MICHAEL BARONE: Feminists shocked: Men ride bikes outdoors, women indoors.
Robb doesn’t make the obvious follow-up point. Women, psychologists agree, tend to be more risk-averse than men. Evolutionary explanations are obvious. Riding a bicycle in New York, as Grose appreciates, is a lot riskier than riding a bicycle in an indoor cycling facility. “It’s possible,” Robb writes, in a bow (curtsy?) to feminist theory, “that in a totally gender-equal society, every activity — from gardening and crocheting to taxi-driving and construction work — would have an equal number of male and female practitioners.”
No, it’s not. There are salient differences between men and women, on average, as the natural result of the evolutionary process, and those differences are reflected in different behavior and different career choices, again on average. We want a society where people can make the choices they want, but we fool ourselves if we think that in such a society men’s and women’s choices would be statistically indistinguishable.
Feminists who insist that such choices are only the result of societal pressure often conclude otherwise after their attempts to get their little boys to play with dolls or their little girls to play with trucks prove futile. Yes, there are some males and females who do not follow typical gender patterns, and there are a very small number who choose to change gender.
Alice Robb stops short of making this general argument—would the New Republic print it?—but she goes some creditable distance in that direction. Good for her.
Always sad when getting people to come close to admitting long-established truths — boys and girls are different! — counts as a victory, but that’s where we are.
My question is, why are feminists science-deniers? Monkey test shows gender choices.
An experiment seems to back the theory that male monkeys choose traditional boy toys above dolls, which female monkeys choose to play with.
The experiment, which was conducted at the Woburn Safari Park, in Bedfordshire with Barbary macaques, formed part of a Horizon investigation into the differences between male and female brains.
The science is settled. You don’t want to be a science-denier, do you?