Women Have Come a Long Way

I'm retaking a class from 10 years ago this semester. The class's official title is "The Psychology of Gender." And, although the teacher isn't very good, and the book is pretty boring, there was one quotation in the book that was pretty funny. Now, before I share it here's the disclaimer...


I in no way support the allegations made in this quotation, I only share it so that I can scoff (along with my equals of the gentler sex) at the egregious claims made by this silly ignorant Frenchman.

Anyway, there was this chap back in 1879 named Gustav Lebon...this is what he had to say....

"In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed of male brains...All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women...recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt, there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads."

Crazy! This guy must have been very lonely. Also, unless he was very courageous, he probably made sure that comment was published after his death. If not, it's possible that some intelligent women (aka gorilla like monstrosities) tore him apart.

I love the irony in how he declaims how women think while writing (and by extension reasoning) so poorly. For example, the guy writes that women excel in fickleness and inconstancy...when inconstancy is an extension of fickleness, and then he lists not thinking and not being logical and incapacity to reason...and once again logic is an extension of thinking and incapacity to reason is an extension of absence of logic.

So, the guy kinda demonstrates bad thinking in the attempt to point at bad thinking. Redundancy is redundancy. Or as this guy (Gustav) would write: dumb is stupid.

Oh, and speaking of stupid...I went to one of the worst church meetings of my life last night (I'm speaking objectively here...I'm reporting not apostatizing).

Last night the stake presidency had a leadership training. The way the meeting went was we had an opening part where a member of the presidency spoke (good talk by the way) and then we broke off into smaller meetings to discuss our individual callings. I don't know the guy who did our meeting...but it was really really bad. Here's how it went:

We were supposed to talk on how to conduct an effective meeting but he started off by sharing a little flow chart his son had made while working in a prison. The chart tried to explain the leadership methods of Satan and God. The guy said that God works by persuasion alone, and that Satan always uses force. This is just dead wrong. There are many evidences of God using coercion.

For example: Jonah and the whale. Jonah wanted to go the other way, it wasn't until God sent a whale to swallow him up that he did what he was supposed to...that's not really a choice. Now, you could argue that Jonah could have still gone the other way...but really? If he was swallowed by a whale every time he went the wrong way...then going the right way wasn't really a choice. Now it's an analytic truth that a free will is free.... if not it wouldn't be a free will... but God can limit all our options so that we behave in a specific way...and this is coercive power (even if it's a weak form of coercive power). So, when the guy said that coercive power is the Satanic method I was a little put off.

Next he discussed how Satan always uses force. It's a commonly spoken (and I feel true) adage that Satan only has power over us as we give it to him. That is, when we open ourselves up to his temptations. He can't do anything to us against our will..it's our sins that give him access to our lives...but this guys argument is that Satan always works by force. How can that be the case when he can only control us as we give him permission through sin? Satan can only work on us when our poor decisions give him permission....which is the exact opposite of this man's point.

To be accurate he should have been something like "Satan tries to enslave us, but he must have our permission to do so, while God respects our freedom and only interferes for some greater good." That would have at least been consistent with scripture.

Anyway, this wouldn't be such a big deal. I mean, I can handle a poorly thought out idea without getting annoyed...what was troublesome was this guy was supposed to be training us on how to conduct effective meetings. The irony here is we spent 30 minutes discussing the beauty of an inaccurate diagram and we neglected what we gathered to discuss: how to conduct effective meetings. At 5 minutes before the meeting had to end he said "oh my goodness, we don't have any time left. Well, all I can say is that to conduct an effective meeting you need to use time wisely, have an agenda, and stick to it."

This is when I finally realized how clever this man was....the whole meeting was an object lesson. He taught us the downfall of doing the very thing he was warning us against: wasting time. What he did was waste 30 minutes covering an irrelevant an inaccurate diagram, and then he used the last 5 minutes to rush through the principles of an effective meeting...thereby demonstrating how he had squandered the previous 30 minutes. After this painful lesson I walked away well instructed. I never want to subject anyone to 30 minutes of boredom, and then cram 30 minutes worth of material into 5 minutes...so in the future I will carefully plan the meetings I conduct... and stick to an agenda.

I see what he did there.....that clever clever man.

Oh, and to complete the randomness of this post here is a sentence from a paper I just turned in for that Gender class (I'm responding to the argument that ALL rapists are loser men who rape women because they want to pass on their genetics but are unable to convince a woman to reproduce with them through the usual methods)....

My paper:
"Research has shown that rape is more frequently a crime of violence rather than passion. Men who rape women usually want to punish women in some way, not pass on their genes (well I guess sometimes rapists pass on wearing jeans)."

Sometimes I just try to make sure that professors aren't bored reading my papers.