Today’s Feminist Outrage-Meter-Pinner

     Ace has the story:

     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."

     Please read the Telegraph article Ace cites. The reactions of the feminists – both sexes – who immediately went into High Dudgeon^TM over Dr. Hunt’s opinion, are the point of what follows. Ace’s take on their reactions is classic:

     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....

     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?

     Gentle Reader, that is How It’s Done.

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     I’ve worked in the sciences and, of course, in engineering. Both environments included a few women. Emphasis on “a few:” women are not drawn to the STEM fields, for reasons we needn’t address this morning. Such environments can be successful, if certain conditions apply:

• Everyone involved is at least 60 years old; or:
• All the women are married to linebackers, wrestlers, or Navy SEALs; or:
• 98% or more of the work is actually performed by individuals working in isolation.

     You see, what Dr. Hunt said is accurate. Let’s take his observations in reverse order.

     Women are far more sensitive to criticism than men. I’ve encountered only one woman, the most intelligent woman I know, who can stand to hear a man tell her that she’s made a mistake. To get a woman to take a critical look at her own actions requires so great a load of pre-exculpation and emotional padding that for practical purposes, it’s not worthwhile. It’s far easier simply to fix her mistakes for her and say nothing about them, then or afterward.

     Women of the susceptible age range (0 to about ten years after menopause) do fall in love with men they work alongside – if the man treats the woman exactly as she desires to be treated, which is a requirement for averting the torrents of female tears of which Dr. Hunt spoke. Not many men are willing or able to do this, as we’re not nearly as emotional and are far more tolerant of criticism. We tend to assume that what we would find appropriate and acceptable really is appropriate and acceptable. Women disagree. Everything must be sugar-coated to spare their feelings...and a man who treats them that way, assuming he doesn’t look like Quasimodo or smell like a Staten Island landfill in July at high noon, almost automatically becomes a fantasy-romance object.

     Finally, men in the STEM fields don’t have a lot of female presence in their lives. The natural consequence is an amplification of the significance of those they do have around them. The tendency to attempt romantic involvements with them follows as a matter of course.

     But facts have never mattered to an aggrieved feminist.

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     Here are a few more facts:

1. Women are not men;
2. Men are not women;
3. Neither can be made into the other.

     Henry Higgins’s plaint is as pointless as the “Women Shrieking the Same Shrieks” Ace cites. The sexes are optimized for different things, as a result of many millennia of evolutionary pressures. To demand that they react to the same things in the same ways is fatuous.

     Today, far more men understand and accept la difference than women. Feminists reject it categorically, even militantly. Indeed, they want to have the cake and eat it, too: they demand not only that women be regarded as absolute equals to men in all things, but that they be treated as infinitely fragile creatures to whom even the slightest disagreement might prove fatal. The contradiction involved troubles them not at all.

     Needless to say, this is not on. American men are steadily withdrawing from women in every way: economically, socially, and romantically. Women find this unacceptable, but it will continue to worsen until they accept that they’re women and not men, with all that implies.

     One way in which American men are not withdrawing from women is sexually...but this is hardly something to be celebrated, for the mode of interaction is increasingly depersonalized: he wants access to her body and nothing else about her. This Neanderthalization of male-female relations is sending large ripples through American society. Deceit and abuse of intimacy are, if not the norm, increasing in frequency, especially among younger Americans to whom every encounter with the opposite sex takes place in a demilitarized zone, a place where no one can set up housekeeping.

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     All generalizations are inaccurate, including this one. There are women who are sensible about the ways in which women differ from men, and who take no offense at being treated as women. There are also men who sincerely strain, against the evidence and their innate inclinations, to treat women as if they were men. But these aren’t the ones under discussion this fine June morning.

     There is no Last Graf. The problems that stem from what’s increasingly a live-fire war between the sexes cannot be “solved.” The war will continue until American women accept, en masse, that they are women, that men will never see them as anything else, and that attempts to bludgeon men into treating them as if they were men, even with the force of law, will only result in misery for all concerned.