Tuesday, November 20, 2007 - Posts
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In Meghan's wonderful piece on Susan Faludi's new book, she argues that while all bias against women in our country has not been eradicated, "Faludi tells us that the sky is falling when the debris coming down, in some cases, is just another glass ceiling being cracked open.'' Exactly! You've perfectly summed up my knee-jerk skepticism about how much Hillary hatred goes back to Eve, when maybe some of it is only personal. And just as a thought experiment—one that might or might not show how far women have come—how do you think it would have played if Barack Obama had given a race-based version of Clinton's gender card answer in last week's debate? What if, in other words, Obama had given a speech somewhere about dealing with the all-white club, had been asked to explain himself and had answered with playful derision that, duh, black people do have just the tiniest bit of extra *!%# to put up with from time to time. My bet is that the room would not have exploded in laughter.
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But, Rachael, that's exactly how my blond hair evolved! OK, I was 37 at the time, but still ... Given the appalling lack of basic scientific knowledge in this country, I guess it's hardly surprising to see even science writers and researchers wandering off into the woods in search of ovulating lap dancers and speculation about whether the guys in the Geico commercials would prefer Marilyn Monroe to Jane Russell. Only 14 percent of Americans even believe the theory of evolution is "definitely true''—which could easily explain some pretty desperate adaptive measures to sex up the science, literally. I doubt if these stories are the hoped-for antidote to Mike Huckabee's apparently widely shared feeling that one can either believe in evolution or God; on the contrary, they could well have just the opposite effect, and make scientific inquiry in general seem frivolous, over-packaged and completely expendable.
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