I came across an article in The Washington Post, written by a woman called Charlotte Allen, titled We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?. The article is basically a misinformed and a misspresented pseudo-scientific misogynist interpretation of popular culture to prove that women are dumb. Part of what Allen says in the article:

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

But another woman wrote a brilliant response debunking the myths that Allen treated as universal truths about women, and politely bitchslapped her for thinking so little of her own sex. Bitchslapping can be good, let’s hope it wakes Allen up and stops her likes from giving a feminine voice to misogyny. The great response came from Katha Pollitt, also in the Washington Post, titled Dumb and Dumber: An Essay and Its Editors:

The upshot: we ladies should focus on what we’re really good at — interior decoration and taking care of men and children.

Oh, gag me with a spoon. Sure, girly culture can be silly — but what does that prove? It’s not as though men spend their evenings leafing through the plays of Moliere. Susie whips up doggy treats, Mike surfs porn sites; she curls up with the Friday Night Knitting Club, he watches football. Or maybe the two of them watch “Grey’s Anatomy” together — surprise, surprise, about half the show’s audience is male. If you go by cultural preferences, actually, you could just as well claim that women are obviously smarter than men — look around you at the museum, the theater, the opera house, the ballet, the concert hall. Women read more than men, too, especially fiction, which men tend to avoid. (A story about things that didn’t happen? How does that work?) Women even read fiction by men and about men, further evidence of their imaginative powers — while men, if they do pick up a novel, make sure it’s estrogen-free. Who’s really the dim bulb, the woman who doesn’t see the beauty of “Grand Theft Auto,” or the man who thinks Tom Clancy is a great writer?

For Allen, it’s definitely the woman: her brain is just too puny. She cannot mentally rotate three-dimensional objects in space — and that, as we all know, is the very definition of smarts. Funny how that definition keeps changing, as women conquer field after field that was supposed to be beyond them. In the 19th century, physicians insisted women couldn’t cope with college: studying would send rushing to their brains the blood that was needed for the womb. Back then, nobody credited women with the superior verbal abilities and memories Allen says scientists now find women to possess.

True to form, she dismisses these as minor talents that only helped her “coast” through school and life. But back when the experts were explaining why women couldn’t be lawyers or professors or poets (at least not very good poets), nobody said verbal skills and memory were trivial; they only became trivial when women were found to excel at them. Now the sexists diss women as inferior mental-object-rotators. I have no idea whether this is true, and whether if so it’s unchangeable, but you have to admit this is a very narrow scrap of turf on which to plant the flag of manly superiority.

The two articles are too long for me to post here, but please take the time to read them both before leaving me any comments that have sweeping generalizations or irrelevancies.

I am entirely glad that someone like Pollitt wrote back and spoke up for the millions and millions of women that Allen pretends to represent but in fact fights against. This is exactly what I mean by women pulling women down, some are so infected with myths about women’s inferiority that they dare not believe in themselves as capable of anything comparable to men’s achievements. Allen clearly stated she can’t do much beyond add 2+2 together, called her brain Cream Wheat, and explicitly said that women are ‘dim.’ What’s outrageous is that she used the pronoun ‘we’ as if she was the spokesperson of half of the population of earth.

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Make the world a better place for everyone.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 12:15 am and is filed under Wonder Woman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.