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| peter zohrab... |
 Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 6:10 am |
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Introduction
This book* is interesting and well-written. However, the point of this
review is to discuss the dumbing-down of Western universities which
has
resulted from the political power of Feminists in such institutions.
Even a Kindergarten child has, I assume, the intelligence to avoid
self-contradition ( http://equality.netfirms.com/femathom.html ). This
intelligence is ironed out of them, as children progress through
feminised
Western education systems, and as they learn that what matters is to
agree
with Feminist women.
The Politics
This book first makes claims about the differences between the average
male
brain and the average female brain and then explains autism as an
extreme
version of the average male brain. What I am interested in discussing
here
is the first part of the book -- the differences between males and
females.
Ideologically, Baron-Cohen (professor of psychology and psychiatry at
Cambridge University) makes it clear that he is in favour of
"equality"
between men and women, but that he fears that Feminists may react
negatively
to the fact that he is claiming that male and female brains are, on
average,
different from each other. From a Men's Rights point of view, I should
perhaps commend him for criticising not only sexist jokes about women,
but
also sexist jokes about men. He may think me ungrateful for feeling
that
that is not enough!
What we have here is an academic who appears to have the courage to
stand up
to political pressure from Feminists in a university context (
http://equality.netfirms.com/edpwrcnt.html ). This commendable courage
is
less startling when seen against the background change in intellectual
fashions which he himself describes, whereby it is now relatively
common for
genetic, and not just environmental, differences between men and women
to be
researched into.
Nevertheless, the scenario appears to be one where an individual male
academic is making a more or less courageous stand against more-or-
less
organised Feminist pressure. By this I mean that Feminists are
organised
into networks, associations and institutions such as Women's Studies
departments. In addition, it appears from what he says that Baron-
Cohen's
colleagues are mainly female. So he is dependent, on a day-to-day
basis, on
not offending too many of these females too severly or too often in
his
writings. Psychology is a female-dominated field, anyway.
Right after outlining the book's main thesis (see below), Baron-Cohen
plunges straight into the politics of the issue:
Will this theory provide gist for those reactionaries who might wish
to
defend existing inequalities in opportunities for men and women in
society?
The nervousness of those readers might not dissipate until they are
persuaded that this theory can be used progressively.
Why does an ostensibly scientific (albeit popular-scientific) work
have to
give such prominence to political issues? The answer, of course, is
that
academia is a generally left-wing, totalitarian environment, which
runs on
the antithesis to Deng Xiao Ping'sfamous slogan, which I formulate as
follows:
Who cares if a cat can catch mice, as long as it is red?
The terms reactionaries and progressively are left-wing, politically
biased
terms. I am sure that many Feminists regard me, for example, as
reactionary
and themselves as progressive, whereas I regard myself as progressive
and
not reactionary, and I apply a lot of other, negative epithets to
Feminists.
Empathy
One of the best features of this book is that it states its main
thesis on
page1:
The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male
brain is
predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.
So the female brain is an empathizing brain and the male brain is a
systemizing brain, according to him. Naturally, I wanted to see how he
defined these crucial terms, and this is where the book trips up and
falls
over rather heavily. Either it falls over because Baron-Cohen's brain
(as he
admits himself) is not a systemizing brain, or it is because his
working or
publishing environment is such that he has to say nice things about
women.
On page 2, he states:
Empathizing is the drive to identify another person's emotions and
thoughts,
and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion.
Appropriate
Note the word appropriate ( http://equality.netfirms.com/aprpriat.html
) ,
which is a crucial sticking-point. He does not define appropriate. You
may
think that is unnecessary, since the word apparently has a totally
straightforward meaning, viz:
suitable, proper (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, tenth ed.,
revised).
However, Feminists often use a "mother-talk" version of this word,
whereby
appropriate means morally suitable/proper. This appears to be what
Baron-Cohen means -- strange as it may seem, in a scientific context.
For example, on pages 26-7, after mentioning sympathy as being one
form of
empathy, Baron-Cohen goes on to say:
But in other empathic reactions there is a different, still
appropriate,
emotional respose to someone else's feelings. Perhaps you feel anger
(at the
system) in response to the homeless person's sadness, or fear (for his
safety), or guilt (over your inability to help him): these feelings
are
based on empathy. Feeling pleasure, or smugness, or hate towards him
would
not be empathic reactions, since none of these emations is appropriate
to
his emotion.
So Baron-Cohen is really using the word appropriate as a synonym for
nice.
From a detached, scientific point of view, it is perfectly appropriate
to
feel pleasure or smugness in reaction to someone else's sadness -- but
it is
certainly not nice or morally proper.
Nice Women
I don't see why I should have to expend so much effort to work out
what a
Cambridge Professor (no less !) should have made clear himself. What
Baron-Cohen appears to mean by empathizing, then, can be made clear by
rewriting his definition as follows:
Empathizing is the drive to identify another person's emotions and
thoughts,
and to respond to them with a morally proper (nice) emotion.
Here is another crucial point: Baron-Cohen is saying that the female
brain
(unlike the male brain) is hard-wired to be nice. That is a Feminist
tenet
if I've ever seen one !
Self-Contradiction
Now we get to the self-contradiction which I referred to at the start
of
this article. Baron-Cohen maintains that the female brain is hard-
wired to
be nice. Since I experience, day-to-day, how women treat you in
Western
societies if you dare to have opinions that they don't like, I find
that
notion utterly ludicrous! The notion that women are nice and men are
evil is
a central feature of contemporary Feminism (
http://equality.netfirms.com/isfemnsm.html ) , and is closely linked
to
Feminist lies ( http://equality.netfirms.com/islies.html ) and half-
truths
about Domestic Violence ( http://equality.netfirms.com/isdv.html ),
for
example.
On page 35, Baron-Cohen says the following:
.... it is ... the case that indirect aggression (the more female kind)
needs
better mindreading skills than does direct aggression (the more male
kind).
This is because its impact is strategic: you hurt person A by saying
something negative about them to person B. Indirect aggression also
involves
deception: the aggressor can deny any malicious intent if challenged.
It is hard to see why indirect aggression is a form of empathy, if
feeling
smugness, hate or pleasure at someone else's sadness is not an example
of
empathy. Having stated on page 26-7 that the female brain is
intrinsically
nice, Baron-Cohen gives an example of its greater nastiness (than the
male
brain) on page 35!
Conclusion
So Cambridge University, like most other Western universities, is a
women's
kindergarten. Whether involuntarily (because they have been
brainwashed by
their Feminist environment) or deliberately (because they are Feminist
activists, or merely afraid for their careers), academics churn out
slipshod
and even self-contradictory drivel which pleases their Feminist
mistresses.
This has severe implications for the ability of non-Feminist men to
succeed
in higher education ( http://equality.netfirms.com/iseducat.html ).
On page 26, Baron-Cohen discusses what he calls the "cognitive"
component of
empathy (as well as the "affective" component). It seems clear that
the
female brain's empathy has a much less impressive cognitive component
than
does the male brain's systemizing, which does not seem to have
anything
other than a cognitive component. Add to this the fact that the female
brain
( http://equality.netfirms.com/resescam.html ) is smaller than the
male
brain (even after body-size is taken into account), and that
anthropologists
routinely interpret hominid brain-size (
http://equality.netfirms.com/latimes1.html ) as a measure of
intelligence.
Maybe anthropologists are making simplistic assumptions (after all, we
keep
hearing stories about the intelligence of several bird species), or
maybe
the Feminist universities and the Feminist Psychology industry are
designing
IQ tests that conceal from us the fact that women are just
(comparatively)
dumb! ( http://equality.netfirms.com/dumbfemi.html)
Peter Zohrab
* Baron-Cohen, Simon, The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains
and
the Truth About Autism, 2004, New York : Basic Books.
Cambridge University a Women's Kindergarten
http://equality.netfirms.com/cambridg.html Member of Parliament says
Mother
Abused Father equality.netfirms.com/garrett.html HIV-and-Circumcision
Scam
equality.netfirms.com/circscam.html Men's Refuge
equality.netfirms.com/casahomb.html Sian Elias' Coup d'Etat
equality.netfirms.com/coupdeta.html Violent Women Put in Refuges
http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=3929 New Zealand's gendered mortality
http://ips.ac.nz/publications/publications/show/251 Female
Subjectivity as
Standard for Law & Policy equality.netfirms.com/subjecti |
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