KEY POINTS:
Women are in a bad way. We are still made scapegoats and traduced and our true natures denied. Two female polemicists have published books explaining why, although they have come to very different, arguably opposing, conclusions. One is also very much better than the other.
Susan Pinker is a Canadian developmental psychologist and newspaper columnist perplexed that, after decades of feminism, there's still a pay gap and so few women run major corporations. Girls do better at school and, at least in North America, which is where The Sexual Paradox is really concerned with, enter university in greater numbers.
Pinker prods and pokes at this paradox by considering the successful careers of men previously diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger's and by interviewing formerly high-achieving women who have dropped out of corporate life.
The conclusion she reaches, never mind Simone de Beauvoir's liberating message all those years ago, is that biology is destiny.
"People are programmed," she writes at one point. Women are "built for comfort, not speed". Testosterone makes the male of the species more vulnerable, but also more risk-taking. Oxytocin makes women more empathetic.
The trouble with this evolutionary psychobabble is that while it may get us a little way along the road to understanding, it strands us miles from any useful destination.
There may well be useful conclusions to be drawn from this. But the one Pinker draws, that women are naturally more empathetic, is a huge and unsubstantiated leap.
Pinker first sets up what is probably a false opposition (public success and empathy are not in fact mutually exclusive) and then wholly fails to account for high-profile women such as Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton or all the women who are running companies and law firms.
Neither, I suspect, could she explain the pioneer-era women profiled in Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream, who bravely and often viciously fought Native Americans after their menfolk had failed them, usually by running away. These women, Faludi argues, have been airbrushed out of the founding-of-America myth, just as a similar airbrushing is now distorting our accounts of 9/11.
The attacks on the Twin Towers left America feeling exposed, Faludi says; shocked at the utter failure of the state to provide protection, many Americans felt helpless and humiliated.
The media responded, as she painstakingly demonstrates, by re-framing the attacks and their aftermath as an atavistic myth of virile maleness and female vulnerability.
In reality, men and women were equally powerless that September morning.
But in the retelling, the firefighters (increasingly referred to as firemen) became heroes. The fact that many of them felt uncomfortable with this designation was ignored, as was the shocking knowledge that many fewer would have died had they had radios that worked. Rescue pictures almost invariably showed women being carried out of the World Trade Centre, even though three times as many men were in the buildings and three times as many died. Any women who attempted to present a more nuanced view (Susan Sontag, Arundhati Roy and Barbara Kingsolver in particular) were demonised and accused of emasculating America.
Faludi's book is largely about the media and one is left to speculate about the impact of the rhetoric on real lives. Condoleezza Rice does get a mention, as does Hillary Clinton, but to read this book without knowing about them, you might conclude it would be impossible for a mother to run for President or a single woman to be Secretary of State. All the same, it's a book that needed writing, because you have to understand the spin to makes sense of the substance that follows. And to counter it.
Here lies the final, but maybe most important distinction between Pinker and Faludi. The latter offers up her polemic as a challenge to the world to improve. By recognising absurd representations of men and women, she implies, we acquire the power to prevent them. Pinker, on the other hand, makes no plea for a more equitable accommodation of her supposed gender differences. And the fact she doesn't address the deterministic, regressive implications of her message makes me suspect that she must be complicit in them.
- OBSERVER
