An extraordinarily stupid article

I hesitate to legitimize this by giving it more attention than it's due, but it's bothering me too much not to write about it. This week the Washington Post published an appalling article by Charlotte Allen about--really--how stupid women are; how we are prey to our emotions; how silly it is that women have fainted at Obama rallies, but also that Hillary thought she could get away with crying; how we're bad drivers; how the extraordinary women of history such as Elizabeth I are "exceptional outliers"; how we should focus on what we're best at, which is making a house a home.

She bases this not on any in-depth reseach but on her own experience. "Based on her sample of one," commented an astute online reader, "I have to conclude she's correct."

Now, first off, it's shoddy journalism, full of misrepresented statistics, unconfirmed observations, and outdated science. No paper should have published it, let alone the same paper that Katharine Graham used to run.

I could borrow her tactics and use myself as a sample of one. I could report then that in fact women do not watch "Grey's Anatomy" or "Oprah"; that we have not read Eat, Pray, Love; that we happen to do really well at analytical thinking and the arts; that our linguistic abilities are the result of hard work as well as genetic luck; that we also manage to faint when Obama is nowhere in sight, simply by locking our knees on a hot, crowded El train. I'd really love to borrow my sister as the sample: she graduated from the University of Chicago with a 4.0 GPA and--wait for it--a triple major in biology, chemistry, and classics; she studied biophysics at Oxford on a Marshall scholarship; now, on a Hughes scholarship, she's finishing up her PhD in biochem at MIT, where the head of her lab is also female. Yes, Charlotte, clearly we girls should stick to knitting.

But it would be silly to attack her for shoddy reasoning and then resort to the same.

Katha Pollitt actually did look into Allen's sources, and pointed out some of the statistical problems:

Allen claims that the misogynist canard is true: thanks to their superior
visuospatial abilities, men (although maybe not gay men?) are better drivers,
with 5.1 accidents per million miles compared to women's 5.7. "The only good
news,"[Allen] adds, is that because they take fewer risks, women's accidents are
only a third as likely to be fatal. That's a very interesting definition of
ability behind the wheel: the better drivers are the ones who take more risks
and are three times as likely to end up dead.

I have not yet seen a rebuttal that dealt with Allen's unquestioning reliance on IQ as a definition of intelligence. But that's almost as stupid as basing an argument on Freudian psychology. IQ has a well-known bias in favor of white, affluent males. (This should not be terribly surprising, given that the very people defining intelligence have, historically, been white and affluent and male. I take issue with the very idea of logic as the highest form of intelligence; but that's a subject for another essay.) If Allen had used a more contemporary definition of intelligence, such as the Howard Gardner model, she might not have been in such a hurry to give men the edge.

There's been a lot of discussion of hysteria lately, mostly in relation to Hillary's candidacy. While my first instinct is to dismiss it as laughable 19th-century thinking--yes, we ladies do get hysterical, particularly when we have the vapors! But a spot of Dr. Masterson's Patented Nerve Tonic clears it right up!-- it's widespread enough that women my age should probably give it some attention. Let's go straight for the main problem: the idea that emotion is negative, that feeling emotion is weak and showing it is even weaker. Bollocks. That's a standard of male interaction. If the past several thousand years of warfare and repression are any indication, it doesn't seem to be serving the guys all that well. It certainly doesn't seem to be serving Hillary well, and I hope no future female candidates fall into the same trap.

Emotion is not weakness. Emotion opens the doors to empathy--the sort of understanding that makes diplomacy possible. Emotion is the source and strength of our humanity. To say that women in power must shed their emotional sides is to define equality in exactly the way that means equality is still an issue.

Let's take, as a counterexample, the woman who troubles Allen so much: Oprah Winfrey. Oprah has built a damn empire on emotion and empathy. Oprah has so much power that Barack Obama joked that it would be a demotion if she became his VP. And girlfriend cries on TV every week.

Now, I don't watch Oprah's show. And I do sometimes find her demigoddess status creepy. However, as a novelist I surely owe her some gratitude for helping keep literary fiction on the cultural radar. I can't fault her charitable giving. And if women want to choose someone to admire and emulate, I don't see what's so wrong about choosing someone who has managed to become the highest-paid entertainer in the world despite the considerable obstacles of being female, nonwhite, and not shaped like a model. (If you don't think the last one is such a barrier to entry in the entertainment world, take a look at the Actors' Access casting calls for women sometime. If art truly does hold the mirror up to nature, we are a nation of strippers and model-hot girls next door.)

As for the Elizabeth I argument (Allen groups her with Margaret Thatcher, which . . . well, I guess they are both female leaders of England), aren't all really extraordinary people, male and female, "exceptional outliers"? How many Goethes and Galileos and Shakespeares does Allen count among her male acquaintances? The female achievers are, if anything, even more exceptional because of their ability to overcome societal thinking like Allen's. Virginia Woolf already took this argument apart quite thoroughly in A Room of One's Own. It baffles me that a century later anyone should still think it has merit--and that one of the most respected newspapers in the country should give it a home.

At least that home is nice and pretty, I suppose.