So our old friend Janet “JudgyBitch” Bloomfield has written a rather silly post on how men are a bunch of STEM geniuses while women are basically designed to make babies. (On average.)
You’ve heard all this nonsense before, I am sure:
Human achievement depends on the tenacity and ingenuity of men, and their willingness to shoot for the moon (or a comet). Our mastery of the human condition, an end to suffering and poverty and disease and destitution requires technology. Water doesn’t magically clean itself, food doesn’t spring forth from the Earth without coaxing (at least not in sufficient amounts to feed all of us), the oceans do not replenish, diseases do not cure themselves and our ability to communicate and connect with each other, from one side of the planet to the other, all depends on technology.
Technology is designed, built, installed, maintained, repaired and operated almost exclusively by men. Without men, we would be living in grass huts, eating mud.
I’ll give her credit for at least suggesting a slightly novel “solution” to women (allegedly) being a bunch of stupid-heads compared to men. And by “novel” I mean “novel” only to MRAs.
Here is what I propose: we socialize girls to be more like men, and more like exceptionally intelligent men, in particular.
As she sees it, that means (among other things) making girls play with legos instead of Barbies (or any other traditionally girly toys), forcing them all to play Dungeons & Dragons (no, really), and requiring that they
study logic and rhetoric and traditional game theory, to sharpen their ability to work through a problem using reason and the empirical method.
Huh. I’m thinking that most of the dudes in the Men’s Rights movement must have slept through that part of their male socialization.
JB’s proposals are weirdly totalitarian, envisioning a mandatory one-size-fits-all approach to education for girls. And the misogyny underlying her glorification of “male” ways of thinking is fairly obvious. Her attempts to challenge traditionally gendered ways of raising girls fall more than a few steps short of feminism.
Sure, feminists have long fought against the pervasive gendering of toys. But they’re also into, you know, kids making choices for themselves. Encouraging girls to play with legos? Great! Forcing all girls to play exclusively with Legos, because you want them to become STEM geniuses? Not so great. Some girls want to play with legos; others prefer dolls. As do some boys.
For what it’s worth, JB describes her proposal as, yes, a “modest proposal,” so it’s not clear if she actually thinks that raising girls the same way as boys is a good idea, or if it’s one akin to eating babies.
Speaking of babies, here’s my favorite line in her post:
[T]he ultimate expression of femininity is a baby, and the ultimate expression of masculinity is the Large Hadron Collider.
Assuming this is true — and Janet Boomfield said it, so it must be! — just imagine what humans could accomplish if men and women worked together.
Yes, I’m talking about the ultimate in technology: the Large Baby Collider.
Oh, wait, we already have one of those; it’s called the Men’s Rights Movement.
But that’s a pretty primitive model. Here’s a prototype for an improved Large Baby Collider. It’s still a long way away from perfect — you may notice that half of the babies have been replaced by dogs — but it’s still a wobbly step in the right direction.
H/T — @TakedownMRAs
Because of my profession and research work people constantly ask me to help them find information about women engineers. Some years ago I started to point out that they didn’t need me to do this for them, there was this thing called Wikipedia that can classify information like that and we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. I started a campaign to get people to add links to this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_in_engineering
I do seem to have lost the battle to call it ‘women engineers’–I hate the ‘women in’ word construction–but at least we’re getting some links; there were only a dozen or so when I started encouraging people to use this page, now we’re at 126.
I was introduced to Fatima al-Fihri at this exhibition:
http://www.1001inventions.com/
at the Science Museum in London–it was fascinating, enlightening, and beautifully put together. Not only was the exhibition itself excellent, it was profoundly moving to see Muslim children, particularly Muslim girls, being inspired by their scientific and technological heritage.
Fun facts about that Lego ad: it was the work of a creative director named Judy Lotas, who had two young daughters and wanted the campaign to stress that Legos were for everyone. The children in the ads were asked to play with Legos and were then photographed, in their street clothes, holding whatever they had built. The little girl in this ad is now a doctor.
Sorry, I mean none of that happened because women just make babies and eat dirt all day.
Its says something that at first sight I read ” Large Headroom Collards”. A second look was slightly better: “Large Hadron Colander”. Clearly it’s time for me to go to bed.
BTW: It would be awful if these people were made aware of Ms. “Bloomfields” misogynist activity in their area:
http://www.nwowomenscentre.org/
Awful.
Supposedly women outperform men at language skills. Ergo we shouldn’t bother to teach boys to read because they’ll never be as good at it as girls, and boys should be discouraged from careers and hobbies that require literacy. Books by men should be treated as cute little novelties. Anyone who challenges this should be told, “If men are as smart as women, how come there aren’t any male writers?” over and over no matter how many examples of male writers they come up with.
A friend of mine works at CERN (and in a proper science-related job) and she’s had a baby.
I’d like to think that this would make JB’s head explode, but I fear that’s far too optimistic.
Another notable entry for women in STEM fields: Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler and major contributor to FORTRAN, the first higher-level programming language.
Er, correction, she was involved with COBOL, one of FORTRAN’s contemporaries. Though since most higher-level programming languages make use of compilers, she does get credit for FORTRAN too, because it wouldn’t be a thing if it weren’t for compilers.
In order to spite Bloomfield, let me tell you a tale about a great female scientist.
Today’s story is about Maria Kirch, nee Winkelmann (1670 – 1720), one of the important early astronomers, back when the field was differentiating itself from astrology.
Winkelmann’s father was a priest of the Lutheran faith who raised her to believe that women were the equals of men in intellectual pursuits, and taught her as much mathematics as he knew. Since women were not permitted to attend Prussian universities, Winkelmann became an observatory assistant in exchange for lessons, working first for Christoph Arnold and later for Gottfried Kirch, whom she married.
The Kirch household must have been an interesting one: some visitors complained that Maria was too visible in the observatory and took too equal a role with her husband. There was also suspicion that a number of Gottfried’s papers were actually hers which he had submitted because she was not literate in Latin, the language of German academia at the time. Most interestingly, they solved the perennial work/family balance issue by training all four of their children as astronomers, who worked as their assistants.
Maria Kirch didn’t just work with her husband, however. She published her own papers on the side in German, concentrating mostly on observations of the sun; but also publishing on whatever happened to take her interest. On 21 April 1702, she spotted the comet now called C1702/H1 and rushed to publish her discovery.
What followed was a national prestige battle. On April 20, two Italian astronomers had observed it; on April 24 a Frenchman, de La Hire, had made the observation too. Each of the three nations claimed it for their own discovery, and Kirch became a Prussian sensation, winning its highest medal for science. Around this time she became a friend and correspondant of Leibnitz and, unusually, of the science-obsessed Peter the Great.
Sadly, Gottfried Kirch died in 1710, and the Berlin Academy of Sciences refused to let Maria take over his membership there; even with Leibnitz’s intervention on her behalf they refused to permit a woman to enter their hallowed halls. As a result, the Kirch family stepped up: their eldest son, Christfried, became the front man and Maria and the three daughters became his “assistants.” With their help, Christfried quickly rose to become the director of the Berlin Observatory, and was smart enough to not try to prevent his mother from continuing to publish her own work on the side.
Sadly Christfried fell under intense political pressure to not have his mother taking such a prominent place in “his” observatory and he was forced to order her to retire, which she did in 1716 with ill grace. She continued amateur work but her publishing largely ceased before her death four years later in 1720.
Christfried Kirch continued to be assisted by his three sisters, but none attained the independent respect that their mother had.
Maria Kirch’s work in her own name is central to our understanding of solar astronomy; she also did some of the pioneering studies of the planet Saturn and made some critical observations of the effects when Saturn and Jupiter pass one another. On the side, she did some excellent weather observations too (possibly when it was too cloudy for astronomy) and of the Northern Lights.
Kirch is also known to have produced several astrological charts for friends and patrons, but it is suspected that she did so with distaste.
Germany continued to press for Kirch to be regarded as the discoverer of comet C1702/H1 until the nineteenth century, when they recognised the Italian team as having made the first observation.
Wonderful. One good friend of mine, who I’ve known for 11 years, is a woman works at the LHC, specifically in the ATLAS project and was involved in the Higg’s boson discovery. So, the LHC has only male scientists heh? I beg to differ.
@Orion – Ah! I didn’t click on the link, just read what David wrote and quoted.
Isn’t socialising girls in a way equal to boys like… a major aspect of Feminism?
I dunno why she thinks lads all learn Rhetoric and Game Theory.
I went to the only school in my district that still teaches Latin, and the subjects of Critical Thinking and Advanced Mathematics were only available to A-level students (and usually only the high achievers). And of course, subjects are taught to pupils of all genders at a co-ed school.
It’s not as if Game Theory really has all that much practical application in the real world. Female-dominated subjects like Psychology and Languages are probably better in terms of being able to understand the world and bend it to your will like a manly man.
Engineers, meanwhile, tend to be the butt of jokes for being notoriously socially inept.
Gender should not get in the way of a well-balanced education, but it’s ridiculous to treat traditionally “masculine” subjects as inherently superior.
On the topic of gender and Legos, I’m reminded of Anita Sarkeesian’s video series on the subject, particularly with her pointing out the problematic aspects of the “Lego Friends” brand:
Marie Curie was born in a country where women were not allowed to study at that time. Her parents were poor and she made a pact with her sister Bronya. Bronya went to study medicine in France and Maria worked as a governess to pay for her expenses. Years later, Maria started studying science in France while Bronya, who had become a doctor, paid for her sister expenses in turn.
Who said women couldn’t stand up for each other?
Interestingly, she’s more or less universally known in Poland as Maria Skłodowska-Curie – although I suspect this is more in the interest of emphasising her Polishness than emphasising her birth name!
I’m currently assessing local schools for my daughter, and I was rather impressed with a single-sex school whose presentation said that one of the major advantages of being single-sex was that it meant that their girls could explore whatever interests they wanted without any fears about gender stereotyping or being ridiculed by the (here nonexistent) boys.
Obviously, I’m not naïve enough to believe that this invariably works that way in practice, but the mere fact that they considered this important enough to bring up in an hour-long presentation was a very positive sign.
Lego friend filled a void that some adult fan (including me) needed, in term of color and theme (being the most people-oriented lego gamme for now, and treating a lot of thing classic city don’t).
I do find important to not say that “friend” lego aren’t true lego or anything. They have differents focus, and while thoses focus in friend could have been done better (and actually, were done better originaly than now, for sale’s sake AFAIK), they are good toys nonetheless in my opinion.
@happy cat
Totally inspiring!
I still want that sister I never got,,,,
She clearly does not have particularly good knowledge and common sense when it comes to people – not only because of the claim that women make babies and men make hadron colliders, but also the fact that she thinks we used to eat mud.
Wat.
Ohlmann,
Your prose writing style reminds me of an Ohlmann I know as a Dom4 player. Is that a coincidence or are you he?
Woah, that article of hers is a mess, she goes from brown nosing Milo Yiannopoulos, to acknowledging discrimination by giving us a synopsis of crime drama The Bletchley Circle, then possibly spins off into satire. What is she trying to say? That encouraging girls to do STEM is ridiculous? Or she trying to make out that it’s actually boys who are being forced to follow a ‘feminized’ education?
I wonder if JB is regretting her choices? Maybe she should’ve finished that PhD?
JB, Men aren’t exactly exempt from the whole making babies thing.
So close JB, so close. If only you’d taken your line of reasoning a little further:
– “Men do ALL THE AWESOME”.
– “Women should also be taught to do ALL THE AWESOME”.
– “It’s almost like I’m suggesting that gendered socialization processes may have been holding women back from equal opportunity to achieve in STEM fields”.
– “And that these learned processes can be deconstructed”.
– “You might almost say I’m suggesting that gender and gender roles are social constructs which have privileged men and limited women’s choices.”
– “…feminism…?”
But then the mental gymnastics happen, and it’s back to, “…but most ladybrains aren’t as good as man brains so there”.
OK, with a little more finesse we could be getting somewhere…
Oh, Judgy. You just couldn’t resist, could you?
Alto Fronto,
Boys are born knowing rhetoric, logic, and game theory. It’s part of the magical powers of the penis. It’s why MRAs are such good debaters and know everything.