House of Eratosthenes

I’ve been noticing for awhile now that before the Weiner scandal goes away, there’s a looming threat that it might undergo a metamorphosis and turn into something actually worth discussing. Then I’d have to make a decision about whether or not to write it up.

That became a reality on Saturday when the New York Times explored the question of why women don’t get into sex scandals as often as their male counterparts. The author seeks to draw a gender line, and I don’t object to this. There does seem to be a consistent statistical dominance in these stories that come out. But what really caught my eye was the fleshing out of the characteristics involved, particularly this passage:

Research points to a substantial gender gap in the way women and men approach running for office. Women have different reasons for running, are more reluctant to do so and, because there are so few of them in politics, are acutely aware of the scrutiny they draw — all of which seems to lead to differences in the way they handle their jobs once elected.

“The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “Women run because there is some public issue that they care about, some change they want to make, some issue that is a priority for them, and men tend to run for office because they see this as a career path.”

Hmmmmm…yes, the gender lines do break down in isolated little pockets we could argue about interminably. I think Paul Ryan is in public service because of an issue that has captured his passion, he’s a dude. I think Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama like to be in the limelight, and they’re chicks. But these are exceptions that prove the rule.

At this point, I’d run off onto a tangent…or rather, maybe the story is running off on a tangent compared to where I’d take it. Since the observation is statistically valid and almost certainly provable, but it’s loaded with all these bothersome gender exceptions, I’d be more interested in the missing-middle aspect of it. You can carve through the House of Representatives, all 435 members, and I daresay you could neatly categorize all 435 as one or the other with little or no lingering doubt about anybody. Congressman A: Fix something. Congressman B: Wants to be famous. Fix, famous, fix, famous. All the way down the line until you reach the end.

Regarding the gender differential, in 2011 I think this is why we’re frustrated with our presidential candidates, although nobody will admit it. There seems to be a nationwide hunger for an exception to this rule that is somehow perfect: A man who wants to fix things. In the entire line-up, I perceive that the only exception to the above rule is Pawlenty. More exceptions are desired. To say anything further about the election next year is to betray my chosen subject matter, so I’ll stop that thought. There’s something else that merits discussion.

Via Althouse (hat tip to Instapundit), I see there’s a doubling-down in the department of “okay to say one sex is superior to the other as long as you’re saying women are better.”

Hold on to your butts. This is sweet, syrupy, sappy and sick:

Why is it that men so often self-destruct? In the political world, Weiner joins Eliot Spitzer, Bill Clinton, John Ensign, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Edwards as hypocritic slimeballs who let their pants set their personal policy.

But it’s not just politics. Todd Thomson, young, married, chief financial officer at Citigroup Inc., was embroiled in a scandal a few years ago with money honey Maria Bartiromo of CNBC. Her career survived. His didn’t.

There’s Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the International Monetary Fund, who’s accused of sexual assault. There’s James McDermott, who was CEO of Keefe Bruyette & Woods until a dalliance with a porn star named Marylyn Star embarrassed him out of the company.

We men just make bad decisions. We can’t help it. We’re men.

Women, on the other hand, do almost everything better. We’ve known this intuitively for a long time. If you didn’t, just ask your wife or your mother. But now there’s a raft of evidence that suggests women are better at everything — including investing.

A new study by Barclays Capital and Ledbury Research found that women were more likely to make money in the market, mostly because they didn’t take as many risks. They bought and held. Women trade this way because they aren’t as confident — or perhaps as overconfident — as men, the study found.
:
A new body of evidence is emerging that shows women are better at just about everything — or, as Dan Abrams has titled his new book, “Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else.”

As Abrams notes, women are better soldiers because they complain about pain less. They’re less likely to be hit by lightning because they’re not stupid enough to stand outside in a storm. They remember words and faces better. They’re better spies because they’re better at getting people to talk candidly. [emphasis mine]

Question: If we’re going to pronounce that this train of thought, right or wrong, should be believed and acted-upon because it is fashionable and trendy — and it most certainly is — what sort of women would we then want to place in positions of power?

We’re settling on women because we want people who can make things actually work, right? So what kind of family lives should these favored women have, I wonder.

Well, we were clued in to the female superiority because of the self-destruction of Congressman Weiner, so we’re already using the functionality of the family unit as a litmus test. I simply propose we should move in a consistent direction on this. Marriage is tough; women who can make it work, go to the front of the line. I shouldn’t even have to suggest that, right?

Why, then, does it seem the star status — the “magical woodland fairy we want to be fixing everything” power — falls consistently on the harpy who drives the hubby out the door? I saw a Facebook update from Breitbart a few weeks ago as a certain other powerful family man went supernova: “Maria Kennedy Shriver for Sec’y of State.” Ingenious, even if you do have to stop and think about it for a moment.

What lesson to take away from this? Very little we didn’t already know. There is a prevailing wisdom from about the early 1970’s, maybe late 1960’s, that says women and men are exactly the same in every way — unless you want to say women are better than men, and then that is okay too, you are allowed to distinguish and differentiate.

The less obvious lesson is: We, as a modern culture, like to delude ourselves into thinking we’re searching for effective and productive people when we really aren’t. What other qualifications does Hillary Clinton have for being Secretary of State anyway, besides her husband cheating on her? I’ve heard a lot about her “experience in the White House” — how many hundreds or thousands of people in the DC area can say as much, or more? Is her character to be defended with the excuse that it was Bill’s error and not hers, therefore her only transgression was to choose her man foolishly, or with overly pragmatic motives? Okay, sure I’ll buy that. But it certainly isn’t a qualification for a cabinet level position, or for any office in which one is to make better-than-average choices. Would you say it’s a good idea for her to choose Chelsea’s husband? How about your own daughter’s? If not, then why would we want her deciding something for the State department? And where are the teeming hordes of female allies of Hillary being elevated to similarly high offices, who are still married to their first husbands, families intact and with the soap-opera drama turned down low?

Families, by and large, are an either-or proposition. They either work or they don’t. That idea isn’t so popular; many will argue with it, because we’ve been taught a lot to the contrary. Everybody’s family is flawed, quirky, filled with infighting but ultimately lovable. I’ll go along with the strange relatives, it does seem everyone’s got at least one. But when it comes to belief in the family unit, you either have it or you don’t. The philandering husband begging to be taken back & given just one more chance, has become a cartoon caricature. Good manners in our evolving society dictate that if Congressman Weiner’s wife wants to continue with the charade, the rest of us are obliged to persist in a larger “wingman” game of make-believe.

But deep down, we know dysfunctional is dysfunctional. So I say: If we’re going to choose competence by stereotypes, let’s make the stereotypes sensible. The philanderer’s behavior is not the fault of the cuckolded wife; the statistics show the females are more productive and show better judgment than the males at some things; those two factors, even added together, don’t do anything to enhance a resume. They certainly don’t qualify a woman for high public office, if she as an individual person has accomplished little or nothing else.

Now back to this regrettable trend that seems to be shaping up. The title of the book described above captures it rather nicely, I think: “Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else.” Oh, my. What a coffee-table conversation starter. Prof. Reynolds has an awesome proposed-nickname for these men who bash men to please women: “Uncle Tims.”

What sort of person buys a book like this? A mother, with one or more sons, perhaps? Would any of these sons be taking longer than the average, I wonder, to seek out & find a sense of direction in life, a purpose? Would this lad be requiring medication so he can pay attention in class? Just asking the question, here; wondering how many cases would fall into the criteria I set down. Tens of thousands? Millions? Tens of millions maybe?

There starts to be a jeopardy-of-human-potential issue here, on quite a large scale.

Many will reflexively deny it — without any information — just because. Others might toss a joke at it, which the rest of us are required to take “good-naturedly,” something to the effect of “what human potential would that be Freeberg, they’re just boys and weren’t going to accomplish much anyway.” But to those with the maturity that is needed to evaluate the question in a rational way, I’ll just sign off with: This doesn’t seem quite so cool and hip anymore, now does it?

Cross-posted at Brutally Honest.

The notion that men and women are equal, unless one wants to claim that women are superior, is a social offset. Everyone knows that away from a desk, pen, and paper that rhetorical arguments like that don’t sum up to reality.

Take driving, for example: it’s statistically true that women get in less accidents than men, but it’s not because they’re more skilled drivers, it’s because they’re more cautious drivers. Why? Because the part of the male brain that controls hand-eye coordination (the chief component in driving) is larger than that in females. Therefore, driving comes so easily to males that they take more risks in their car by pushing asphalt physics to make the experience more interesting . Women, on the other hand, struggle more with hand-eye coordinated tasks, so they’re more likely to obey the rules of the road–including reducing their speed–to mitigate slower reflexes and reaction time.

That’s not skill, it’s different behavior as a product of biological determinism. A vulture is less likely to get fired from a management position than a human being, because it’s a bird, and doesn’t hold office jobs, not because it’s superior and more intellectually skilled than those people who have been canned.

As for male politicians that get into sexual trouble, that’s an easy one: men have a higher sex drive than women. Everybody knows it. Some moron will get on here after this comment and rant and rave to the contrary, but we all know that men want women sexually more than women want men–unless the man and woman are in a long-term relationship and he’s sick of banging her. I’m not even going to bother citing the plethora of research out there that confirms this, you have two eyes to see the differences in how men and women act sexually in your daily lives–just be an adult and accept reality.

Many women prefer to think they are morally superior creatures, since they don’t lead with their crotch, and that their “superiority” is what accounts for the differences in behavior between the genders. But that need for self-deceit is, in itself, a demonstration of inferiority. Superior people don’t rely on mechanistic intellectual reassurances to convince themselves and others that they’re better, whenever differences are exposed. They’re either superior in a given area or they’re not, and they’ve learned to deal with it.

Even the need for such platitudes as “Women can do anything men can do, only better,” is over-compensation for the fact that many women, by default, are assumed (perhaps unfairly) to be less capable. The reality is that if one can do something better than another, one usually just demonstrates it. Trying to “prove it” rhetorically through debate, and cherry-picked literary “evidence,” is ignoring the very real fact that it’s a doing thing, not a talking thing.

I’ve never met a capable woman who was invested in arguing with men about how women are better. It’s always the unskilled who want credit for something they’ve never earned. And the unskilled annoy everyone, regardless of gender.
- sanskara | 06/15/2011 @ 09:50
Yep, those who can, do. It melds on that front into another discussion that is absolutely gender-unrelated. Show me a hundred squawkers droning on about what some job does & doesn’t “take,” who is & isn’t qualified…I’ll show you a hundred who cannot produce in that field, because if they could they’d be doin’ it. Cue the picture of the ugly goth chick holding the “women are not for decoration” sign outside a Hooters’ restaurant being handed a cup of ice water by the hot waitress.

There is another point to be made here: Women are always going to be racking up fewer penalties in…well, anything that has a formal process for penalties. Somewhere there is a human adjudicating whether it does or doesn’t count — and we all, male and female, have been brought up from grade school in a setting of “don’t pick on the girl.” So a man and a woman both drive the same speed stop, exceeding the limit by exactly the same margin, same cop on the beat. She cries, so the ticket is never written. Whoah not so fast there, bud. It is not going to work for you…

We write it off, because when you’re a dude, you live in a “nobody ever said life is fair” kind of existence. But there’s more to it than the fine and the court appearance; we tend to forget, there is then the statistic. There’s a record that a man committed a traffic misdemeanor. The woman, according to the written record, was really never even stopped and her morning commute was entirely uneventful.

So yes, women are better at everything. They make fewer mistakes. According to the written record…which is, of course, measurable.

The other thing that should have made it in? It seems women are highly likely to buy things — and maybe the men are, too — if the message comes out that women are better. It creates an environment in which it’s easier to sell crap. I’ve seen an awful lot of commercials where it’s necessary to show different players in the family unit making different decisions, some right & some wrong. To date, the only commercial where the man was using the right product, was in a commercial for a now-defunct specialty pizza oven company. In all other samples, the wifey makes the right call and the man uses Brand X. That’s how you sell crap.
- mkfreeberg | 06/15/2011 @ 10:03
The is no human thing so bizarre or so ugly as the society of women divorced from men,and that includes the society of men divorced from the influence of women–misogynistic Muslims.

BTW, a female cop is two and one-half times more likely to shoot than a male cop. At heart, she knows one truth of gender equality better than anyone.
- jamzw | 06/15/2011 @ 10:13
Prof. Reynolds has an awesome proposed-nickname for these men who bash men to please women: “Uncle Tims.”

Small-Tee ain’t gonna like this.
- bpenni | 06/15/2011 @ 11:32
Small-Tee ain’t gonna like this.

Follow the cross-link, to Rick’s place. He’s got a great response to all this, or should I say, non-response. One for the books.
- mkfreeberg | 06/15/2011 @ 12:18

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“Uncle Tims”Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

“Uncle Tims”
Wednesday, June 15th, 2011