Pissing Into the Wind: "...but men are innately worse at shaking their sweet little asses"

What is it they always say on TV? "Art imitates life?"

Well, whatever it is, it's true. Bentley's topic couldn't be more topical--no more than 24 hours heretofore, over fish and chips, I delivered the Daniel R. Foster Memorial Lecture on Political Correctivity to an audience of severals and severals of people. My topic was, of course, the rt. hon. President Lawrence Summers' recent comments on the stuff chicks aren't good at.

So, although my remarks here mustn't cannabilize too much of what I intend to set forth more thoroughly in a monograph of the lecture tentatively titled Cute Things Girls Do, I will say a thing or two about the issue of gender differences.

Summers' comments were in bad taste. Let's all of us agree to that. The President of an American institution of higher learning should know better. You simply don't go out in public and suggest heterogeneity or deviation from uniformity of any kind. Unless of course, you're celebrating diversity (having filled out the appropriate paperwork in triplicate, and thus obtained the necessary permits)--in which case the bigger the cultural difference, the bigger the celebration. The annual Inuit-Zulu mixer, for instance, puts Carnivale in Rio to shame.

But lets leave aside for a moment the fact that it was Cretinous for Summers to open his mouth(it's my understanding that many at Harvard did not get enough iodine as children). Is there anything objectively wrong with what was said? Surely, the properly indoctrinated liberal* in you says "Aye! Summers' suggestions about differences between men and women undermine equality!"

And alas, that Janus-faced beast, with each of its free and equally malevolent aspects, rears its civilly liberated head. We Americans may be free to worship as we please, but in the end we kneel before one altar, worship one God, fondle one boy: and his name is Equality. A word so far up the American poopshoot, that there was a time in middle school when I believed they called it 'egalitarianism' because that's how it was done in the land of the Bald Eagle.

But what does it mean to be "equal"? Does it mean that each of us are entitled to be treated as ends and never as means, that we possess some innate, inalienable status as moral beings irrespective of things like race or creed? If that's what it means, I Kant say I disagree. But it seems equality is more than a moral notion, its a political principle as well. So what does equality in politcs mean? Does it mean we each of us have the same right in determining our modes of governance and the basic structure of our society? Does it mean the gaurantee of the equal protection of the laws? To the most extensive system of liberties compatible with similar such systems for others? If this is what political equality is, I'd gladly take a graze to the arm from a small caliber pistol to defend it.

But it's quite clear that if equality ever was one of these quaint notions, it has since ceased to be. I may not be the most astute of political observers, but it seems to me that political equality in America today consists mostly in white men in ties apologizing at press conferences and summarily tendering their resignations. Liberal political equality--as set forth on paper by a long list of non-American dead white mean who preferred cravats to ties, never held press conferences, and resigned only to obscurity--was a foundation, a preliminary maxim necessary for the formulation of substantive political principles. It was never, so far as I can tell, to be trumped as a political virtue in itself, but only (ideally) as a means of inviting everyone to the table to take part in the Great Conversation that is republican** politics.

But that's precisely what it's turned into, equality as an end unto itself. The thinking, I suppose, is that there's rarely much fuss among lemmings, and even less if they're issued modestly-priced SUVs, 3-bedroom ranches on quarter-acre lots, and have access to 162 unique blends of Ethiopian coffee. All we'd need is a tireless and dedicated Handicapper General to make sure nobody takes unfair advantage of their natural abilities.

Exactly where this thinking went wrong is unclear to me, but I'd like you to close your eyes and imagine for a moment that I've just presented all the arguments against the primacy of equality set forth in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Go ahead, I'll wait....

There. Now do you see what I mean? Good. So we're in agreement that equality as virtue in itself is completely vacuous and arbitrary. What's this got to do with our ould friend Larry Summers? Summers, according to his own account of the incident, was asked to attend a conference on the status of women in the "hard" research sciences, not as Chief Company Man of Crimson Incorporated, but as an economist. He was asked, in this capacity, to be provocative. While he refuses to provide a transcript of his remarks, reports suggest that he provided three hypotheses about why women tend to be underrepresented in the hard sciences. "The biggest, he suggested, was that fewer mothers than fathers are willing to spend 80 hours a week away from their kids. The next reason was that more boys than girls tend to score very high or very low on high-school math tests, producing a similar average but a higher proportion of scores in the top percentiles, which lead to high-powered academic careers in science and engineering. The third factor was discrimination by universities."

It was in stating the second hypothesis that Summers apparently used the words "innate ability" or "natural ability" as a potential explanation of the differing test scores in men or women. So what if he said it? Is the God of Equality so cruel It will smite thee simply for suggesting there might be a trace of difference between the sexes? Would Summers have taken just as much flak if he had suggested that "men, by and large, tend to have bigger penises than women"? My guess is he would have. Why? Because we're The Man. And we've played cricket and golf and hunted and lounged in recliners and drank Tom Collinses and fucked our secretaries and whipped our slaves and raped and pillaged and undervalued your currency and sent you to finishing school and converted you by sword and drank Old-Fashioneds and raped and stole your natural resources and kept you out of the Augusta and disenfranchised you and hosed you and drank Ginandtonics and sent you on the trail of tears and put you in the kitchen and circumsized and pacified you and drew humorous cartoons about it all in the New Yorker and who the fuck do we think we are? Fine, I've gotten used to the Dutch-Door, Kill-Whitey mentality and I understand that I'm not allowed to complain.

But Summers was expressing an empirical hypothesis, something we can test scientifically by collecting and interpreting data. Do I think that women are innately worse than men at math and science? Probably not. Do I think we could study the question in a meaningful, interesting and objective way? Absolutely. Do I think it will turn out to be the case that the under-representation of women in the hard sciences is attributable in part to socially defined gender roles? Almost certainly. Do I ask myself questions and then answer them with annoying frequency? You bet your ass I do.

But the point is that Mighty Equality can have my tax dollars and my soul and my first born, but It CAN'T HAVE THE TRUTH. It can't silence a well-defined hypothesis, however crazy, except by disproving it. So why don't all the female scientists so enraged by Summers' suggestion set about to showing that it's bunk? Because Equality would rather throw Summers into the bigot's dungeon and let him rot then DEAL with the fact that the diversity they perversely trump maybe, just maybe cuts both ways.

Maybe its the case that we can't all be particle physicists or astronauts, maybe women are from Venus and straight white men can't dance. But if you're the one heterosexual WASP who can really cut-a-rug, get out on the floor and do it. Not for straight guys everywhere or white guys everywhere but for you. And if you're a female grad-student studying Quantum Mechanics at MIT, don't let Summers (or Bentley) get you down, you publish that paper on wave-particle duality and stick it right the fuck to the man.

The Individual, my friends, is the ultimate minority.

And now a joke: A guy walks into a doctor's office and says "Doc, you've got to help me, I'm twelve years old and I have a full beard". The doctor examines the patient thoroughly, from head to toe, and after some time says, "Son, you're not twelve years old, you're a midget."

If that joke is against the spirit of equality, then call me the George Wallace of humor.

-The George Wallace of Humor


NOTES

*No, I don't use that word in the sense Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson use it. Instructions if this isn't clear to you: Put down your copy of USA TODAY, turn off The O'Reilly Factor, hit yourself in the face with a shovel, and go to a fucking library.

**See above if you think by 'republican' I mean Trent Lott.