Today, while reflecting, I wondered what Google would suggest if I started the search with "women are". The one that caught my attention was, you guessed it, "women aren't funny." This led me to an interesting article written by a Christopher Hitchens for the magazine Vanity Fair. While I recognize Hitchens from an image search, I'm not all that familiar with him. I just did a quick forum search on Hitchens and found that he has been the subject of a few conversations here.
Here's a link to the article.
A few notes:
- What Hitchens is basically saying without saying it is that women aren't funny because they're illogical.
- His reasons for women's lack of ability in logical thought is two fold: 1) because they don't have to be, from an evolutionary standpoint. Men excel in logic to such a degree that there is very little to zero need for women to go through the pains of the transition from stupidity to logical consistency. A substantially overbearing influence to this, and more fundamental, is 2) the fact that women are primarily responsible for human reproduction. Women are almost always engaged in the evaluation and/or management of their social status in regards to her sexuality, and are highly valued by sexually driven men (i.e., nearly all men) for doing so.
- Another note of influence, not explicitly pointed out by Hitchens, is that children symbolize the fundamental innocence of humans, which is greatly treasured by adults, and is mostly felt lost among men. Women are, in a sense, the bearers of human innocence. Men try to compensate for this loss (e.g., by being humorous), while women instead try to personify it.
- Reading Weininger has made me more alert to notice any particularly male-ish physical characteristics in women based on their stance on things. In the article, Hitchens refers to his conversations with a couple of female comedians, and their opinions on humor in women. So when he quoted comedian Fran Lebowitz in saying "The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what's more male than that?", I did a google image search on her expecting to see a masculine looking woman. I ended up, for a second, thinking that my search had gone wrong, as I was sure that I was looking at a long haired man.
He then addresses his discussion with Nora Ephron saying that "Ms. Ephron did not disagree. She did, however, in what I thought was a slightly feline way, accuse me of plagiarizing a rant by Jerry Lewis that said much the same thing." [Lewis on female comedians: 'I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator.']I then performed an image search on her, expecting a more feminine appearance, and what else appears but plenty of makeup and hair styling. Still interesting to note is the masculine sharpness to her thin complexion.
This, of course, does not prove that you can completely judge a book by it's cover, but the consistency cannot be denied.