasteful, dangerous, counterproductive, and generally unsuitable to life in a civilized society all these qualities are (and, in addition, while they might prove advantageous to any given individual achieving higher status and accumulating more wealth, they are also quite detrimental to that same individual’s psychological health, interpersonal relationship quality, and life satisfaction, so it is at best a qualified benefit).
iknklast and Claire are right based on my experience, most of us are not math types beyond doing the budget, calculating the tip, maybe doing some puzzles and games and so on but the women who do the hard work (Ophelia #2) are good at maths. I know I’m not a math person because I’ve worked with four applied mathematicians over the decades, two women and two men. When we work together on a project each of us has a bit of elbows out at the beginning about where we think we can better contribute but once settled in (project requirements take priority, there’s no room in the schedule for gender issues) the collaboration is effective and each has a learning curve for mutual benefit.
Evans #4. Noether’s work is foundational, satisfying the requirements of Dirac to be beautiful.
David Evans @4,
Ah, Emmy… You may have missed:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2017/a-pervasive-attitude/#comment-2703847 (comment # 10)
And while you’re at it, also…
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2017/a-pervasive-attitude/#comment-2703845 (comment # 8)
@iknklast you write plays too? Wow. I know nothing about playwriting although I used to want to be an actor when I was a teen. Ended up a scientist, because I fell in love with programming and data wrangling. :-D But I can imagine the challenges you’re describing. Hell, look at the backlash every time a movie has female lead(s) that is not just the romantic love interest. The Ghostbusters debacle was so depressing for example.
I wish I knew what the answer was.
@Anna Y – it is my personal belief that the measurable differences between men and women in verbal competency are mostly culturally driven. Women and girls have to be able to tread careful verbal lines that don’t piss off male listeners from pretty early on and we teach girls to be agreeable almost from the moment they’re born.
One of my research interests is autism, where there is a known sex disparity. But one of the things that is beginning to become clear is that autism is actually underdiagnosed in girls, partly because of expectations in the minds of pediatricians (behavior that raises red flags in boys is ignored in girls) and also because there are girls who learn to mask their autism through repetition and memorizing.
This is hard to explain if you’re not very familiar with the disorder, but anecdotally, a colleague of mine relates a tale of an autistic girl he met who on first encounter, didn’t seem to match his expectations of a child on the spectrum. It was only on subsequent meetings that he began to realize that what she had done is memorize a specific and yet cleverly generic set of responses and behaviors that superficially seemed to be neurotypical. Bear in mind this child was just five years old, and yet she’d managed to come up with what is essentially a kind of cold-reading as a way of conforming to her parents expectations of how she should behave.
This is the pattern across space and time: each culture has activities deemed prestigious; these are totally divergent per culture, but what they share is that they’re occupied predominantly or exclusively by men (Talmudic scholars, Chinese calligraphy masters, coders in the US before it became lucrative and “leading-edge”). When women move into prestigious occupations (doctors in the USSR, admin assistants in many countries after the early 20th century) the pay and prestige of these occupations drop precipitately.
In Shogunate-era Japan, merchants were classed below peasants, and financial planning/tracking was deemed unworthy of a samurai man — the women of the households did all the economics. So it has been traditionally allowable for Japanese girls to be “good at math” as a less worthy occupation.
Yes, I do! Recently had a production in Lincoln of a science-based play that actually demonstrates my point. The lead character is a strong, intelligent, capable woman in a position of authority. The director/actor sexualized her, had her swooning over the rude, boorish male character, and this in turn led to a situation where a teacher was fondling her student. I was horrified. Most people laughed, but I didn’t find it funny. I wasn’t alone. One of my other (female) playwriting friends thought it was creepy; another was saying to me “I never knew you to write that way!” I informed her that I didn’t.
I think that most (all?) of these generalizations (boys are better at, girls are better at, white people are worse at, etc.) are post-hoc rationalizations. The people who tell you very soberly and rationally about these differences don’t actually know these things to be true. They haven’t conducted or consulted any research. They don’t need to. Because they already know it’s true. Because everyone knows it. Because it’s universal. Because it’s obvious. I think it’s based on nothing except the stories we’ve all been told about people.
Anna Y @12:
That’s one of the tip-offs that the whole “I’m not saying that women aren’t equally skilled, I’m just saying they’re differently skilled” routine is disingenuous.
As the former Google exec pointed out, if women aren’t suited for coding but are great at empathy and communicating with people, then they ought to be dominating the management ranks even at tech companies. As you say, they ought to be dominating the field of literature (as well as film, television, photography, music). Companies should be hiring disproportionate amounts of women to be sales staff. Law firms should be female-dominated, as these stereotypical women would be the best rainmakers given their ability to relate to and manage clients, and the best trial attorneys with their knack for understanding judges, jurors, and witnesses. Political leaders ought to be mostly women, what with the ability to “feel the pain” of the ordinary voter. Etc.
And yet… the world doesn’t work that way. Apparently, the “separate but equal” skill set of women mostly seems to give them an “advantage” at the lowest paid, least prestigious professionals. (Which is itself curious, because given that women have a lower labor participation rate since they disproportionately take time off for childbearing/childcare, “women’s services” ought to be scarcer and employers should be bidding up the price for this rarer commodity.)
Why, it’s almost as if something else is going on.
Athena #16,
Exactly. If modern Western patriarchy had, for some reason, decided that being collaborative and “emotional” were more desirable traits than being competitive and “rational,” you can bet that Mr. Memo would be falling all over himself trying to find proof that women are innately biologically awesome at asserting themselves and writing super code.
Athena, Cressida – that’s what makes it so interesting to read literature and other writings from past eras. I was reading Erasmus Darwin one day, and it was sort of fun to see him commenting on how women had to be persuaded into marriage, while men were eager, because marriage was such a good deal for men and such a bad one for women. Fast forward 250 years, and we’ve reversed that equation, without ever realizing it hasn’t always been that way.
I was recently reading about Maria Mitchell, an early astronomer who contributed a great deal to the knowledge of comets. During her early life, science was seen as properly a woman’s field. It was perceived as conservative, mostly just categorizing things, and not liable to create havoc in the minds of women, who were prone to inappropriate thoughts and behavior when exposed to reading the classics or the literary field. By the end of Mitchell’s life, Darwin, Hubble, and a wealth of others had altered the perception of science, made it obvious that it was in fact capable of world-shattering discoveries, and also raising the prestige, and low and behold, women couldn’t do science anymore.
It’s because women are so adaptable. They can be bad at whatever thing a particular dude wants to argue they’re bad at at any given moment.
That’s Science.
There’s even a lot of special pleading involved in declaring women to be “the emotional gender.” I mean, if you were an alien studying human culture, wouldn’t you be inclined to say that the gender that commits most of the violent crimes, that commits most of the sexual crimes, many of whose members appear simply incapable of refraining from commenting on a co-worker’s or passer-by’s sexual attractiveness, is the emotional one? Or at least that the issue is up for debate?
iknklast – Interesting about Erasmus D. I don’t think that was a typical view of the period though. Women are generally portrayed as pretty damn eager – think Lydia Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. Mill talks about how this is a big part of the way women are trained to be subordinate.
@ Ophelia #22 I love you. I want you to know that. You made me laugh out loud on a day that was not going well.
@Screechy Monkey Absolutely. I was once accused of being overemotional by a man screaming in my face. He had to be physically restrained by two of my friends because they were scared he might hit me.
From chapter 51:
“Only think of its being three months,” she cried, “since I went away; it seems but a fortnight I declare; and yet there have been things enough happened in the time. Good gracious! when I went away, I am sure I had no more idea of being married till I came back again! though I thought it would be very good fun if I was.”
Her father lifted up his eyes. Jane was distressed. Elizabeth looked expressively at Lydia; but she, who never heard nor saw anything of which she chose to be insensible, gaily continued, “Oh! mamma, do the people hereabouts know I am married to-day? I was afraid they might not; and we overtook William Goulding in his curricle, so I was determined he should know it, and so I let down the side-glass next to him, and took off my glove, and let my hand just rest upon the window frame, so that he might see the ring, and then I bowed and smiled like anything.”
Elizabeth could bear it no longer. She got up, and ran out of the room; and returned no more, till she heard them passing through the hall to the dining parlour. She then joined them soon enough to see Lydia, with anxious parade, walk up to her mother’s right hand, and hear her say to her eldest sister, “Ah! Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a married woman.”
It was not to be supposed that time would give Lydia that embarrassment from which she had been so wholly free at first. Her ease and good spirits increased. She longed to see Mrs. Phillips, the Lucases, and all their other neighbours, and to hear herself called “Mrs. Wickham” by each of them; and in the mean time, she went after dinner to show her ring, and boast of being married, to Mrs. Hill and the two housemaids.
“Well, mamma,” said she, when they were all returned to the breakfast room, “and what do you think of my husband? Is not he a charming man? I am sure my sisters must all envy me. I only hope they may have half my good luck. They must all go to Brighton. That is the place to get husbands. What a pity it is, mamma, we did not all go.”
“Very true; and if I had my will, we should. But my dear Lydia, I don’t at all like your going such a way off. Must it be so?”
“Oh, lord! yes;—there is nothing in that. I shall like it of all things. You and papa, and my sisters, must come down and see us. We shall be at Newcastle all the winter, and I dare say there will be some balls, and I will take care to get good partners for them all.”
“I should like it beyond anything!” said her mother.
“And then when you go away, you may leave one or two of my sisters behind you; and I dare say I shall get husbands for them before the winter is over.”
“I thank you for my share of the favour,” said Elizabeth; “but I do not particularly like your way of getting husbands.”
—-
The irony throughout this scene is of course that Wickham “seduced” Lydia, and had to be bribed and coerced into marrying her when they’d been shacked up together for weeks.
Claire @ 26 – aw, thank you. I hope your day goes better.
And a piece of Pride and Prejudice, my favorite novel! I think I shall have to read it again, it’s been about a year.
This popped up in my RSS feed and it sort of relates in a tangential kind of way about men and emotionality. You might find it interesting:
https://medium.com/@remakingmanhood/why-do-we-murder-the-beautiful-friendships-of-boys-3ad722942755
It reminded me of a friendship my brother had with a boy called Keith in his school. They were inseparable until my dad got another job and we had to move away. I also had a best friend I was moving away from, and so I saw first hand the different way my parents treated our two friendships. My mother encouraged me to write letters to Julie and we were allowed to talk on the phone once a week, for thirty minutes. (We were poor and the phone was expensive, hence the restrictions).
But my brother’s friendship was spoken of in very different terms. I overheard my parents talking about it, and my dad told my mam that he was glad things had worked out that we had to move away, because he felt my brother and Keith were too close. He didn’t like the way Keith was influencing my brother’s choices and preferences. Things like he started liking ketchup, whereas he’d never wanted it before. Nothing earth-shattering. So once we’d moved, they made it difficult for him to keep in touch with Keith. He wasn’t encouraged to write. He wasn’t forbidden from talking to him on the phone, but Keith’s family didn’t have a phone (not uncommon in eighties Britain) which meant calls were all but impossible. We had relatives who lived close to where Keith lived and my brother was allowed to visit him when we visited them. But ultimately such slight contact meant that the friendship died.
My parents are fairly progressive people so I don’t really know why this happened. I’d basically forgotten about it until I read the article.
Helene @14
Yes, I did miss those. I was holidaying around Loch Ness and off the net.