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Cosmo Claims Men “Lack” 12 Abilities
Cosmopolitan is at it again. Trying to mitigate their “Please him better!” terrible advice for insecure women with “But, it’s okay, you’re better than him!”
The “girl power whoo” attitude of their online article 12 Things Women Do Better Than Men annoys me because it tacitly marginalizes men without recognizing the full story. For each “fact” Cosmopolitan cites a study, because yanno, that’s the final authority on the men v. women debate. As a gender egalitarian, I say this is not helping feminism.
This junk list confirms what I’ve already known: The average Joe and Jane columnists suck suck suck at reading and interpreting scientific studies. (In this case, it’s Christie Griffin, who lists some of her favorite things on Twitter as “dresses” and “karma.”)
I’ll give them a few of the stereotypes. Women are cleaner*, eat more diet consciously, and live longer. They statistically make better lifestyle choices that are good for general health and longevity. Sure. It still doesn’t say much about happiness or other factors about that go into quality of life. This is where Cosmo’s list falls off the boat.
We Interview Better
A study at the University of Western Ontario says that women have higher anxiety about interviews, but prep and perform better.
But there’s no objective scale for “best” interview qualities. Here’s the school’s press release about it. The study was done by a doctoral student under a couple professors, but I can’t find it published in any journals, which makes me think it was a poorly-conducted or insignificant study. I have no idea what the methodology was or if more than one person was doing the judging.
In the professors’ previous work, interviewers were asked to rate the interviewees using a Relative Percentile Method that the professors themselves wrote. Nothing says ass-kissing your professor like citing their work as a reference in your own.
We Evolve Hotter
Men like to fuck hot women? No! News to me.
We Have Stronger Immune Systems
As a BioChem major who studied under a virologist, this immediately didn’t sound right.
The study is titled “Gender differences in expression of the human caspase-12 long variant determines susceptibility to Listeria monocytogenes infection.” It looked at the expression of a single human gene transferred into mice, and then assumes that this inflammation effect would translate to humans. Does that not ignore the fact that the Caspase-12 gene is just one component of a complex immune system? Have men evovled different adaptations for other kinds of infections or even other food-borne pathogens?
Cosmo makes a broad claim for a weak conclusion.
I have a personal anecdote for this one. My fake stock account at updown.com has a 15% return because I invested in safe companies like CVS/Caremark and Blizzard Entertainment. It’s still only a 15% return.
Yes, women are more risk averse in a lot of areas, but it can also prevent them from flirting with the great rewards that those risks can grant access to.
We Graduate College More Often
Here’s the big statistic that’s tossed around all time. It’s True.
But in the “real world” it doesn’t matter all that much because there’s still a disproportionate amount of women studying the humanities over the sciences and having trouble landing prestigious positions. We still get paid shitty, especially after age 35. The wage gap is smaller but still there for science and tech jobs.
If you want to talk about women in the workforce, those are the statsitics you want to talk about. Not gloss over the problems with Degree Pride, while ignoring the ridiculous amounts of debt caused by tuition inflation.
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I’m pretty sure the reader demographics of this magazine almost entirely consist of 14-year-old girls who don’t know where their clits are. And maybe a smaller number of 14-year-old boys who don’t know where the clit is.
Some months I want to relentlessly mock the entirety of Cosmopolitan, but there’s already a blog that does it remarkably well.
*Follow-up post about cleanliness: https://clantilyscad.com/2012/06/17/are-women-cleaner-than-men/
Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” Teaser Trailer Released
The film stars Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Christoph Waltz, and is scheduled to be released on December 25, 2012.
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The Atlatnic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates gives his thoughts:
It’s also really dangerous to get caught up in that narrative. The violence is seductive and can find you arguing along the same barren lines as those you allegedly oppose. It is not merely wrong to focus on the militarism of the Civil War because those who do so generally don’t want to talk about slavery. It is wrong because such a focus says that the only thing important about war are those who carry the guns.
Sorry, Ta-Nehesi, I couldn’t hear your political correctness over how awesome the music was.
Sheryl Sandberg’s Harvard Business School Class 2012 Commencement Speech: Communicate Better
“As you lead in this new world, you will not be able to rely on who you are or the degree you hold. You’ll have to rely on what you know. Your strength will not come from your place on some org chart, but from building trust and earning respect. You’re going to need talent, skill, and imagination and vision. But more than anything else, you’re going to need the ability to communicate authentically, to speak so that you inspire the people around you and to listen so that you continue to learn each and every day on the job.”
Neatly edited transcript at HuffPo.
As Facebook’s Chief Operations Officer, Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most prominent female business leaders today. She’s also a great speaker and a genuinely sweet person. At her alma matter, she addresses the challenges graduates will face in today’s competitive workforce.
Her commencement speech also briefly touches upon challenges faced specifically by women in the corporate jungle gym, an echo of her TED talk, “Why we have too few women leaders.”
A different kind of commencement speech than the one Neil Gaiman gave the UArt’s Class of 2012.
Noam Chomsky Describes the Social Significance of Occupy Wall Street
Video and full transcript at Democracy Now!
The Occupy movement spontaneously created something that doesn’t really exist in the country: communities of mutual support, cooperation, open spaces for discussion. They just developed a health system, a library, a common kitchen—just people doing things and helping each other. That’s very much missing. There is a massive propaganda—it’s been going on for a century, but picking up enormously—that you really shouldn’t care about anyone else, you should just care about yourself…
I can remember, as a kid in the ’30s, when the situation was objectively much worse. But then, my family was mostly unemployed working-class here in New York. But there was a sense of hopefulness, largely because of labor organizing, which not only provided benefits to the people involved, but also made them part of something in which we can work together. The term “solidarity” wasn’t just a vacuous term. And to rebuild that kind of thing, even if it’s in small pieces of the society, can become very important, can change the conception of how a society ought to function.
I said similar things 6 month ago about social cohesion but on a much more personal note in my “Self-Indulgent OWS 99% Post.”
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Are Women Cleaner than Men?
[This post is a spin-off from my Cosmo Claims Men “Lack” 12 Ablities post.]
Everyone seems to has a personal anecdote about the topic. Are women more, less, or equally as dirty when compared with men?
There’s tons of messy girls out there for demonstration. I’m one of them. Clothes all over my floor. Smell test if I’ve only worn an outfit once. Desk drawers open with the contents sprawled about on the table. My friend’s mom has a “messy room equilibrium” theory where each person has their own messy quotient before they’ll start cleaning, and I think mine is pretty high.
I’m messy. But I’m not gross. I think this is an important distinction in the debate.
The layer of fecal coliforms that I scrapped off the inside of my boyfriend’s toilet does not exist in mine. (Baby, in all your last-minute toilet scrubbings before I show up, you’ve forgotten to really get under the inside rim.) In college, I had to harass the boys on our coed floor to cover their meat with aluminum foil so it didn’t funk up our fridge.
In organic chem class, my regular partner was sick. I was paired with two other boys for the lab. When prepping, they dumped the test tubes in semi-soapy water and then pulled them out to dry. “Don’t you want to scrub those on the inside first?” I asked. “No, it’s good enough.” We finished first before all the other girls, but also got contamination-caused false positives in the lab results.
False positives, hah, I’m not even trying with the dirty puns. Anyway, those are my stories that form my prejudices about cleanliness.
Let’s looks at the science:
Bacteria
The study that Cosmo quotes found that researchers discovered that men had 10 to 20 percent more bacteria in their workspaces than women. Reasons the researchers hypothesized were that men were known from previous studies to wash their hands less, and they simply have a larger surface area on their bodies to shed germs off.Oh wait, here’s an infographic that says womens’ desks “have 3.5 times more bacteria.” Which one is right?
Well, an older study from 2007 that found that more women stored food in their desks than men, and that’s why there was more bacteria in the desks and on the keyboards. You know what? It doesn’t matter. I don’t even want to analyze the methodologies of the studies. We need bacteria anyway to build up immunity against more serious pathogens
You swab different people at different companies, and you’re going to find different results. It’s not a study that reproducible in a meaningful way. Just wash your hands when you scratch your ass or somebody else’s ass and you’ll be fine.
Hoarding
Despite the people that tend to pop on the TLC shows, men reportedly have slightly higher tendencies to become hoarders than women.
“Hoarding” is going to pop up under its own category in the DSM-V revision, but in my opinion, it’s just a different behavioral manifestation of OCD. OCD, of course, can go the other way with obsessive cleanliness. It’s hard to find gender stats on that particular behavior, but I’m sure there’s plenty of men on that side of spectrum as well. The Aviator, anyone?
Children
Children are just the incubi and succubi of viral plague. With parental tendencies to overuse Amoxicillin and Tamiflu on little Jimmy and Jane for every sniffle and then not finish the 10-14 day course (I’ve see this happen all the time in my line of work), it’s a recipe for breeding newly mutated forms of upper respiratory infection. Which the kids will pass around with the ball at recess and then bring home to mom and dad.
I’m still pretty sure women are still statistically the primary caregivers, so they are the next in line for exposure to the grossness. Even so, this is a cultural thing, not an innate tendency for sickness.
Personal Hygiene
This one is a clear win for the women in terms of bathing, washing clothes/sheets more often, and general fastidiousness to personal grooming.
Conclusion
Cleanliness and perceptions of cleanliness can vary so much by occupation, upbringing, and culture. Even from an evolutionary perspective of division of labor, it’s not like men never had to clean (weapons and temporary camp sites).
“Women are cleaner than men” is a reasonable argument. But like every argument that marginalizes the outliers and sets the stage for norms that divide the sexes, there’s no need to claim it makes them the better sex.