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Have you ever thought of quoting Henry Higgins non-ironically? If so, have you ever thought of making a scholarly comparison of his arguments against those of Charles Darwin?

If so, then you must be Susanna Christina Hoff Sommers, she of the Bangles AEI. In an essay titled Men or Women: Which Is the More Generous Sex?, she actually offers the following supposed dilemma:

Men are so decent, such regular chaps.
Ready to help you through any mishaps.
Ready to buck you up whenever you are glum.
Why can’t a woman be a chum?
–Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady

Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness…. Man… delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness.
–Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)

Who is right–Henry Higgins or Charles Darwin? The question is not merely academic. If one sex is significantly better than the other, then perhaps we should be looking for ways to help the lesser sex improve.

This question isn’t “merely academic” because there’s absolutely nothing academic about it. In fact, I order Ms. Hoff Sommers to turn in her Ph.D (and any guitars she might have lying around) immediately; this sort of fart bubble can’t be tolerated in intellectual waters.

If Darwin and Henry Higgins were thrown in a cage pit and ordered to fight to the death, Darwin would win easily. This is because Henry Higgins was never actually alive. In fact, he’s a character in a musical, a genre generally unconcerned with the deeper philosophical issues. One could even say he’s a right bastard character in a musical, a pouty, self-obsessed elitist who should rankle the audience right up until he learns his lesson. Which he does.

Henry Higgins is a case study in the suckery of dudes, especially rich ones. My Fair Lady wasn’t written to trumpet his value system — even Debbi Peterson knows that. Interesting, then, that wingnut “philosopher” Hoff Sommers would choose to open a defense of male generosity with homoerotic lyrics sung by such an obvious cad.

Between the derb’s creepy reading of Lolita, the 50 top conservative rock songs (assuming you ignore 95% of all the lyrics and/or all of a band’s demonstrated politics, of course), and this brutual misinterpretation of a musical tale so simple a child grasps it, I think the right wingers are no longer allowed to participate in discussions of art.

And that isn’t even my point.

In the first half of her Manic Monday ramble on generosity, Ms. Hoff Sommers attempts to paint a fair picture of the generosity gap. She even debunks (well, admits that others debunked) a 1993 study that falsely demonstrated men give more than women:

In 1993, for example, researchers asked subjects to donate all or part of ten dollars to a common pool. Anything they kept was theirs, but anything placed in the pool would double in value and be divided among the group. Men were far more trusting and cooperative. In one version of the game, they gave 94 percent of their funds to the pool; females gave 72 percent.

But as Eckel and Grossman point out, the 1993 study and others like it were actually measuring risk-taking–not generosity.

After that, Ms. Hoff Sommers gets downright gushy over the female Eternal Flame for caregiving. She mentions the existence of “voluminous literature documenting women’s greater capacity for care and empathy,” and that, according to the Dept. of Labor, 32% of women volunteer. Men? 25%.

After highlighting the social contributions of women, though, Ms. Hoff Sommers attempts to cast the debate in a Different Light:

The authors [of the 1986 review article “Gender and Helping Behavior” in the Psychological Bulletin] note that while females tend to adopt nurturing and caring roles toward people they know, men excel at good deeds and acts of kindness involving strangers. If you should fall down in the subway, become stranded on the highway with a defective automobile, or need to be rescued from drowning or a fire, it is quite likely that the person who helps you will be male.
[...]
Of course, men’s greater physical strength, as well as the special risks strangers pose to women, help to explain why men are more likely to, say, pick up hitchhikers, help someone with a flat tire, or drag someone out of a truck stalled on a railroad crossing. But there is a large literature suggesting that men’s behavior is also shaped by notions of honor, gallantry, and chivalry. The great nineteenth-century psychologist William James said that for men “the world is a theater for heroism.”

The world may be a theater for heroism, but heroism isn’t merely rooted in the vague notions of “honor, gallantry, and chivalry.”

Most boys grow up playing adventure games or daydreaming about great feats, all of which end with him receiving a full meal of accolades complete with two scoops of glory. Interest in helping others is inherent in these fantasies, but there’s also a tremendous reward envisioned at the other end of some gambling feat of derring-do. We want to be superheroes and swashbucklers because the risks they take are thrilling, and taking them to help others also nets massive theoretical social profit.

The socially reinforced adoration and emulation of these heros amongst boys might help foster an appreciation for risk-taking and might also help explain the willingness to engage in a greater amount risky behavior during the debunked 1993 study. On the flip side, this exaltation of heroism’s risks and rewards (imagined or not) might explain its appeal more than pretending there’s some formal code of honor and chivalry still impressed upon strapping lads everywhere.

Of course, reading Ms. Hoff Sommers’ article, one would think only men have ever saved the day:

While it is undeniably true that fewer men than women enter the helping professions such as teaching, nursing, social work, or caring for children, it is also true that men predominate in the saving, rescuing, and defending vocations such as policemen, firefighters, and soldiers. Activists who work to resocialize men and boys seem to be unaware that there is a masculine style of generosity that is every bit as necessary to the well-being of society as the female style.

Frankly, I was at a loss to understand why she was writing this piece at all until I got to that last sentence. Turns out she fears the strawactivist stealing all our manliness and leaving us with a bunch of schoolmarms and no freedom fighters. Of course, she references no specific activists or any actual programs working to “resocialize” the man out of the boy. She appears to be carping about something that isn’t really happening. [Yeah, yeah, what else is new on the right, right?]

If I were to communicate with Ms. Hoff Sommers, I would probably write her a musical, since she seems to bow to the wisdom of even their most immature characters. In that musical, I would sing songs and dance dances about how no longer treating femininity as a disparaging aspect of one’s character would leave plenty of people around to get her cat out of a tree or racially profile her neighborhood for her safety.

Masculinity isn’t going anywhere, no matter how many people Walk Like an Egyptian. Ms. Hoff Sommers’ implication that we could ever condition all men into passive, risk-averse scaredy-cats is ludicrous. It also ignores how many women have fought against _their_ conditioning to take on the heroic roles that supposedly can only be filled by those raised like a manly man.

If she wants to protect the hero culture so badly, maybe Ms. Hoff Sommers should clamor for more women to be rewarded for taking the kinds of risky positions currently hoarded by the Boys Club. Presently, there’s plenty of discrimination and harrassment to go around for those brave enough to try. Ignoring the obvious, accepted systemic female mistreatment in heroic occupations as a (if not the) reason those fields are male-dominated is inexcusable.

The myth of the masculine hero oppresses. You don’t have to be a man to be brave, or to be attracted to the thrills and risks of heroism. To conflate bravery or the pursuit of risk with “masculine generosity” demonstrates a level of patriarchal corruption so deep I’m surprised Ms. Hoff Sommers doesn’t sweat men. Our society sticks women with the less-lauded grunt work of social work, nursing, and child care by ostracizing them from everything else, not because people with feminine qualities are inherently incapable of saving the day. In fact, given the willingness of so many women to take on those thankless roles (those of greater generosity due to even less reward), I daresay that if more believed they could wear a badge or tote a gun without being mistreated by her peers and superiors, it might not be too long before they outnumber the men.

As Eliza Doolittle says to Mrs. Higgins, “the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.” The same is true of the difference between a potential male hero and a potential female one. Until women choosing to act heroically are rewarded equally to men, what’s the incentive for oodles of women to take on even more risk, even more burden, to perform the same jobs? Until we embolden young women to believe they have every bit the same claim to the hero fantasies as a boy, how can we expect them all to buy into it?

Heroism’s generosity isn’t a man’s domain. The patriarchy just wants us to think so.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 6:59 am and is filed under Feminism, Mutterings Of The Disturbed, What Patriarchy?. 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.