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Amanda can’t fisk this, but I bet I can (although I admit to being less sure when I got to the bottom of the page and saw the link to page 2).

Long story short: Women, why did we ever give them the vote?

Long story longer: Charlotte Adam just can not stop typing when it comes to talking about women, and how much they suck. I can’t imagine how she managed to get that many words onto the screen on this topic, seeing as she must have been stopping frequently to look at her own hands and/or faint reflection in computer screen and shudder or sob quietly for at least a few seconds. Maybe it was cathartic, and when she finally put the final period on the final sentence, she sighed a great sigh of relief, knowing that for a little while at least she was no longer unclean.

Charlotte has noticed that Obamamania has swept the nation, with girls going wild over the man who could be our sexiest president since Kennedy. And like our first Catholic president, our first black president can work an audience like no one’s business.

“He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female’s cry of ‘I love you, Obama!’ with a reassuring ‘I love you back.’ ” Women screamed? What was this, the Beatles tour of 1964? And when they weren’t screaming, the fair-sex Obama fans who dominated the rally of 16,000 were saying things like: “Every time I hear him speak, I become more hopeful.” Huh?

Let me help you deconstruct that last sentence, Charlotte: Whenever this one woman listens to Obama’s speeches, she feels more of an emotion called hope. You’re probably unfamiliar with this feeling, having been dead inside ever since that traumatic ceremony that marked your entry into “honorary guy” status, but basically it means that Obama’s message makes this woman feel excited by the possibility that he can make the future better than the present. The more Obama speaks, the greater this feeling becomes in her heart. Probably, it’s because he outlines policies that, if enacted, she feels would make her life and the lives of others better.

Or, it’s because she’s a stupid irrational cuntbag who poses a danger to herself and those around her merely by existing. Your call.

I can’t help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women — I should say, “we women,” of course — aren’t the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women “are only children of a larger growth,” wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?…Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true.

Women like bad television and sappy media, self-help books and romance stories; Hillary Clinton’s staff is a bunch of man-hating Amazon dykes and she herself isn’t even smart enough to fire them at the right time. Also, goddam are women neurotic.

Of course, not all women do these things, either — although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn’t some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.

Men don’t call in sick when they’re really just taking a personal day, men aren’t hypochondriacs, men like only good television and serious books, and men don’t pussyfoot around with soft-core porn in romance novel form, no sir, they like it hard, hot and violent. (or was Charlotte’s soft-core porn remark not supposed to remind us who is driving the hard-core porn market?) Men are so much better than women it’s not even funny. There’s probably a biological, immutable basis to this, tied to childbirth because there’s no way that women can do something men can’t without a cost being extracted somehow by benevolent natural forces. Oh, and gay men count as women.

Also, by “several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true” Charlotte actually means “by cherry-picking studies, or even results within studies, and fluffing numbers and deciding what does and does not matter in a way that favors one group over another, you can basically show anything you want.” For example, saying “women are worse drivers than men” hinges on the idea that it is absolute numbers of accidents, and not the severity of the accident that matters. Insurance companies often beg to differ, which is why young women get much better rates than young men, even though young drivers in general are accident machines. Oh, to live in a world where women generate 5.7 accidents per million miles to men’s 5.1 per million and every single one of those were silly boys and girls scratching cars in parking lots and getting into fender-benders, because that would be a world in which 0.6 accidents per million friggin’ miles actually matters. (Charlotte is also apparantly not familiar with the concept of normalization, but that’s because her silly girl brain can’t handle statistics).

The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents

–these being, of course, equivalent statements –

is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence.

Um, no. Please read the Mismeasure of Woman for the zany history of neuroscience ‘proving’ that women have inferior brains. It is actually quite funny.

While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.

Which people like Charlotte love to point out, although it has absolutely nothing to do with most people’s everyday lives. And, real quick Char, proportional to what? is it M = A*W, where W = # of female geniuses and M = # of male geniuses and A is some constant of proportionality determined experimentally, or were you just trying to put a big word there you didn’t need to sound as smart as a guy? Anyway, the fact that some tiny number of men are super-smart doesn’t make the men you’re likely to deal with every day smarter than you.

Let’s handle the requisite post-feminist quasi-apology in list form. I have numbered Allen’s sentences for convenience.

(1)I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can’t add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). (2)I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own. (3)I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men. (An evolutionary just-so story explains this facility of ours: (4)Back in hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear trajectories, while women were the gatherers and needed to remember where the berries were.) (5)I don’t mind recognizing and accepting that the women in history I admire most — Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher — were brilliant outliers.

(1) Could you be less sincere, or if you are sincere, less self aware you privileged ass?
(2) Probably too many. I too, have lost count, and I own so many more shoes and clothes and cosmetics than my male roommate. But before you castigate me for being frivolous and him for being fiscally reasonable, let’s compare DVD and video game collections.
(3) Shhh! Don’t let the peons know it’s all a scam! I like my graduate assistant stipend! If they find out that all you need to be an academic is superior intellectual skills, it’s all over!
(4) Jesus fucking Christ, is it time for another round of evolutionary psychology bingo?
(5) However, Socrates, Newton, Hobbes, Einstein, and Hawking are all par for the course in Penis-land, where all the men are above average.

The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can do their jobs and do them well, and I don’t think anyone should put obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.

Read: “Just because women are moving into male-dominated fields in slowly increasing numbers is no reason to think they’ll ever achieve parity in any of them, provided that we can weigh them down with children and a disproportionate share of the child-care for the foreseeable future. Gender stereotypes will be crucial in the fight to keep women at home with the kids.”

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.

I am personally offended by this statement, seeing as I do not naturally excel at tenderness toward children and men. In fact, as far back as I can remember, children have instinctively cried when placed into my arms; they are right to do so: I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to kids. My attempts at making a house a home, you know, cooking food or having furniture that matches, is seen by my roommates as a girly affectation not worth humoring. Hell, I can’t even get the one to admit there is a clear, tactile distinction between dishrags and washcloths. So thanks, but no thanks, I’ll keep the higher education and the industry job and you can have the making a house a home.

Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

Speak for yourself, girly-girl. That sounds like a circle of hell to me.