Pissing in the Wind, Round ?: Orgasmic Chemistry

Before I get into this week's topic of gender roles/differences, as articulated by Harvard President/bull-in-a-china-shop Larry Summers, I should make a quick disclaimer. Like JFK, Natalie Portman, and the Unabomber, I'm a product of The Kremlin on the Charles, and have seen my share of Harvard debates turned national debates. Mostly, the only reason they get press is because of where they take place. Were this to happen at, say, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I doubt any newspaper besides the Star Ledger would waste any ink on its behalf. So I tend to not take these things very seriously. So keep that in mind, as well as the distinct possibility that I've been brainwashed by the elitist, intelligentsia of fair-at-all-costs Harvard. But anyway, let me begin...

America is a nation of whiners. Always have been, always will be. We were founded by a bunch of whiners. "We want to practice our crazy religion and churn butter all day long," the Puritans whined. Thus, Massachusetts was born. "We don't want to pay our debts," and thus, Georgia was born. "We don't want to take showers," and thus, New Jersey was born. Then we whined about taxes and sequestering soldiers and having to chop down cherry trees and being forced to lie about it. And thus, America was born. The South whined about taxes, we whined back about slavery, and we had the civil war. Then a bunch of stuff happened which we naturally whined about...

Fast-forward to the 1960s. It was then that whining reached it's zenith in America history. Whining became a way of life. In fact, whining became its own movement, captivating the disillusioned youth and inspiring them to stage numerous sit-ins, teach-ins, LSD-ins, and other acts of symbolic protest which required little to no effort. They whined and they whined and they whined. And eventually, they won a few battles. We withdrew from Vietnam, and Nixon was forced to resign.

But then the generation of whiners grew up. Their whining was turned elsewhere. Rather than taking on The Man, they took on The Corporate Ladder. Instead of protesting the government's role in world affairs, they protested the government's role in their lives. Supply-side economics was Hot, and bellbottoms was Not.

What does this all have to do with Summers saying women suck at science for a reason? Well, if there's one thing the ex-whiners turned Reagan Democrats love to whine about, it's whining about how much the current generation whines about political correctness. Summers response was met by the religiously-PC camp with accusations that Summers thinks women (or rather, wimmyn, womin, or whatever it is you're supposed to say) are genetically stupid, and on the other side, by the religiously anti-PC faction that Summers' deriders were freedom hating lesbian-communists whose aim is to hyphenate every word in the English language. Allow me to take a side somewhere in between what I have misrepresented these two sides as saying.

I once read of an experiment where a group of Asian schoolgirls (easy there, perv) was given a math test. When they took it the first time, they filled out their name and gender on the answer sheet. The second time, their name and race/ethnicity. The two tests were relatively the same degree of difficulty. Surprisingly--or perhaps not--when they wrote "female" they did worse than when they wrote "Asian." And when they wrote "Asian" AND "female" the research team became incredibly turned-on. (Sorry, couldn't resist).

Obviously social roles, expectations, et. al. have something to do with performance. Granted not everything. I seem to remember reading once that males and females have their brains wired differently--one is more left-brained or right-brained than the other. But I'm sure that doesn't explain why the vast majority of people teaching or majoring in one of the hard sciences will be male, and the humanities female.

To be honest, I think the more interesting question is the relation between good-lookingness and intelligence. Go to any Ivy League campus and look around for a while and tell me what you see. I guarantee you'll see a student body composed of wildebeests, hunchbacks, and the disfigured. Do the genes that control for facial symmetry also control one's preference for shiny objects and loud noises? Is IQ lessened by 10 points for each cup size after A? Sure there are exceptions--myself and my co-bloggers obviously included--but by and large this holds true.

Just think about when you meet a person who is both good-looking and intelligent. You don't trust them. You just know there's something wrong with them. They're either: 1) an alien, 2) a free-mason, 3) a robot, 4) psychotic, or 5) gay/taken. Either that, or: 1) you're actually quite slow yourself and the person isn't all that smart, 2) you have painfully low standards, or 3) you're drunk, and it's a combination of 1 and 2.

Like Foster, I'd also like to close with a joke of my own:
A man walks into a bar. Ouch.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

(Same post, different blog)