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todd seavey on feminism

Todd SeaveyMy friend Todd Seavey is one of the most engaging, hilariousand socially-connected people I know. And he finally has a blog! This denunciation of feminism has gotten a lot of comments. I don’t agree with everything he says — and “feminism” is one of those fuzzy words that can mean a lot of different things to different people — but I wholeheartedly agree with his first point:

1. Making A Priori Moral Assertions About Thoroughly Empirical Questions

This is really my main complaint about feminism, as philosophy… I get the sense whenever listening to feminist arguments that there are conclusions I am being morally goaded into drawing about how the world works even before I have been allowed to investigate — that women and men’s intelligence “must” be found to be equal, or that if men are smarter at some things, women “must” be smarter at others in such a way that it all evens out (in some grand, ill-defined metaphysical sense) so that everyone feels like an equal partner in democracy at the end of the day. That’s just bad science. …

[T]he data suggest that there are intelligence differences between males and females, and without going into each sub-category of intelligence (ability to negotiate three-dimensional spaces, ability to read emotions from faces, recall, math, etc.), I will say that there seem to be both more male geniuses than female geniuses and more male idiots than female idiots. For a moment, the reader hoping (for whatever a priori reasons) to find “balance” in evaluations of the two sexes might feel relieved that in some sense the IQ differences appear to “even out” — but a tendency for women to bunch near the norm while males are more likely to rise to the top and to end up in prison is hardly, I think, the sort of simple “equality” that underpins most traditional, idealistic feminist thinking. Those differences have huge implications that we’re still sorting out and may render, for example, the application of affirmative action laws to gender “balance” absurd (and unjust).

I agree with all of this. Everyone pays lips service to the idea that men and women are indeed different — but certain feminists then go on as to treat it as outrageous that women are underrepresented in certain fields, or have more responsibility for child-rearing, or what have you.

The idea that men and women are equally ambitious, equally interested in making money, equally intelligent, equally interested in participating in sports, or even equally competent at certain jobs — all those are assertions that need to be proven, rather than just assumed.

As Todd puts it, “The oft-cited “income disparity” stats about how much women earn vs. how much men earn are Marxist nonsense of the most presumptuous sort, based once again on the a priori assumption that women ought to be making the same career choices and displaying the same work habits and thus making the same amount of money as men — have we forgotten all those chaos theory lessons about how tiny initial differences can lead [without chicanery] to vastly different outcomes?)”

5 comments to todd seavey on feminism

  • themofo

    I agree with this too. If there really were salary discrimination against women, if they really made only 70 cents on the dollar for doing the exact same job to the exact same skill level as a man– I’d hire nobody but women, and make a killing.

  • I’m not just talking about salaries, though. In so many other areas — from time spent raising kids to sports participation to the percentage of women partners at top law firms — the a priori feminist assumption tends to be that men and women should end up there at equal numbers. And when they don’t, it must be because of discrimination, or society not encouraging girls enough.

  • ariana

    I think since his whole blog is about denoucing feminism, I will start one called denouncing him. It will be called “Boy, that Todd is F-Ugly!” … you may now return to your regular programming.

  • themofo

    Interesting op-ed in the Boston Globe today about mothers being the real victims of discrimination among employers. Note the statistic that for women ages 27 to 33 without children, pay scale with men is 98 percent, essentially equal.

  • Ethan McCarthy

    I often wonder about all of this, not that it would effect me in any way, however, I have a friend (just happens to also be a radical feminist) who works in finances in a major university and that same person once mentioned to me that the Engineering and Mathematics departments often give out full scholarships and grants to female students to try to increase the female to male ratio in their departments. It is very easy for an average female engineering student to have their education paid without loans. It is a very marxist way to increase representation and force equality between the sexes. All very interesting.

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