Re: verb gender

Brian M. Scott wrote:
> > The prediction is that the women will drop out when they
> > find you can't do work at the highest levels without
> > giving up everything else; a requirement that large
> > numbers of males are perfectly happy with.
>
> 'The prediction', eh? I can see why no one wants to take
> responsibility for it, though.

You sense a moral component. We are all as neuter as pine boards
at bottom, is the assumption, and it figures into your projections.
Call it the null hypothesis, or the way it ought to be even if it isn't.

It's sort of a prescriptive grammar of sex.

The puzzle is how things actually are, as a poet would be interested in it.

How is it that girls ride horses and boys drop out around puberty?
Or that men do math happily, coming in every weekend and holiday to
putz around with it as a hobby even though it's a job, and women don't?

The hard line feminist answer is that something's wrong and men have to
change to fix it, in the form of this or that moral complaint. Marching
under the banner of morality though is perhaps not a good fit.

Perhaps the increasing number of women PhD's in math means increasing
unhappiness, did you think of that? How would we tell?

http://home.att.net/~rhhardin9/vickihearne.womenmath.txt
http://home.att.net/~rhhardine/vickihearne.feminism.txt

those being bits from Vicki Hearne I've copied out for this or that
reason; Stanley Cavell is another philosopher who is hitting on
sexual difference as one of the points of Shakespeare, with the
differing forms of (male) skepticism and (female) fanaticism, the
one being the drive to know beyond human forms of knowing, and the
other being the drive to love beyond human forms of loving. He adds
``Is this news?''

It's not anti-feminist or anti-woman to try to get it right.

The hysteria at Harvard is enough of a proof that something fundamental
is involved in getting with the program. Questions that must not be
raised are the most interesting.
--
Ron Hardin
rhhardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.
.