Why do women cling to pre-feminist stereotypes?

Ripped from the wires ... Barack Obama's effect on women makes writer wonder whether women aren't the weaker sex after all:

By Charlotte Allen

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 OK 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 soupcon of soft-core porn, has made for centuries of best-sellers -- 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.

Allen is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus Web site. charfleur@aol.com

Comments

[beachguy(original)]

since a child I always thought "women" were the "superior beings" here. I am shocked and skeptical of these statistics.

[Denney Clements]

BGO: I agree. But she does make persuasive arguments that they're not as highly evolved as some have hoped.
dc

[jim sefter]

I am not anti-woman, (married and in fear for my life if I were to even remotely appear as such) and usually don't comment on politics and candidates, etc., but after some of the comments by Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama recently, I have serious doubts about the outcome in regards to the Country's future if Hillary OR Obama win the Presidency. However, speaking historically, I have ALWAYS been disappointed with whomever wins the Office, whether or not I voted for the winner or loser. It always seems to be same-oh, same-oh.

[jim sefter]

(actually, that should be "same ol', same ol'")

[Richard L. Wolfe]

Women will get to where they want to be when they use whatever God given talent they have with the same ease and poise as let's see Obama. As long as they or anyone else sets out to prove something you put unnecessary pressure on yourself and inhibit your natural ablility. In other words the best way for women to succeed in public life is to forget that they are women.

[Cherie]

Morgellons is a very real infection. Plenty of men and little children suffer from it too. Oklahoma State University can help you if you are interested in publishing the truth.

http://www.thenmo.org/

http://www.healthsciences.okstate.edu/morgellons/vision.cfm

[Beverly Drottar MD]

Men are simply less likely to discuss their illnesses openly, and are more stoic publicly about their symptoms--otherwise, I have not seen any obvious gender bias for Morgellons Disease.
-Dr. Drottar

[Miche]

When I read this article it reminded me of the mentality of the Editor of Godey's Lady's Book...from the 19th century.

It is now understood that gender is socially constructed. It is a different concept than biological sex. If for some reason we are finding that a particular gender displays specific undesirable behaviors, we should be asking ourselves how our core societal values shape the way individual citizens develop. To simply mockingly criticize and stereotype one gender over another is sexist. The fact that this author is a woman, doesn't make her opinions any less sexist.

As "isms" such as racism should never be acceptable, rather one is making remarks towards another race or their own, Allen's comments reflect the same kind of self-loathing, narrow-minded ideology.

~
Allen, If Gender & Sex were the same they would "shift" simultaneously, but they don't so please don't try to justify gender stereotyping with brain size.

Other societies, current & past, have had differing beliefs about the gender identities of their citizens. Since our understanding of biological sexual make-ups have remained more constant, while ideas about gender have seen great shifts, it becomes more clear that social behaviors witnessed in society by "men" or "women" are variable factors dependent upon present cultural teachings.

~
Dangerous Drivers:

Have you ever heard people "joke" that women can't back up? women can't park?

There are many roles in our society that women themselves are told they are too inferior to fulfill, rather it is forthright or through suggestive sarcasm. We used to think women couldn't be construction workers, or basically succeed in any physically demanding job outside of the home. Those who tried were belittled and insulted. This still occurs today, even with the progress we've made. This same kind of belittling social learning trickles down to the most common areas of our lives.

Many women are told they will be bad drivers, they will make mistakes. I'm not saying this is why a particular study found that women were worse drivers, but I am asking that critcs explore other concepts, if they are going to use information like this as evidence for a literary argument.

Also, if it is a fact, I'd like to know why some auto insurance companies will insure women at a lower rate?

~Thanks for reading.

[Leah]

So Charlotte.... tenderness towards children is the MOST important thing in life? What if one does not like children?