2 Feminist Critiques: Systemic Attention Paid to "Men vs. Women" Research, Statistics, and Sexist Conclusions

Here are some "conclusions from [USA] national data ... supported by research at ... the College of St. Benedict, and at Saint John's University":

• Women underestimate their abilities and express lower levels of self-confidence than their abilities suggest. Men overestimate their abilities and express higher levels of confidence than their abilities warrant. This difference arrives with them as first-year students and leaves with them as seniors.

• Men in college spend significantly more time in leisure activities (especially, for example, video-game play and athletic pursuits) than do women. College women are hyper-scheduled participants in co-curricular activities.

• Women have higher GPA's than do men—when they enter and leave college—even when the sexes show equivalent aptitude on standardized tests. 

Here are some conclusions from William J. Bennett, new author of The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood and former U.S. Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan and former Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H.W. Bush:

• For the first time in history, women are better educated, more ambitious and arguably more successful than men.

• The Founding Fathers believed, and the evidence still shows, that industriousness, marriage and religion are a very important basis for male empowerment and achievement.
  

• If you don’t believe the numbers, just ask young women about men today. You will find them talking about prolonged adolescence and men who refuse to grow up.
  

Bennett warrants his claims here with these numbers:

• In 1970, men earned 60% of all college degrees. In 1980, the figure fell to 50%, by 2006 it was 43%. Women now surpass men in college degrees by almost three to two.
  

• In 1950, 5% of men at the prime working age were unemployed. As of last year, 20% were not working, the highest ever recorded.
  

• Men are also less religious than ever before. According to Gallup polling, 39% of men reported attending church regularly in 2010, compared to 47% of women.
  

Now how should we attend to these statistics? Is higher education making no impact on the divide between women and men, as the data suggest? Or is education actually giving women advantage over men in every way, as Bennett argues?

MaryAnn Baenninger, President of the College of St. Benedict, speaks out to critique the former. (She is well aware of the American Council on Education report that "The percentage of [US college] presidents who were women more than doubled, from 10 percent in 1986 to 23 percent of the total in 2006, but women's progress has slowed in recent years" so that in 2011 "about 25 percent of college presidents are women.") She says, "Clearly, our conclusions about gender must be nuanced, and we would be wise to suspend assumptions about whether women or men are doing better or worse." See her wonderful wisdom here.

And Theophrastus, a blogger and "a professor at a US university with strong interests in applied issues in linguistics," speaks out to critique Bennett. Theophrastus says, "Bill Bennett’s article claims to be about the emasculation of American men and the need to 'empower' them. But clearly, his ultimate motivation has to do more with the domestication of American women." See the brilliant critique here at BLT.

par elle, et elle a habité parmi nous, et nous avons contemplé sa gloire

Suzanne's Bookshelf offers "one example" of a Greek text that "demonstrates the enormous fallacy and extremely limited scope of any discussion of pronoun gender in translation."

The one example illustrates how,

English readers are cut off from the diverse ways that this passage could be read at the time it was written. We are cut off from how this passage is read in other modern European languages. The English translations are also committed to an interpretation which is foreign to a Jewish understanding of the text.

Read more in the post, "All things were made by her ..."

Post-race-and-gender Politics Question

(Let's not use f-words today.) Let's ask (instead), How long have the politics of the USA been post-racial and post-gender (and post-Aristotle)?

"Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."
--G. Gordon Liddy
(HT Allison Gaudet Yarrow of The Sisterhood)























--President Richard M. Nixon with his Chief of Staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman
(HT Karen Tumulty of Time Magazine)

Aristotle was one of the earliest to tackle the problem: he saw menstruation as a sign of female inferiority, related to the passive part he felt women played in reproduction.
(--from Janice Delaney's, Mary Jane Lupton's, and Emily Toth's
The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation)

But menstruation is not just any cyclical occurrence. It involves the shedding of blood, which is itself a dire event, with or without group synchrony and astral coincidences, and at least intuitively associated with acts of deliberate bloodshed. Aristotle observed in the Historia Animalium that menstrual blood runs "like that of an animal that has just been stabbed" in sacrifice and Hippocratic medical texts used the same analogy.
(--from Barbara Ehrenreich's
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passion of War)

For the Hippocratics the weakness of a woman's body (her porous flesh) caused menstruation; for Aristotle menstruation caused her physical weakness.
(--from Sarah B. Pomeroy's
Women's History and Ancient History)

Aristotle tells us that the highpitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices. If you hear a man talking in a gentle or high-pitched voice you know he is a kinaidos (“catamite”). The poet Aristophanes put a comic turn on this cliché in his Ekklesiazousai: as the women of Athens are about to infiltrate the Athenian assembly and take over political process, the f****ist leader Praxagora reassures her fellow f*male activists that they have precisely the right kind of voices for this task. Because, as she says, “You know that among the young men the ones who turn out to be terrific talkers are the ones who get f***ed a lot.” This joke depends on a collapsing together of two different aspects of sound production, quality of voice and use of voice. We will find the ancients continually at pains to associate these two aspects under a general rubric of gender. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. Just how uncomfortable may be measured by the lengths to which Aristotle is willing to go in accounting for the gender of sound physiognomically; he ends up ascribing the lower pitch of the male voice to the tension placed on a man’s vocal chords by his testicles functioning as loom weights.
(--from Anne Carson's
Glass, Irony, and God
- the unoffending *s have been added for our comfort.)

Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly [as by a syllogism of logic] . . . . [S]ince woman does not bound herself, she must be bounded. The celebrated Greek virtue of self-control (sophrosyne) has to be defined differently for men and for women, Aristotle maintains. Masculine sophrosyne is rational self-control and resistance to excess, but for the woman [according to Aristotle] sophrosyne means obedience and consists in submitting herself to the control of others.
(--from Anne Carson's
Men in the Off Hours)

New Testament Translation Question

(Let's not use the word "feminist" today.) Let's (instead) focus precisely on the Greek text of the New Testament. Let me make a suggestion that I've made before, and then ask a question. Here's that suggestion:

that Mark is translating Jesus to give a pluralistic hermeneutic when he has him saying and asking:

Καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς, Οὐκ οἴδατε τὴν παραβολὴν ταύτην; Καὶ πῶς πάσας τὰς παραβολὰς γνώσεσθε;

And he said unto them, Know ye not this parable? and how then will ye know all parables?

The entire parable and this whole pericopic episode seem to get at interpretive difficulties and ways of being and repentance and subjectivities against pretended objectivity and the like. Yes, I know I'm exegeting isogetically - but isn't that some the point here in Mark 4? To keep outsiders out and insiders in and to multiply statements and so forth?

So the question:

How differently would you read this story of this parable if it started, really and textually, in Mark 3:31? With Jesus being challenged about his ostensible inattention to his mother and his brothers. Yes, I know the manuscripts and therefore the text critics go bananas here in verse 33. But Mark has Jesus turning the whole question of precise definition back to those challenging him:

Καὶ ἀπεκρίθη αὐτοῖς λέγων [ἀποκριθεὶς αὐτοῖς λέγει], Τίς ἐστιν ἡ μήτηρ μου [ἢ οἱ] [καὶ οἱ] [ἀδελφοί μου] ἀδελφοί [μου].

And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren?

Then he goes even further, and Mark does as well with his Greek:

34 Καὶ περιβλεψάμενος κύκλῳ τοὺς περὶ αὐτὸν [τοὺς περὶ αὐτὸν κύκλῳ] καθημένους, λέγει, Ἴδε, ἡ μήτηρ μου καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοί μου

Ὃς γὰρ ἂν ποιήσῃ τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ, οὗτος ἀδελφός μου καὶ ἀδελφή [μου] καὶ μήτηρ ἐστίν.

34 And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!

35 For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

Do you see how bold this interpretation? How additional to the text this marked detail? Is this a set up for the story of a sower sowing? Does gender matter? Embodiment in interpretationS? Wordplay in Texts?

In the words of Jesus: What does the text say? How do you read it?

Do You Blog in "Himglish" or "Femalese"?

Jean Edelstein has a new book coming out entitled Himglish and Femalese. The author is describing the differences between male and female English - the work is reminiscent of You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation by linguist Deborah Tannen and “Yup.” “Nope.” “Maybe.” A Woman’s Guide to Getting More Out of the Language of Men by therapist / counselors Stephen James and David Thomas.

So do you think Edelstein is a man or a woman? And might this writer write more in Himglish or in Femalese? Do you email, txt, or twitter in one of these gendered languages? And which do you identify more with as you read my blog and blog yourself?

Look, listen, from Jean Hannah Edelstein on the differences between women and men writing in love in her post, "Lost in translation: Men and women speak different languages, and now, with text, e-mail and twitter, our wires get utterly crossed." Hear - here are some examples, so as not to get your wires too crossed, in which "Jonathon" is the man writing "Himglish" and "Alice" is the woman writing "Femalese" [and the portion I've put the brackets around is Edelstein herself explaining "What she / he really means"]:

Femalese E-mail

To Jonathan Himglish From Alice Femalese

Hi Jonathan, It was lovely to meet you at the party on Friday. Did you have a good time? I did. What an amazing DJ! Anyway, work has been so busy this week, I am really looking forward to taking it easy this weekend, although I’d quite like to catch a film or something. What have you got planned? Alice x

[What she really means Will you go out with me this weekend? Please note I have signed this e-mail with an “x”, indicating my romantic interest (you will only get more kisses once we are properly dating).]

Himglish E-mail

To Alice Femalese From Jonathan Himglish

Hi Alice, Great to meet you too. Yes, I think I’ll also be laying low this weekend. I also enjoy films — maybe I’ll see that new one with Seth Rogen in it. Jonathan x

[What he really means I am rather oblivious and have terrible taste in films.]

Femalese post-date tweet

Alicefemalese Just had the most amazing night with a new friend.

[What she really means I just went on a really hot date and am totally smitten.

What he thinks she means I went out with this guy tonight, but I don’t fancy him. I guess we can be friends, though.]

Himglish text message

Thanks for a great night! I hope I can see you again soon. J

[Her reaction “Great night”? What does he mean by “great”? What a dull adjective. Wouldn’t he say “lovely’ or “amazing” if he really liked me? And he didn’t sign with a kiss. I’m sure he signed one of his previous texts with a kiss. Does this mean he doesn’t fancy me? I don’t think he does. This is awful. I’d better call my best friend and discuss this terrible development with her for at least three hours.]

Karen Jobes Gets A (Man's) Dollar

What if some 2008 years later or so, Karen H. Jobes got to keep every penny she earned on her $1.00 (compared to the men)? Same question for Beth Sheppard.

Hats off to Zondervan, and IOSCS, and Logos Bible Software for hiring a woman translator for three respective teams of translators.

But did the twelve men on the translation team for the TNIV get their $1.00 while Jobes, the only woman, was only given 77¢ for the same work?

Did the twenty-eight men on the translation team for the NETS get their $1.00 while Jobes, the only woman, was only given 77¢ for the same work?

Did the thirty men on the translation team for the Lexham LXX get their $1.00 while Sheppard, the only woman, was only given 77¢ for the same work?

And yet, some of us are still curious what it would be like some day if things were completely reversed:

What if twelve women or twenty-eight women or even thirty women—but just one man—made up a team of translators of the Bible? Who would the publishers’ poster boy be? Would he get paid just 77¢ for their (woman’s) $1.00 for the same work? And would that man be assigned only the text or few texts of the Bible that only primarily focus on a male protagonist (but not at all the many many other passages that deal with the women of the Bible)?

And how differently would these texts or these texts or this text or this text or this phrase or this word be translated? How differently!

Wouldn’t we push for equality much more quickly?

Sexism: A Multiple Choice (Quiz)

A full decade ago, from the first couple of pages of Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn reminded us of our problematic history that meets our present sexism. She says:

For the past twenty-five hundred years in Western culture, the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement). . .

Rhetoric always inscribes the relation of language and power at a particular moment (including who may speak, who may listen or who will agree to listen, and what can be said); therefore, canonical rhetorical history has represented the experience of males, powerful males, with no provision or allowance for females. . .

Except for rhetoric, no intellectual endeavor—not even the male bastion of philosophy—has so consciously rendered women invisible and silent. . . .

So how are we doing (if we are citizens of Western culture now)?

Here’s a quiz:

1) In 2007, for every dollar a man earns in the U.S., a woman earns:

A. 77 cents
B. 84 cents
C. 92 cents
D. the same

2) In the most recent count during the past decade, for every dollar a man earns in the following seven countries respectively (Portugal, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, France, and Canada), a woman earns:

A. 92, 91, 91, 89, 88, 87, and 86 cents
B. 93 cents (woman’s dollar to man’s) in all seven countries
C. 96 cents (woman’s dollar to man’s) in all seven countries
D. women earn the same as men in all seven countries

3) In 2007, women make up what percent of Canada’s Members of Parliament?

A. 21%
B. 31%
C. 41%
D. 51%

4) In 2007, women make up what percent of the U.S. Senate?

A. 14%
B. 21%
C. 33%
D. 50%

5) In 2007, women make up what percent of the U.S. Congress generally?

A. 16%
B. 23%
C. 35%
D. 50%

6) In 2007, women make up what percent of the state legislatures in the U.S. (with percentages of all fifty states averaged)?

A. 24%
B. 35%
C. 46%
D. 50%

7) In 2007, what percent of tenured professors at PhD-granting universities in the U.S. are women?

A. 20%
B. 30%
C. 40%
D. 50%

8) In 2007, what percent of Fortune 500 CEOs in the U.S. are women?

A. 2.6%
B. 15%
C. 26%
D. 50%

9) In 2007 (by measures so far), what percentage of the speakers at web conferences are women?

A. 37%
B. 47%
C. 57%
D. 67%

10) In 2007, how many of the 28 translators of the newly published English translation of the Greek Septuagint are women?

A. 1
B. 5
C. 15
D. 22

So how are we doing? What do the numbers say? And how did you do? You may have recognized the correct answer for each question is “A.”

The real question is whether answer A ought to be “correct” this late in the history of men and women.

(I also wonder whether Frank Miller really had to have Sparta’s Queen Gorgo agree to be unfaithful in her marriage just to earn the right to speak to the all-male Council on behalf of her husband, her city, and her nation. She did. That is, she did sleep with a scoundrel, but she also did have to do that. In 2007, Miller gets it right. We must continue to revise the history of the rhetoric of women until it’s correct. Miller’s film adaptation of his original graphic novel 300 is a “90 percent accurate” history of a profound human struggle, and of “the Spartans' heroic code,” and of “the key role played by women in backing up, indeed reinforcing, the male martial code of heroic honor.” That’s according to film director Zack Snyder and Cambridge Greek history Professor Paul Cartledge. I just regret that Athenian philosopher rhetorician Aristotle isn’t here today to see the movie, and to hear that valiant [woman] Gorgo. Maybe we Westerners would do well to listen and to act as bravely.)

The questions and answers of our quiz are from these sources:

Girl with Pen
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of British Colombia
Christian Science Monitor
Feminist Law Professors
The SWWAN Blog
Matrocracy
The Lilith Gallery
LawGeek
New English Translation of the Septuagint
Better Bibles Blog