I’d be very interested in knowing the male female breakdown of your readership. My guess is 90/10 male. Any info on that?

Anyway, I, for one, applaud Felix Salmon for his apology. I think he gets it about as well as it can be got.

Scientifically though, the XX v XY chromosome difference does cause phenotypical differences between women and men. I think what is not fair in today’s society though is the equality of opportunities, I think too many people get bogged down in worrying about making everything equal and ignoring differences, when what they really mean is that women should be entitled to the same job opportunities as men get – and they should certainly get the same pay for the same work. But we should use the differences for the benefit of society, not try to negate them at the cost of demotivating boys in education, say.

Be loud, be proud, and short of thermonuclear mistakes. blogging should mean never having to say you’re sorry.

Given the high social cost of non-conformity, I strongly suspect that in the absence of the pressure of gender stereotypes enforced by ostracism and violence, the sexes would be even more variable / less differentiated.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/201 3/02/06/men_and_women_are_basically_the_ same_new_study_says_our_personality_trai ts.html

People make generalizations of this sort hundreds of times a day to get by in life and be effective human beings. Generalization/(pattern recognition) is one of our most powerful mental tools. Picking out a few spheres of life and pretending to turn it off is just ridiculous.

Felix makes all sorts of unsupported arguments based on his personal opinion and experience on this blog. This was another one of those. There is nothing wrong with his belief that women bloggers and generally different in X or Y respect than female bloggers.

New flash. Men and women are different! There are so many ways, that everyone is familiar with that it isn’t even worth listing them. Pretending otherwise is just wanton ignorance masquerading as progressiveness. Yes there is a spectrum of traits, and any individual woman might be say more interested in sports than any individual man, but when speaking of men and women in aggregate it is perfectly appropriate and accurate to say men are more interested in sports than women. And no amount of Title IX or forced socialization, or PC speech is going to change that. It is a brute fact about men and women.

The type of person who goes all fire alarm fire angry at the mere mention of possible differences between men and women in X or Y way is the type of person who is still trapped in the world of gender stereotypes and gender roles they claim to so desperately want to escape.

No one would bat an eye if Felix said “I don’t like Toyotas I had two Toyotas and they both gave me tons of problems” except crazy Toyota partisans.

Perhaps a few rational people would point out that as a matter of fact he is wrong in this case and Toyotas are in fact generally reliable, but no one would begrudge him the opinion base don his experience.

Initially, Felix wrote that Maria Popova was making an enormous sum – about $500,000 – based on numbers he partially made up and partially took from a previously published blog on Tumblr. Despite the implausibility of this eye-popping sum, he published it without checking it or calling Ms. Popova. She later wrote in to say that his estimates were off by at least 90% – that is, that she is not making even a tenth of the numbers he published on Reuters.com.

Then, in “correcting” this, he threw off this risible comment about women or bloggers – either way, however you read his understanding of it, two categories that are entirely too vast to summarize. Yet he did so, condescendingly. Several prominent female writers, including me, Xeni Jardin, Kate Aurthur, and Irin Carmon told him in no uncertain terms that he was off base. Kate, in particular, said this was the “stupidest generalization of 2013,” which I agreed with.

Felix’s reply to me, and me alone: “@moorehn If you think I was generalizing about female bloggers, you’re an idiot.”

This, I suppose, is the kind of “nasty pushback” that Felix writes about here without acknowledging that he is guilty of it. This is severely disappointing behavior.

He may brag about Yale Law School podcasts, but with unprofessional, dismissive and misogynistic comments attributed to him of late, one must question whether he deserves the prominence he so enjoys bragging about.
-Heidi Moore

I was struck initially in the first (updated) post about the extreme narcissism on display by Popova. Her response was basically, “You don’t understand me. I’m so important. So is my time. How dare you not understand me and what I do.” Of course, she was loath to divulge actual facts to counter your positions (and used sentence structure that was clearly designed to obfuscate).

The next two posts, I guess you decided to dive full in to the pool of narcissism and now we are doing nothing about talking about you personally? I think this blog works better when we talk about things that are important.

If that were not enough, perpetuating (and copping to!) this obviously errant charge of “sexism” just increases the inanity. Perpetuating a stereotype that one (or many) women do not care for is not “sexism”. “Sexism” is the treatment of an individual on the basis of his or her gender rather than his or her abilities or the content of his or her character. Can we at least try to have some sort of semantic consistency please?

The stereotype-obsessed like this are no different than republicans who are against all government expenditures (except for the government expenditures that directly benefit them, and God help you if you threaten those expenditures).

We all use stereotypes and heuristics and rules of thumb. There is no one who doesn’t. That is logically impossible.

This hollow charge of “sexism” is nothing more than a whiny plea to stop using a stereotype that the complainer thinks might harm their own specific status in the world. They’re fine with stereotypes, and they’re fine with stereotypes that harm women who occupy other subcultures, but damn the person that uses a stereotype that doesn’t empower them.

This whole thing is ridiculous and foolish, and I can’t believe you used your valuable time to engage in this.