Knowing When to Shut the Hell Up.

A good rule to follow if you want to avoid getting caught out there having said shit that you haven’t much considered is to keep quiet on those things. Like how someone who is a newbie to football should probably refrain from offering up an opinion on revamping the 3-4.

So it takes a special kind of hubris to offer up a piece that says you haven’t thought much about X and then decide to get your bloviation on anyway.

Here’s a textbook example, via Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry.

I don’t know about anyone else, but ever since I got married, I think a lot about women, and the role women play in society. Because of my wife, of course, but most importantly, because of the daughters I will one day (inch’Allah) have.

Every time I think about women, or “women’s issues”, I think about my daughters.

We lived for centuries in a world where technology and culture limited women’s possibilities. But sadly today, in the West, the most limiting factor in women’s economic fortunes is women themselves. For example, women without children have the same salaries as their male counterparts.

The idea that my daughters might, for just one second in their life, think that their potential is less than that of a man, that their horizons might be limited, fills me with a mixture of pain, sadness and fury.

Shirky’s post addresses this by calling on women to level the playing field with men. What I liked most about it is that it’s pragmatic. It doesn’t put forward a grand theory of gender backed by partial studies in neurology or genetics or psychology or cognition or astrology. It simply draws simple lessons from everyday observations: women don’t do nearly as much as men to advance themselves, and they should.

So yes, actually, women need to man up. You don’t show up with a knife for a gunfight.

And I intend to equip my daughters with rocket launchers.

The condescension here is first-class. Women, you see, are too silly to aggressively advocate for their own interests, which is why they’re paid less and passed over for promotions! Why, if women would just man up, they could achieve economic parity with men in no time!

Emmanuel-Gobry writes that he wants to arm his hypothetical daughters with rocket launchers (I’ll leave the gender semiotics for someone else to dissect) but that assumes a world in which his daughters aren’t penalized as shrill harpies for doing so “the way a man would.”

It also assumes a world in which women and men don’t face different consequences for similar life choices. As long as women continue to bear the major responsibilities of child-rearing — disparities ironically re-enforced by workplace policies  like maternity leave that are  generally not extended to fathers — then the decision to start a family will have fewer professional repercussions for men.

This post, and the Clay Shirkey post that started it all, both ignore another real truth. Both writers bizarrely posit that powerful men earned their executive offices and salaries because they were cutthroat. But to the extent that’s even true, those men are being rewarded for that kind of behavior by other men who are already in power and see those traits as masculine.

Emmanuel-Gobry thinks that because he hasn’t seen sufficient drive among women in the workplace it must not exist, that women in the main are less motivated. The less arrogant take would be that his experiences are too limited and anecdotal to draw conclusions about a  broad swath of people whose diverse experiences he admits he’s never really considered. I’m getting really sick of this Friedersdorfian, earnest-but-obviously-flawed -assertions-based-on-observations-made-from-my-townhouse-apartment-window schtick that seems to be all the rage among young conservative “cultural critics” because their nonsense  is cloaked in the fabric of “reasonableness.” (See: Douthat, Ross.)

Sometimes you really just got to know when to shut the hell up.

G.D.

G.D.

Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
G.D.
  • Awesome. Erm, paranthetically…”bloviation”? (I mean, I like it, but don’t think I get it.)

    • hmmm. what’s wrong with ‘bloviation’?

      • Absolutely nothing, I just don’t know what the word combo is. *scratching head*

        • you mean ‘getting your bloviation on’?

          • Yup! Word combo = “blog” + “motivation”? Bear with me on this one, sometimes I’m slow…

            • ooooh. i gotcha.

              http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bloviate

              Main Entry: blo·vi·ate
              Pronunciation: \ˈblō-vē-ˌāt\
              Function: intransitive verb
              Inflected Form(s): blo·vi·at·ed; blo·vi·at·ing
              Etymology: perhaps irregular from 1blow
              Date: circa 1879

              : to speak or write verbosely and windily

              • Thanks, G.D.!

              • de nada, mi hermana.

  • Lisa

    Wow. What a tool this guy is. He doesn’t even have his facts straight, women without children don’t make the same money as men do. Where did he pull that from? His butt? And yes, he does seem a lot like Ross Douthat, I keep hearing people refer to him like he is some bright shining star and I’ve read a few of his pieces but to me he often comes across as clueless, vapid, and pretending to be “reasonable” when he is actually very firmly pressing a specific right wing agenda but is just saying it more “nicely.” Maybe clueless is the wrong word, he is either naive or he knows exactly what he is talking about but tries to obfuscate it by pretending to be reasonable. I’m to the point that I cringe when I hear his name.

  • Seth in LA

    Besides PE-G saying that women without children make as much money as men do, which as Lisa above says is certainly false, he also uses it as a bizarre example: “But sadly today, in the West, the most limiting factor in women’s economic fortunes is women themselves. For example, women without children have the same salaries as their male counterparts.” If I understand him here, he is using a woman’s decision to have children as an example of (and his only example of) a female behavior that limits women’s economic fortunes.

    The Shirkey piece, while celebrating the ruthlessness of men, also seems to promote above all, men’s ability to lie, or at least skirt the truth for their own benefit as the key to success. If only women could lie as well as men, they would be more successful too.

    Does anybody believe this to be true?

  • I feel sorry for his daughters. What’s going to happen when they grow up and start to feel like nothing they do is ever good enough (read: aggressive enough)? Let alone the fact that aggressive women are generally seen as cold-hearted bitches. I don’t envy them, because if he succeeds in giving them “rocket launchers” they’re going to have a very tough time managing relationships inside and outside the workplace.

  • I think there is data, actually, that single, childless women earn the equivalent or more than their male peers in some industries. I’ve seen some from a sociologist from Queens in the NYT concerning salaries in NYC. Andrew Beveridge.

    There’s also a lot of research on the marriage and motherhood penalties for working women. And I think men become more valued in the workplace once they become “providers”.

  • Word. I hate people who make assertions based on personal experience and then pretend that they are universal. There is a room for that kind of writing, but too many conservative commentators these days rely entirely on it. I blame the fact that they all came up blogging instead of reporting.

    • quadmoniker

      hear hear. if you want to use personal examples to illustrate a problem that you have facts to support, or to write about a purely personal thing, then fine. but you can’t say, hey, because i have a wife now i think this is true of women.