posted April 29, 2005 04:51 AM            

When Harvard President Larry Summers wondered aloud whether innate differences between the sexes might partially explain the dearth of female scientists, a female scientist from one of America’s most prestigious scientific universities, MIT, became so distraught at hearing truth told to dogma she rushed from the room to avoid vomiting. At that moment, Summers should have simply declared, “I guess that settles that.”

Instead he fell to his knees in a fit of remorse and self-flagellation, and he grovels there still, a disgraced actor in a drama of the retching and the wretched. Such is the state of modern academia, where truth is not only relative, it’s downright nauseating. Had Summers conjectured that innate differences might also help explain the even more pronounced dearth of black scientists, everyone in the room would have hurled in unison.

Had he gone further and inquired into the effects of feminization on Western society he would have unleashed pandemonium. But then he didn’t need to ask about that. He only had to wait a few hours for the answer to roost at his front door.

It’s no secret that women are a major force behind the repressive atmosphere on most campuses today, a product of both the neo-Marxist theorizing that drives feminism and the nature of female reasoning itself. Feminists are the most closed-minded, fascistic members of the university community, and women’s studies are the most doctrinaire. Speech codes, intimidation and political correctness are the direct progeny of the feminist mindset. Dashing from the room to avoid vomiting might be a peculiarly female form of censorship but its curbs free speech and open discussion quite nicely, as Summers discovered.

Because of ideology feminists are committed to the absurd dictum that gender differences are entirely socially constructed rather than innate. To feminists human society has been one long exercise in sexist discrimination with gender roles arbitrarily and unjustly forced upon females (males are always both reviled and privileged in feminist thinking). Yes, society has always produced the same gender roles (including disgruntled proto-feminists) since time immemorial without a single known exception, but that doesn’t imply any innateness. Males are the oppressors, females the oppressed. That’s all you need to know.

Though feminists get this simple-minded theorizing from males -- which should invalidate it by their own reasoning -- they believe they’re the vanguard of a new type, an ungendered female, one freed from male determinism. That they’ve always been around and that gender transformation is driven by demographics and not by them escapes their notice. They may be degreed and tenured today and possess a self-legitimizing vocabulary, but they’re archetypically female.

The personal is political, feminists say, and they conform to that rule with a vengeance (literally). Read the recent obituary of feminist pioneer Andrea Dworkin and try to separate the personal (and pathological) from her politics. Any thought of transcending the self, the personal, to obtain an objective and universalizing vision is anathema to feminist thinking (and beyond it, in any case). Psychology, not reason, empowers feminism.

According to feminists we’re all equal blank slates at birth. Thus if not for sexism a female society should be no different from one controlled by males (except for all the bad parts, of course). Female scientists would abound. Does anyone believe that? Would there be any female scientists at all without white males?

As with all Marxist fantasies the feminist analysis of the social order breeds unmitigated contempt for society, past and present, and for those who presume to speak for it -- that is, those who disagree with the victimhood orthodoxy in any way. Why should the oppressors have a right to speak at all? That only perpetuates the social injustice and bruises victims’ self-esteem. In reality, this leftist Manichaenism always has the same goals: to assert moral superiority over others, excuse perceived group shortcomings, instill guilt and extort special privileges.

Ironically, women know better than men that sexual differences are innate. They rear the species, after all (except for the many feminists and female careerists who remain childless, possibly explaining their ignorance of gender). Even as Harvard’s women were reaching for their barf bags research was being published in Nature revealing the extraordinary genetic difference between men and women. That difference is greater than the gap between humans and chimpanzees. (Give chimpanzees tenure, though, and watch that gap disappear.)

In the orgy of tearful recriminations and over-reactions that followed Summers’ closed-door remarks, the Boston Globe published an op-ed piece by author and management consultant Ronna Lichtenberg. She chastises Summers for being “too blue” but then cites a Cambridge University study that divides the sexes, Summerslike, into those with “systematizing skills” (males, blue) and those with “empathizing skills” (females, pink). Business needs more pink, she says (forgetting apparently that the pink is actually just a symptom of male sexist oppression).

This prompts Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom to remark in National Review that her piece “illustrates one of the most remarkable traits of contemporary feminism: its breath-taking ability to work both sides of the street, insisting that males and females are identical in every important way when the assertion serves their immediate end, and then switching without pause to the opposite view that women are fundamentally different from men when that serves the same end better.”

He’s right, but he’s taking a male perspective. For most women this double-sidedness is not hypocritical or even intentional. It’s simply how their logic works. It’s what Catherine Seipp refers to as “that typically female emotional-reaction-as-argument” logic, and every male on the planet is familiar with it.

Thus criticizing Summers while simultaneously quoting research that supports him is not contradictory and certainly not self-refuting. And running from a room in a fit of female hysteria because you can’t stomach even the suggestion that females think differently from males doesn’t even raise a hint in your mind that you might be confirming what you can’t bear listening to. Maxine Waters epitomized this thinking earlier this year when she proclaimed to a crowd of pro-choice demonstrators in Washington, “I have to march because my mother could not have an abortion,” perhaps the looniest remark ever made by a liberal. It was greeted with wild applause.

By its very nature there’s no reasoning with this logic, and that makes it dangerous. Where it ascends unchecked, as it has on college campuses, intolerance and demagoguery ascend with it. All dissent is deemed heretical and attacked with a ferocity that would have made Stalin proud. Free speech is always the first victim of feminist power.

In her op-ed piece, Lichtenberg asks “why do male attributes automatically seem to be worth more?” Harvard is why. Replacing rationality with empathy is a blueprint for social disaster. The alternative to an open, rational, blue society is a closed, irrational, pink one. Only in a blue society can you even talk about alternatives.

Open debate is under attack everywhere in America from this mindset, not just in the academy. But if this illiberalism cowers even the leaders of the very institutions dedicated to preserving free inquiry, what hope is there for the rest of society? Larry Summers should be fired not because he told the truth but because he failed to defend it when it was attacked. That kind of spinelessness from the president of Harvard is enough to make even a grown man sick. http://www.americandaily.com/article/7585

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