Those evo psych quacks are getting craftier about pushing their message (in essence: women are less worthy than men and therefore should have to do more work for less pay)—-the trick increasingly is not to flatter male egos by telling them that they’re meant to roam around town fucking everyone in sight while “natural” women appreciate staying at home being monogamous. That was a crashing failure and made women eager to look for the flaws in research that doesn’t exactly conform to our experiences of being women. No, the trick now is to put down men and flatter women in hopes that women don’t notice that, at the end of the day, the evo psych theory is on shaky ground and is dangerous to our rights. That’s the trick in this article that uses the angle of arguing that our “hard-wiring” makes men boring, so see ladies, that smaller paycheck isn’t that big a deal. (Hat tip.)
It’s a clever article, because it addresses a real frustration I think a lot of women could relate to immediately (I know I can), and it subtly reverses a stereotype.
Are men boring? A straw poll among friends and relations would suggest the contention is so irrefutable that evidence is barely necessary. In Brighton, my friend Esme Jones, 38, who has just had a baby, spent a precious night out with her husband, a film editor, and said she kept nagging him to talk. “If I’d been with you or another girlfriend, even if we’d seen each other earlier in the day, we’d have been gabbling away 19 to the dozen.”
Prudence Barratt, 52, a management consultant, went to a dinner party in Hampstead, where she lives, at which the women sat at one end of the table, the men at the other. “And it was the nicest dinner party I’ve been to in ages. Normally when you arrive at a party, the women talk to the women because they know they’re not going to be allowed to later. It was like in the old days, when the women retired leaving the men to drone on over the port and cigars, but for the whole evening. It was bliss.”