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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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YOU’D THINK LARRY SUMMERS’ FATE WOULD HAVE COWED THE REALISTS…...

Not some of them. The Claremont Institute for instance, has published THIS REVIEW of Steven E. Rhoads’ book, Taking Sex Differences Seriously, itself something of a profile in courage these days. The following gives a bit of the flavor of the review:

Yet amble any great distance along the path of sex differences, and you will soon find yourself with Harvard President Larry Summers, tripping painfully on the gnarled and dangerous roots buried there. Summers’s provocative comments about sex differences at an academic conference prompted Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nancy Hopkins to walk out of the room in protest. Hopkins, who now moonlights as the Ivy League’s self-appointed, publicity-seeking gender warden, several years ago spawned a similar media tempest by claiming, on paltry evidence, that women at MIT were the victims of institution-wide discrimination. Posturing provosts nationwide reacted with predictable alacrity, setting up panels and convening commissions at their own universities to root out this new but amorphous enemy: “unintentional” discrimination against women. Summers’s crime, in this context, was to have the temerity to state what science has long known about men and women, and to do so without worrying about offending the missish sensibilities of some female academics.

and the review ends with a forthright recommendation:

Rhoads’s book might be especially useful for men and women in college, who are thinking about the kinds of lives they would like to lead. Perhaps with some reflection they might begin to see the truth in Rhoads’s suggestion that our differences should not be the source of bitterness or resentment, but the recipe for genuine complementarity of the sexes. Men’s “sense of duty and capacity for sacrifice will be brought forth more readily if women will say ‘no’ to casual sex and give them time and motive to turn their lust into love,” Rhoads writes. “The idea that women can transform men for the better is out of fashion, but as the social science on the effect of marriage makes clear, it is undeniably true.” Whether young women will be willing to take on the role of arbiter, and in the process transform relations between the sexes, remains to be seen, but if they read this book they will at the very least have heard a persuasive argument for why they should.

OH! that every college student would READ THE WHOLE THING!

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 05/20 at 10:30 AM

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