The Answer in the Question

Elaine McArdle in her Boston Globe article ("The freedom to say 'no'") - May 2008 - writes about research in economics and the social sciences which shows that smart and highly educated (in math and science) women choose jobs other than those in IT, physics, and engineering. They self-select jobs in which they deal more with organic substances and language, and less with tools and inorganic substances.

These data apparently surprise researchers who sought the reasons for such choices in physiology, education, or at the door or glass ceiling of the workplace. But they found that it’s not about brains, aptitude, ability, or out-and-out barriers; it’s mostly about choice, they say. Women choose freely.

Yet, McArdle reports that researchers don’t know why women choose as they do. They don’t know how experience and socialization work in shaping women and their choices.

But doesn’t the answer about selecting jobs lie exactly there, in the answer to the question of how culture shapes women and their choices from infancy?

We have a willful and collective blindness, in certain quarters at least, about the role of ideology in shaping people’s choices, especially when it has to do with the role and place of women in our society.

We are not so blind when it comes to subcultures, though. It’s interesting that a couple of years ago in Texas, with the FLDS cult, we had no such trouble understanding how constant exposure to certain ideas from infancy shapes women’s beliefs and makes them accept behavior that is harmful to themselves and to their children.

I am frankly pessimistic that researchers will even look to see the results of exposure to beliefs about what it means to be a woman in a dominant culture. If they did, they might have to admit that women actually have less choice than they “find” in the research McArdle reports.

Researchers will continue to look everywhere but where the truth lies. The real answer to the Freudian question about what women want is that it’s only a rhetorical question.

Elaine McArdle is a writer in Cambridge, Mass. She has co-authored a book with Dr. Carolyn Bernstein called The Migraine Brain.

Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - December 13 - 19/09

This is post number 100!!!

Posts from the last week before Christmas. Enjoy!

The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four from December 13 - 19/09 - December 19/09
The Jinxed Blog Post - December 18/09
Life as Writing Practice - December 17/09
Lunch at the MRA Department Store - December 16/09
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Grandmother - December 15/09
Good Thinking About Art - December 14/09

The Weird, Wild, Wonderful Four from December 13 - 19/09

Serious Eats is an excellent food site. I posted about it in September and began receiving two of their weekly newsletters, which I always enjoy. The site has reader-contributed content, recipes, Q & A about food and techniques, a place where readers can contribute their food photos, columns, and much more. All this month in Serious Chocolate, Lindt chocolatier Ann Czaja answers questions.

Feministe "is one of the oldest feminist blogs online designed by and run by women from the ground up." I only discovered this blog a couple of weeks ago (probably the last remaining feminist to do so!) and always find the posts interesting and important.  The posts are largely about current events, responses to articles in the media, and commentary about ongoing problems women face. They don't pull punches. I like that.

On Familiar Things: Rediscover Classical Paintings is a wonderful, detailed, chatty blog by a  former professor of fine art (Amsterdam) and a professor of art history (Utrecht). Each post offers (usually) a classical painting and an informative, but informal discussion of it, sometimes with personal things woven in as well. This is a great place to learn about some famous and not-so-famous paintings with two learned but down-to earth art lovers.

Animal picture in the Telegraph UK  - One of the very few animal pictures I could not resist sharing. What can I say; every once in awhile "cute" gets me, and this one really is cute.


(chocolate photo credit)

Hardwiring 101 for Women

Evolutionary psychology has been trendy for nearly two decades, finding increasing numbers of human pursuits for which we are supposedly hardwired. Yet it is no coincidence that the field gained in both popularity and influence during a time of retro-conservatism and backlash against feminism.

Increasingly, evolutionary psychologists "find" that our essential nature conforms quite rigidly to a deeply conservative agenda. The religious right should embrace evolutionary psychology as its best and most helpful friend.

Scientists and psychologists in other areas have long questioned the aims and findings of evolutionary psychologists and researchers in related fields. Applying the laws of evolutionary biology to the human psyche has its detractors. Evolutionary psychology is by no means an uncontentious player in the field.

Even so, articles appear again and again, authoritatively telling us ("us" often meaning women) of the newest findings about motherhood and women's roles in society. One such recent article is "Femina Sapiens in the Nursery" by Kay Hymowitz in City Journal (Autumn 2009).

Hymowitz's article is more balanced than many I have seen and brings in reference to neuroscience, primatology, and genetics, but for all its discussion of the complex frontal cortex of women and their rightful place running the state department, Hymowitz leaves the overall impression that women are driven by hormones which are tanatmount to a "maternal instinct." And although she claims that she believes the answer to the question of female identity is a mystery, the article itself leaves far less room for it.

The article's subtitle - "The conflict between parenting and career is hardwired in the female brain" -  doesn't really relay the thrust of Hymowitz's argument. She acknowledges that women have a role to play in society, other than the mothering role, because of the overall development of the frontal cortex in humans generally. Women, like men, have developed the abilities necessary for careers. But a conflict will result because women have an even more primordial hardwiring to be mothers.

Feminists have long questioned the findings of evolutionary psychologists, especially as one of the main areas of investigation has to do with sexuality, mating, and offspring. Hymowitz believes that many findings of evolutionary psychologists will force feminists to admit defeat:.

Especially galling to feminists has been the field of evolutionary psychology, which proposes that evolution has fundamentally shaped human sexual and reproductive behavior—behavior that often seems to conform to the worst stereotypes.

I think that Hymowitz understands neither feminists nor the limits of the data she promotes.

Hymowitz offers two recent stories in the news about mothers who found it difficult to either stop breastfeeding or return to work, leaving a young child. Her first example:

Consider a recent article by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic. Rosin finds that nursing her infant is holding her back from the work she enjoys, despite her plan for a fully egalitarian marriage... She combs through research on the health benefits of breast-feeding for babies and makes a convincing case that they aren’t as strong as experts have insisted. So does she quit nursing? She does not—even though, she admits, “I’m not really sure why.”

Why does Rosin continue? According to Hymowitz, it is because she has mammary glands. Isn't this begging the question? She has mammary glands which allow her to feed her infant, so she continues to use them because she has them!

The other story is by Katie Roiphe who describes an “'addiction to her newborn baby that left her indifferent to work."

Hymowitz ignores much in both stories. First, both Rosin and Roiphe are writers/journalists, and the first rule for a good story is to have conflict. I'm not saying that the stories aren't true, just that they are stories to be published and to compel readers - perhaps not the best examples.

Second, Hymowitz and others who make these arguments ignore the numbers of women who do not feel this conflict, or do not want or have children at all. She also ignores the data regarding women who neglect and/or abuse their children. She assumes the model of the nuclear family also, ignoring other arrangements in which mothers hand off the care of their infants to wet nurses and nannies. She also does not factor in the common social pressure to breastfeed or stay home with young children that many mothers feel, nor does she discuss the fact that many women would be reluctant to be full-time mothers, workers, and homemakers.

Finally, she ignores another compelling argument. While it is true that feminists "consider sexual identity a “social construct,” a human—or, to be more precise, a male—invention," it is not true that they deny that the females of the species carry and give birth to the offspring or have the equipment with which to feed them. Feminists, scientists, philosophers, psychologists, post-modernists, to name a few, do, however, question how much these facts influence identity, sexual or otherwise. So it is not to say that oxytocin has no influence on women, nor is it to deny that oxytocin may be the hormonal name for the "maternal instinct," rather it is to say that this hormone may not shape female behaviour to the extent that some would believe or wish.

The impetus to define women predominantly as mothers has been around for millenia; such a definition serves the patriarchal status quo. It is always interesting to trace the ways in which the claim is argued and supported, changing over centuries as human understanding of what it is to be human changes and as science and technology give us new tools with which to frame the hypothesis.

Women will be mothers; women will love and be connected to their children; women will find it difficult to leave their children and return to work. No argument from me and no judgement about women's choices. Women will also choose not to have children, will choose careers, will have children and regret it, or refuse to breastfeed.

Hymowitz asks "In the struggle for equality between the sexes, it keeps coming down to motherhood, doesn’t it?"  My answer to that is a definite, "No, it doesn't!" My regret is over how many people wish it were so.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City Journal and the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book is Marriage and Caste in America.



I would like to invite Kay Hymowitz to my soiree.

The Answer is in the Question

Elaine McArdle in her Boston Globe article (May 2008) writes about research in economics and the social sciences which shows that smart and highly educated (in math and science) women choose jobs other than those in IT, physics, and engineering. They self-select jobs in which they deal more with organic substances and language, and less with tools and inorganic substances.

These data apparently surprise researchers who sought the reasons for such choices in physiology, education, or at the door or glass ceiling of the workplace. But they found that it’s not about brains, aptitude, ability, or out-and-out barriers; it’s mostly about choice, they say. Women choose freely.

Yet, McArdle reports that researchers don’t know why women choose as they do. They don’t know how experience and socialization work in shaping women and their choices.

But doesn’t the answer about selecting jobs lie exactly there, in the answer to the question of how culture shapes women and their choices from infancy?

We have a willful and collective blindness, in certain quarters at least, about the role of ideology in shaping people’s choices, especially when it has to do with the role and place of women in our society.

We are not so blind when it comes to subcultures, though. It’s interesting that last year in Texas, with the FLDS cult, we seem to have no such trouble understanding how constant exposure to certain ideas from infancy shapes women’s beliefs and makes them accept behavior that is harmful to themselves and to their children.

I am frankly pessimistic that researchers will even look to see the results of exposure to beliefs about what it means to be a woman in a dominant culture. If they did, they might have to admit that women actually have less choice than they “find” in the research McArdle reports.

Researchers will continue to look everywhere but where the truth lies. The real answer to the Freudian question about what women want is that it’s only a rhetorical question.

Elaine McArdle is a writer in Cambridge, Mass. She has co-authored a book with Dr. Carolyn Bernstein called The Migraine Brain.



I would like to invite Elaine McArdle to my soiree.

Defining Women, Inviting Violence

(November 25 is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and kicks off 16 days of activism to end violence against women. This post was written especially for the Bloggers Unite event in support of the UN initiative. )



It's no coincidence that second wave feminism and the civil rights movement of the sixties and seventies developed at a time when the nuture side of the nature/nuture equation was predominant. Both movements fostered the development of people according to their abilities, strengths, and dreams, rather than according to a rigidly essentialist view. Although the road was not without setbacks, both from within and from without, in the West we are in a place now where gender and race are somewhat less restrictive.

But it is no done deal, either. In the last several years - nearly two decades, now - there has been a backlash against the gains women have made. Susan Faludi was one of the first to write about the trend in her 1991 book Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women.

For the last few years, the nature side of the equation has made quite a comeback, with researchers from both science and humanities disciplines insisting that we are "hard-wired" for almost everything, including gender roles - the old, ongoing, reactionary, stifling, male-privileging gender roles.

And it's not surprising, considering that even women's modest gains undermine a centuries-old power structure bent on recapturing the little bit it has lost and shoring up its sagging infrastructure.

When Plato declared the world of forms more real than the material, when the Bishops of Christendom decided on the true nature of  Christ's relationship to God and the method of his incarnation, when the Roman church claimed apostolic succession from Peter for its bishop, the Vicar of Christ, women were excluded from the seat of power. 

The great abyss between male and female was effected and male privilege (sexual and otherwise) was entrenched in politics, religion, philosophy, and ideology.

The gender coup of classical Greece and its offspring Christianity led to definitions of women that control them and keep them subject to male power. The definitions are too, too familiar: women are defined as weak; emotional; caregiving; sexually depraved; fertile; enmeshed in nature, rather than reason; provided for man's succour, service, and sex.

 Woman is the chaste virgin queen or modest wife, valiantly eschewing her depraved nature and deserving of male protection, or the debauched woman, unwilling to renounce her evil ways, thereby making herself deserving only of male anger and abuse.

History is full of cases of violence against women perpetrated because they did not, would not, or could not live up (or down) to society's definitions of them.

Recent times are no exception. This year, on December 6th, is the twentieth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre in which gunman Marc Lepine shot and killed 14 female engineering students and 13 other students at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique. To the female engineering students he said, "You're women, you're going to be engineers. You're all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists."  Then he systematically gunned them down. Women do not become engineers, according to Lepine's definition - and not according to the definition of many who deplore women taking "men's jobs," a common complaint at the time.

Some of the most contested issues in society revolve around women, marriage, and reproductive rights. It's no coincidence that some of the most vocal, dangerous, and charged rhetoric centres on abortion, gay marriage (and the nature of marriage), family planning and birth control. For centuries, marriage, pregnancy, and the fetishization of motherhood have defined women and kept them in their place.

We see enormous concern about boys in a supposedly too-feminine world; we see the likes of the American group of male politicians who call themselves The Family and grant each other the right to subservient wives, sex with whomever they choose, and a will to power that would make Nietschze quake.

And we see sexual slavery, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and honour killings - all because our human societies define women in ways that invite it all. And we say it is in their nature.

We must have as many voices as possible saying that this must stop, but we must realize that it will never stop as long as we don't fight the battle where it starts - with definition, with words.

Well-Deserved Criticsm

Popular, trashy romance novels have hackneyed characters, doggedly predictable plots, and no sentences more difficult than what a primary schooler could handle. They are painful to read.

Slightly more literate romance novels have slightly less hackneyed characters, perhaps an interesting plot twist or two, and sentences for middle schoolers. They are sometimes well-written, but are still painful to read.

Most romance novels are, purportedly, written by women. Regardless of the gender of writer and reader, they are still painful to read.

Emily Gould believes that "women are often the cruellest critics of other female writers." In her article "What Are Women Fighting About?" in More Intelligent Life (October 29/09), she discusses the particular venom she feels is levelled by women at women who offer traditional, vapid female characters - characters who are dependent, materialistic, and want someone to sweep them off their feet and take care of them by providing as much cash as possible.

Gould generously lists the aspects of good writing she finds in one particular novel, but says that she hates the novel, the "retrogressive plot," and the female characters and worries that readers will find the character portrayals representative of real women like her:

This worry elicits the cruel female response:

So I become, once more, the kind of person I can't bear: the female critic who despises any female writer who doesn't project what she feels is the accurate or ideal vision of modern womanhood. This critic believes it is her job to tear down women who are "off-message" because there is only so much publishing space allotted to women, and so more attention for them is less attention for her and other worthy types.

Female critics are right to give these novels a pass and to review them with a highly critical eye, but not because they don't fit with an agenda, and not because there is limited publishing space. As Gould's one example of a cruel critic says (and it's all she says as example!), "The novel is just terrible."

Female (and male) critics are right about these novels because they offer characters who are stereotypes, acting in stereotypical ways, in stereotypical situations. Even though the descriptions, locales, and outfits may be finely drawn and the sentence structure admirable, romance novels are painful to read.

Men and women who support the ongoing fight for women's equal place are right to criticize vehemently. The continued portrayal of women as dependent, sexualized children has real consequences in the world; it is more than an agenda issue. It is sad, disheartening, and frustrating, no matter who promotes the stereotypes.

To say that these novels and their authors are" giving women what they want" is to try and give them a legitimacy they don't deserve. Romance novels, like so many other aspects of pop culture, play to the lowest common denominator; they carry the messages of advertisers promoting stereotypes of those most likely to buy their products; they require no mental effort; they are easy and comfortable; they are often based on the worst aspects of humanity. They are thoroughly and readily criticized for many reasons.

Gould's critique of female critics pits women against each other much more insidiously than any outraged and open female criticism of romance novels. She takes what is healthy anger at the continued promotion of damaging stereotypes on one hand, and legitimate criticism of bad novels on the other and reduces them to that demeaning question Freud asked - "What do women want?"

Gould's title "What Are Women Fighting About?" invokes Freud and diminishes the well-deserved criticism of romance novels to the level of a bitchy catfight.


(photo credit)
(photo credit)


.

Gullible's Travels

Yahoo, shout feminism's critics at the results of the study "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" by researchers "Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972."

Phyllis Schafly, a long-time opponent of women's rights, and others of the same persuasion wish to see these results as a condemnation of feminism.

The trouble is that the study simply does not support that conclusion, according to Barbara Ehrenreich's article "Are women Getting Sadder? Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?" in Guernica (Oct.13/09).

For Ehrenreich "(1) ... there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2)... there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) ...even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone's."

Ehrenreich writes that there was "an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates" that allowed the study's authors to find only a tiny difference between men's and women's reports on their levels of happiness. An equally tiny difference was coaxed out about each gender's assessement of the change in happiness levels since 1972.

The most (and only) objective measure of unhappiness that we have shows that women are happier (or less unhappy) than they previously were. Suicide rates for women have dropped from 1972 to 2006 (the dates of the study). Also, the Wharton study documents that African American women report being happier than in 1972, which means the results about "the blues" apply only to white women.

Finally, the researchers clearly note that those women involved most directly in second-wave feminism have similar results to those of younger women:

As the authors report,... "there is no evidence that women who experienced the protests and enthusiasm in the 1970s have seen their happiness gap widen by more than for those women ...just being born during that period."

There's no surprise that some will turn anything into an attack on women and women's rights. With this study, feminism's detractors have tried to turn Lilliputian results into Brobdingnagian ammunition.

Yahoo to you, too!

Ehrenreich has written 17 books, been a columnist for The New York Times and Time magazine, and contributed often to Harper's and The Nation. Her most recent book is Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Pursuit of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.




I would like to invite Barbara Ehrenreich to my soiree.

Unveiling Abstraction

Robert Fulford writes about Marnia Lazreg in The National Post article The politics of the veil:

Lazreg's fascinating book, Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (Princeton University Press), tells us that the veil comes and goes, according to the rise and fall of ideologies and the change in male perceptions of women and women's beliefs about themselves. Algeria illustrates the point. After women helped achieve independence from France in 1962, many ceased to wear the veil. It lost its political force as a form of rebellion and became an archaic custom of an older generation.

In the book, Lazreg writes about, what Fulford calls, "the most potent human symbol on earth," although it is not a symbol for piety. According to Fulford, Lazreg believes:

In truth, the veil stands for political ideology and male power.

Further, any woman wearing the full body and face covering is erased:

...Unable to look anyone in the eyes, lacking peripheral vision, her hearing muffled, she becomes an abstraction.

In the Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra ( nom de plume of Mohammed Moulessehoul), a woman must be executed, but the individual woman under the burqa is not really the issue. The identity of the prisoner is never verified because the need to assert control over all women is so strong - any woman will do and must die.


The execution is concrete enough; but the whole process is symbolic of political ideology and male power. The woman becomes an abstraction.

Marnia Lazreg teaches sociology at Hunter College CUNY. She elucidates these issues on behalf of us all, as she studies, lectures on, and writes about development, gender, and geopolitics of Islam.

I would like to invite Marnia Lazreg to my soiree.