If you want to get your daily funnies in for some good laughs, consider renting a copy of Caroline Criado Perez’s “Invisible Women.” Occasionally she has a pragmatic point worth considering, such as the fact that women spend something like 2.7 times longer in the restroom than men, yet there is usually equal allotment of lavatories for men and women.
She could simply make the point that in this case we really do want equality of outcome and not opportunity and she could pragmatically win some readers over, including yours truly. Like any good feminist, though, the thirst for power is strong; the need for righteous indignation is mighty. According to Criado Perez, this isn’t about a lone woman—an independent, unchaperoned lady who was perfectly free in a free country to attend a concert in nothing but her underwear if she wanted to with no risk of arrest or violent harassment—tweeting about the injustice of having a line for the loo. This is also somehow about every female warehouse worker who doesn’t micturate on the job and the women in parts of India who are violently raped while attempting to defecate in open fields because of the inadequacy of available indoor plumbing.
Wow, that escalated quickly. As it often does with feminist fantasies. Rich, independent chick at the concert whining on Twitter has about as much to do with atrocities against women in other parts of the world as Hilaria Baldwin has to do with Spain (for the hard of hearing: nothing). Such are the outrageous examples in Criado Perez’s feminist brainchild.
And it goes on. And on. And on. Excuse us; that description of the work likely suffered from severe sexism. One steeped in the misogyny of one’s oppressor can only bear so much. Without laughing. Heartily. When a woman finds it appropriate to drag multiple ex-boyfriends into the book, you know you have found a winner. Apropos of nothing, Criado Perez brings up men she is now no longer dating. Using one’s own book to settle old scores and prove once and for all that you are not a crazed feminist obsessed with imagined injustice: Class act.
External evidence suggests one of these poor saps actually proposed! She was apparently outraged that he proposed. And outraged that he proposed without specifically asking her to marry him. Which, goodness, if in the presence of such a bristling ideologue, would you feel comfortable mentioning the “m” word? It was all for naught, no matter what he said, because she refuses to marry until we entirely reimagine the entire legal system surrounding marriage to affirm radical equality of the sexes.
All inappropriate, deeply sexist personal attacks aside, let us consider in brief one of Criado Perez’s fanciful theories that does not stand up to reality. On the subject of computer programming, Criado Perez bemoans the blatant sexism of a computer science teacher who remarked that he had never had a single female student get the coding bug the way his star male students did (Find a computer science teacher who has?). While the boys would stay up all night coding if they could and choose to code before anything else, girls who expressed interest in programming were never driven to such extremes.
From there, Criado Perez cobbles together a wide array of data points showing what women did with computers once and what modern programming has become to suggest that the hyper focused, stereotypical male programmer is nothing but a self-fulfilling prophesy dictated by industry elites. It could just have easily been women in there if those sexist industry leaders didn’t take it away from them!
What Criado Perez fails to understand is that aggressive men gravitate to cultural frontiers. The fact that women could confidently manage complex computer operations and demonstrate skill in advanced mathematics as part of the military-industrial complex (a place renowned for its stability and predictability) does not mean those same women were well suited for the volatile and uncertain forefront of internet technologies that have emerged in recent decades. Loner men make very good risk-taking innovators. Resource and “time poor” women (as Criado Perez likes to call them) do not.
Having, with a broad brush, reimagined the entire tech industry, Criado Perez returns to the computer science teachers. Her female friend wisely observed how wrong the first teacher was. The fact that girls do not, en masse, stay up late tinkering and learning code should not suggest that they are not serious future programmers. No, more than that. The fact that girls do not hyperfocus is a sign of their maturity.
In response to this, we ask: have you met surgeons?
Surgeons are stereotypically alpha males. Entitled. Braggadocious. Overconfident. Right up there with fighter pilots and entrepreneurs. And yet, we all tolerate surgeons when they are good at what they do. Any sane person will take the overconfident egomaniac with an exceptionally good set of fine motor skills refined over years of hyperfocus. Yes, please!
When someone is going to cut into your throat and remove an organ or fuse spinal discs together, that person must possess a truly neurotic degree of over confidence. At that time, you don’t want someone to gaze into your eyes and reassure your feelings. Hopefully, you will be totally oblivious at that point. What you want is a man bold enough to take your life in his hands—literally—and have the unjustified confidence that he knows what he’s doing. And you want him to have the years of obsessive practice to ensure that he does kind of know what he is doing and can anticipate almost every possible variable likely to occur in your particular surgery. Some women can and do muster that kind of overconfidence and aggression. But sane people will opt for the man.
Hyperfocus is stereotypically masculine, as Criado Perez wails. We do not, as she thinks, overvalue hyperfocus, and, if anything, we seem to severely undervalue it. To understand hyperfocus, one has only to encounter an experienced surgeon working on home renovation projects. Once a discreet task has been set, he will tap into an unseen reserve of strength and determination. Despite physical or emotional obstacles, he will doggedly pursue the task until it is done. If it is unsatisfactory, he will confidently scrap the whole undertaking and start again. That is the hyperfocus that saves lives in 14-hour spine surgeries. That is the hyperfocus that brings functioning indoor plumbing to billions of people so they don’t have to get raped while defecating in fields.
Masculine hyperfocus is a potentially dangerous force, but when harnessed effectively is a key component in the engine of civilized life. If you have a major, i.e. dirty, dangerous, complex, plumbing job, you can consult dozens of experienced plumbers in one of the largest cities in the United States. Not one of them is a woman. It’s not because women don’t want to do jobs like that…oh, wait, maybe it is. The point is, masculine hyperfocus can be a powerful force for good. Instead of imagining some other world we want to live in, maybe we could take a look at the one we do live in with a modicum of curiosity.
There are certainly forms of hyperfocus that suggest immaturity. For example, hypothetically, of course, if a woman was such a narrowly-focused activist that her Wikipedia page fails to include a “Personal Life” section because her entire life is one unending campaign to stop imagined oppression…that could possibly be a form of hyperfocus that isn’t doing anyone any favors.
Enough! We must stop. Are we inspiring virtue by ridiculing feminists? Probably not. And yet, people who take their bad idea so very seriously deserve to hear laughter. We promise a forthcoming philosophical treatment of Criado Perez’s nonsense book. Totally impartial!
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