What is it with women (or men)?

Twelve foot python attacks pet store owner,
trooper tries to kill it. She says no, its too
valuable. He saves both snake and her.

What is it about women that men seem so unable to understand or accept? Chris Matthews is on the carpet, along with Tucker Carlson, Bill Kristol, Cafferty, and many more, for their misogynistic attitudes and remarks. Many people seem to believe that gender is Hillary Clinton’s biggest problem, her “Achilles heel,” as it were. I don’t know about Clinton, but this has an interesting history that might be worth briefly considering.

An older African informant once announced that, “the trouble with women is they have small, smooth brains. Still another one said that the problem was that women’s brains were farther back in their heads and that is why they were so often wrong. And, of course, for a long time it was believed that as women’s brains were smaller they couldn’t be as intelligent as men:

“In general, the brain is larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior races…Other things being equal, there is a remarkable relationship between the development of intelligence and the volume of the brain.” (from Paul Broca, the leader of the craniometry movement).

Another man offered an evolutionary explanation for this:

“The man who fights for two or more in the struggle for existence, who has all the responsibility and the cares of tomorrow, who is constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, needs more brain than the woman whom he must protect and nourish, or the sedentary woman, lacking any interior occupations, whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive.” (this is from Topinard).

Gustave LeBon made the link between women, children, and savages:

“In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are large numbers of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man.”

Even Darwin linked women to a lower state of civilization:

“It is generally admitted that with women the power of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.”

Lombroso, the greatest criminologist of his time:

“We also saw that women have many traits in common with children, that their moral sense is deficient, that they are revengeful, jealous, inclined to vengeances of a refined cruelty.
In ordinary cases these defects are neutralized by piety, maternity, want of passion, sexual coldness, by weakness and an undeveloped intelligence…”

You might want to laugh at this now, but the literature, even the scientific literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, was full of this kind of nonsense. And even black males were allowed to vote before women. Our laws reflect these same attitudes. For example, men were allowed to sue for “lack of consortium” for years but women were not allowed to do so. Women were not allowed to do many things without the permission of their husbands, and so on. These things have changed greatly but still seem to exist in one form or another. Why is this so difficult to understand and change?

I have personally known four different women, all of whom were counseled in High School not to try to go to college, who not only went on to PhD’s but also became Deans and Executive Officers in major universities.

Closer to home, when my wife and I, who both have PhD’s, first moved here to Sandhill, our house was full of books. One of our first houseguests, a female, took one look and said, “your husband must be really smart.” This kind of thing happens all the time. I have no explanation for why this persists as it does. Have women over the years done something to bring this on? Or is it merely the natural misogynistic attitudes of males? It is obviously completely irrational as we now have a history of highly successful women in all fields, including the very highest levels of government. Because this is so, I find it hard to believe that it is this that is keeping Hillary Clinton from winning the nomination. But it might be. It clearly exists, just see Time magazine on Chris Matthews, the current poster child for misogyny. But he is hardly alone. Everyone nowadays pretty much knows that these attitudes towards women still exist in one form or another. But I have yet to see any valid explanation as to why this is. Is it merely one of those things that is neither rational or irrational, useful or useless, functional or nonfunctional, but just simply cultural with no other explanation?

If you wish to pursue this further, see Gould, Ontogency and Pylogency (1977), and Langness, The Study of Culture (2005).

LKBIQ:
“Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.”
Bertrand Russell