Forward Into the Past!

My Diversity Manager Facebook friend shared this meme the other day.

It annoyed me enormously, because it invokes 1950s sexist stereotypes as gender norms.  I commented to that effect.  My friend said he'd been inclined to agree at first, but then realized that it was about the fact that genitals don't define gender, and said I needed to remember the context.  What?

The more I thought about the meme, the worse it became.  Let's start with the final paragraph.  It assumes that dress, hair, and other visible details define gender, and also tell me whether a person is trans or not.  This fits with the widespread tendency to treat transgender as nonconforming gender presentation rather than subjective gender identity.  That is not only erroneous but harmful, because it favors and promulgates sexist stereotyping.

Consider my Diversity Manager friend himself.  For the three decades I've known him, he has had flowing shoulder-length hair, which in Barbie-and-Ken terms means his gender is female, which tells me that he's trans. He isn't, but that's what his gender presentation says.  In the early 60s when men began wearing their hair longer, they were frequently accused of looking like women, confusing the sexes, and so on, even when that long hair was the only gender-nonconforming trait they had.  And it didn't even have to be that long: when I look at the Beatles' early albums, for example, their hair doesn't seem long at all, yet it drove gender cops mad with anxiety and fury.

Along with their hair, many men in that era began changing their clothing styles, wearing brighter colors that were taboo for males in their parents' generation; some experimented with makeup, many began to pierce their ears and wear earrings.  Before long older men also adopted some of these modes, and soon after those young men became older themselves.  Often these fashions were defended and rationalized as a rejection of restrictive traditional masculinity, though that rejection was only partial.  It frequently coexisted with a very traditional male supremacy, misogyny, and predatory male sexuality.  As Dorothy Dinnerstein recounted in her important book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976):

Men could assume sweetly open, uncertain postures, carry flowers, adorn their bodies in what their society at large regarded as outrageously feminine style, and still be masculine. But women who dominated meetings by sheer lung-power, or demanded that others type their leaflets and make them coffee, would have been unsexing themselves. A roomful of male students of mine during that period, decorative and gentle-looking, charmingly tentative in their style of speech, full of aphorisms of the “Kids are beautiful” and “Where you are is where it’s at” and “Like, you know, like, I had this feeling” genre, laughed explosively at the following riddle: “Why won’t [name some plain-spoken, forthright female head of state, or congressperson, or controversial author] wear a miniskirt? Because she’s afraid her balls will show!”

This clinging to masculine status and privilege helped to fuel second-wave feminism.  Effeminate gay men are often ferociously misogynist, as are many MTF transsexuals.  In his book on sex changes, Patrick Califia documented MTF transsexuals who criticized women for not being feminine enough: womanhood, they complained, was wasted on them, and should be reserved for those who appreciated and knew how to do it properly.  More recently, I've noticed that critics of so-called TERFs (women who refuse to accept the legitimacy of transgender identities) tend to fall back on misogynist abuse that reminds me of Gamergate in its monkeys-throwing-feces abandon.  But of that, more in another post.

During the same period, women appropriated styles that had been considered male property.  Even in the 50s, when I was a kid, there was criticism of women who wore trousers.  That seems to have pretty much faded away, and women can wear skirts or trousers as they find convenient: they can even change their "gender" from day to day. Women have also taken on jobs that men had previously monopolized.  Gender reactionaries who insist on the immutability of sexual difference have to forget that the current state of gender affairs should not, on their assumptions, exist: women and men have changed their behavior and presentation in areas that were claimed to be set in stone.  Better still (in my opinion), what replaced the 1950s gender order was not a new conformity but freedom.  At the university where I worked for four decades, students now wear a variety of hairstyles, costumes, uniforms, and they don't seem to view them as mandatory for all.

Perhaps, as I've suggested before, we'll never have equal proportions of men and women in some fields; no one knows.  But the thing to remember is that in the past, we were assured that there would never be any women scientists or CEOs or rabbis, because women were biologically unsuited to those jobs; and that no men at all would attend childbirth, or do early childcare.  If we're still at, say, a 70/30 ratio of men to women in math or physics, remember that in the Good Old Days, 99/1 was defended as God-ordained and biologically inevitable.  It took considerable thought control to ignore that in fact such unicorns already existed, but the eye of faith is generally blind.  (Remember: faith means knowing what you know isn't so.)

So we can see that gender presentation does not equal gender identity, and that we can't know whether people are trans or cis by the way they dress or carry themselves.  What the Sixties produced was a rejection of that assumption.  Gender stereotypes and norms didn't disappear altogether of course, partly through cultural inertia and partly because of conscious resistance to these changes, but overall, the boundaries have been moved much farther than their defenders said they could be, and there's much more variety and freedom in gender presentation than there was in the 1950s. That's why the equation of 1950s sex stereotypes with "gender" in the meme above annoyed me so much: I think it represents a rejection of the breakdown of gender stereotypes that I and many other people welcomed.  I didn't foresee that the progress we've made would have to be defended not only against religious fascists but against people who promote those stereotypes as an advance, even as liberation.  Well, you live and learn.

More on this soon.

"It Is Curious How Thoughtlessly We Use Words"

While I was in Boston recently, someone recommended Patricia Bell-Scott's book The Firebrand and the First Lady,* about the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Pauli Murray (1910-1985).  Roosevelt, I hope, needs no introduction; Murray was an important activist and writer about African-American civil rights -- and, my informant added, a lesbian.  I'd never heard of her, but my interest was piqued.  The ebook was too expensive for me, but the physical book was on the shelves at the public library when I got back to Bloomington, so I checked it out immediately and am now about 180 pages (out of 360) into it.

It has turned out to be a fascinating read.  I'm surprised that I hadn't heard of Murray before.  Her achievements are too numerous to go into here, and her struggle against poverty and ill health (leaving aside racism and sexism) makes them all the more remarkable.  But here's a taste:

In the fall of 1945, Pauli Murray finished requirements for the master of laws and passed the California bar exam.  The publication of her thesis, "The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment," in the California Law Review marked several milestones.  It was her first publication in a law review journal; it was the first essays ever published in a law review by an African American woman; and it was the first law review essay on the subject of sex discrimination and employment [177].

Unable to enroll at Harvard (her first choice) to get a doctorate in law, because the Law School refused to accept women of any color, or to find suitable employment despite her many connections, Murray felt obliged to move back east to care for her elderly aunt.

Her belongings were packed and her train ticket booked when she met Robert W. Kenny at her swearing-in ceremony to the California bar, on December 8, 1945.  Kenny was a liberal Democrat, an advocate for fair employment legislation, and California state attorney general.  Having just read Murray's groundbreaking law review article, he offered her a temporary post as deputy attorney general on the spot.  Until she passed the civil service examination, her appointment would be subject to the return of employees on military service leave.  Murray accepted Kenny's offer in spite of the shaky terms.  In doing so, she became the first black deputy attorney general for the state of California [178].

There were many such firsts in Murray's life; eventually, for another example, in 1977 she became the first African American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.  She seems to have lived more in one lifetime than most people could live in several.  I look forward to reading the rest of her story.

Right now, though, I'm chafing a bit at the book's scanting of Murray's lesbianism.  I don't assume that this is necessarily due to authorial homophobia; Bell-Scott is more concerned with Murray's public career, which was eventful enough. (Also with Roosevelt's: The Firebrand the First Lady is really a dual biography, following both women's lives even when they weren't interacting with each other.  And Bell-Scott buries Roosevelt's lesbian connections: ER's beloved friend, the journalist Lorena Hickok, has been mentioned in passing but her lesbianism has not, nor her relationship with Roosevelt.  A look at the index shows that Hickok's "intimate friendship" with ER is referred to briefly once, and her lesbianism acknowledged, once, a hundred pages later.

In Murray's case, she evidently grappled with her love of women from her teen years onward, and it's not always clear which of her women friends were actually girlfriends.  That may be because Bell-Scott doesn't know, but Murray was a compulsive writer and documented her anxieties and conflicts pretty fully.  Maybe more information has been published elsewhere, and more may come later in this book.  But I found this passage, about her state of mind in her late twenties, very interesting.

Since Murray's hospitalization [for an apparent mental breakdown] at the Long Island Home three years earlier, she had been consulting with doctors and scouring the scientific literature in search of an "answer to true homosexuality."  That Murray asked one psychiatrist if she had "a mother fixation" demonstrated her familiarity with psychoanalysis.  Having rebuffed psychiatric treatment and the theory that her attraction to women was a manifestation of homosexuality, Murray constructed an alternative explanation.  She convinced herself that she was a pseudohermpaphrodite with secreted testes (and she would hold this belief until X-rays of her uterus, fallopian tubes, and the surrounding area proved her wrong).  Such a condition pointed to biology -- specifically, the presence of male gonads and hormones -- rather than mental illness as the source of her attraction to women, her tomboyishness and her lack of interest in feminine pursuits, such as housekeeping [57].

I'm fascinated by this glimpse into conceptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation in the 1930s.  How odd that, though she rejected a medical diagnosis of "homosexuality," Murray invented and embraced a no less medicalized theory of herself as a "pseudohermaphrodite."  And, of course, "biology" and "mental illness" have always been intertwined, whether for sex or for other conditions.  Professionals never quite made up their minds, in this period or later, whether homosexuality was purely mental or the expression of a physical abnormality.  ("Homosexuality" was originally conceived of as a social and quasi-legal concept when Karl-Maria Kertbeny invented it in 1868; it was only appropriated by the medical profession later on.)

The reference to Murray's "tomboyishness" understates the case too.  "Just a few years earlier, Murray had proudly asked Nancy Cunard to publish a photograph of Pete, her 'boy-self.'"  I wonder if Murray ever read Radclyffe Hall?  Murray also liked to wear "men's" clothing, and it wouldn't be off the mark to think of her as a "passing woman."  Bell-Scott also recounts a trip to North Carolina that Murray made in 1940 with her friend (nudge, nudge?) and roommate (wink, wink?) Adelene McBean (aka "Mac").  They were arrested in Virginia for refusing to stay in the back of the bus they were riding.  Only a couple of pages into the story, with the two women in custody, does Bell-Scott mention that Murray "was apparently dressed in male clothing and had told officers, according to one passenger, that her name was Oliver Fleming" (63).  Murray "gave her name and clarified her sex status as they were booked" (64).  There's no indication that Murray's cross-dressing or her adoption of a male persona added to their legal problems, though I'd have expected it to.  As I read all this, I began wondering just what Murray's "boy-self" meant to her.  Bell-Scott doesn't say, but it appears that Murray's life is very well-documented, as indicated by the detailed witness accounts of her and Mac's arrest and her custom of thinking through personal issues at the typewriter.

I'm not interested in deciding what Pauli Murray "really was."  Invert, homosexual, Urning, gay, lesbian, transman, bulldagger -- such terms, as I've written before, are "the fossils of ideologies of what men and women and sex are."  Many people nowadays would jump to identify her as transgender, for example, but I don't think our categories today are any more correct than those of a century ago.  I just want to know more about how Murray saw herself, especially since she clearly thought and wrote about these questions, and left a large archive behind her.  Since she lived into the 80s, she must have come into contact with later constructions of sex and gender, and thought about them.  Well, maybe another book by someone else will address these questions.  Right now, at this stage in Bell-Scott's book, I am dazzled by Murray's gutsiness, energy, doggedness, and intelligence -- brilliance, really.

* Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship -- Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (Knopf, 2016).

The Quest for the Historical Francis

Richard C. Trexler's Naked Before the Father: The Renunciation of Francis of Assisi (California, 1989) would have been worth reading just so I could learn about this 1980 Marvel Comic book about St. Francis of Assisi.  Unfortunately I couldn't find online the panel Trexler reproduced, showing a hunky young Francis standing naked (but visible only from the waist up) after renouncing his inheritance, including the clothes he was wearing, in front of his father and the local bishop, but maybe I'll try to scan it myself.  (P.S. Done!)  I checked Trexler's book out of the library out of curiosity about his other writings, having found his Sex and Conquest (Polity Press, 1995) very useful.  Naked Before the Father was also very good, and I'll be checking out more of Trexler's work before long.

Trexler's subject here is one key episode in Francis' life, the renunciation of his property.  Trexler begins by summarizing the surviving documentation of Francis' family, then analyzes the earliest accounts of Francis's life and career, which began appearing just a couple of years after his death in 1226.  It turns out that there are fewer contemporary records of Francis' father than of his mother, though his father plays a much more prominent role in the hagiographies.  Trexler concludes, with proper caution, that Francis' mother's role was downplayed because men were trying to shut women out of public life in thirteenth-century Italy.  Up to that point women could own property, participate in legal action, and so on.  If Francis could have inherited an estate from his mother (who Trexler speculates may have been richer than his father), his father would have seen him as a competitor for that estate.  This was not a trivial issue, because a postulant's property would go as a dowry to the order he joined.  The cult of Francis as a saint also had economic aspects, since it drew tourists ("pilgrims") and created jobs in the region.

I'm just sketching this, partly because it's not my main point here, but also because I don't know how scholarship on Francis has developed since Trexler's book.  What I found fascinating was that so little is known about Francis' family and background, even though archives preserve written documents from the period, and the Franciscan order preserves a fairly stable and unbroken tradition dating back to his lifetime.  The surviving "notarial" documents never mention Francis' father by name, for example, and barely mention his mother by name, though not as Francis' mother.  Francis' father is named in the hagiographies, and his mother is barely present, nor is her name mentioned.  By contrast, we know, or think we know, the name of Jesus' mother from the first three New Testament gospels -- but though she's a prominent character in the fourth one, the one "according to" John, she is never named.  In Mark, the gospel that most scholars agree was probably the first to be written, Jesus' father is never named, and Jesus is referred to in his home town (Mark 6:3) as the son of Mary.

One important difference between the early hagiographies of Francis and the gospels (canonical and otherwise) is that the accounts of Francis can be dated much more closely, and the sequence in which they were written is known.  The differences between them, then, can be examined.  We also know the identities of their authors, unlike the gospels. The author of the "official" one, Bonaventure, who later became a saint himself, wrote explicitly to supersede his predecessors, and tried to have their work suppressed.  This reminded me of beliefs held by many people nowadays about the New Testament, that the Church deliberately rewrote history and revised the biblical canon to suit its agenda and consolidate its power.  These beliefs are lightly dismissed as conspiracy theories by most scholars, and I don't share them myself, but as the case of Francis shows, they are not inherently implausible.

Consider: we know almost nothing about the development of the Jesus cult in his homeland.  It's reasonable to suppose that Christianity persisted in Galilee after Jesus' death and resurrection, for example, but we have no information about it.  We have very little information about the first Christian generation in Judea, or even just in Jerusalem.  (The Book of Acts is not reliable as a historical source, as shown by its many conflicts with the letters of Paul.)  Nor do we know much about Palestinian Jewish Christianity; the New Testament writings are the product of Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles in the diaspora around the eastern Mediterranean.  To some extent this can be explained by the cataclysm of the Jewish revolt of 66-73 CE, which resulted in enormous changes in Judaism, including the establishment of a doctrinal center in Babylonia that engendered rabbinic Judaism as we know it today.  Christianity virtually disappeared among Jews and became a primarily Gentile cult by the beginning of the second century.

By contrast, the cult of Francis, though it spread widely, remained based in Assisi, with continuities that can be traced back to his lifetime and the years immediately after his death.  Though important documents were written in Latin, the language of the church, others were written in Italian.  We have authentic writings by Francis in Italian, and none by Jesus or his original followers in any language.  Most of the paintings Trexler analyzes were produced in and for churches in Italy, with a couple of later ones elsewhere in Europe.  There weren't the kind of upheavals that disrupted the history of early Christianity.  And yet there is a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty about Francis' life, his family, his motives for becoming a friar, and so on.  It's fascinating to see, for example, how Francis' mother advanced and receded in depictions of his renunciation, and how his father becomes increasingly angry and even violent: some later paintings show him beating Francis with a stick, although this is not mentioned in the early hagiographies.  Reading Naked Before the Father brought home to me the difficulties of writing biography and history even of figures in literate societies, for whom there's more or less contemporary documentation.  How much more difficult it is to establish the history of figures from the ancient world, be they Jesus or the Buddha or Socrates or Pythagoras.

All the Sade Young Men; or, Kill for the Love of Killing

I've been reading a bizarre novel from the late 1960s, The W.A.S.P. (Bantam, 1968) by Julius Horwitz.  "Bizarre" doesn't mean bad, mind you; it's a serious work about blacks and whites in mid-century America, perhaps all the more interesting because it was written by a white man.

Julius Horwitz (1920-1986) doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, but there is a Facebook page dedicated to him, maintained by his younger son.  He wrote eight novels, and The W.A.S.P. is the first I've read.  He was a welfare case worker for New York City between 1956 and 1962, and that experience probably informs The W.A.S.P.

The novel begins with the narrator, John Brooks, attending the funeral of a liberal white lawyer, Samuel T. West.  Brooks is an expert on the welfare system, and he (along with everyone else, it seems) anticipates the arrival at the funeral of Thomas Emerson, a black friend of West's, who dropped out of Yale Divinity School and plunged into the most impoverished parts of New York City.  At the time the novel begins Emerson is running a storefront church which mainly functions as an afters-school activity center for troubled Harlem Youth.

Emerson arrives and delivers a twelve-page eulogy of West, describing the blight of poverty in New York City and recounting the dead man's good works, which ended when he went to Harlem to inform the mothers of two young black boys that their sons were in jail for bludgeoning to death an elderly white couple in their apartment building.  He was only able to tell one mother about it, because when she heard the news she began to scream, and West had a heart attack and died in his tracks.  This was the first sign for me that The W.A.S.P. was something other than a realist exposé.

Brooks tells the reader about his friendship with West, who introduced him to Emerson.  West, like the other white characters, was fascinated by Emerson; he saw him as one destined to become a murderer (another sign that the novel was moving into phantasmagoria) because as an aware black man in America, he could have no other destiny; and as an Ivy-League-trained minister, Emerson was in some obscure fashion the One, who by becoming a murderer would bring about some kind of apocalypse:

"Emerson knows murder," West said.  "He's seen murder in the children he works with. We need a murder. I mean America needs a murder. Not a Leopold-Loeb vase, which was sensational because it invoved money, murder and homosexuality.  We need a murder that will make us stand in awe of everything that we call justice.  We need a murder committed by a man who knows why he is killing, why he is taking a human life, why he chooses to kill a man at a particular point in his life.  A murder that threatens all of us, that alerts all of us at the same time.  The ancient human sacrifices were such murders.  The priest killed at an exact time to achieve an exact effect.  We need a murder to open our eyes.  The murder I might commit or that Brooks might commit or Emerson might commit if we believed that murder could accomplish what we couldn't accomplish by law or logic" [65].

This isn't just West talking; almost everyone in the novel talks like this, including Brooks, Emerson, and the professional participants at a conference on the welfare system that occupies pages 82 to 98, the junkie who rhapsodizes on heroin for three pages, the young Southern white woman, Jenny Beal, who is fascinated by Emerson -- all are demented bullshit philosophers in love with their own nihilistic voices. It's often difficult to tell just which character is speechifying at any given moment. (Notice the reference to homosexuality in the passage I just quoted.  The novel is mildly obsessed with homosexuality.  As the Kirkus review blurbed on the back cover of the paperback kvells, "Atrocities, murder, addiction, rats, homosexuality, right down to black babies being tossed out of Harlem windows -- it's all here.")

".... I had one boy that I used to give a quarter to run out and buy me cigars.  He was picked up by a detective for hustling, selling his fourteen-year-old ass to the homosexuals on Riverside Drive.  The boy called me because I was the only person in the world whose telephone number he had.  I got him a lawyer and he beat the charges.  I gave him money to go to Cleveland, where he had an uncle.  He got a job with a cousin of mine and now he's making a down payment on a house within three minutes of Shaker Heights" [The W.A.S.P., 111-2].

West showed Brooks the long letters that Emerson had written to him, describing the horrors of poverty that he'd observed.  A sort of friendship grew up between Brooks and Emerson, and eventually, divining that Brooks was reading the letters, Emerson began directing them to Brooks instead.  Emerson shows Harlem to Brooks, and when the story circles back to West's death, eventually Emerson finds his victim.  More than that I won't say, in case the reader should want to find out personally how it turns out.

I don't believe it diminishes the enormity of poverty and racism in America to say that the horrors Horwitz describes and lists are not really important in the novel.  If anything, The W.A.S.P. diminishes them by using them to work through the author's apparent obsession with ultraviolence, sexual and otherwise.  I happened on a review of Horwitz's earlier novel, Can I Get There by Candlelight?, published in 1964. That one concerns an American soldier stationed in London toward the end of World War II, and according to the review it involves "alcohol (consumed with a relentless dedication), orgies (a few), and fornication (lots)."  (I'm tempted to read it to see what the "orgies" look like.)  It sounds as if Horwitz had his Big Theme and looked for settings that gave him an excuse to write about gang rapes, people thrown from the tops of buildings, old people clubbed to death by feral children, heroin, and so on, rather than being moved by a situation that needed to be addressed.

To be fair to Horwitz, there was a lot of this kind of rhetoric in the air in America in the Sixties.  Horwitz's older contemporary William S. Burroughs loved to fantasize apocalyptic violence, for example, and I was reminded of Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream as well.  It has roots in American sensational fiction, such as George Lippard's 1845 best-seller The Quaker City, which in turn is descended from the apocalyptic works of antiquity.

It happened that I read a little further in Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, 2002) today.  After discussing David Hume's demolition of natural religion and the Argument from Design, Neiman moved on to the Marquis de Sade.

Sade longed to be more criminal than he was.  Indeed, he longed to be more criminal than was conceivable.  For he often noted, with a mixture of rage and pleasure, that true crimes against nature are improbable.  If the impulse to crime is natural, mustn't nature cooperate in any urge to its own destruction?  There may be a way around this objection, and Sade sought it without rest [170].

Neiman noticed Sade's ambivalence, which probably had multiple functions.  It's a lot like Burroughs' ambivalence; as I wrote of him: "It is never clear to me whether Burroughs actually considers this debauchery noxious or not. Sometimes he seems to disapprove, even while he is cataloguing the practices in enthusiastic detail."  This fits with what I've read by Sade, and I think it also fits Horwitz's outraged yet voyeuristic catalogues of sex and violence.

"... The girl had a big belly filled with a baby.  She had the needle in her arm when I kicked open the door.  The needle dropped. She fell down on the toilet floor like an animal.  She started licking the stuff, licking it off that toilet floor.  Get out, I screamed at them.  Get out and kill yourselves."  Eaton said one day that I should get Harris up to the Foundation for a lunch [The W.A.S.P., 103-4].

In one of his letters Emerson tells of a visit to a police station, where a lawyer tells him this story.

He said, I've got to hang around this court because some white pig accused my client of rape.  One look at the pig would tell you that she couldn't be raped.  But my client is black and the pig is white.  He was driving home from work, the nut, when he stopped for a red light in Chelsea.  This pig opened the door to his car.  That should have been a cue for him to slam the door shut and take off against the light.  But the pig was white, young, looked attractive, at least in the time he had to see her while the light was changing, and she said it would only cost him twenty dollars.  He said, Move in.  When she got into the car they looked for a place where she could go to work.  He didn't want to take her to his apartment, for a very good reason -- he lives in a middle-class project with his wife and three children.  Finally he said to her, Maybe we'd better call this thing off.  He made the mistake of not giving her the twenty dollars or at least a five-dollar bill  The pig called the police, gave them a solid description of my man and the car and said she had been raped.  He has no defense unless the yellow sheet proves the pig is a whore [The W.A.S.P, 143-4].

Emerson "couldn't understand why he was telling me, a complete stranger, the details of his case, unless it was his way of telling me that the Part 1A court didn't exist, wasn't real and he had to confide in me to keep his sanity as he waited for the case to come up" (144).

Why did Horwitz tell his readers, complete strangers, the details of this fictional though perhaps not entirely unrealistic case?  He certainly told me something about himself -- that he didn't believe a "pig" could be raped (only hot babes can be raped) or that a whore could be raped (if she's selling it it's okay to steal it from her) or that in the world of white liberals the word of a john of any color is to believed over a whore of any color.  Perhaps he thought he was being extremely daring by making the whore white and the john black.  (If it had been the other way around, I wonder which one he would have sided with.)  Granted, the story is filtered through the words of the defense lawyer, but Horwitz invented the lawyer too.

Of course I don't know anything about Julius Horwitz as a person, and I'm not saying that he was a sadist who wanted to rape women or throw babies from a rooftop.  A writer, like anybody else really, is not his or her fantasies.  He was probably -- no sarcasm -- a nice person with a social conscience, and working in the welfare system surely must have given him good reason for anger and despair, which (being a nice person) he expressed through writing fiction and advocacy nonfiction instead of through violence.  Or something; I am not sure what he thought he was doing.

I don't think The W.A.S.P. works; the message gets shoved aside by the subtext.  The few quotations I've typed in here probably don't get across the cumulative effect of the descriptions of poverty and violence, which fails for me because Horwitz and his characters don't really seem to care about the victims.  Emerson is really the only black character in the book; the others -- children, gangbangers, mothers -- are disposable, extras, there to suffer and die.  All of Horwitz' spokespeople are hopeless about them: the children are feral, barely human, and it seems pointless to try to help them, unless you can get them away from the Homosexuals in time and send them to Cleveland.  As though there were no homosexuals or prostitutes or drugs in Cleveland.

Only I Get to Decide Which Criticisms of Me Are Valid

To a great extent I agree with this meme; it makes an important point.  But even as I clicked "Like," I heard once again that snarky voice in the back of my mind saying, "Oh, yeah?"

Rather than try to tell other minorities what they should do, I'll start with the one of which I'm a member.  I don't trust gay people to decide what is homophobic, or what is antigay bigotry.  Many gay people are themselves homophobic; if they can't spot it in themselves, they probably won't be able to spot it reliably in heterosexuals.  And they don't.

There are two phases to the question, it seems to me.  First we need to know what we're talking about when we talk about homophobia.  Merriam Webster's definition is revealing:

irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals

I've already discussed the odd conflation of "aversion" and "discrimination."

But I once had a revealing exchange about all this online.  I wrote that if you are uncomfortable seeing two men kissing, but not a man and a woman kissing, that is homophobia.  It didn't seem like a particularly controversial statement to me -- that discomfort is an irrational aversion, no? -- but other gay people disagreed with me vehemently.  Their argument was that if you aren't throwing rocks at a gay person, you aren't homophobic.  It also seemed that they were hesitant to label someone a homophobe merely for wanting to vomit at the sight of two boys kissing, because homophobes are, like, monsters -- demons, even.  That's odd when you consider how much fuss there has been among my people over language like "That's so gay," which doesn't constitute overt violence either.  But then, many gay people have at least claimed to be disgusted by public displays of affection between people of the same sex.  They would commonly try to mask their own homophobia by claiming to be just as disgusted by heterosexual PDAs.  The only disgust at PDAs I've ever observed among my fellow Homo-Americans, however, is disgust in gay men at lesbian PDAs.

I've known a fair number of people who were initially shocked (irrational aversion) or repulsed (ditto) by the idea of homosexuality, or the sight of same-sex couples kissing (or even holding hands), but who got over it -- without therapy.  Their original reactions were born of ignorance and socialization, and these faded away when they got to know gay people, and their repugnance faded.  Even if one wanted to call this homophobia an illness, like most illnesses it can pass without treatment.  Some people, true, cling to their revulsion; that's a lifestyle choice.  It can be judged morally, though a sensible person will also recognize that clinging can become a reflex that isn't turned off easily.

Many, perhaps most gay people regard as homophobic any criticism of born-gay theories of sexual orientation.  Anyone who doubts that homosexuality is innate will be accused of believing that being gay is a "choice" and of siding with the bigots.  This is problematic given the absence of sound scientific evidence for, or a coherent concept underlying for those theories; but as with the medical model in general, the conclusion comes first and the evidence later, if ever.  And the born-gay faith is compatible with considerable internalized homophobia.  (Would anyone choose a lifestyle that caused them to be hated, despised, persecuted ...?)

Having said that, I notice that "Gentiles don't get to decide what is anti-Semitic" is conspicuously absent from the meme.  I suspect that many if not most American Jews would agree that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, unless the critic is a Jew, in which case he or she is a self-hating Jew. Should this be allowed to stand?  I know that the acquaintance who posted the meme on Facebook is critical of Israel, as am I, and would dismiss the contention and the accusation.  But this can't stand, on the meme's simplistic terms. 

"Non-patriots don't get to decide what is anti-American" is also absent from the list.  So is "Non-Christians don't get to decide what is anti-Christian," along with "Non-Catholics don't get to decide what is anti-Catholic," and even "Non-fundamentalists don't get to decide what violates religious freedom."  What complicates the problem -- and also indicates the way out of it -- is that not all members of any of these groups agree, about much of anything.  There is a wide range of attitudes to homosexuality and antigay bigotry among gay people, for example; many critics of Israel are Jewish; many critics of the Vatican and the Catholic hierarchy are Catholic; feminists take a wide range of stances; and so on.  It's easy, and all too common, to dismiss the dissenters as willing victims of false consciousness, but that won't work: who gets to decide who has authentic consciousness?

But too much good work on women's issues has been done by men, good work on gay issues has been done by heterosexuals, good work on race has been done by white people, and so on, to limit discussion to the simplistic level of this meme.   Beyond that level, what matters is the quality of the arguments a person makes.  By that standard, much of the discourse of oppression by the oppressed groups doesn't measure up, and it's not news that majorities in such groups are often hostile to the arguments made by the more thoughtful among them/us.  Which doesn't mean that academics and other intellectuals should automatically have the last word either; nor can an outsider dismiss the complaints of the oppressed by pointing to one or two among them who support the oppressor.  You have to acquaint yourself with the range of opinions in any group, and then think about them.  That's a lot harder, but it's what has to be done if anyone's going to learn anything.

A Woman's Place Is in the Lab

In recognition of International Women's Day, the science-cultist Facebook page I Fucking Love Science posted a lot of memes about women scientists.  One of my friends reposted the one above.

It's certainly interesting, so I decided to look Noether up in Margaret Wertheim's useful book Pythagoras' Trousers (Norton, 1997).

This meme gives the false impression that Noether remained in Germany under the Nazis. In fact, says Wertheim, she "soon found herself desperately seeking a post abroad. Unlike Einstein and Hermann Weyl, who had been installed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Noether was unable to obtain a research position. In the end she took a post teaching undergraduates at the women's college Bryn Mawr, but it was clear to everyone that she needed a place where she could continue her advanced work. In 1935, just as it seemed the Institute for Advanced Study was on the verge of appointing her, Emmy Noether died as a result of complications from an operation to remove an ovarian cyst." So, although at least she didn't have to dodge Brownshirts in the US, she didn't receive the recognition she deserved here either, and got shunted off to the side while her male colleagues were taken better care of. As Wertheim observes, "Whatever resistance Einstein himself had faced from the ivory towers of academe pales by comparison with the treatment they [Noether and Lise Meitner, q.v.] encountered" (190).

It's good that women scientists are getting this coverage, but it seems not only tokenistic but somewhat dishonest and evasive, since it overlooks the fierce resistance that women in science faced, not from religious nuts, but from their male scientific colleagues -- or from "science," as IFLS calls them -- right down to the present.

Oh, and P.S.: Einstein's condescending remark about her, quoted in the meme, is interesting too, when you consider that "When Einstein was battling with the mathematics of general relativity, she was one of the people recruited to help him" (ibid.).

Not All Atheists?

A couple of days after I got here, I got into a dustup with my Liberal Artist Friend on Facebook.  He posted a link to this meme, which had been posted on an atheist Facebook page.  The comments there are painful enough.  LAF remarked on his repost:

Religious friends: Why are so many of your co-religionists so stupid and hateful? And why can't they write or spell? This person thinks there are dessert islands! (Sounds great!) He thinks bombs hatch. He doesn't capitalize Jesus (!?!). And weirdly and surprisingly, he's concerned about the safety of "out women." Why, why, why???

Now, the first thing to notice about this is its self-righteous stupidity.  Does my friend really believe that if people stopped being religious, their spelling and punctuation would suddenly, magically improve?  I've known too many atheists who can't spell or punctuate (and theists who can) to take that notion seriously.  What do spelling and punctuation have to do with religion anyway?  As for "stupid and hateful", I've been pointing out the stupidity and hatefulness of many atheists, including prominent ones, for years now, and I don't see any improvement coming.

I don't know why many people have difficulty with technical skills like spelling and punctuation, but those skills are not rational (English spelling? please!), and they're not a sign of moral virtue or even intelligence.  They are class markers, of course, which I suspect is why my friend invoked them.  That speaks badly for him, and for his own ability to think critically or rationally.

The same goes for attitudes towards women.  When challenged by one of my friend's friends, I mentioned the attacks on Rebecca Watson for pointing out sexism among atheist males, most infamously by Richard Dawkins (though I hear he's retracted his earlier statement, however belatedly and gracelessly).  My challenger jeered: was that all I could point to?  Why, it was years ago!  Of course it wasn't all I could point to, and it's still a live issue among atheists, as is sexism among scientists.  Another person, a woman this time, argued that you can't expect atheists to get rid of all their sexism instantly:

Sexism is part of our culture. It began in religion but that does not mean a person can easily remove themselves from that reality just because they do not believe in a god.

And a few men do not represent all atheist men. Just as this idiot does not represent all theists.

"Sexism began in religion" is ambiguous, because you could probably say the same of everything in every culture: art, science, cooking, etc.  So where did religion come from?  This person was talking, as so many atheists do, about religion as if it were some autonomous system distinct from human beings, that imposes its will upon us, instead of something that human beings invented.  Religion is sexist, insofar as it is, because human beings were sexist and created their gods in their own image.  Religion has also been a medium through which people have challenged and tried to delegitimize oppressive structures, for the same reason: I don't like it, so obviously God must not like it either. And you know where that goes.

These countermoves were drearily familiar to me. I get them from Christians and other theists all the time.  Oh, that was a long time ago, it's not a problem anymore.  Oh, that is just a problem now because some have fallen away from true faith, it didn't used to be a problem.  You can't judge all Christians by that person, he or she is not typical at all, he or she isn't really a Christian.  Of course Christians aren't perfect, it takes God a long time to cleanse them of their errors and wash away their sins and corruption, but they're so much better than they'd be without Him.

I don't expect atheists to escape or abandon all problematic errors automatically; I certainly haven't.  That's what I've been saying for years.  In my experience and observation, though, it's mainly atheists who blame every problem on religion and talk about "enlightenment" and "waking up" as though error will simply fall away once you throw out belief in gods.  You will then be rational, free of superstition, a new creation in Not-God.  And while my friend and his friends disavowed any such notions, they still are too cavalier about the work needed to get rid of error in themselves.  That's one reason why their cheerleading for science and jeering at the religious annoys me so much: they're like fundamentalist Christians who bask in the intelligence of a few unrepresentative literati or academics like C. S. Lewis, but don't want to work at educating themselves.  I'm enlightened and rational unlike those stupid religious believers who can't spell, because I honor Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, Stephen Hawking, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson!  But these guys are no more representative of atheists than C. S. Lewis was of fundamentalist Christians.  And you know, I'm not a fan of any of them.  For a long time, and maybe still, the most influential atheist in the US was the "prophetess" (as Mary Midgley mischievously dubbed her) Ayn Rand.

As with religion, the not-all-atheists approach backfires.  It's true that not all atheists are like Richard Dawkins or Ayn Rand or any other celebrity atheist.  But what are we like?  I'm not sure there are any universals to cling to, and even generalizations are difficult.  Even what would presumably be the core of atheism, the absence of belief in gods, doesn't look the same in all atheists.  There are what I'd call dogmatic atheists, who are certain there are no gods; and there are what the late Antony Flew dubbed Stratonician atheists, who see no reason to believe that gods exist, and who put the burden of argument on theists to come up with (1) some kind of workable definition of what they mean by "god" and (2) good reasons to believe that such entities exist.  I'm in the latter category myself, and though I have numerous disagreements with Flew, his account of atheism has influenced me more than any other.  I've also seen some atheists dismiss Stratonician atheism as not real atheism, and I suspect the dogmatic atheists are more representative of atheism than I am.  Not that I worry about that.

The point is that no matter what you say about atheists or atheism, it won't be true of all of us.  (The same is true of theists, just to hammer the point monotonously home.)  It's okay to generalize, but to do so responsibly you must have reliable information about the group you're talking about, and I'm not sure we do.  It's likely, I suspect, that the less attractive aspects will be more common and so more representative than the more attractive ones -- and who gets to decide what's attractive? -- so it's just safer to remain ignorant of what your movement is actually like.

This is probably one reason why biblical illiteracy is so common among Christians.  I recently had an exchange with someone on Facebook who assured me that hellfire and damnation, sexual repressiveness, faith-healing and exorcism, and end-times preaching were not Jesus' teaching as found in the gospels, they were added by the Church much later.  This is of course false, and revealed my opponent's ignorance of the Bible.

I was bothered, in the post on Dawkins I linked above, when the blogger wrote that Dawkins is "not a good leader for me, but even Jen McCreight, who recently called for new attitudes in atheism, says she likes Dawkins despite his flaws."  And again: "If Dawkins were to learn from criticism the way Cromwell does, then he’d be valuable as a leader.  But I’m not holding my breath for him to check his privilege, because there are much clearer thinkers to pay attention to."  I don't think atheists should have leaders, though of course many other atheists clearly want them.  (Who's more representative?)  I've learned a lot from other atheists, though also from some theists, but I don't regard any of them as a leader.  Once you have a leader, you're going to have authority and a cult of personality, and people will be expected to be loyal and obedient to the leader and to the movement.

It's ironic.  I've been attacked for arguing that it's odd for atheists to treat 'religion,' rather than human beings, as responsible for the bad things we find in religion and culture, and those other atheists accused me of setting myself up as the Authority on atheism and trying to decide what an atheist should or should think.  None of them tried to address rationally what I'd said; they simply declared me a Bad Atheist, perhaps the Bad Atheist.  (When I pointed out problems with their account of some elements of Christianity on another occasion, one of them accused me of being an antigay fundamentalist Christian.  Don't you just love rational critical thinking?) Authority plays an obvious part in most religions, though such authority is often challenged from within in various ways; but like most problematic phenomena, you don't get rid of it simply by disavowing belief in gods or faith in reason.  You don't have faith in reason: you use it, well or badly.  And many avowed rationalists use it badly.

So, for those atheists who want to disavow or excommunicate Dawkins, Harris, or any other celebrity atheist, I must ask the same question I've asked Christians about Christianity: which atheists are representative of the "movement"?  I spent some years listening to Christians' answers and following up on them, always finding their Christian exemplars wanting and being referred to new ones.  I've probably read more on atheism (and on religion for that matter) than most of my fellow atheists have, so I may have an easier time in this area.  I'm not asking for atheists who'd qualify as leaders, as I indicated before; I'm asking who is knowledgeable about the historical and philosophical issues, responsible, and usually rational?  Probably there are no such people, which doesn't discredit atheism; it should be a reminder of our human finiteness, our lack of omniscience, and of how much we have to learn.  That shouldn't really be a stumbling-block for atheists.  Should it?

A Lot of Explaining to Do

I recently read Rebecca Solnit's new book, Men Explain Things to Me (Haymarket Books, 2014), a collection of essays kicking off with her deservedly famous piece of the same title.  Readers may be surprised that I bought a copy right away, since I've hammered on Solnit more than once in the past (she really ought not to try to write about religion, she gets it wrong every time), but "Men Explain Things to Me" is a powerful, important essay, and the other essays in the book are fine too.  So this time I'm going to quote her with approval and appreciation.

In the essay "Grandmother Spider," Solnit writes:

I think a lot about obliteration.  Or rather that obliteration keeps showing up.  I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it.  She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did.  Her mother did not exist, and nor did her father's mother.  Or her mother's father.  There were no grandmothers.  Fathers have sons and grandsons and so the lineage goes, with the name passed on; the tree branches, and the longer it goes on the more people are missing: sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history.  Her family is from India, but this version of lineage is familiar to those of us in the West from the Bible where long lists of begats link fathers to sons.  The crazy fourteen-generation genealogy given in the New Testament's Gospel According to Matthew goes from Abraham to Joseph (without noting that God and not Joseph is supposed to be the father of Jesus) ... Thus coherence -- of patriarchy, of ancestry, of narrative -- is made by erasure and exclusion [70-72].

This is very good, and I hope it will encourage my readers to read the entire essay, and the book.  I still have to quibble, though.  The genealogy of Jesus that opens the gospel of Matthew is not a "fourteen-generation genealogy": it is forty-two generations, divided into three groups of fourteen.  Maybe that's what Solnit meant, but it's not what she wrote.

So let me digress for a moment and have a New Testament scholar, Dennis Nineham, explain things to you*.  Nineham points out "the problem that on the most plausible interpretation of the most likely form of the text as we have it, the third period contains only thirteen names; [but] Matthew clearly intended, or understood it, to contain fourteen" (172).  He goes on to explain that Matthew seems to have gotten the names in his genealogy "from the LXX [i.e., the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible used by the early churches], mainly from I Chronicles 2-3, supplemented by Ruth 4.18 and possibly Haggai 1.1 -- an intelligible enough procedure if you believed, as presumably Matthew did, that the Old Testament was inerrantly accurate on all matters, including matters genealogical" (174).  That covers the first thirty names.  However, "When we come to the last eleven names in the third list, the vital names which specifically link Jesus with the acknowledged kingly line in Israel, we are completely in the dark" (174),

To add to the confusion,

... we may ask: if Matthew drew on the Old Testament because he regarded it as authoritative, how comes it that he felt free to deviate widely from it in the way he does, for example omitting four names from the list it gives and assigning Rahab to a date fully three hundred years later than that to which both the Old Testament and later Jewish tradition unmistakably ascribed her?  It has often been suggested that the absence of the names of three of the kings may simply have been accidental, the result of an error on the part of a copyist; in which case we should presumably have to say that the balanced numerical structure which so impressed the evangelist was fortuitous and factually baseless.  although this suggestion of a scribal mistake is not without plausibility on palaeographical grounds, to suggest that such a symbolic numerical structure was simply the result of an accident surely stretches our credulity rather far, and we may notice that if we accept it, we shall have to suppose that Matthew cared so little about accuracy in factual matters that he did not know, and did not bother to check, whether the numbers he regarded as so significant were really derived from the Old Testament [175].

Speaking of Rahab, she's one reason I don't think Solnit bothered to look at this crazy genealogy before she wrote about it.  One of the other puzzles about Matthew's genealogy (and there are plenty of them, discussed in Nineham's article) is that it includes the names of five women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary the mother of Jesus.  This makes it anomalous for a biblical genealogy, the exception that proves the rule.  I suppose Solnit was limited for space (though "Grandmother Spider" is pretty long), and discussing the women in Matthew's genealogy would have diverged from the main course of her argument; but given her customary sloppiness when she writes about the Bible I think she simply didn't know about them.

This doesn't affect the point Solnit wanted to make, of course: genealogies, Matthew's included, are meant to bolster someone's authority, and they do so by erasure and exclusion, not to mention invention.  And it happened that a few days after I finished reading Men Explain Things to Me, I read another book that showed the same process of erasing women at work, but this time in evolutionary biology.

The book was Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller, published by Routledge in 1992.  By quoting it I run the risk that some of the problems she points to have been corrected in the past twenty years, but from what I see in more recent discussion about science, I doubt it.  And in any case, the 1980s and 1990s were hardly primitive, pre-scientific times; they were a time of scientific triumphalism as defenders of Darwinism contended with "Scientific" Creationists in the courts and in the media, asserting the correctness of their science against pseudoscientific superstition.  In "Language and Ideology in Evolutionary Theory," Keller wrote:

In much of the discourse of evolutionary theory, it is commonplace to speak of the "reproduction of an organism" -- as if reproduction is something an individual organism does, as if an organism makes copies of itself, by itself.  Strictly speaking, of course, such language is appropriate only to asexually reproducing populations because, as every biologist knows, sexually reproducing organisms neither produce copies of themselves, nor produce other organisms by themselves.  It is a striking fact, however, that the language of individual reproduction, including such correlative terms as "an individual's offspring" and "lineage," is used throughout population biology to apply indiscriminately to both sexually and asexually reproducing populations.  Although it would be absurd to suggest that users of such language are actually confused about the nature of reproduction in the organisms they study (for example, calculations of numbers of offspring per organism are always appropriately adjusted to take the mode of reproduction into account), we might nonetheless ask: What functions, both positive and negative, does such manifestly peculiar language serve?  And what consequences does it have for the shape of the theory in which it is embedded? [128-9].

Which individuals reproduce themselves?  For a long time, biologists assumed them to be male on the assumption that "the reproductive contribution of females [provided] the raw materials or nutriments for growth" (130), though that has changed.  Even Darwin, who tended to see natural selection as a process affecting individuals, "was at other times quite explicit in including differential procreation along with survival in his definition of natural selection" (131).  Eventually population genetics tried to solve the problem by focusing on the reproduction of gametes.

In spite of this fact, however, the theoretical (and verbal) convention that subsequently came to prevail in much of the teaching and practice was to equate natural selection with differential survival and ignore fertility altogether.  In other words, the Hardy-Weinberg calculus seems to have actually facilitated not one but two kinds of elision -- first, of all those complications incurred by sex and the contingency of mating that are lost in the representation of reproduction as gametic production, and second, more obliquely, of reproduction in toto [133].

One way of dealing with

the difficulties of sexual reproduction is that of acknowledging sexual difference, and attempting (at least in some contexts) to restrict reproduction to only one sex -- for obvious reasons, usually the females of the species ... This strategy (known in demographic theory as the reproductive dominance of females) would be perfectly adequate were there, in fact, one sex, or alternatively, if neither the attributes nor the availability of males were relevant to the reproductive process, and we furthermore agreed not to inquire too closely about the reproductive fitness of males [138].

Although "rewriting the equations of mathematical ecology for two sexes appears to relatively straightforward" (139), Keller shows that there is a tendency among scientists to resist doing so, and to continue to treat sexual reproduction as if it were asexual.  And twenty-first century evolutionary psychologists continue to treat reproduction, and evolution, as if they were about the reproduction of males, with females either cooperating passively or wickedly obstructing the males' struggle to perpetuate their genes.

*Dennis E. Nineham, "The genealogy in St Matthew's gospel and its significance for the study of the gospels."  Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 58 (1976): 421-444.  As reprinted in Nineham, Explorations in Theology, London: SCM Press, 1977: 166-187.

Pink, Pinker, Pinkest: Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?

Someone posted a link to this 2006 article on Facebook yesterday.  (At first I mistook it for a more recent publication.  You see what happens when you assume.)   It's about a neurobiologist named Ben Barres, who was born female but transitioned to male in the 1990s, and discovered that he and his work were treated very differently than when he was a woman.  When he was an undergraduate at MIT,

An M.I.T. professor accused me of cheating on this test. I was the only one in the class who solved a particular problem, and he said my boyfriend must have solved it for me. One, I did not have a boyfriend. And two, I solved it myself, goddamn it! But it did not occur to me to think of sexism. I was just indignant that I would be accused of cheating.

Years later, after his transition, he gave a presentation at MIT, and, "a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, 'Ben Barres’s work is much better than his sister’s.'"  You guessed it: Barres doesn't have a sister -- the work being deprecated was his/her own.  The only thing that had changed was the name attached to it.

What makes the Washington Post article so interesting is that they invited some of the men Barres criticized to respond.  Larry Summers didn't, but Peter Lawrence and Steven Pinker did, and both declared "convincing data show there are differences between men and women in a host of mental abilities."

Pinker, who said he is a feminist, said experiments have shown, on average, that women are better than men at mathematical calculation and verbal fluency, and that men are better at spatial visualization and mathematical reasoning. It is hardly surprising, he said, that in his own field of language development, the number of women outstrips men, while in mechanical engineering, there are far more men.

"Is it essential to women's progress that women be indistinguishable from men?" he asked. "It confuses the issue of fairness with sameness. Let's say the data shows sex differences. Does it become okay to discriminate against women? The moral issue of treating individuals fairly should be kept separate from the empirical issues."

Well!  If Steven Pinker says he's a feminist, then he couldn't possibly be biased, could he?  Besides, he's a scientist, and an atheist besides, so he's rational and honest by definition; only religious fundamentalists try to keep women down.  His dishonesty and plain foolishness, which I've seen before, surprised even me.  Sure, there is some evidence of "average" differences between men and women in certain domains, though it's disputed.  But average differences don't mean much.  That men, on average, may be "better at spatial visualization and mathematical reasoning," doesn't tell us the amount of variation among men, or among women.  The amount of difference in the averages also matter.  Many women will be better at spatial visualization and mathematical reasoning than most men are; if you assume that a woman can't do good scientific or mathematical work because she's a woman -- like the MIT prof who refused to believe that Barbara Barres had solved a difficult math problem, and accused her (nonexistent) boyfriend of doing it for her -- then you're not just biased, you're showing that you don't understand averages in a very basic way.  Either way, you're not competent to teach or evaluate would-be scientists.

By Pinker's logic, men shouldn't teach classes involving "language fluency," meaning not only grammar but probably literature as well.  But men have traditionally dominated higher education in the humanities, including literature classes, and have accorded the writing of men greater value than that of women.  (So do most women, it seems.  But in what other area than gender do the primitive myths and misconceptions of the masses get respect from enlightened scientists?)  To this day they try to rationalize their judgments, but clearly (if Pinker were right) they're just ignoring the science of gender differences.  Contrary to Pinker's protestation, though, the "moral issue of treating individuals fairly" is inseparable from "the empirical issues," because unfair treatment of women is an empirical issue.

The article Barres published in Nature is available online.  It combines anecdotal accounts of bias against women in science and mathematics with references to research that shows how bias works.  There's considerable literature on discrimination against women in the sciences, from women being denied access to laboratories because their ladyparts would affect the accuracy of the delicate scientific equipment to women being denied credit for their work -- often work of considerable importance, like the discovery of nuclear fission.  Lise Meitner, who made crucial contributions to that discovery, was overlooked when it came time to award a Nobel Prize for it.  The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science (The Feminist Press, 2010), by Julie Des Jardins, covers Meitner's case, as well as more mundane examples of the barriers female scientists had to contend with; so does Margaret Wertheim's Pythagoras's Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender War (Norton, 1997).  Bias against women may not be "a primary factor" in the lower numbers of women in certain fields, but it's clearly a significant one, and Pinker's denial is not persuasive, since he fails to comprehend the issues involved.

Peter Lawrence is no better:

Lawrence said it is a "utopian" idea that "one fine day, there will be an equal number of men and women in all jobs, including those in scientific research."

He said a range of cognitive differences could partly account for stark disparities, such as at his own institute, which has 56 male and six female scientists. But even as he played down the role of sexism, Lawrence said the "rat race" in science is skewed in favor of pushy, aggressive people -- most of whom, he said, happen to be men.

"We should try and look for the qualities we actually need," he said. "I believe if we did, that we would choose more women and more gentle men. It is gentle people of all sorts who are discriminated against in our struggle to survive."

The incoherence of his remarks is interesting.  It may be utopian to aim for equal numbers of men and women in all jobs, but I don't think Barres is calling for equal numbers; he's calling for an end to bias that keeps talented and qualified women out of fields they want to enter.  Beyond that, Lawrence goes all mushy and touchy-feely in advocating that "we" (who's "we," by the way? hiring committees?) should "choose more women and more gentle men."  This is a common move by apologists for bias and injustice, by the way.  (Like Barack Obama lauding the work of Gandhi and King in his Nobel Prize address before dismissing it as utopian: "I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.")  It's part of the standard defense of the scientific status quo that knowledge is not advanced by mere technical ability, but by a masculine competitiveness -- what Lawrence called the "rat race" -- that drives (male) scientists to obsessive devotion to their work.  That Nobel Prize isn't going to win itself!

There's another aspect to this.  A wide range of scientific ability appears among men as well as among women, yet boys are encouraged to study science and girls aren't, even though most of them will not go on to pursue science as a career, let alone do top-ranking work.  There's no need to expect that every girl in a high-school or college science class will be a Marie Curie or a Lise Meitner, any more than every boy who attends summer basketball camp will be a Michael Jordan.  First, you can't tell in advance who will eventually stand out; second, you need a large population of non-specialists to appreciate and support the very best achievers.  Excellence will largely take care of itself; discouraging those who don't show excellence from day one is self-defeating if you want a culture of self-critical scientific rationalists, of both sexes.

My, Your, Our Bitchy Resting Face

My friend A complained today from work that she "has already been told to smile by two men today. STOP TELLING WOMEN TO SMILE." That set off a mild storm of discussion, including one man and his wife, both cutely using the same account, who accused A of stereotyping all men.

A added as a comment: "Would they ask a man doing the same job to smile? Probably not." I mentioned that it isn't only women who are told to smile.  I have often been told to smile, usually by women.  Those of us who have what is becoming known as a Bitchy Resting Face -- a face that looks grim when it's at rest, not because we are angry or upset, just because that's how our faces are arranged.  I'm most likely to be told to smile when I'm busy, concentrating on a task, so my expression is intense, not angry.  Ditto for A, who reports that she replied, "No, I"m busy" when one of the men asked her if she was having a bad day.  But the fact that this kind of face has been gendered female and called "bitchy" instead of serious says a lot about attitudes toward women, don't you think?

There are evidently a lot of people of both sexes who feel compelled or entitled to police other people's facial expressions.  They aren't necessarily evil, but they are rude.  I've been told more than once that my BRF intimidates some people, and that does concern me: I only want to intimidate some people, and I want to know when I'm doing it.  But maybe they need to learn to read facial expressions better?  If you mistake a serious person concentrating on a task as bitchy, arrogant, intimidating, maybe part of the fault lies with you.  And, of course, many women who are ordered to smile by men are just walking down the street on business of their own: they're not obligated to smile at anyone if they don't want to, and men who demand sunshine from a random woman they don't know are almost certainly sexist porkers.

Those who order other people to smile -- and it is an order, generally accompanied by a vacuous grin -- may have a point when they're addressing someone who's interacting with strangers (aka "the public") at the moment, as part of their job.  When I've done such work I make an extra effort to look pleasant, but I know I don't always succeed.  I also know from my own experience that it's no fun walking up to a service person who looks at you as though you're interrupting them at something more important, when their job is to interact with you.  Still, most of my thirty-seven years in university dining halls was spent in the back of the kitchen, washing dishes, not serving the public directly, and I preferred it that way.

One of A's friends and commenters protested, "Smiling makes the world a better place." I agreed, but added that being told to smile makes the world a worse place.  Suppose that I'm looking grim because I am in a bad mood: being told that it can't be that bad doesn't improve my mood, especially if it is that bad, if something is wrong.  (It's like telling me to "chill," one of the surest ways to get on my bad side.)

The writer of the Atlantic piece I linked earlier suggests that the tyranny of the smile may be peculiarly American:

Outside the United States (and certainly outside the South), the tyranny of the smile is considerably weaker. In France, even women with the most naturally perky of faces seem to purposely cultivate BRF to enhance their je ne sais quoi. I live in Hong Kong, one of the densest cities on earth, where turning your face into a blank mask is simply a tool of urban survival. If I walked along Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui with a grin on my face, people would think I was psychotic. 

One of her commenters agreed, speculating that her own BRF

was the unconscious influence of my very beautiful Italian mother -- from a culture in which inane public grinning is considered undignified. I'll never forget watching the Miss America pageant with her as a child (the only time we ever did so) -- she observed for awhile, obviously becoming increasingly exasperated. "Why" she finally asked, perplexed, "are they smiling like that?!?  Like hyenas?"

I first remember being told to smile when I was barely out of my teens, by some of the typists and clerks at my first job in the mailroom of a commercial office.  I realized that people who looked serious, even grim, most of the time, really lit up when they did smile.  One elderly lady in the office was the best example I knew.  It's not for me to say whether that's true of me.  I came up with various answers to that order over the years -- most recently, I would just say "Bah, humbug!" -- but it was that knowledge that stayed with me.  I don't go around telling people who always smile that things can't be all that great, the world is a serious place.  (After all, many people look like they're smiling because that's their resting face.) But I remember that the people who make the world a better place, for me at least, are those whose expressions mean something, and aren't just a mask they wear regardless of what's going on in their heads.

Not Much of a Difference Between a Bridge and a Wall

I was out of town all weekend, from Friday morning to late Sunday afternoon, and I had no time to write.  I'm still getting caught up, but I'm also reading I Am Your Sister, a posthumous collection of Audre Lorde's essays and speeches.  Lorde was one of the great teachers, and as I read these pieces I'm inspired all over again.  That's especially valuable now, when I've been wading through acres of sloppy sludge on Facebook -- I did have time to scan my news feed over the weekend -- that is equally offensive intellectually whether it comes from liberal, radical, or reactionary sources.  By contrast, Lorde's voice on the page -- poetic, exact, and often angry without being panicky -- is like a satisfying meal after an exhausting day.  I don't always agree with her, just most of the time.

For example, from "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action":

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.  That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.  For instance, "I can't possibly teach Black women's writings -- their experience is so different from mine."  Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust?  Or another, "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?"  Or, "She's a lesbian, and what would my husband say, or my chairman?"  Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children."  And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other [42].

I think I've always known this, since as a child I sought out the stories of people different from me as well as those like me.  Rather than hoping to find myself in one person, my twin or clone, I learned to treasure the similarities I found piecemeal in many characters: this interest here, that trait there. I like to think Lorde would have been as put off as I was by the gay male filmmaker who talked as if he believed that we can only respond to characters exactly like ourselves.  That belief is kin to the idea that men can get nothing from women's writing, that straights can't identify with gay characters, that whites can't identify with blacks, and so on.  To me, the stories of people unlike myself have always been invitations to come in and visit and learn.  I'm always baffled when other readers see such stories as forbidding, unwelcoming.  I suspect they're projecting: because they don't want to read these stories, they fantasize that the stories don't want to be read by them.

Not that Lorde accepted all differences.  (Nor does anyone else, really.)  She was sharply critical of those who made excuses for denying the humanity of others, whether they were white feminists who didn't want to have to "deal with the harshness of Black women" (Lorde, Sister Outsider, 126) or black men who didn't want to have to deal with the harshness of black women.  In a scathing response to black sociologist Robert Staples' 1979 attack on black feminists, Lorde wrote:

The lack of a reasonable and articulate Black male viewpoint on these questions is not the responsibility of Black women.  We have too often been expected to be all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our very own.  Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them.  Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that.  Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof.  No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women's work.  Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves [46].

The last sentence of that paragraph is familiar to me too.

Among her most thrilling insights were those about difference.  As she told students at Hunter College,

It is within our differences that we are both most powerful and most vulnerable, and some of the most difficult tasks of our lives are the claiming of differences and learning to use those differences for bridges rather than as barriers between us [201].

That's not easy to do, of course.  There's a fascinating scene in the documentary Audre Lorde - The Berlin Years 1984 to 1982 in which Lorde tries to talk to a couple of Afro-German men in her audience.  But one of the things she worked at during her too-short life was learning to how to use differences as a bridge rather than a barrier, and this more than anything else is something I need to learn from her.