Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Tostada and Fugue in Claire Minor

Tostada

Twenty-nine days to WDW, which has become the only principality in the New World to condone—nay, to insist on—gay marriage. I’m going to be honest: the whole idea of getting married at WDW borders on the bizarre to begin with. This ties back into my notes earlier on Disney princesses. By the time you’re old enough to get married, you should have put the whole princess idea behind you a bit. But to maintain not merely the substance of the princess fallacy but also the form? That goes beyond delusion into what can only be considered serious dementia. Let me tell you: I know a lot of guys who are married and not one of their wives thinks that any of them are any sort of Prince Charming. Yet the deluded WDW bride can arrive at the chapel in a white carriage, and the groom can arrive on a white horse. Whoa, Nellie! And don’t even ask how much all of this costs, but then again, weddings aren’t cheap even when they’re at the local 7-Eleven. Obviously I’m not quite in the spirit of this thing, gay or straight.

Speaking of not being in the spirit of things, yesterday the father of Juan, Kwan and the Stoners: The Next Generation managed to wreak yet a new kind of havoc on the chez. I’d already met Dad one morning as he surveyed the landscape. Dad is retired, but he likes to keep his hand in, and JKS:TNG comprises his entire progeny, or at least the ones who have taken to the family trade. When I ran into Dad (it was about 4:00 a.m., and I was out tending the sheep on the back forty and I’m not quite sure what Dad was doing there), he patted the chimney fondly and told me that he had built this one himself, way back when. Fire having been recently invented, apparently, the building of fireplaces was considered quite avant garde at the time. Of course, JKS:TOS had covered up all Dad’s brickwork last year with the new stones, but Dad was undeterred, and proud as punch over the original work, the new work, his sons, me, the sheep, and life in general. Dad’s day is, apparently, not exactly brim-filled with incident. Anyhow, last night when I came home from a business dinner, no amount of clicking could get the garage door to open. Cleverly trying to outwit the clicker, I tried the door on the other side of the garage. Still nothing. At which point I noticed there was no outdoor light welcoming me home, and also that Liz’s car was on the outside of the garage looking in, a most unusual position. It turns out that yesterday morning Dad, in a covert attempt to help JKS:TNG, had begun working solo on some drainage for us, and managed to cut the electricity to the garage. I guess we’re lucky he didn’t fry himself, but for the moment, the mews is off-limits. Fortunately the JKS:TNG progeny include a full contingent of electricians, one of which will pop by today and set things aright. With luck, the progeny include a prison guard who will lock Dad up until the work at the chez is concluded.

Jeesh!
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Fugue

Or, let’s finish up this feminism stuff.

The question raised by the princess fallacy (and my calling it that begs the question of what value I give it) goes to the core of feminist thinking, or more to the point, thinking about females. An article I read this weekend about the Brooklyn Museum, which is opening a center for feminist art, succinctly explained the situation, citing the range of thought from the essentialist (represented by the essential physical aspects of the female, the case in point being Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, which is currently on display) to the social construct of the feminine. That is, the idea of female lies somewhere between the fact of the female side of reproduction and the beliefs we have in our culture/society about women. We know what makes women primarily different from men physiologically. That one’s easy. But what makes them different culturally? And is there anything about the cultural difference that is real, and not merely an ephemeral social construct? Or to phrase it in a way even a Plebe can understand, are men and women really different, aside from the naughty bits?

I have no glib answer, but I offer the Larry Summers Dilemma for helping evaluate the question. And I strongly recommend some reading on the subject aside from what I’m saying; it would behoove you as a debater to have some academic material under your belt (maybe O’C can recommend something). Anyhow, the Larry Summers Dilemma suggests you to take any situation and look at it from every angle. Summers, while the chief Hot Dog at Harvard, famously posited that women were bad at science because their brains weren’t inherently hard-wired for the stuff, presumably as an excuse/rationale for his university’s lack of women in the science area. Yeah, he’s not working there anymore, almost entirely because of the ensuing flap over this statement, but that’s not the point. The one fact in this that was clear—and this one clear thing is the starting point you must find first in any pursuit of the subject—was that, given the percentage of women in the world, roughly half the general population, women were not roughly half of Harvard’s science population. Why not?

Well, let’s see. First, we can accept that either men and women are equally adept at science, or that one or the other group is more adept. If we accept that they are equally adept, then perhaps Harvard is simply discriminating against women in its policies relating to its science departments. The same fact of discrimination would be true if we accepted that women are more adept at science than men. And it would not be discrimination if men were more adept at science than women; in this case the actual numbers would be merely a reflection of the general adeptness of the two groups.

So we need to discover the relative adeptness of men and women in the sciences. And here is the next problem, which is whether or not we’re willing to believe that Harvard’s policies are discriminatory. Theoretically, the number and type of students studying something is presumably a reflection of the number and type of students interested in that thing. For instance, if in a university 5% of the population studies architecture and 30% of the population studies computers, this can be seen as a measure of the percentage of architects and computists in society at large rather than a discriminatory policy against those interested in architecture. So the number of women in sciences may not be a result of discriminatory practices, but simply a measure of the percentage of women in science in society at large.

If we’re willing to accept this non-discriminatory reflective idea, we start approaching the core of the issue, which is why there are more men than women in science in society at large. There are three possibilities, and we’ve already in a sense discounted one, which is that educators discriminate against women in science (although this could indeed be true, but we want to proceed beyond this question for a moment). The other two possibilities are that men are better at science because they are inherently better at science (i.e., Summers was right, and their brains are hard-wired for it and women’s brains are not), or that men are better at science because they are socially accepted/acculturated/developed/perceived as being better at science (that is, society’s brain, if you will, is soft-wired to believe that men are better at science, regardless of the truth of the matter). Obviously, if the latter is true, that society believes men are better at science than women with absolutely no basis in fact, then the number of men versus the number of women is reflective of a social issue which, if not exactly discrimination, nonetheless is part of a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, are men better than women at science? And if so, are they better than women at science because of essential innate abilities or because of society’s beliefs about those abilities?

We can boil this down further. Are men different from women at X? And if so, are they different from women at X because of essential innate biology or because of society’s predisposition to believe in that difference? This is the feminist test you can apply to any situation. Are we acting this way because of our biology or because of our culture? That, in a word, is what feminism is all about. How do we discover the innate differences between men and women, and deal with those, and how do we discover the artificially constructed beliefs that separate men and women, and deal with those? We need to seek truth, of course, and accept that truth, whatever it is, but what separates feminist theory different race theory or legal theory or the like is that there really is at least some meaningful biological differences between men and women, whereas there are no meaningful biological differences between blacks and whites. (I assert that last point, but nonetheless I stick by it.)

So maybe we should leave this here. Solving the feminist question is a deeper, more academic pursuit henceforth. But at least I think we’ve managed to frame what the question ought to be. As I’ve said in the past, you are the philosopher, learning the meaning of existence in order to create a better world. Your job now is to figure out how to do it in a way that makes sense. Otherwise all we’re doing is trying to win debate rounds qua debate rounds. And what would be the point of that?

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