Choosing Difference

From an intriguing piece in the Boston Globe, via Arts and Letters Daily.

...Women who are mathematically gifted are more likely than men to have strong verbal abilities as well; men who excel in math, by contrast, don't do nearly as well in verbal skills. As a result, the career choices for math-precocious women are wider than for their male counterparts. They can become scientists, but can succeed just as well as lawyers or teachers. With this range of choice, their data show, highly qualified women may opt out of certain technical or scientific jobs simply because they can.

The article goes on to say that in those nations in which women have the greatest freedom of choice, thanks to education, maternity leave, job availability, and so forth, they are less and not more likely to choose "traditionally masculine" careers:

They have a provocative echo in the conclusions of Susan Pinker, a psychologist and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. In her controversial new book, "The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap," Pinker gathers data from the journal Science and a variety of sources that show that in countries where women have the most freedom to choose their careers, the gender divide is the most pronounced.

The United States, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, and the United Kingdom, which offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. In countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, she writes, the number of women in physics is as high as 30 to 35 percent, versus 5 percent in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

"It's the opposite of what we'd expect," says Pinker. "You'd think the more family-friendly policies, and richer the economy, the more women should behave like men, but it's the opposite. I think with economic opportunity comes choices, comes freedom."

Clio Books

From a review in the Atlantic of what sounds like a wonderful new history of post-war Britain, Austerity Britain, 1945-1951. Via Arts and Letters Daily.

At war’s end, Britain faced a housing crisis. German bombs had destroyed or severely damaged 750,000 houses, and virtually no new ones had been built for six years. Kynaston shows that, far more than national health insurance or the nationalization of industry, “across the country, it was on the home that most people’s hopes and concerns were really focused.” In their diaries and letters as well as in survey after survey, people made clear their strong dislikes in housing (“nothing less than a mass aversion towards the whole idea of flats,” Kynaston characterizes it) and their equally strong desire: a small suburban house with a garden. The planners and reformers would have none of it. Stridently communal, possessed of what Kynaston describes as an “almost visceral anti-suburban bias” and an accompanying conviction that “explicitly identified social virtue and cohesion in living cheek by jowl” in apartments and planned “New Towns” (innovations, Orwell noted, that would tend to break up the family), they wouldn’t let the preferences of the public vitiate their glorious designs. As one of them, the economist P. Sargent Florence, declared, the predilections of “architects and planners” should trump “the inarticulate yearnings of the average working-class housewife.” When addressing an unruly public meeting that opposed his “New Town” planning schemes designed to create “a new type of citizen,” Lewis Silkin, the minister of town and country planning, put it more bluntly: “It’s no good your jeering; it is going to be done.” Ah, the People’s Tribunes.

Ah, that visceral anti-suburban bias! Clio admits that she tends to share it, not out of contempt for suburbanites, but because it wastes space and forces everyone to live in cars for half the daylight hours as suburbs spread out and grow larger around the city's core. Ah well, back to Parnassus, where the sweets of life never grow stale and nobody needs a car.

On a more cheerful note

Just fun (the picture that appears with the video isn't MY fault):


Lovely tune, hard pictures:


Sweet as honey (but probably lip-synched, and not the most dynamic performance):


One of my all-time favourites in popular songs:

Nice Guy Encounters: #7, What Really Happened to Bluto?

CM must confess that the responses to the last post tired her out. Not that they were offensive. It's just that the various commenters, including CM herself, appeared to be repeating themselves and talking past each other, by the end. This may be a sign that the various Nice Guy and Dating Dilemma stories that she has presented here have begun to grow stale, and that it's time to bring this series to a close. (Plus, she's running out of stories, or at any rate, stories that she is willing to tell online.)

All the same, here's another, an extraordinarily sad one, and she hopes that readers will give it some careful thought before responding to it.

Nice Guy #7 was a young man she knew in university, or "college", as Americans say. They lived in the same residence and on the same floor. Although the dorm was not a frat house, its atmosphere was very frat-house like, or so it seemed to its inhabitants. This was the result of a conscious and deliberate attempt on the part of its young men to emulate the manners and activities of the frat-boys of Delta Tau Chi in Animal House, a film that had been released a couple of years before CM first arrived there. Their efforts at emulation were almost too successful.

She never dated #7. In fact, she didn't know him all that well. But he was, or appeared to be, a central figure in the small clique of men that ran the floor's social life. It would be easy to call him a geek or a nerd, but those words, in their present-day usage, don't quite fit. He wasn't math and science oriented; computers were not a part of any of our lives yet; and he wasn't a very good student, either. In fact, he was quite sociable, funny and easy to talk to. Women liked him, but none of us ever fell in love with him, and CM doesn't think he ever asked anyone out, in the four years that she knew him.

How to define the place he occupied in our dorm culture? He hung out with the most popular of the men. No party was complete without him, and he was invariably seen at our events drinking way too much, egged on in his goofier antics by his friends, and, afterwards, heaving his guts out outside in the snow. I think you could say that he was the Big Guys' mascot, a figure of fun as far as they were concerned, although CM could have sworn at the time that they genuinely liked him, too. Still, in spite of the laughter that always accompanied him, in spite of his jokes and the number of friendships he had, the sight of him at a party, surrounded by men urging him to drink some more and chanting his name while he did, always made her very uneasy. There was something tragic about him.

It would be nice to think that he was a Blutarsky figure, destined for great success and the prettiest girl on campus. That was certainly who he wanted to be; the pop culture figure he channeled in his insane drinking binges; the person whom his buddies groomed him to be. But whereas Bluto was an amoral puer figure, a child with no conscience and no limit to his appetites, Nice Guy #7 was fundamentally shy in spite of his sociability, had a conscience, and was little more than a joke to his so-called friends.

CM lost touch with him and with many of these people after she left her residence. But about 5 years later, she was flipping through the newspaper and as she turned the pages to get to Dear Abby or something like that, her eye caught a name at the bottom of the obituary page on her right: it was Nice Guy #7's name. There was very little information in the notice, no age given, nothing to indicate that it was him, for his name was a common one. Still, she felt a cold shock go through her at the sight of it.

By coincidence, the following weekend she went to stay with her former room-mate and to attend a Homecoming reunion. Sitting around a table with her old friends in one of their favourite drinking-holes on campus, she suddenly thought to ask about Nice Guy. "I know it's a long shot, but I saw #7's name in the obituary column in the paper the other day. Could it possibly have been him?" The other people at the table looked at each other, and one of them - one of #7's principle buddy-tormentors, the biggest of the dorm Big Guys - said, "He jumped off a bridge in X two weeks ago. He sent me a letter just before he died." One of the other men present spoke up loudly, "He killed himself over a girl! Can you imagine doing something like that for a woman?" And someone else quickly changed the subject.

Later, CM heard from her old room-mate that #7 had developed a serious drinking problem after leaving school (as if he hadn't had a bad enough one already), had never really been able to find work that suited him, and had drifted from place to place and job to job. The Girl had been, perhaps, his last hope.

So I suppose some of you might say that this was the classic case of a Nice Guy, abused and misunderstood by a woman. CM has always believed, though, that his g*d-damned friends, who had brought him a little happiness and much misery, had as much to do with the poor man's fate as any woman might have done.

RIP, Nice Guy #7.

Commenters are asked to be especially respectful in responding to this post.

The historian's art

From a review linked in Arts and Letters Daily:

One of the things that must be missing from historical narrative is the observational self, because there is no place within historical narrative for the observational self to stand. There is no place for Keegan, for example, to be as an observer—he has, in effect, exchanged his observational self for the persona of historian. As the narrative and analytical intelligence of his book, he is in no one place, and the events he is presenting with such exemplary historiographic competence and such rhetorical élan are not events that happened to him in the course of his lived experience; reading the documents and making the historiographic and rhetorical decisions that turned them into a coherent narrative are part of his lived experience, but that is a different matter. As a historian, he stands in hundreds of different places and from each of them he sees things in sharp focus. It is a convention of this kind of writing that his personality, his opinions, his beliefs, his personal life are left behind when he assumes his professional role.

What Works

Here CM must tread a careful line between saying too little to make sense, and saying too much. She wishes to protect her privacy and those of the men she once cared for. She isn't quite certain that she will be able to do this, so it's possible this post will never be posted.

Imagine a night in early November, the weekend after Hallowe'en. There is a Hallowe'en party at a big house in or near College Park, Maryland. It's a cool night after a warm day so there is ground mist rising everywhere. The party-goers fill the house and garden. Those who are outside look decidedly odd because their feet disappear into the ground-mist. The guests are mostly in their mid-to-late twenties. They are students, or were recently students, and are now working at various low-paid jobs. Having just turned 30, CM is slightly older than most of them, but not noticeably so.

She is a stranger at the party, brought there by N., a colleague from work, who used to go to school with several of the guests. And was once married to one of them, for a short time. There is a tall man at the party, at 6'3" taller than most of the other guests. He is dressed in a kind of Death's Head costume, his face whited with theatrical makeup, his eyes blacked out, and his hair is tucked in a bandana (haute-cool style in the early 1990s). CM notices him, at first, simply because of his height. Her friend introduces her to him, and he and N. commiserate, because, it turns out, both are recently divorced. He doesn't appear to notice CM after being introduced to her, which piques her interest in him. After that, she keeps catching his eye, something that she will eventually learn is an almost sure sign of a man's interest in her. If you keep catching a man's eye without intending to do so, it's usually because he is looking at you.

She drifts through the party. At one point, she is talking to a young man, sweet and rather beta-ish, and The Tall Man comes up to speak to them. He and Beta are close friends. CM asks where the glasses are (they are in the kitchen), because she is thirsty. Beta offers - with the best of intentions - to go get her a glass of water, and she says yes.

By the time he gets back with the water, several minutes later because the kitchen is very crowded, it is too late for him. She has her back against the wall, while Tall Man leans over her, propping himself on the wall with his hand. This is supposed to be one of the most aggressive postures a man can adopt. Tall Man isn't otherwise aggressive or dominant - he speaks to her very gently, in his low baritone voice, and asks her about her family - but he appears to have an instinctive understanding of how to assert himself in the presence of a woman. He asks for her phone number but she is a new arrival in the DC area and doesn't yet have one. "Write your name on the bulletin board here so I know how to spell it," he says. And she says yes.

Pentecost

Today is an important day for believing Christians everywhere: Pentecost Sunday, once known as Whitsunday. It commemorates the day that the Holy Spirit descended upon the remaining Apostles as they sat, gathered together, while Mary led them in prayer. The Spirit manifested itself as tongues of flame above each of their heads, while a great wind swept through the room.

Today is also an important day for CM and her family. Not only is it Mother's Day (that well-intentioned, highly commercial, er, festival), it's also her brother's birthday. I don't usually mention family birthdays on my blog, but in this case I do so because of something I wanted to say about my brother. He suffers from schizophrenia in one of its more severe forms. His medication controls the condition to some extent but cannot suppress it altogether. Some sufferers are more fortunate in this respect.

His story is his own and I don't want to tell it here, but I do want to remind readers that the tormented wretches you may see on the street babbling to themselves were once ordinary people, functional people, who had no idea of the blow that was about to descend on them. I cannot imagine anything worse that can happen to a person. Walter Bagehot, whose mother suffered from bouts of severe depression all her life, said "After all, all the horrors of life are a joke, next to madness." I suppose I might come up with one or two examples of equivalent horrors, if I wanted to try. Certainly the worst day of my own life was the day I went to see my brother in hospital during his first breakdown, and found him wearing a strait-jacket. He smiled at us a little, and he said, "At least I had a happy childhood." Though my brother, of course, bore the heaviest burden, the rest of us, my parents and my two other brothers, were much affected by it as well. It was a long time before any of us were really happy again.

Researchers now speculate that schizophrenia, although heritable (but many cases appear in people with no family history of the illness), may remain latent and never develop into full-blown illness without some external stimulus, usually in the form of severe stress or trauma. There are reasons to suspect that something like this happened to my brother.

Perhaps readers could consider giving money to support research into the cause and cure of severe mental illnesses, which remains rather underfunded.