Considering how much interest I have in the subject of how pseudo-science is used to belittle women, it’s a real shame that I hadn’t read, until this week, the bible of critiquing choad-based science, Mismeasure of Woman: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex by Carol Tavris. I’m so glad to have corrected my error, because even though this book is 16 years old, it’s more relevant than ever in an era when misogynists are seeking to canonize Larry Summers for talking out of his ass about something he doesn’t understand. The book is a refreshing blast of common sense, with Tavris arguing that women are not inferior to men, superior to men, opposite from men, or the same as men. In fact, the book is based around the idea that if you ask the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers, and society is going to continue to fail to understand women as long as we conceive women as not-men instead of as-women. Or, more importantly, as themselves, which is people who are diverse. (As are men.)
One of the most stunning and important observations she makes in the book is that all the press on the much-ballyhooed differences between men and women is on qualities where men and women don’t differ. That’s towards the end, after she chronicles the ways that men and women don’t differ, how they do, what’s biological, and what’s a function of power differentials between men and women. Where men and women don’t differ is in intelligence, moral compass, the having of emotions (though for social reasons, they do express emotions differently), needs, desires, the stuff that makes us human. And this is where the press dwells, ignoring the real world differences that actually matter, which are how men and women behave differently because they have different roles or, of course, how men and women’s experience of sexuality and reproduction differ. If a story shows even a sliver of imaginary evidence that women are less mentally capable than men, it’s front page, but a story about how women dwell on relationships more than men because they’ve got the responsibility to maintain relationships (and take the blame if they go wrong) will be relegated to the back page.*