Larry on La Différence

Larry the Barefoot Bum takes me to task for my suggestion that some disparities in male-female payscales might be "justified."  He says:

When we are talking about establishing differences between classes of human beings (which seem, quelle surprise, to usually be construed as inferiority), our null hypothesis should be that there are no differences, until evidence compels us to reject the null. I do not believe that we have anywhere nearly enough evidence to conclude that that women are substantively inferior... oops... different in capabilities than men.

I'd agree 95 percent, maybe 97, maybe 94, whatever.  Assessing differences is a perilous business at best, and turns invidious at the flick of an eyebrow.  It's  very like (but perhaps not quite like) the Hegelian insight that we can't know what "man (sic) in the abstract" looks like because nobody has ever seen man in the abstract, nor women neither, for what it is worth.

But there is a dangerous slippage underfoot here.  Back in the 60s (say) we all learned (or were taught) that we shouldn't assert differences between men and women.  We subtly tramsmogrified that mandate into the proposition that there are no differences between men and women.  Narrowly interpreted, this little two-step is incoherent: if we cannot know that any categorization of men versus women is empirically based, how can we know that it is not?

Actually (one reason Hegel doesn't apply here) my take is that there are a few--perhaps very few--differences that we simply cannot explain away as matters of culture.  My pet is the fetal damage through drug use.  So far as I know, there is no dispute on the proposition that the male fetus is more vulnerable to such the risk of such damage than the female. I first ran across that one about 20 years ago.  I haven't yet run across any possible basis on which this variation could be cultural.   It's small potatoes I suppose; I suspect there are others but for the moment I only need one to make my point.

Larry is quite right that we have a long history of using this kind of stereotyping in ways that are adverse to women (Does Senator Dianne Feinstein fail to understand torture because she is "too emotional?"  No, I think not.)  But Larry might be overlooking an important cultural shift: these days, it's at least as likely that the stereotyping is used in ways that are invidious to men.    On that latter point, FWIW, I'd have to confess that I am a culprit.  I do tend to think that men are on the whole idiots. their minds clouded by sexuality and a tendency towards violence.  I suspect (though  certainly can't prove) that traits like this are hard-wired.  I think we'd make a mistake to say that of course it can't be so when the fact is we don't know at all (nb, I think I have just said that I'm not sold on Larry's "null hypothesis," supra).

By the way, does anybody remember Ashley Montagu's Natural Superiority of Women?  It was published in 1952, i.e., when I was just starting my senior  year in high school; when I was, in other words, obsessively alert to the question of the truth or falsity of just that proposition.  I see there's an Amazon review saying that "Most men will not care for [the book] at all."  I'm not at all sure that that is true: I suspect that most men know they are oafs and are not pleased with themselves for being so.  Stereotyping again.

Fair Game

Here's an email from Elizabeth Warren that will not surprise: 

John,

When I started teaching elementary school after college, the public school district didn't hide the fact that it had two pay scales: one for men and one for women.

I can't believe we're still debating equal pay for equal work 40 years later.

She's right, of course. The disparity does persist, and it is unfair--it cannot be fully justified (though I think it can in part be justified) by factors that have nothing to do with gender.  It's another one of the facts of life I came up against in the City Room of the (notoriously liberal) Louisville Times back in the 60s.

I think I understood the unfairness to women in the regime as it subsisted.  But I was more alert to the unfairness to me. The boss would have said (I think perhaps he did say) that it was only right that he paid women less because they didn't have families to support. True as a matter of fact, but it also glosses over the point that I did have a family to support, and all this low-price scab labor was undercutting my paycheck.  I think the boss felt pleased with himself for providing jobs for women when they weren't all that common.  I don't think he minded pocketing the extra change that came from hiring (at my expense) on the cheap.

Who You Gonna Believe?

Bartlett:

Link.  Or Frum:

Link.  Or heck, let's just relax with Alyssa:

Link.    Just as wild speculation, I'd guess that people in earlier generations also felt a letdown in their 20s as the burdens of adulthood came crashing around their shoulders.  For men of my cohort, you woke up one day married and with kids and a mortgage and not the slightest idea how it all happened.  Oh, and the high likelihood that if you did not meet these new responsibilities, you would go to jail.

Sarah Palin:The Beginning of Wisdom

Balzac says no woman learns the truth until she reaches a  certain age.  Underbelly recalls and refashions:

Who's Sarah Palin?
Get me Sarah Palin!
Get me more Sarah Palin!
Get me someone like Sarah Palin....
Who's Sarah Palin?

Now this: link.

Roman Gender Roles: A Not Quite Frivolous Question

Would it be true that the only smokers left in Rome are women? And not the old ones in black dresses, but the young and snazzy with scooter helmets? In a week I counted perhaps a dozen women puffing coffin nails and zero men

Afterthought:  Right, ambiguous modifier.  Yuk yuk.

They Want What?

Kenneth Waltz (in 1959) surveys the contributions of "behaviorial scientists" to international relations:

Thus James Miller … thinks the cause of peace might be greatly advanced if we could plant one thousand trained social scientists in the Soviet Union, disguised as Russians, who would use the latest techniques of public opinion sampling to find out what the Russians are thinking. Gordon Allport advocates arranging the entrance to the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Security Council, and Unesco so that the delegates will have to pass through the playground of a nursery school on the way to their meetings. And J. Cohen, another psychologist, believes that the cause of peace might be promoted if women were substituted for men in the governing of nations.

--Waltz, Kenneth N. (2010), Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (pp. 46-47).

Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition

This all sounds pretty weird to us and I suspect also to Waltz, but I suspect that we don't find the idea of “women...substituted for men in the governing of nations” weird in quite the same way it seemed weird to Waltz. I suppose I can cut him some slack on this one: aside from Wu Zeitan, Catherine de Medici, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Cleopatra, I don't suppose he had a great deal to go on. The question really would be: was “J. Cohen” right that the presence of women would lead to a kinder, gentler politics?

I know the easy answer is: Margaret Thatcher! Indira Gandhi! Ha! And I admit that when you look at the current lot, you sometimes wonder why we ever gave them the vote. But these are side issues. I think on the whole the answer has to be emphatically yes, we do get—well, perhaps not a kinder, gentler politics, but a steadier, more issue-oriented politics with less banty-rooster posturing, less risk-taking (whether it also means fewer boy-toys is a question on which perhaps the votes are still out). And at the very least, I know of no case where a female politician has been outed for buying oral sex from a cleaner at a six-star hotel.

Afterthought: I do think all those “social scientists disguised as Russians” would have made a great Peter Sellers movie, though.

No Wait, Maybe Things Aren't That Different After All

 Just in from Davos:

But if wives have it bad, mistresses, who are invited under a variety of guises and usually wind up with a white name tag, have it worse. Typically their men are swallowed up by a tsunami of meetings and interviews and don’t have the time or inclination to take their mistresses around with them. Often these men go to high-level dinners to which wives and mistresses are not invited. The skinny and beautifully dressed Davos Mistress typically hangs around the auditoriums waiting for a couple of minutes with her man. While waiting, she keeps her eyes peeled looking to search and destroy the competition.

The only thing worse than a white pass, is no pass. Rumor has it (heard first-hand from more than one jealous Davos Mistress) that there are legions of women — let’s call them the aspiring mistresses — who do not get a coveted Davos invitation and badge and so can not enter the Congress Centre but who come anyway. They book a hotel room and prowl the streets hoping to snare their prey. They are the worst enemies of the Davos Mistress.

Link.   Thanks, John.

Catch of the Day: MR on the Boy Girl Thing

Just follow the link, and note that the comments are better than you might expect, too.

Another Meditation on the Superfluity of Men

Kay S. Hymowitz has put together an insightful (and often funny) take on a recurrent favorite topic here at Underbelly Central—the increasing superfluity of (young) men (link). She reads Nick Hornby, watches The Man Show and (mostly) flips through the pages of Maxim—all in the interests of science, of course—and puts together a pretty-near bulletproof brief that men are pretty much what you always suspected: a bunch of mindless oafs.

It’s a dead-on putdown (and BTW, is there really an article entitled ““How to Make Your Girlfriend Think Her Cat’s Death Was an Accident”?). But despite a few faltering attempts, Hymowitz doesn’t seem to have much to offer about how they got this way or what to do about it. I can clarify: men are this way because (a) this is their natural state of being and (b) in the current environment, there is simply no incentive to act otherwise. More directly, men are surplus: the world doesn’t need them any more and has left them parked, as it were, in the play yard, with the earnest hope they won’t make too much of a nuisance of themselves.

In earlier times (somewhat oversimply, before birth control), women had to make deals with men; to pretend to tolerate, even to admire, some of their goofier habits. For their part young men found themselves faced with a juggernaut of constraints—the threat of prison, starvation and celibacy—designed to turn Big Bad Bill into Sweet William. Pretending to Be Nice was part of the package. I have some dim, not entirely pleasant, memories of those days: the responsibilities of adulthood falling on me around the age of 25, like a landslide in an earthquake. But I didn’t know any alternative.

Both sides of that bargain have broken down. These days, there is simply nothing women need out of men that can’t be accomplished with a high school chemistry set. Always ahead of her time, Malvina Reynolds saw it coming 50 years ago (link):

They can come to see us
When we need to move the piano,
Otherwise they can stay at home
And read about the White Sox.

Malvina understood: even with threats or inducements, men are a damn nuisance. So without them, they are impossible. For their part young men have figured out that the threats or inducements, however strong, are simply not enough to overcome their natural tendency to oafishness.

I grant this is a somewhat Eurocentric view of things: in some other parts of the world, the phallocentric posse appears to continue to (oh tee ee) hold things well in hand. But unless (not an entire impossibility)—unless we slide back into a world of total male domination, I can’t see any reason why women won’t, after another generation or two, just breed ‘em out.