Friday, January 28, 2005

UPDATE

Detailed explanation:

Powerline wonders whether the reason for fewer women in the sciences has to do with biological, as opposed to social, reasons. (expository) That is, men are biologically superior at math and science because it was important to know about calculus and mapping the human genome and stuff when we were hunting, whereas those skills weren't so handy for the women cooking and breast feeding. (sarcasm)

I can buy it - except that I honestly don't really care that much. (truth - I don't care that much!) It's much more interesting to me when people are good at things they aren't supposed to be good at, women math professors, white male rappers, black golfers, you know what I mean. (true - it's much more interesting than "proving" who and what has biological superiorities....men in general are stronger than women, big deal. Megan Keane could still kick my ass. That's interesting, and funny.)

It does bug me, however, when Denise Richards plays a nuclear scientist (Tomorrow Never Dies) or Elizabeth Shue plays a genius mathematician (The Saint). I much prefer the nubile high school sex maniac (Wild Things) and the babysitter out of place in the big city (Adventures in Babysitting). Those roles are more appropriate, biologically speaking. (I prefer it when Denise Richards get's it on with Neve Campbell and Matt Dillon, revealing her enormous, perfect boobs in Wild Things than her cock-tease role as a bond chick pretending to be a nuclear physicist. Sue me. These are beautiful, young women, and I don't buy them as genuises....like I said before, I wouldn't buy Austin Kucher as a scientist, either...or John Travolta, or Salma Hayak (although she's very mutha fucking smart, from what I hear). Does this make me threatened or wary of women?)

If that makes me a non-feminist, oh well. Feminism is soooo passé, anyway. (It's true, feminism is out....gay rights are in, mixed ethnicitiy is in, fundamentalist religion is in, civil rights is out...come on, guys, get with the program, you know these things.)

But if you want to take this shit seriously, and truly care about feminism, the PRIMARY issue to a true feminist in this day and age has to be how the Islamic world treats women. If a "feminist" wants to complain to me about how upper middle class American chicks don't have as many opportunities as upper middle class dudes - I think they aren't truly feminists, but rather, using "feminism" to further their own personal interests. Feminists care about women's rights. The right of women to even show themselves in Islamic countries is so horrendous and humiliating, I can't only barely imagine what effect it has on the human soul. To equate that with the fact that women CEO's make 85% of male CEO's - 850,000 G's a year versus 1,000,000 is to reveal such a narrow view of feminism, that it barely qualifies.

It's as if a baseball team won 110 games and lost 52 and the management points to a five game losing steak at the beginning of the year and criticises the team for a shitty year....yeah, it's true, but it completely misses the bigger picture that the team won 110 games, a spectacular feat.

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