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.

Pissing In The Wind: You add like a girl!

The President of Harvard recently tried to explain that part of the reason women don't achieve as much in math and science is because they're just innately worse at it. There's been a maelstrom of negative press, no doubt protests are about to commence, and let's see him try to get a date now.

But was he wrong? Men are faster than women, by and large. Women look less ridiculous when figure skating, perhaps without exception. So is it that unbelievable that women just don't quite get the wave-particle duality?

Or is it all a masculine-based construction? Maybe the very concept of measuring liquid with a graduated cylinder is rooted in a phallic object for a reason: to exclude women.

So, this week, we present the battle of the sexes. Foster, Levi, I put it, what are women better at, what are men better at, or is everybody equally good at everything? Are the Olympics a social construction that if we didn't go into it with preconceptions would have every man, woman, child, and animal finishing the 100-meter dash in 8.43 seconds?

Phone-a-Shmuck

A friend's recent blog post highlights cellular companies' latest bid to wring money out of the people who can least afford it: recurring charges for what barely constitutes content. The $1.99/month charge that they charge would be criminal, and is only made more so by offering you a Sir Mix-a-lot Ringtone. Let's face it, if you're appearing on VH1's I Love The 90's, Part Deux, nothing you are involved with is worth paying for.

But that isn't to say your star has completely faded. Cash in on your has-been notoriety! What if for that $1.99/month, instead of getting a Sir Mix-a-lot ringtone, you got a call from Sir Mix-a-lot! What else is he doing? Sure, this may be a pay cut from their star days: Optimistically, this would be equivalent to them living off the interest of $5 million, which is far less than they earned during their peak. But, I'm willing to bet, a lot more than they have in the bank.

So, let's set it up. You subscribe, and everytime you're out with your friends, you get a call from a different B- -list star. I know I'm looking forward to the day I'm bowling with a prospective mate and appear that much more sexy for being worthy of a ring-a-ding from Erik Estrada.

-D"As long as it's not Carrot Top"an

The Logical Construction of Personality: A Long, Technical, and Marginally Humorous Study of Getting Laid

If you're like me, you want to get laid. And to do that, you'll need a modicum of looks, and (thanks to women's sliding scale of attraction) a heaping helping of personality. Nick Carroway said that personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, and he was gay, so he probably had plenty--that's how he managed to bed Jordan Baker, and she was gay. Most of us straight guys aren't so fortunate. But we do have a bit of a secret weapon in the fight against endless masturbation: science.

Let me explain what I mean. If we take Carraway at his word (and we can't, according to the same critics who have him longing for Gatsby even as he pals around with his golf-club-toting-ingenue-uberdyke beard), then it seems personality isn't some intrinsic property in a subject, but rather something extrinsic, in other words, something a subject does, a series of gestures, patterns of speech and behavior--a construct made of a particular sequence of ostensions and utterances. In still other words: Bullshit.

The good news about this account of personality is that you needn't waste any time attending wine tastings, Kabalah classes, foreign films, or, worst of all, being yourself. This is because your "self" is merely the affects of this logical construction of utterances and gestures. It runs no deeper than that. So all you need do is pick a mark--that is, some woman (or man) F-- and retire to the lab to build a personality P suitable for the job of bedding F.

Elsewhere, Jones and Foster (2004) have conjectured that for every woman f, there is at least one set of propositions (in this case, speech acts and physical gestures) call it p(x), which, when performed in a particular sequence (s), will succeed in rendering (f ) vulnerable to bedding (L). Call this expression Lp(x(s))f a bedding theory of f. The logical notation here might be a bit confusing at first, but it translates simply into "p(x(s)) L's f" or "the set of gestures p(x) in sequence s will bed (or make bed-able) f."

This theory is expressed in various ways in the vernacular: seducing f, wooing f, picking-up f, slipping f a roofie, etc. But, of course, the consequences of formalizing and systematizing such a theory are profound and far-reaching. Imagine, a universe of ass at the fingertips of every nerd with a graphing calculator or a slide-rule and basic hand-eye coordination. Provided you are neither troll nor troglodyte, you, dear reader, could very well bed Natalie Portman, or that girl from Accounting, or your TA, or the Queen of England. You just have to do the math.

Now, I know what you're saying: "Dan, where's the fucking empirical data?!? Do you expect me to swallow some a priori theory based on nothing but the Romantic musings of a fictional narrator and the anecdotal conjectures of two third-rate armchair philosophers?" Well, it'd be nice if you did, but I understand your hesitation. Here, take three test cases.

1) In one possible world, that is, the fictional world of the adult film classic "Buttbanged Hitchhiking Whores", our test subject Lex, executes a short series of gestures that secures him the bedding of not one but TWO attractive blondes. This particular instantiation of the theory Lp(x(s))f contained two gestures: one physical and the other sentential or propositional. Gesture g1 is physical; it entails Lex stopping his car at the side of the road. Gesture g2 is an utterance expressing a conditional proposition, which can be paraphrased thusly: "I will transport you and your compatriate to the destination of your choosing if you agree to engage with me in various unprotected acts of lechery, including several distinct sodomous acts." We can formalize this theory for getting laid by two blondes f1 and f2, thusly:

Lp(x(s))f = []Plc, E(x) [E(y) [((x=f1) . (y=f2)) . (Ql(f1 . f2) --> Dl(f1 . f2))]].

Notice how crucial the sequencing is here. If Lex had not pulled over his car before making the conditional proposition, it is doubtful he would have bedded either, let alone both, of the attractive blondes.

2) The most rudimentary of sequences. Our test subject is John, and the mark is Debbie, the village whore. Again, the theory contains two gestures, one physical action and one utterance. John first removes a five dollar bill from wallet and holds it stiffly in front of him, next he utters the English language phrase "blowjob". Needless to say he succeeds in bedding Debbie. Here the sequencing is less important; it seems fair to infer that the sequence [g1, g2] here described could have been replaced with the sequence [g2, g1] to much the same effect.

3) This is an extraordinarily complex instance. The test subject is Agememmnon and his mark is Helen of Troy. A complete model of the theory-sequence used to bed Helen would occupy countless pages, but suffice it to say it contains thousands of physical gestures--including boat trips, gorings, beheadings, horse-constructions, and body-draggings to name a few--and as many utterances in the form of dialogue and soliloquoy.

Of course, if you don't have the logical capacity or technical know-how to construct a set of gestures sufficient to bed the woman of your choice, there are two options. You might try the trivial gesture-sequence--that is, the set of all gesture-sequences. Elsewhere, my girlfriend has referred to this is as the "Groundhog's Day Sequence". Given enough time and access to a particular mark, you just continue to say and do things until she gives in. Lastly, researchers are hard at work on coming up with universal gesture-sequences, or sequences that work on all women. Preliminary calculations show that something called the "Pitt-Clooney Set" is probably the best bet. It includes being ridiculously good-looking, moderately talented, and fantastically wealthy.

Pissing In The Wind: Wrap-up

So many good points by the two of them, fighting like hamsters who are in one corner of the cage fighting like... hamsters.

But what can I say that isn't said so much better by:




-D"Consumer*ist* whore"an

P.S. Buy the computer I'm orphaning to make space in my room, wallet, and heart for a mini the day they come out.