Critical Mass

By Daniel Gelernter 

The March/April issue of Yale Alumni Magazine features an article called, “The Baby Gamble” by Nadya Labi that ponders the question of why there aren’t as many tenured women as men at Yale: Of 381 tenured professors, only 71 are women (and over half are in the humanities department – not terribly surprising). “One solid hypothesis,” Labi writes, “is motherhood.” That is, that being a mother and taking care of children requires time and effort. Shocking.

Yale’s response to what the magazine describes as the “dilemma” of children, is to find ways to work around the nasty little things. For example, Yale Alumni Magazine reports, Yale has revised its tenure policy, which now “extends the leave offer [a semester’s paid leave from teaching] to any full-time faculty member who bears or adopts a child under the age of six or whose spouse or same-sex partner does the same.” I would have thought that bearing a child over the age of six would entitle the mother or same-sex partner to twice the credit.

The leftist article is full of fathers who take care of the kids (and cry when their wives get tenure) and mothers like the physics department’s only tenured woman, Meg Urry. (“She ate lunch at her desk while pumping breast milk and talking to her students.”)

The Yale Alumni Magazine (and in turn, it would seem, Yale itself) are concerned about the “dramatic” “constant interruption” of work that children cause, and looks for ways to keep the nuisance to a minimum. Their ideal world is one in which the children can be dumped into Yale’s posh $1000 per month daycare system, where the parents can share the work, looking in on the kids on alternate days. The idea of putting children above a career, or the suggestion that women are by and large unsuited for an academic profession is, of course, not on the table.

A few weeks ago, after a Tory debate had just ended, the chairman of the Independent Party at Yale introduced himself to me – he said he’d heard of me: several debates ago, I’d made a speech so shocking that details traveled even to the farthest corners of the Political Union.

What had I said? Than it’s a man’s job to protect and provide for his family, and that a woman’s place is in the home.

My speech that night had been warmly received (to say the least) and provided a great deal of entertainment. Now, in my conversation with the chairman of the IP, I was praised for being ‘gutsy’ – but could not avoid feeling that I was also considered somewhat insane. The statements I made that night were common knowledge 40 years ago. Now it requires ‘guts’ even to suggest them on a college campus.

Since modern feminism’s became popular at the universities, woman’s role has become a touchy point and any hint of contrary thought is instantly attacked – it can even help bring down a university president. Feminists are far too defensive to encourage free speech or thought.

The points I had put forward weren’t new; they’ve been around for a couple thousand years. But this happens to be a subject that no one in my generation seems to have thought about at all – because the ‘final’ decision has already been made for them.

Of course I am not against the original feminist idea of legal equality. Women should have the vote and be treated equally in court cases etc. That goes without saying.

What I object to is not equality but interchangeability: the idea that despite everything we know inherently, can figure out from common sense, and be reminded of on a daily basis, women and men are equivalent and identical. Though it would thrill feminists immensely, even they cannot apply the suggestion to physical appearance (women are 7% shorter than men on average, and you may have noticed other differences for yourself).

Feminism has tried to claim that underneath a woman’s smaller and differently-arranged exterior there lies the same potential for strength as in a man. But a quick look at the records of our ‘new’ military provide no end of illuminating if pathetic examples – like the female mechanics who need men to carry their toolboxes, or the female ordinance handlers who were tested for certification with empty ammunition crates because they weren’t strong enough to carry loaded ones. Look at West Point’s physical fitness test: A perfect score for a man will require (in part) a 5:20 mile-run, 75 pushups, a one-armed basketball throw of 102 feet, and 18 pull-ups. The perfect score in these events for a female: a 6:00 minute mile, 50 pushups, a basketball throw of 66 feet, and 7 pull-ups (though a woman can be admitted without doing any pull-ups – she has the option of the “flexed-arm hang”).

Most feminists nowadays admit this point as lost by refusing to discuss it. (For the military, it has become another “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy where you aren’t supposed to find out if a female is too weak for her job, and can’t do anything about it anyway) [1] .

In any event, the battleground has shifted from the body to the mind. The assertion nowadays is that man and woman have identical minds – that the tendency to one field or another, along with variation in ability, is due merely to social conditioning and years of patriarchal oppression.

This idea is very bizarre – if men and women who are so different in every aspect of physical appearance and biological construction should turn out to have identical brains, and in turn identical minds, it would be absolutely astonishing.

However this is not the case. And we are not astonished.

This brings me to one of the reading subjects of my vacation – a fascinating book by Dr. Anne Moir and David Jessel entitled Brain Sex. The book traces the roots of the behavioral differences of man and woman back to the formation of the brain, which always begins as a female brain. If the male hormone is present in sufficient quantities during fetal development, the brain will be ‘rewired’ into the male brain pattern.

A baby just a few hours old (obviously too young to have been conditioned by society) will already display the characteristics of its brain type. Male babies are interested in things (apparently not caring whether they are given a human face or a balloon to gaze at). Female babies are interested in people; females learn to recognize faces much more quickly than males.

Women are generally better at recognizing characters, and they learn to speak more quickly. The female brain is arranged with greater communication between the two halves, with a thicker connecter (the corpus callosum). In women most brain functions are shared between the two halves of the brain, whereas in men brain functions are concentrated on one side or the other (a fascinating study by Dr. Sandra Witelson found that women could recognize emotional content in a photograph whether they saw the image through their left or their right eye; men recognized emotional content only when the image was transmitted to the right-hand side of the brain, through the left eye).

Women in general surpass men on verbal tests. And they ‘hear’ more of a conversation, taking in subtler vocal nuances. They are more acutely aware of (and care more about) how a person feels.

Men, on the other hand, are better than women in dealing with abstract or spatial concepts. They are better at reading maps, and in picturing and rotating shapes in their minds. Men are more aggressive and assertive. Johns Hopkins tested thousands of children who were in the top three percent of verbal IQ or mathematical ability, and found that the ratio of girls to boys decreased on the math test as the scores increased: at the highest level, there were thirteen boys to every girl.

Brain Sex examines several case studies of men and women whose brains developed unnaturally, because they were exposed to an unusual level of the male hormone while in the womb. Girls afflicted with “adrenogenital syndrome” have kidneys that secrete a substance very much like testosterone. Their brains developed along a male pattern, and, despite the fact that they were girls, and were brought up as such, they rejected their social conditioning, preferring rougher physical play, neglecting dolls in favor of toy trucks, and becoming more interested in careers than in children.

There are also case studies of girls with Turner’s syndrome – whose bodies produce absolutely no testosterone where the normal female body produces a small amount. The behavior of such girls is “exaggeratedly feminine” and “ultra-romantic.” Turner syndrome girls play with dolls “to the virtual exclusion of everything else” and think constantly about marriage and motherhood.

On the other hand, there are mothers who, having diabetes, were treated while pregnant with a synthetic female hormone. The male children born to these mothers tend to have no interest in physical activities, sports, or mechanical things. They are, in fact, more likely to be homosexual. (An explanation of why there is far greater sexual deviance in men than in women is that the male mind must be rewired in the fetal state to become male, whereas the female mind is born female, requiring no change and therefore having less chance of being abnormal).

The conclusion of the researchers in Brain Sex is that females are not socialized into being female (a conclusion, once again, that used to be taken for granted).

Today, of course, the predominant social forces in ‘enlightened’ America are feminist. Girls at Yale have been told their whole lives that they should have a career. So why is it that, according to a remarkable piece in the New York Times, “many of these women say that is not what they want”?

“Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.

“Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all," said Miss Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.”

Yale’s dean, Peter Salovey, is concerned “that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles.” Maybe women just don’t want men’s jobs. (Maybe Salovey should think outside the box).

Feminists are afraid that this admission, and the acceptance of traditional gender roles, puts women into what is deemed an inferior position. But as the authors of Brain Sex write:

“Deemed inferior by whom? By men of course – although men and women, as the evidence has shown, are different, and have different values. It is only when women judge their own worth at men’s valuation that the problem arises. A woman isn’t concerned with status and the pecking order. That is man’s obsession. So…why should any woman adopt a male value system which devalues her own female values? For a woman to try to be ‘more like a man’ seems almost by definition to make her a less-happy woman.”

I am fully prepared for a flood of notes from angry women who will claim that there’s nothing so fulfilling as battling for a seat on the stock exchange. But do such women care what their children are doing while they’re fighting it out? The selfishness of modern feminism requires that women look no further than their own careers (whether they want them or not). They are bribed, cheaply bought off, into placing themselves above everything – which is not a natural thing for a woman to do.

When I wrote a piece almost a year ago on the evils of the modern ‘feminized’ military I got many comments and emails about it. The fascinating thing about these responses was that every single pro-women-in-combat note I got was written by a man, whereas the responses that agreed with my piece (and were against women in combat) were from women, military men – and even a couple of military women. It was a striking reminder that women do not want to be forced to act like men.

Men, on the other hand, are perfectly happy to send women to fight for them – or to have their wives work so that they can exchange better child-care for a higher standard of living. Given a choice between being a gentleman and being a feminist, most men will choose feminism because it’s much easier. Being a gentleman requires effort; being a feminist requires merely a desire to squeeze as much value as you can get out of a woman.

Civilization’s ultimate triumph was the containment of man’s inherently predatory nature. [2] When we break down the walls that hold men in, the women suffer. By removing, for example, the stigma of casual sex, the men are free (and happy) to act in their naturally polygamous way, taking advantage of the women, who desire lasting relationships – and who are no longer protected. It’s hard to imagine that many women are happier for that. (And how many women do we see arrested for rape? – there’s a reason why the Bureau of Justice Statistics lists the rape conviction rate per 1000 male population.)

If society decides that women should go to work, the men won’t complain – it’s in their best interest, albeit not their children’s; they’ll be able to buy more things and live in a wealthier country. They will not, by and large, consider the damage to the female population.

The evidence decisively rejects the view that women want to dedicate their lives to fighting their way up the corporate ladder. There will always be a few women who do want to work, and to them I say, go ahead. But their fight to turn the woman at work or in the military or in academia into something society views as a necessity will forever damage the happiness of women – and that is what the modern feminist is shooting for.

[1] Read Brian Mitchell’s excellent 1998 book, Women in the Military

[2] Read “Why Mothers Should Stay Home” from the February 1996 issue of Commentary Magazine