a wolf angel is not a good angel

You know, I do not currently have anything going on that could be called a crisis. (I may, in a few days. But right now: no!)

It’s really a rather nice feeling.

So to counteract that, I will complain.

When I was going somewhere I didn’t want to go to, at -20 weather, before 8 on Saturday, I had to pick up gas. (Subcomplaint: lost my bus pass.) Fine. I also decided to get myself one of those machine espressos, which are unaccountably tasty and in any case hot.

I go to pay, and the guy at the counter asks me if I am cold. Well, yes, it’s minus fucking twenty out, of course I’m cold. No, he says, he means I seem cold-like-unfriendly. I am not sure how friendly I am supposed to be while waiting in line at the cash while he chats with another customer, but obviously friendlier. I ignore that and say it’s early and cold, and he informs me this is Canada! And we must get used to the cold! And not complain![1] And also I should smile more and be less cold.

Today’s xkcd comic:

The forum for the chat about this thread? Unsurprisingly, how it just happens to be true, women are just worse at math than men (overlapping bell curves etc), hunter gatherer proves it, how could we think otherwise, etc etc. Historically, there’s been a lot of trying to prove that people who aren’t white Christian men are stupider than those who are, by trying to parse brain size, brain weight ratio, size of various subparts of the brain, and so on, and they’ve all been shown to be bullshit. So the standard of proof to show that there is an innate biological difference that makes women stupider than men is really high, and it’s so far been unproven.

Some of my favourite quotes:

Seriously, I think that, on average, boys are better at math than girls (just because of the way our brains evolved)

It’s just science! I think it, and I used a science word, so I proved it.

I believe the genders were in equal positions during the hunter-gatherer era (women may have even had a little more going for them than men) but the trend was towards men dominating women during the agricultural revolution, due to unequal division (i.e. specialization) of tasks due to biological differences.

I’m not sexist, because I claim that thousands or tens of thousands or a lot of years ago, women were smarter than men, but now they have uteruses so they don’t have to think.

Well, the whole point is that they’re brains function somewhat differently, actually, because they serve somewhat different purposes. Just think about an average society: generally the male will be the one doing the hunting/raising the money, right? To do that he needs to solve problems. To do that he needs more logical components of his brain.

Men work more, therefore they are smarter. There are absolutely no societal reasons for this to be true, so it must be the brain. Men hunt down the money, like when they work as middle management, and women gather up the laundry.

Now, I’m not dismissing society as a factor; in fact, I think societal forces are the main factor (as they are what magnify the differences—in a balanced society, I think the differences would probably be minimal); it’s just that, when looking for the origin of all of these societal forces, I can think of no other explanation than biology.

I can’t think of another answer. Some might say that this proves that men aren’t creative, but I say it proves that there is no other answer.

There are some people valiantly (and, of course, pointlessly) fighting the good fight there, but I am going to go and smile and be super friendly to all the strangers I pass by on the street so that when they try to pick me up, I’m a bitch for not being interested in them.

[1] What would we ever talk about if we didn’t complain about the weather? We can no longer even complain that HNIC always shows the Leafs since, due to their not being very good, they don’t.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 1:56 pm and is filed under lunacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.