06.04.06
Female superiority and…bullshit
So I finally sat down to update this blog, and what do I find but a comment from some dude who is trying to lecture me on the connection between socialism and poverty without knowing anything about socialism or (I presume) poverty. Did he need facts? No, of course not. He was able to manufacture his arguments out of thin air.
Sorry guy, I’m a believer in content. I know stuff. You don’t know stuff. Why? Because when you went to school, they taught you that all opinions are created equal, all facts are created equal, and an opinion is as good as a fact. So you watch Fox TV, the propaganda arm of the republican party, where they manufacture lies at the drop of a hat, spread them with malice aforethought, and move on to the next set of lies as the press, having lost interest in fact-checking, serves as a pipeline for the lies.
No. If your opinion is not supported by the facts as they exist, you are only deluding yourself by manufacturing factoids to support some proposition that you don’t even understand.
That which we call a rose
Now for the fun stuff.
Degree-wise, women dominate in once-male bastions
By Ben Fuller
Associated Press
Washington - Women now earn the majority of diplomas in fields men used to dominate - from biology to business - and have caught up in pursuit of law, medicine, and other advanced degrees.
Federal statistics released yesterday show women now also earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees in business, history, and biological and social sciences…
And in disciplines where women trail men, they are gaining ground, earning larger numbers of degrees in math, physical sciences, and agriculture.
Women now account for about half the enrollment in professional programs such as law, medicine, and optometry, up from 22 percent a generation ago.
Despite the gains, women earn about 76 percent as much as men…and are underrepresented in full-time faculty jobs…
While women make gains, the enrollment of men in professional degree programs is declining.
Boys need to have their aspirations raised just as girls have, said Tom Mortensen, senior scholar for the Pell Institute…
“Women have been making educational progress, and the men are stuck,” he said. “They haven’t just fallen behind women. They have fallen behind the job market.”
What? Examine the facts. A more correct statement would be, “Women have been making educational progress, and the men have fallen behind women in educating themselves and the job market.”
Fallen behind
We’ve talked about this before, guys who don’t work in school and women who do. The sense of privilege boys have because they are male, and the fact that they have decided that life will come to them as easily as A’s in middle school, because they’re good, just for being guys.
And the fact that we put up with this in school in order to nurture their fragile egos, so they can discover learning by themselves, or choose to sit on their duffs and watch tv, then complain about bad grades and sue schools for discrimination against males.
There’s too much freedom in modern society. Given freedom, males get lazy and express their creativity through gambling and aggressive competition, as the entry I have linked to shows. Men need to be controlled. Looks like women are the ones who will need to do the controlling, and they are studying hard to do that. Otherwise men will just be excess, useless, like drones at a beehive.
I’d be damned if I’d ever support a guy who was unemployed because he’d chosen not to bother learning in school. Can you spell ‘drone’?
jason said,
June 13, 2006 at 9:40 pm
Hello Principal Quattrano,
I am a high school teacher and I think your arguments are right on target. The male students that I have in all of my classes are a great deal behind their female classmates by the time they reach high school. They have no dedication to learning or interest in school whatsoever it seems while many girls are very studious and conscientious. To me it is very obvious who will be running this country in about 10-15 years if not sooner…
Jason
(A drone)
angela said,
June 15, 2006 at 11:19 am
Good boy.
Roger said,
October 4, 2006 at 11:45 pm
Its interesting that when schools are segregated and boys are taught by men teachers that boys will out perform girls on sat tests. Could it be our female teachers have a hidden agenda? Our schools today are nothing more than factories for producing female superiorly in society. Apparenty you love CBS news, it figures.
angela said,
October 5, 2006 at 12:45 am
Roger,
Clearly you have not spent much time in schools, which are in fact highly conservative institutions.
Much of what I write about here revolves around the motivational differences which effect educational outcomes. Thanks mostly to societal changes - changes in peer influence and parental expectations - but abetted by changes in the educational system, boys have become lazy and have stopped working on their asssignments. They have chosen to do this even though it will impact their grades and their learning. A quality private education will help whatever student receives it. Girls in top-notch private schools come out at the top of the heap. But many private schools are not top-notch; the mere fact that a school is private or sex-segregated does in no way guarantee a quality education, for either boys or girls. Many private girl’s schools give distinctly inferior educations.
Your unattributed assertion - factoid - that boys in sex-segregated private schools taught by men will come out ahead of girls would also imply that female teachers are keeping down girls, and traditionally this has been proven true. Read “Failing at Fairness” by Sadker and Sadker for a researched understanding of the gender biases that have favored males in education.
The fact is that our educational system favors those who study and work hard, as do most educational systems. Is this discriminatory against boys? In previous generations boys competed to come out on top of the system and succeeded, taking most of the honors. The system has not changed, the participants have. Girls now work harder, seeing that their future success is open, not circumscribed by discrimination in college acceptance or job potential. Not that long ago girls were told not to go to college, as there were no jobs open to them. My older sister scored high on the “medical” portion of a career test and was told to become a nurse. Instead she became an anesthesiologist.
So far as your assertion that I “love CBS news”, please tell me about it. I haven’t watched television in years.
From the Office of the Principal » Blog Archive » A comment and commentary said,
October 5, 2006 at 1:10 am
[...] From Female Superiority and Bullshit: [...]
Craig said,
November 9, 2006 at 2:42 pm
Reading Tamim Ansary’s recent article in Encarta “The Rise of the College Woman” would initially strike fear into the hearts of many a Male Chauvinist, but you know something? Reading the Holy Bible for many years, I have yet to read anything depicting or predicting the overtaking of Western civilized males, i.e. men becoming the new INFERIOR SEX (or as more politically correct, the SECOND SEX)!
It’s really weird to even perceive such a thing in our American culture, given the objective of achieving egalitarianism and not out and out role reversal. I personally believe that, for the moment, men are “letting” women win, or the situation makes it appear to be so.
Let me argue my point:
a) HELLO — THERE IS WAR GOING ON IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN! After “911″, many young men opted to serve their country in the war on terror. The bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon inspired many men (more men than women) to put college on the back burner, seeing they could go back to school funded by taxpayer dollars, after their tour of duty had ended. In World War II, women outnumbered men on campuses all across the country, but that ended when the war ended, as the GI Bill helped many men to enter campuses to better themselves.
b) The pressure put on men to be the primary breadwinners in a family will always cause most men to GET THE JOB FIRST — GET THE EDUCATION LATER! It is, and probably always will be, easier for men to exercise the option of learning a high paying trade outside of college, like plumbing, construction, electrical, interstate tractor-trailer driving, auto mechanics, than it will be for women. Most of the occupations that pay comparable to (or less than comparable to) the above mentioned positions, say, elementary school teaching, nursing, bank customer service, retail business management, child development, etc. will require further formal education in college. See a pattern here?
c) I argue that the surplus of women on campus these days are:
1. Married, widowed, or divorced women living in “empty nest” situations. Many of these women grew up believing that they had to give up college in order to marry and raise families. Nothing wrong with this, but you can see the growing number of women in this category flocking back to finish their education nowadays (My sister received her bachelors degree at age 51!) I say good for them! They should!
2. Part-time enrollees (note the Encarta article)
3. Online enrollees
I think that when the going gets rough, the natural fragility of the male ego (trust me, the female ego is not exactly a stone wall either) will be motivation enough to get men going in the direction of further formal classroom education. No way the normal male is going to let women take over, especially when we have the potential to go further, if we want to. It’s clearly a myth that a higher level of education is the only indicator of intelligence. You only need a GPA of 2.0 to get anything from an Associates to a Master’s Degree, and who in their right mind is going to show their GPA on a resume’??? Isn’t the degree listed on the resume’ more than enough? Anyone with an average intelligence and the drive to succeed, even with the desire to go frequently to the teachers for extra help, can and WILL get a degree. However, a degree doesn’t necessarily mean you are automatically an “Einstein”!
Naturally, you need high school to get ahead in life, but many people, men especially, became successful financially, and have even proven themselves giants in the “mental Olympics”, without finishing college. Take for example Bill Gates, a billionaire, and Rush Limbaugh, a millionaire. Rush admits on the air that he never set foot in college. There are perhaps more male MENSA members than there are female members (geniuses). My guess is that some of these men probably didn’t go to college either.
Personally, I am getting sick and tired of all the male bashing, especially on the college campuses (women’s studies and everyday interpersonal dynamics). I experienced some of that when I attended college in Central New York way back in 1975. I was constantly debating in the cafeteria with the “feminazis”, and I think it’s only gotten worse. I have one thing to say to young men who are considering going to college: GET TOUGH, AND GET SOME INITIATIVE! Men may have to swim against the current nowadays, and yes, nowadays IT MAY TAKE SOME MEN TWICE AS MUCH WORK TO GET HALF AS MUCH CREDIT AND RECOGNITION. This was not unlike the motto of many women in earlier days (substitute the word “women” for men above), and guess what guys — FORTUNATELY IT’S NOT THAT DIFFICULT!!!!! TOUCHE’ !
With all the talk about “affirmative action for men” (see Encarta article), one area that college promoters can start improving on is the billboard ads and ads on the internet. I made an informal study as I drove down many a highway and surfed many times on the web and found something really startling, and this could affect young children’s minds: NOT ONCE DID I SEE MALES IN THE COLLEGE ADS — ALWAYS A FEMALE — ALWAYS A FEMALE!!!!!! What’s a little boy going to think? (Mommy, do boys count anymore?) SUNY (State University of New York) is a real sexist pig in their billboard advertising.
But really, I do love and appreciate women. I’ve been married to one for almost twenty years now. Would you stay married to someone you hate for twenty years??? Please don’t misunderstand. My aim is not misogyny — just simple fairness and justice, that’s all. Is that asking too much? Or should we “new men” just tend to baking cookies and attempt to get in touch with our “feelings” (the new buzz word for “FEMININE SIDE” — AARRGGHHHH!)
Note from The Principal: I have responded to this comment in From the Office of The Principal