I can’t describe how surprising this thesis was to me when I first read about it in a diversity anthology—I wasn’t emotional I guess, but I was very surprised—but now that I’ve acclimated to it, it’s somewhat hard to comment on. I mean, of course, because men have ruled the world, and since they go on to be considered more intelligent, if we’re honest about our beliefs, (as we almost can’t be, and still be normal!), then of course schools equip boys in a way that they don’t equip girls. And there’s a lot of evidence behind the thesis, you know.

I guess that the one point so far I’d comment on, being an apparently masculine person, is the doll. I mean, they’re right, the Barbie doll SHOULDN’T say, you know, math is hard, because they’re going down One Direction alley, you know, the path to madness. “The pedal’s down; my eyes are closed: no control.” And that’s their music, high-energy, no thought, no limits. It sounds attractive I guess in a way, but it’s…. Destructive. Destructively stupid.

And Barbie doesn’t say, But Rumi’s great, you know. Boys test better in, and are considered smarter in, most humanities, just to a lesser extent than with the sciences. Nobody tells boys they’ll have trouble with Shakespeare, you know; not that they should. But sometimes the trouble with this kind of feminist critique is sometimes that they value things just because they’re difficult to attain and less ‘attainable’ for women, whereas I think it’s not *quite* like that, you know. But Barbie says, you know, Math sucks; lipstick is great; and that’s One Direction—that’s madness.

But they say, and this is what I disagree with, that maybe if Ken said it too, it would be ok. And, you know, I don’t think most people need advanced math, you know. But we have this very two-headed civilization, where it’s like the upper head says, Only math; and the lower head says, Only bacon pudding, or whatever. I mean, they were trying to be good, to make a concession in a somewhat academic book, and that’s nice. Sometimes it is nice to have a little openness to vulnerability. But being stupid isn’t really the same as vulnerability, although I’m sure that that’s not what they meant, you know.

The kinda more central experience to the main thrust of the book was, I was reading this book in Barnes and Noble, about how a long time ago, according to a single life-span, female intelligence was so devalued that girls would literally get half the prize money or whatever for a school academic prize…. And then I saw this older woman, asking for help finding a word search. You know, those “books” of random letters—QWERTY, ASDFGH, whatever, and you have to find the ‘NORMAL’ and ‘TELEVISION’, and, you know—she was an adult! Just an adult that was taught to be less comfortable being mentally mature, since she was a woman.

And, you know, it’s also true that we fund schools in such a way that there aren’t enough teacher hours to distribute around so that all the kids can talk a lot, so that any kid who doesn’t have educated parents and/or isn’t a pushy little kid, you know—boys battles and dangerous things, right—gets ignored to some extent, and Many kids lose out, girls and boys.

And, you know, as soon as you do learn something, Society calls it dangerous. The conservatives in the 80s say, We’ve had five years of unlimited study into the effects of the 5,000 years of female oppression, and I think that’s QUITE long enough. You go back to drinking tea and eating crumpets now, or I’ll get the rifle I use to hunt bears with. 😾

…. I think from my experience that there’s a lot of nonsense about our insistence on always testing and assigning merit and worth, dividing people and evaluating them, both the strange problem of testing well, of being told that you’re objectively superior and better than other people, which gives no real happiness, no joy, but only a deadness inside and ensures that you need to lean on institutional and income strength to ‘succeed’, since your club can’t rely on the resources of those it excludes, who in mob rule might crush you, perhaps even inadvertently, having been assured that there is no bridge between me and thee, (which most people can probably only come out of by feeling some guilt for awhile, although that at least would be almost their first feelings)—and the obvious problem of lack of career advancement, of being made lower than and less than, at least implicitly, which could of course easily be constraining and diminishing, if you buy into the system. (Of course, I am not saying that I have experienced everything, but what I have I think I have in spite of things to a large extent, and I think at least that’s really true for everyone, though I suppose to different degrees.)

…. I was surprised with all the information about girls’ schools being sometimes better for girls. No guys to steal their thunder, so they all get to share it. Maybe coed schools don’t really train girls to grow up and be the competent companions of men, you know. “He talks; I listen.” But if they’re all girls, girls will talk. I don’t know how it would be in a boys’ school; from my (get my cane! get my walker! I’m an old man!) experience at that age, it seems like a lot of guys, like I was—to simplify—kinda skirt-chase in groups where there are girls, and get hyper-militaristic where there are just the guys, you know. (Even nerds play bloody video games, and the athletes, well.)

Maybe in the short term, it’s just important to directly help the girls by not bothering them, you know, because ultimately both males and females need balanced energy, but then the bulk of the guys are going to be against that in themselves and others if they don’t see the girls being competent and productive because they’ve been sidelined in school and silenced in life, you know.

It’s sad.

…. I guess that the counter-thing would be to say that, since maybe you can’t serve your own interests well enough with equal time, you shut up the girls, and if somebody doesn’t like it, you shut down their funding, and if that doesn’t work, you call them combative. You call them weird.

Though of course, these two aren’t bloody minded people at all, and, you know, it’s just that groups can make mistakes, just like individuals. I guess since most groups in recorded history have short-changed girls, we might even speak of groups of groups, you know. So many it can get combative like, This is normal. Like a much longer-lived (though to God a thousand years is as a day, and to the Earth, too, I guess, to geological time) version of the tyranny, where it’s like, what, what! Everybody likes the dictator.

We hang his picture in the school! 🥸

Update: I’m not as terrified or whatever of feminism as I was once, but I’m also not as feminist now as I became after that. I deleted the bell hooks book I read and “The Politics of Reality”; I did learn some things from them, but remembering them, I can’t feel grateful that I read them. I mean, we’re all adults, right; we all know that feminists aren’t really here for “all women”: they’re here for the girls who are intellectual and/or angry, preferably both. And you know, girls are often barred from that, and nobody’s happy all the time, and isn’t it fun to be a snob when it’s not like a gender club, right…. But wouldn’t life be more fun if we were happy? I wanted to like bell hooks, because I read, say, “The Black Women’s History of the United States”, right, and I know it must have felt good, right, to get it off your chest, right—but I mean, what’s the point trying to talk to someone who just unloads a long list of epithets at you, every time she opens her mouth? I mean…. For real. The politics of reality book opened strong, but it just got more and more delusional the longer it went on, until gay men are a threat to feminism; it’s hard not to worry about a girl like that, right…. So, I don’t know.

(continued) I mean, I get that you don’t write history about folksy Black laundry ladies and housewives; but the thing is, if you’re a post-Kantian intellectual, who knows that it is the fate of the human being to become a robot, although it was the revelation of the 60s & 70s that he was be an angry robot, right—then it’s your job to see yourself as the idealized you—I’m me if I’m perfect, and if you’re not being perfect, it’s not like me—and to see the other girl as just the worst thing that she ever seems to be, //because she just a bimbo, and not a true blue real-man woman//, you know….

And it’s not that I think that the common people are always good, but I think they often have a huge inferiority complex, and it’s like, Oh, I like Harry Potter and Danielle Steel: but if I were smart and a worthwhile person like you, I’d read Shakespeare…. ~There’s a sort of bloodiness to it, and some of it is on feminism IMO, and the super-exclusive inclusivity club, basically; and then bell hooks reacts to that situation by mocking the person stupid enough to waste thirty dollars on her…. book, you know.

But I thought that this was a good book. School teaches a sort of masculinity, and not usually a healthy or inclusive one. Schools don’t have to have nothing that self study doesn’t have, but I actually think it should be mostly about networking and communication, and little, if at all, about competition, hierarchy, and getting evaluated, you know. Because if you go to school for years and years, and that’s what you come away with…. Why? Why would a healthy person value that?

(shrugs) But maybe you don’t think that relevant, the way I do…. And of course, it’s not Just education. More girls go to college, because they try twice as hard to get three quarters as much, you know…. It’s a lot, it really can be.

…. (conclusion) And I don’t think that I need as many diversities books as I used to think I needed, but maybe I’ll replace those two books, eventually, with a book on a period in the history of sexuality.

if you were a "smart girl" who sacrificed being seen as a young woman in order to be seen as smart, or, if you weren't stupid but played the game to get better grades, this book just might bring you to tears. ( )