Because Now Men Are So Superior We Can't Concentrate Either! :-)
Hugo Schwyzer, feminist, takes to task Kathleen Parker, anti-feminist.
"Boys and girls are hard-wired differently, which one notices as soon as the little critters become mobile. Although there are exceptions, girls can sit and focus for long periods and boys need to move around more. In fact, brain research shows that multitasking stimulates the pleasure center of women’s brains, hence 42 years of NOW. The men’s movement has been in gestation for 15 years and hasn’t begun to quicken yet. Ultimately, letting men be men means not insisting that they be our best girlfriends."
I wonder how Kathleen Parker explains the feats of memory undertaken by Torah students for three millennia, who do relatively little moving around and learn with dutiful exactness? Or how the Chinese civil service survived nearly as long with a nearly all-male membership, made up of fellows who spent hours not only committing the law to memory, but learning how to shape complex characters? How could they have done these things, when it is so “natural” for boys and men to be easily distracted and in need of constant physical exertion?
Actually I think the men's movement has had a hard time getting off the ground because we've been fiddling with a variety of unproductive or counterproductive goals and hampered a *great* deal by the "worthiness trap" dilemma of thinking we can only "get it" when approve. And possibly "reward" us with sex. Which is almost exactly the opposite of what I'm pretty sure we need to be doing. Which would have a lot to do with getting over the whole alienated conceit that sex is a reward, a counter, a sign of approval, or "getting lucky" or a 'score" for anything and, instead, recognizing that it's just something our partners want to do because they enjoy it too.
Remember, "entitlement" is nothing but an uncorroborated belief that you've done something that, in *your* opinion, warrants someone else "rewarding" you for it.)
The hoot about the interview Schwyzer quotes, by the way, is that it comes from a Father's Day post by the equally extreme right-wing blogger Kathryn Jean Lopez on the National Review Online interview. The lead paragraph?
It’s Father’s Day this weekend, in a land where men are underappreciated, disrespected, and under attack. Kathleen Parker is here to save them, with her cultural wakeup call, Save the Males: Why Men Matter. Why Women Should Care. She recently took questions on her new book from NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez.
Source: I don't like linking to those people.
So us master-gender men "hard wired" to be impulsive thugs? And anti-feminists are supposed to be on *our side?* Sheah, right. Save the males indeed!
There's no reason to assume you don't know this book already, but The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature, by Steven Pinker, has a great chapter about gender issues and inate characteristics. I can't quote because my copy is in portuguese and I'd need to translate back, but what comes to mind right now is something about not existing 'incompatibility between feminism and the possibility of men and women being psychologically different - equality doesn't mean groups of humans are interchageable, it's the moral principle that individuals shouldn't be judged by the average atributes of his group'. Hmm. I had a point to make on my own about people using science to _justify_ bad things in society and how these people usually get both the biological sciences and the social parts wrong, but I forgot because I started to giggle madly at "Source: I don't like linking to those people."
[Hmm! No I hadn't heard about that book, CB. I'll take a look though. Thanks for the tip! --fl]