...[women's] brains permanently occluded by random emotions

"I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don't even know how many pairs of shoes I own."

Haha, right. She really doesn't need to try to convince anyone that she's a dumbass. I think that's pretty clear already.

What is this? April Fools' come early at the Post?

I couldn't make less sense than her if I tried.

When I first read it I was sure it had to be a parody of what's been going on in the corporate media lately. *sigh* Sadly it turns out it was just a copycat media outburst. Thank goodness I stopped getting the Post a year ago.

Did anyone else seen the response at MetaFilter?

http://www.metafilter.com/69532/does-this-woman-make-my-gender-look-stupid

"You get the feeling they were sitting around the break room saying things like 'I don't get it, what does the internet have that we don't? Oh wait, trolls! Trolls must be what make the internet popular!'"

posted by tkolar at 10:55 PM on March 1

"...

"I tried forumlating a response but I couldn't type anything coherently, all that is left is me slamming my head against my desk repeatdly."

posted by liquorice at 2:00 AM on March 2

"3-6 damage, liquorice. Unless you're not playing forumwarz."

posted by imperium at 2:09 AM on March 2

"If it's an Ikea desk it's only 1-4, with the pyramid die."

posted by Flashman at 2:22 AM on March 2

"Let me see if I can follow the rhetorical progression of this article here:

"1) Some women, somewhere, are doing something the author does not approve of.

"2) The author claims this means that all women are stupid.

"3) The author supports her thesis with dubious studies she does not understand, to the extent that she actually cites results that undercut her own points (e.g., according to a study she cites, women have slightly more minor traffic accidents and a massively lower amount of fatal traffic accidents -- about 60% fewer per passenger mile and an amazing 81% fewer as a measure of total traffic fatalities -- which she claims proves that women are poorer drivers) ...

"4) Thus proving she is stupid.

"5) See?

"I do not think she has proven what she thinks she has proven. She has amply demonstrated point 4, but not point 2."

posted by kyrademon at 3:07 AM on March 2

I don't know which is more pathetic about this Malibu Barbie ("Don't ask me, I'm just a girl! Teehee!"): that she thinks she'll get the right-wingers to like her by doing their homework for them like in high school... or that she thinks approval from that woman-loathing crowd is desireable to begin with?

p.s. my apologies for the link, now that I think about it :o

Wow. Just... wow.

I feel sick. Sick, sick, sick.

I know this is a "opinion article" is wrong on so many levels. On all levels, really.

But the fact that, just because I was born a woman, and in America, some people automatically consider me to be dumb (-er than men), abrasive, unworthy of affection, perhaps less qualified to be a "woman" than some grossly inaccurate caricature of Asian/European/"exotic" women, is overwhelming sometimes. I need a day off from the patriarchy. Let me know if anyone can locate the island of the Amazons so I can fly my invisible plane there ASAP.

I read this on Firedoglake this morning and have been boiling all morning with all my silly little female emotions. I'm sure I was not the only person who emails the link to the ladies at Feministing.

I sent the following to the Post:

"If the Washington Post is so concerned with expanding its female readership as to have assembled a task force with that very aim in mind, I'm wondering how such a self-hating, poorly researched and insulting article as Charlotte Allen's made it to print. It perpetuates debunked pseudoscience about male and female brains and relies almost entirely on flimsy anecdotal "evidence" of Ms. Allen's experiences.

I feel sorry for misogynistic women like Ms. Allen, and it really is a shame she thinks so little of her own gender; the contempt I feel is reserved solely for the staff at Washington Post responsible for printing this drivel. Then again, it's probably just because I'm so "occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial," being one of those feeble-brained women Ms. Allen complains about.

Regards,
Amber Aldrich"

I sent the following:

To the Editor-
I applaud your commitment to expanding the diversity of voices in the Outlook column. Might I suggest though, that a disclosure in the byline that "Charlotte Allen" is in fact the nom de plume of a 5th-grade boy would make the context of the piece much clearer.

Now, if she had written "Republican Women" everywhere she had written "women" maybe I could get on board--I do agree that there are quite a few stupid Republican Women, for that matter, Republicans. But of course the WaPo would never allow a piece to be written about some as general as "Republicans"--oh, wait, you mean "women" are just about the biggest group of people your allowed to indict upon the public altar of asshattery? We'll that theory is out.

Seriously, the WaPo and the New York Times for that matter needs to learn that publishing hate-speech has financial consequences. Women are the majority of readerships in many communities. Vote with your dollars, boycott and explain why we're boycotting.

I study 19th century racial and sexual ideologies, and I feel like the commentary around Obama's campaign is straight out of the 19th century right wing playbook: 'irrational mobs,' 'irrational mobs of screaming women,' 'irrational mobs of screaming women, socialists and people of color.'

They write these articles to get a rise out of women....and then laugh at all the comments they receive I am sure.

I wonder what would have happened if they put up a piece labeled "Black people aren't very bright."

I nominate this for the Special Edition Sunday: Shut the Fuck up Video. A new compliment to Friday Fuck you's

I nominate this for the Special Edition Sunday: Shut the Fuck up Video. A new compliment to Friday Fuck you's

Why is being emotional and intelligent always considered mutually exclusive?

I just reread Reading Lolita in Tehran and am a third of the way through Persepolis for the first time and was already feeling depressed by how many anecdotes of woman-hating in Iran during/after the Islamic revolution were familiar from my own life in the U.S.

Needless to say, this has not helped.

There is literally nothing that is not wrong with this article. I feel ill. You, Charlotte! Out of my gender.

This kind of shit is so stupid. In terms of intellectual capabilities the only difference between men and women is that there is an extremely minor (but technically statistically significant) between men's and women's spatial ability. Its the only demonstrable difference, and anyone who actually studies this kind of thing will note that the difference is too small to make an actual difference and that other variables make a much bigger difference. I don't know that I explained that right.

However, anyone else note that this was inspired by women's support of Obama?

I love the little points she throws in about how her husband eats over the stove and shuts all the curtains in their house - but only when she's not around! Cos ya gotta train your men, ladies! Ah, steriotypes.

Here's my letter! Kinda long...

To the Washington Post editor:

I regularly read the Post online and recently contemplated subscribing but your article “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?� featured on the front page ensures that I will certainly not subscribe nor will I visit your web site again.

In suggesting the women are weak, emotional, and unintelligent, Charlotte Allen relies on easily debunked “science� and personal opinion to present a truly offensive, stereotype-laden argument I usually associate with sexist propaganda.

In an attempt to express how this reads to me, let me switch “women� with “black people�. For example:

“I...wonder whether black people -- I should say, ‘we black people,’ of course -- aren't the weaker race after all. Or even the stupid race, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Black people "are only children of a larger growth," wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?�

or try:

“I'm not the only black person who's dumbfounded (as it were) by our race, or rather, as we prefer to put it, by other members of our race besides us. It's a frequent topic of lunch, phone and water-cooler conversations; even some civil-rights activists can't believe that there's this thing called "The Oprah Winfrey Show" or that 50 Cent actually sells CDs. A black friend of mine plans to write a horror novel titled "Office of Blacks," in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about watermelon.�

I assume that you would never consider publishing an opinion piece so full of racist tripe. That you are willing to give platform to such an offensive and outright misogynistic perspective is both sad for you as a “reputable� news source as well as genuinely offensive to every single female reader you once had.

Signed,
Dr. (name removed)

"Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's"

It has been shown time and FUCKING time again that this has no relation to intelligence on an individual level.

Any IQ test that leans heavily toward spatial abilities (there is actually only one very specific spatial ability, but I can't remember what its called off the top of my head) is going to favor men. This is a very minor difference, as I said before, is not going to affect science and math abilities on some grand sweeping level.

Her 'evolutionary explanations' are massive pop culture oversimplifications of actual archaeological work. This isn't the 1960's kids, no one who studies this stuff actually believes the 'man the hunter' myth anymore. (not that there aren't people who don't do sexist/racist studies) This stuff is complex, and under constant scrutiny. dammit that pisses me off.

This pisses me off because I know people out there believe this.

I am so angry about this that I can barely form sentences.

What an ignorant, insulting, offensive excuse for writing!

Why would the WaPo ever even think about printing this bullshit?

Just more proof the "liberal" media doesn't exist.

I don't get how in one moment, these anti-feminists will go on about evolutionary biology ("...hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear trajectories...") and turn around and say the world was built in a week?

Misspelled, that is the problem. She doesn't want to be a woman anymore. She wrongly, pathetically believes that if she spews enough Victorian bile about her 'fairer sex' that she will become an honorary MAN. That's what they have in common see *snark*, she and men, their misogyny. Sorry not gonna happen Charlotte. Take your two X chromosomes and deal with them like an adult.

"Women are really really stupid! To back this up, here are some opinions from women. Although you probably shouldn't pay attention to their opinions, because they're so stupid. Which proves my point."

... oh shit, I think my feeble little ladybrain just exploded.

"Women are really really stupid! To back this up, here are some opinions from women. Although you probably shouldn't pay attention to their opinions, because they're so stupid. Which proves my point."

... oh shit, I think my feeble little ladybrain just exploded.

...so feeble I apparently can't avoid double-posting. Sorry.

Here is my letter to the Washington Post:

"To the editors of the Washington Post:

I was appalled to hear of your recent article by Charlotte Allen in your March 2, 2008 paper entitled "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?"

I'll answer that question in a way that I hope those who work at your paper are intelligent enough to understand at some level: I'll never be dumb enough to ever purchase or subscribe to the Washington Post.

I'm not dumb enough to ever give any money to a newspaper that prints articles by "journalists" who cannot be bothered to obtain proper citations for the accusations and claims made within the article.

Nor am I dumb enough to lower my standards or self-respect to ever give a single penny to a newspaper that prints an article that is so disrespectful to me and my gender.

I'm not that dumb. In fact, I think the fact that you'll not see any money from me, ever, is pretty damned smart.

I imagine that your objective for printing this article was to tantalize and scandalize readers so much that they continued to read and purchase more newspapers.

How ironic that this article will have the exact opposite effect on me and probably most of the women with whom I share the news of your decision to publish such tripe.

Sincerely,

[ellestar]"

The fact that opinions like that are still "worthy" of publication in a major newspaper is the reason why I'm just plain amazed that Sen. Clinton is even a front runner for the nomination.

Wait, not knowing how many pairs of shoes I own is proof of my stupidity? And here I was, thinking it was proof of my successful career that allows me to buy myself all these great shoes. What a stupid girl I am.

Women are so stupid, it's not like they'll ever make a majority of a class at my med school.

.... oh, wait. :O

My letter...

Dear Deborah Howell,

The op/ed by Charlotte Allen in your March 2, 2008 edition entitled "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?" can easily be disproved.

I am, and many other women are, too smart to ever read such sexist tripe without laughing at it or ridiculing what is obvious drivel based on nothing scientific or objective, AND we’re much too smart to ever buy a single copy of or subscribe to The Washington Post, whose editors are immeasurably stupid for having published Allen’s misogynistic piffle.

Buh-bye.

Wait, not knowing how many pairs of shoes I own is proof of my stupidity? And here I was, thinking it was proof of my successful career that allows me to buy myself all these great shoes.

I thought it was a sign that I have more interesting things to be thinking about and that I don't give a flying fuck how many pairs of shoes I own. But then, I'm also very good at math, so what do I know?

I thought it was a sign that I have more interesting things to be thinking about and that I don't give a flying fuck how many pairs of shoes I own. But then, I'm also very good at math, so what do I know?

Really? Because I thought it was a sign I had so many more interesting things to count, like college degrees or books!

But wait just one minute, obviously I'm too stupid to even graduate fourth-grade, and all my books are cookbooks, and I'm much too busy preparing souffles and skirt steaks for my dutiful husband to count them!

*"Here's Agence France-Presse reporting on a rally for Sen. Barack Obama at the University of Maryland on Feb. 11: "He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female's cry of 'I love you, Obama!' with a reassuring 'I love you back.' " Women screamed? What was this, the Beatles tour of 1964? And when they weren't screaming, the fair-sex Obama fans who dominated the rally of 16,000 were saying things like: "Every time I hear him speak, I become more hopeful." Huh?"*

Ah, that's some good old fashioned family sexism.

I can't believe I just read that. No, I can't believe she wrote it. No way, I can't believe it ACTUALLY GOT IN THE PAPER.

SOMEONE hates all the women voting for Obama, apparently.

Excuse me, I need to go find the acid shower. Be back soon (blind).

I read this article on the WaPo late Saturday night and at first thought it was going to be a satiric article. But then as I read more (and wondered what the ultimate point was) I became very disappointed and angry. How dare Allen use selective statistics (which could be interpreted in other ways) to prove her weak case that women are "dim".

She's proud she can't count? I attribute that to laziness. Even monkeys can count.

Thanks to women like her, women like me who work in male-dominated technical fields continuously have to work twice as hard to prove we really do know what we're talking about.

I still believe women's worst enemy is other women.

For those of you want to understand why Clinton's campaign has failed so miserably, here's the part of the article you should be paying attention to.

[Then there's Clinton's nearly all-female staff, chosen for loyalty rather than, say, brains or political savvy. Clinton finally fired her daytime-soap-watching, self-styled "Latina queena" campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, known for burning through campaign money and for her open contempt for the "white boys" in the Clinton camp. But stupidly, she did it just in time to alienate the Hispanic voters she now desperately needs to win in Texas or Ohio to have any shot at the Democratic nomination.]

As someone who's had a chance to observe Obama's immediate staff firsthand, I can tell you that the people who work directly with Obama are top-notch. Obama's aides and advisers who follow him around the country from event to event are highly competent and on the ball every minute, and I think perhaps that is where the real advantage of his campaign lays. From what I've seen he's done a fantastic job of surrounding himself with the very best people available, a trait that bodes well for his presidency.

You know, Aaron, you didn't need to provide that gross quote (from a source who is, um, less than unbiased) to back up your belief that Obama's staff is awesome. Using that quote to bolster Obama's staff makes them appear LESS awesome.

Goddamn. Even I'm not that desperate to get published.

Wow, Aaron, trying to threadjack much?

Try to stay on topic. The issue is the publication of this astoundingly misogynistic article in a mainstream newspaper. If you'd like to discuss Clinton v. Obama, find a more appropriate venue.

Aaron, this is no place for you to be pushing your politics or candidate. And it's certainly no place for you to be going off on a topic that's completely unrelated to the post. In case you didn't read this is a thread on the washington post article. If you can't stay on subject here than you need to find another thread. Why should I, or anyone else here, have to remind you of something called respect and etiquette?

Regarding the article, I don't know how they got this published in the first place. After finding out about the the LA times editorial, it almost seems like the Washington post had to "one up" them on insulting and degrading women. Why is it that degrading women is apparently so fashionable to these hacks. Disgusting. I doubt the author even took the time to look up statistics on the accomplishments of women (see some statistics at the bottom about women earning degrees). I don't mean to make this a boys vs. girls thing, but girls DO graduate at higher rates than boys at ALL levels of education. Of course this doesn't mean that boys are stupider than girls or girls are stupider than boys, because I think there is more to intelligence than what is tested in school. But it proves the point that an argument for one sex being more intelligent than the other, is, well a stupid argument in and of itself. But still how can the author argue that women are so "stupid" when they so obviously excel at many things. The only conclusion I can make from this article is that it's another exercise in self-hatred. This author has no respect for women, and no respect for herself.

Some of the accomplishments of so called "stupid" women.

"For every 100 girls who graduate from high school 96 boys graduate"

"For every 100 women who earn a bachelors degree from college 73 men earn the same degree."

"For every 100 women who earn a masters degree from college 62 men earn the same degree. "

"For every 100 women who earn a doctorate from college 92 men earn the same degree. "

(The National Center for Education Statistics)

Okay, Aaron, I can see how your post is sort of related to the story, the editorial did talk about Obama and women's reaction to him. Maybe I hit a knee jerk reaction there with telling you, that you were totally off topic. I guess I just don't agree with your anecdotal evidence about his campaign staff and what that has to do with anything in the article. Nor do I think you should be assuming that everyone here thinks Hillary's campaign (as you say) "failed miserably" - when you said that, to me it sounded like you were pushing your ideas about a particular candidate (by making assumptions about what the rest of us feel about Clinton's campaign). I thought you were being a little presumptuous there. But perhaps you can elaborate and relate what you said to the article, specifically the issue of "women being stupider than men" as Charlotte says in the editorial. Do you agree? disagree? What does that have to do with Hillary's or Barak's campaign? Explain.

"I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies--I don't even know how many pairs of shoes I own."

So if I count my shoes, will that be a definitive proof of my intelligence? Will I get a Nobel Prize for counting my socks?

Also concerning driving:

"Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving."

Gay men get dragged in as well. No word yet on lesbians...

For the love of God, please tell me that article was a hoax. I can't believe that tripe like that actually got published.

Thanks Fiz, you got what I was thinking right on. A paper publishing this about race would risk being shut down.

But calling 50% of the population stupid, that's more than alright, because it's just an opinion! And it's a woman saying it.

It's just too much of a paradox for my feeble sensibilities. Woman expecting us to ...believe her when ... she says women are stupid ... but she's a woman and therefore stupid ...

I don't get it.

I just finished my letter to the editor and I canceled my subscription. Does anyone have a recommendation for a respectable national daily newspaper I can subscribe to in its place?

Seriously, can we vote her out of the gender?

Her and Ann Coulter, GONE.

A female friend of mine plans to write a horror novel titled "Office of Women," in which nothing ever gets done and everyone spends the day talking about Botox.

Amazing, how she knew exactly what goes on every day at my office! I mean, sure, it's a non-profit rape crisis centre for women, but talking about Botox is just so much more important than helping our clients. And it's just so darned hard to work! I mean, keeping our centre going for more than 30 years with little to no funding, managing to find and apply successfully for really, really complicated grants, making sure we're doing enough outreach into the community, recruiting and keeping all our (obviously, dumb) female volunteers and trying not to get shut down by our interfering government funders is really not worth the effort! Now that Charlotte has been kind enough to open my eyes, I'm going to tell my coworkers, and we'll probably just shut the place down and scurry home to cook dinner for our husbands.

Pfft. Botox indeed.

You know, if a magazine is touting it wants more female readers...the question that needs to be asked is; why then do they write post these articles?

What is in it for them.

Dear Washington Post,

I know it's been awhile since we really had a heart-to-heart, but I have to tell you now that it's over. This you-publishing, me-reading thing: I just can't handle it anymore. Your mean streak of mysogyny; your sensationalist pandering to hateful tripe; and your hypocritical and insulting assertions that you'll do better next time. I tried to make it work, but you broke my heart one too many times and I'm leaving for good. You may call me a "hysterical woman," but at least I'm sure I can do better than you.

Good-bye forever,
Jess

Well, her article proved that at least one woman out there is an idiot. And possibly two if a female editor approved that piece of trash.

What makes me so angry is her insistence that having emotions makes women inferior. That is her entire argument. I proudly chucked my hair brush at Bill Maher on TV last night in my emotional fury at his criticism of Hillary.

Why does this woman have to bring women down????

I have never written a letter to a newspaper before, but this article pissed me off so much that I was compelled to:
Dear Deborah Howell,
I was deeply offended by your recent article: "Why Do Women Act so Dumb?" (formerly "Women Aren't Very Bright") by Charlotte Allen. I am astonished that a newspaper of your stature would publish such a hateful, misinformed diatribe against half of your readership, even as an opinion piece. Allen's claims and supporting "evidence" have been debunked as myths long ago. As a member of the psychological community, I can tell you that no respectable psychologist would regard the "facts" about men's and women's brains as evidence that women are less intelligent that men. Her use of evidence not only demonstrates her limited understanding of science, she also selectively ignores both the ample scientific and anecdotal evidence that contradicts her points. I could refute her claims one by one, but others have already done this work for me. Her misogynistic arguments about women have been around for centuries, and they are tired, trite, and unoriginal. Although I am confident that I am a highly intelligent woman, I do admit that I fail to understand why a national publication would publish something so offensive and unoriginal.
Changing the title of the article did nothing to placate those of us who were offended and incensed by the publication of Allen's opinion piece. I strongly recommend that the Washington Post issue an apology to its readers and retract the article. Even if you do not value the equality of women, surely you do value the money you will lose if you do to take action to rectify this offense.
Sincerely,
[Name removed]

Here's my letter to Deborah Howell, and I wrote a variation of it to the editors:
Dear Ms. Howell --

I'm trying to be as polite as I can, but your newspaper is making it awfully hard. Was this supposed to be a joke? Am I just too dumb to realize I've been punked? Because if this had been written about any other group, heads would be rolling right now.

Ms. Howell -- how do YOU feel about this? How do the other women at the Post feel about it? The level of misogyny in the mainstream media these days (which appears to be surfacing because Hillary Clinton is running for President) is absolutely amazing to me. Just because a woman wrote it is no excuse. There have been plenty of self-hating members of other social groups as well, and that does not make screeds like this A-OK. You have problems attracting younger women readers? Try reading your own content, and maybe (if you had a penis) you could figure out why.

Ok, I'm going to have to go rest now... all this intellectual activity is making me faint. I hope my law firm clients don't catch on to me! God forbid they realize that I'm missing something under my carefully tailored pantsuits! In the meanwhile, I would appreciate an explanation as to how this column came to be printed in the Post, and what the Post is going to do about it.

I was pretty astounded reading the piece yesterday, but knew I could count on some critiques...

"A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women."

What's "even though" about it? It's per million miles driven.

Men getting more driving experience than women might explain the whole result.

I just sent a letter to the ombudsman. Basically expressing my outrage and further outrage of them throwing this thing back on women by saying it was tongue in cheek and that we can't take a joke. It's BS and I said as much, I also demanded an apology and said I would never be back to read anything on their website, nor will I ever buy one of their papers again. I won't bother to post my whole letter here, it's a bit long - I think that the editors have probably been bombarded with letters, which is a very good thing. Maybe they will finally issue an apology, maybe they will finally admit how wrong they were.

In my letter I also got into the fact that the editors were wrong in approving this op-ed and how disgusting it is that most newspapers have a culture of "white-male-boys-club" in their news rooms. Thus, I'm not surprised that an editorial like this would have gotten past that boys club, they probably even justified it by saying "oh, well it's written by a women, so it must be okay". As if being a women somehow makes saying misogynistic and sexist statements okay. I don't know if that's exactly what happened but I'm sure having a boys-club, frat-boy culture in the news room probably had something to do with it. Not that's it's an excuse at all, because they most definitely need to apologize.

I've read that study, Fred. It is indeed a large part of the result.

See, when you break it out by age cohort, the issue is that young women are much better drivers than men, middle-aged women and men are equal, and elderly women are much worse drivers than men. The study was done in 1998. There are two obvious explanations for the "elderly women can't drive" phenomenon:

- Elderly women grew up in an age when men were expected to drive. They simply didn't learn to drive as young as the men did, or they haven't clocked nearly as many driving hours. Many may have started driving for the first time in years after their husband died. Which leads to my second point:

- There are more elderly women than there are elderly men, and elderly *people* are bad drivers. Depending on how they analyzed the data, they may have failed to account for the fact that in the sample of All Women, there are more elderly people than there are in the sample of All Men, and the presence of elderly people will drag down the average.

Really, I am sickened by the right wing glomming onto this study and passing it around lately. Supposedly they believe in the free market and the skill of corporations, right? So how do they explain, if women are such bad drivers, why men pay up to six times as much in car insurance *just* for being male? Where I grew up in the 80's in upstate New York, the stereotype of "boys drive girls" was reversed when I was a teen because no parents wanted to pay for a teen boy's car insurance. Teen boys routinely weren't allowed to get their licenses until they were 18 because their parents couldn't pay the outrageous teen boy premiums. By right-winger belief in the infallibility of corporations, how could this possibly square with men being better drivers?

The truth is, of course, women are better drivers. When you take people who are equally inexperienced, eg, teens, and compare them, male teens are so much worse than female teens they can barely even be compared. Since our culture has this absurd belief that men are better drivers, and we do our best to make women insecure about everything, over time men clock more driving hours than women. This brings them up to *equality*. The people who drive 74% more of the time are *equal* to the people who don't, until they all get old. I mean, if someone practices a skill 74% more than you but you're as good at it, doesn't that mean by definition you have more natural talent? In fact, if someone practices a skill 74% more than you but are only very slightly better at it (difference between 5.1 accidents per million miles and 5.7 accidents per million miles is much less than 74%), doesn't that *still* say that you have more natural talent?

Mind you, I don't believe that female superiority in driving skill is necessarily biological. I believe that male ego and pride, which are artificially pumped up to ridiculous heights by the patriarchy, encourages men to engage in really unsafe driving behaviors and extreme recklessness. However, I *do* think the difference between teen boys and teen girls *is* biological, due to differential maturation rate. Basically, a 16-year-old girl has the brain of an 18-year-old boy. However, the curves would match a lot faster if boys weren't socially encouraged to be irresponsible and immature -- insurance rates are much lower for married young men than unmarried young men, not because there's some magic about getting married that makes a man good at driving, but because whether he's willing to make a commitment is the only proxy they can get from the data they have to suggest how mature a young man is. I think that training and effort and a serious attempt to tackle male entitlement and how it manifests in issues like road rage could do a lot to save our boys from thousands of needless deaths on the road, not to mention the people they kill when they go. But it's gonna be hard to seriously talk about disastrous male driving and what we can do to solve it when we're *still* on this false bullshit about women being the worse drivers.

Dear Washington Post Editorial Staff:

As an intelligent woman, I tried not to let Charlotte Allen’s pathetic opinion piece (“We Scream, We Swoon, How Dumb Can We Get?�) bait me into a response. However, I think it is important that you hear from numerous and diverse voices about how offensive her viewpoint is.

I support the First Amendment and I believe in engaging with ideas that are not my own. But it is beneath the dignity of a reputable paper to print something that can fairly be characterized as misogynist, degrading, prejudiced, and yes, dim. In my eyes, and many others, the Washington Post is no longer a reputable paper.

Some readers have no doubt refuted Ms. Allen’s weak justifications line by line. Others probably reminded you how tasteless that shoe looks on the other foot: imagine a similar piece on blacks, Hispanics, or Jews. No matter. I have cancelled my subscription, advised my parents, aunt and uncle to do the same, and will no longer visit your website.

I read this article; and I have to say; I am SOOO sick of bad science "facts" that women are worse than men at spatial tasks. What a load of crap. I am a visual effects artist, and I work with a lot of 3D elements. Not only am I pretty effing great at my job, I often have to fix bad 3D from my male colleagues.

However, due to these stupid stereotypes that get bandied around over and over and over again; I often come up against the prejudice that I don't really understand 3D space as well as the men do.

Gods. I am so sick of this whole boys vs girls, girls vs boys, boys vs boys, girls vs girls bullshit. We are ALL in this together, MEN AND WOMEN to fight ignorance, misogyny, misandry, violence and hate. It mean, nothing saddens me more than one group shit-talking another. Women should love each other. Women should love men. Men should love women. men should love men.