So Hey Here's Some Shit To Be Outraged About

Nobel Prize winning scientist says he's not keen on women in the laboratories.

Nobel prize winner Sir Tim Hunt has an issue with female scientists -- they're too distracting romantically and they cry when criticised.

Hunt, 72, an English biochemist who admitted he has a reputation for being a 'chauvinist', reportedly told the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea:

"Let me tell you about my trouble with girls... three things happen when they are in the lab... You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry."

• Female scientist: 'Women do cry in labs --- but I've seen men weeping'

He added that he was "in favour of single-sex labs" but "doesn't want to stand in the way of women."

Here's my take. This is a tricky thing because people do say things which are legitimately offensive to people. Hunt's words are, no doubt, offensive to many women.

My problem is this: First of all, there is some truth in what he's saying. I guess I'm a chauvanist, but I have myself seen problems with women crying due to work criticism.

For this section of my post I am assuming the Typical Man, thought to be more impersonal at work and less attuned to the emotional terrain he stands upon, and the Typical Woman, thought to bring more emotional, personal connectedness in relationships at work.

In assuming this I do not assume all women are the Typical Woman, and all men the Typical Man; some women are stone-cold robots, and some men a gibbering, blubbering babies. But let's just take the average specimen here, the fat hump in each sex's distribution curve, as the Typical Specimen.

One could say, "Is it the woman who has the problem, or does the man have the problem for not just accepting that this is going to happen?"

Well, one could say that, and I have no glib rebuttal to that. But poking past the Grabby Question of Which Sex Sucks the Worst, we can view this from a ten thousand foot vantage and at least observe: Men and women tend to have different views of the roles of impersonalness and personal relations in the workplace, and they often find each other's reactions confusing, vexing, annoying, or exasperating.

Men do not understand why women turn an essentially impersonal relationship and burden it with complicated emotions involving affirmation, loyalty, contempt, and betrayal, and women do not understand why men cannot understand that any relationship between two human beings, however impersonal in theory, is still a human relationship, with all that that implies.

So I think there is actually stuff to talk about here beyond just yelling at this guy that he said a Badwrong thing. I think most of this outrage stuff is intended to silence people from telling impolitic truths rather than falsehoods, and I think the Shoutyfems have an agenda of claiming there are absolutely no psychographic differences between the Typical Man and the Typical Woman, and you are Pro-Rape if you say such a thing.

But there are. Look: There are.

This doesn't men men are right and women are wrong. It does, however, mean that women will annoy the shit out of men, and men will anger women.

As it has been for 300,000 years, and as it will be for another year, when the Sweet Meteor of Death comes to deliver us all to the promised land, by which I mean, Graveyard Earth.

There is no point in claiming that only women are allowed to be angry at the differences they see in men; men don't buy that and never will, even if they condescendingly Yeah Yeah Sweetie just as you say you to death on the point.

That is to say, Shoutyfems, you can bully men into not saying you annoy and confuse them sometimes with your emotional tagging of minor gestures and slight changes in pitch of voice, but you won't get them to stop actually being annoyed.

Men and women are going to annoy each other. Because we are different. There is an entire Code of Manhood beaten (sometimes, literally) in the psyches of young boys that crying or showing any hurt or emotion at all in response to a challenge or confrontation is weak and, well, feminine.

Obviously this is not so beaten into women. (Given the feminized nature of the country, it's unlikely the Millennial "men" will have this same code of emotionless unflappability pressed on them as the ideal.)

To keep shouting that there are no differences, and that things that obviously do happen, do not happen, is to simply keep insisting childishly on a comforting lie.

As to his bit about falling in love with each other: This is another damned difficult thing to discuss. Men and women do tend to fall in love with each other -- particularly when they work together as a team.

This causes all sorts of strains on marriages. And we don't like to talk about this, but yeah, there is a reason (not a controlling reason but a reason nonetheless) for sex-segregation: Men and women will in fact tend to develop feelings for one another, and not only can this create weirdness in the workplace, but it can destroy marriages as well.

Now, that's not me saying women should stay home. I don't believe that. It is no longer economically possible that one half our potential workforce only do housework, and it's not in women's own economic interests to only develop skills as a homemaker.

But to say that the mixing of sexes has no deleterious effects whatsoever is another Political Lie people push, largely, I think, because people just fucking love lying for some reason.

I think it's a power thing, I think. It proves nothing if I can make you say the sky is blue. But if I can compel you to say the sky is pink -- well, that shows that I am Socially Dominant to you. I have juice. I have pull.

All these things are complicated, like men are complicated, like women are complicated, like sex is complicated, like love is complicated. Like life is complicated.

But we're repeatedly forced to claim that everything in life is simple and conforms to the brief bumper-sticker slogans -- the stupid, obvious lies -- that the Sisterhood of Solidarity prefer, or the leftists generally prefer.

This guy is a Nobel prize winner. I assume he's not insane. So when he claims these things have happened, I tend to assume that these things have actually happened, not that he is a psychopathic liar who makes things up because he Loves Rape.

And I don't think he should get the lower pack animal hooting/ostracism cycle for talking about the complications of love and sex and the world as it really is (as opposed to the thickwitted idealists' claims about a childlike-simple imaginary world).

Argue with him, rebut him, point out that his frame of reference (emotional simplicity) is not the same as women's, and that he should not assume his frame of reference is the objectively correct one just because of the happenstance that he happens to have been born male.

But this whole shrieking jag? The whole Women Shrieking the Same Shrieks and gnashing their teeth thing, every third day?

Doesn't that tend to support his "retrograde" notions about feminine emotionality, rather than rebutting them?

posted by Ace at 04:58 PM

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