Sex and equality and blogs and comments

This morning's blog watching spotted a very interesting post from Phoblographer about the perils of dropping feminine pronouns. I've nominated the post for this week's blog watch and took time to comment on the post as well.

Here's the comment I posted:

I agree with your post that removing feminine pronouns reinforces existing biases that perceive women as generally less than men. But I would argue against the notion that there is a conspiracy that holds back comediennes. Our culture simply lets boys play more and thus develop comedic talents.

In Decemember 2005, I wrote a commentary for The Sacramento Bee that touched on this topic. Here's the relevant part:

Take as an example female editorial cartoonists. In the first 19 days of December, The Bee published 33 editorial cartoons, not counting Rex Babin's work. Just four were drawn by women.

Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News drew three of those cartoons. (Etta Hulme of the Forth Worth Star-Telegram drew the fourth.)

I e-mailed Wilkinson, explained the disparity I found in both letters and cartoonists and asked her why more women don't speak out.

"It seems to me," she e-mailed back, "men like to mouth off in public more than women do. You can see that either positively (they have so many more brilliant insights to share) or negatively (they have so many more needs that can only be satisfied by public displays of whatever). In either case, it seems to me that on average women take things more personally than men so don't like getting random e-mails from strangers that say, 'You idiot.' I get that and a lot worse from e-mail correspondents, mostly men.

"There is a growing number of women in politics and in political commentary, but it takes a bold, brazen article to weather the backdraft from putting strong opinions out in the public."

When my son entered kindergarten in 1996, I helped out in the classroom. The thing that amazed me then was what happened at playtime. Nearly all of the boys would go racing out into the playground, climbing on the equipment and generally running around. Meanwhile, most of the girls would gather at tables as though holding high tea. Where does this come from? It certainly didn't come from the teachers or the parent observers. I would argue that it is something so deeply engrained in humanity as to be instinctive.

The place between instinct bred over thousands of generations and the world of desired equality seems vast.