Macedonian Sheep Dogs

November 30, 2005

A month ago there was yet another article in the New York times that got me really angry, but because I"ve been so busy with getting ready for the MINERvA Director's Review (which isn't even until December 13!) I haven't had the energy to write about it.  A wise friend told me this afternoon that these blogs don't have to be life-shattering, perfect, or planned out, so here goes...

The article I would have written about, had I the energy, was by Maureen Dowd (whose OP-Ed columns I usually enjoy), and was called What's a Modern Girl to Do? .  It was a long article which mostly describes trends which to me would signal the death of feminism.  Although many parts of the article made me cringe, the part that somehow stayed with me for the past month was the statement that intelligence in women is a turnoff to men, and that women should really "dumb down" if they want to catch a man.  I remember feeling this vibe when I was in high school, but then finding it blissfully absent when I got to college.  I read this article and thought that either I am really divorced from reality these days, or Maureen Dowd is, and since she's the journalist then maybe I"m the one who is without a clue. 

Luckily there are folks out there who can pull apart Maureen Dowd's work much more effecitvely (and in a much more public forum) than I can, and when I got the Nation a week after the original article by Dowd came out, I felt much better.  True to form, Katha Pollitt offered a scathing rebuttal in The World According to Dowd.  She claims that although things are certainly far from the way they should be in the arena of gender equality, we've come a long way and that Dowd's article tends to reinforce and legitimize the inequities rather than describe the flaws that bring them about.  Furthermore, she points out that women have made great advances and that we are not in fact going backwards.   

"How many young women flash their breasts for the camera or flog themselves academically all the way to the Ivy League merely to snag a rich husband?  More than minor in women's studies, volunteer for rape-crisis hotlines, have black-belts in karate or PhDs in physics or raise Macedonian sheep-dogs?....By many measures young women today are far more independent than we were..."

I'll admit it here: I was proud to be in such fine company, although somehow I'm guessing there are more women getting PhD's in physics than there are raising Macedonian sheepdogs.   

Comments

[hugkhs]

Being a single female, in my late 20s, living in NY, and although not a physicist but working in a scientific field, I have to say that I relate a lot more to Dowd's article than Pollitt's.
There's a lot I could write about, but I'll just remark on your comment on women "dumbing down" their intelligence. When I go out and meet a new guy and we get to that inevitable part of the conversation where we talk about jobs, the first thing out of every guys mouth after telling them what I do has been, "Wow, really?" And then they look at me like I have 5 heads. If I didn't have a sterotypically "smart" job, I'd think I'd be in a much different place right now with regards to dating/etc.

[debbie]

Dear Hugkhs,

Thanks for writing--actually, you are not the first woman to tell me I am living in a fantasy world as far as who's telling the more accurate story, Dowd or Pollitt (at least on the "intelligence is not sexy" front). The whole thing seems very anti-Darwinian to me...

Wishing I had a more cheery response,
Debbie