apples and gender

Yesterday, I was sitting in Hayden and browsing in the impulse borrowing display when I came across Same Difference. I got through 150 pages, then decided reading the rest of it was a waste of my time.

It's mindboggling how many books and articles have been written about feminism in the past thirty years. The field is just swamped with ideas, more ideas, regurgitated ideas, and horrendous ideas. Same Difference explores one branch of feminism, that men and women are inherently programmed differently, and mercilessly attacks that theory.

Although I agree with the main principle of Same Difference, the way that Barnett and Rivers chose to illustrate it was less than convincing. Simply disproving someone else's theory does not automatically make yours correct. Of course, it's nearly impossible to come up with hard facts supporting any angle of feminism. The authors ridiculed previous experiments by exposing flaws in both the implementation and the experimentation. However, they themselves use ad-hoc examples of people such as Mary and Bill. I'm not sure what experiments they're carrying out, but they don't seem legit to me either.

One argument that Barnett and Rivers use to support the idea that girls are just as good as boys in math and science is that 45% of MIT's entering class is female. Some arguments that they forgot to include are that male and female applicants to MIT are most probably judged on a different scale and that MIT probably only increased the percentage of females when pressured to do so or when its administrators recognized the benefits of having more females participating in classes. Over the past ten years, notorious weeder classes at the institution have actually gotten easier. It's not clear whether this is because MIT's objectives and philosophy changed, or whether the influx of girls required classes to become easier or whether the general talent pool has shrunk. Like Barnett and Rivers, I'm speculating as well. I realize that the authors have a point to prove, and I don't expect them to cover other angles. It just shows how tenuous their actual proof is.

Barnett and Rivers repeat themselves too much without coming up with anything innovative. Their main point is that there are less differences between men and women than between either gender in positions of more or less power. However, the writing is sub-par and loose. Combined with a lack of innovation, the book wasn't convincing or entertaining.

I've never been a feminist partly because I never grew up thinking that I had less opportunities as a girl and because I disagree with feminism. As a child, I was encouraged to do well in math and science. I was and still am fascinated with firearms, tossing footballs, climbing trees and sculptures, and wearing grungy clothing on a semi-regular basis. The thing is, I don't know the degree to which men and women are inherently different, and I don't really care.