Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Men Are The Better Communicators

One of many popular myths feminists and psuedo-scientists love to toss around is that women are better at communication than men. Amazing how the gender notorious for the phrase "I don't want to talk about it" can get away with claiming to be our betters in what man clearly is a master at.

Let's gleefully tear apart this moronic bit of propaganda:

TEST SCORES: Boys routinely outscore girls in the SAT verbal. Despite the increasingly hostile environment boys must suffer in school this has yet. The solution? That's obvious, when you are incompetent a level playing field isn't good enough, it must be slanted in your favor!

LITERATURE: Just for the sake of argument, let's ignore everything written up until 1950 when typewriters were available in the western world and quite affordable. Despite that, the overwhelming majority of authors are men. The majority of journalists are men. What few female writers that have appeared over the years have usually tackled the same subjects such as shopping, how to make themselves pretty and how much they loathe and despise men. For the record, there have been a few exceptions. Ayn Rand and Marie Shelley come to mind, but of course such women are snubbed by their own gender. Notice how often you see "author" and "feminist author" used interchangably among them.

ART: This is even worse than literature, though pop-culture has definately allowed for a small group of semi-talanted women to flourish largely on the coattails of their gender. However just with literature they will never produce a great master with anywhere near the regularity of men even if they somehow overcame the poor communication problem. Why? Because women can't bear being criticized and any artist will tell you that it goes with the trade. However I have found one perverse form of art where women have found a niche - the graphic arts. You know the people who tweak photos and throw together the ads that now paper every surface now. However this isn't because women have become marginally better at getting ideas across, it's because this field of 'art' is by comparison very regimented and formulaic.

ARCHITECTURE: Coming from three generations of architects and designers, I have no hesitation in including this. So without resorting to google or wikipedia - can you even name a female architect?

So why are women so miserably bad at getting an idea across? I would put forth the basic problem is that language in particular is built on conceptual foundations. Words have meanings and meanings are intended to be rigid concepts which is in direct opposition to the innate psyche of women. Women want the vague and amorphous, they want things to mean what they want them to mean and the result is they denude themselves of the very tools to get their point across.

They love to say there are "other ways" to communicate, body language being one of their favorites. However, this claim is at best bullshit, because unless you are proficient in sign language, odds are you are not going to do much communicating with your body. Though it does appear women are more capable of discerning cues from body language, this is more along the lines of how blind people have more acute hearing. By disdaining language they had to learn something else. However I would also point this out: lower animals are also more perceptive of body language, but how many books have they written?

1 comment:

taw said...

You name Ayn Rand as a good example of a female author? Even if we ignore her stupid ideology, her writing is just the most awful and painful thing I've ever read. I managed to finish one book only because I really wanted to find out what the whole fuss was about - it turned out to be about noting.

If you want female authors that men can enjoy try Ursula K. Le Guin or J. K. Rowling.