Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Psychologist to creative women: sorry, you're freaks

We came across this item, a long and convoluted presentation on the nature of men, which half reads as a reasoned attempt by someone missing an essential point trying to justify their own set of peccadilloes.

via this reaction to the speech: Psychologist to creative women: sorry, you're freaks, quoted here, and which starts off a discussion worthy of reading on it's own:

Only read Is There Anything Good About Men? if you want to be enraged.

Highlights for my purposes: pits black men against middle-class white women and judges the black men better -- oops, more creative -- because there is of course only one relevant dimension in creativity, and because we have such stunningly good records of what women created that didn't find a commercial marketplace. Black women -- they don't exist in this account, it turns out. Or at least there was just no opportunity to evaluate their (lack of) creativity. Women in general are just off having babies instead, for lack of interest in other things.

Maybe it's ordinary that a psychologist doesn't know history or feminist theory (and thus thinks that feminism is the ideology that promotes women and men as natural enemies, and that sexism and oppression cannot exist in structures but only in conscious mental decisions), but it's sure depressing.

This was a speech at the American Psychological Association.

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