Floating Facebook Offal

Terence and I were talking just the other day about how far women have come and how they pretty much have (at least in our country) all the legal rights they need to make whatever they like out of their lives. (We were comparing similar gains with the civil rights movements.) However, just like racism still pokes its head out of the ground in the most unexpected places, I got a firsthand reminder that chauvinist pigs are still out there. The following comments are copied from a heated discussion between a facebook friend and one of her friends about the intelligence of women.

The first quote that took me by surprise (it came tacked onto an unrelated thread about how funny and precocious my friend’s son is):

More like... Boys. Girls don't care about dinosaurs or science. They just don't have the brain capacity. Kinda like voting, when they grow.

So, girls don't like dinosaurs and science and don't have the the brain capacity to do so. I can't decide if his second point means we don't care about voting or we don't have the brain capacity for it. Raised my hackles either way. On to quote number two, which came after my friend retorted that she was pretty sure her IQ was much higher than his:

IQ doesnt measure intelligence, it measures ability to pass standardized tests. Of course a highly intelligent female will be better at success in institutions that reward docility and obedience than similarly intelligent males, that's natural law in practice. still, you never see a female gates, when it comes to real life, men are more apt as a rule. Even whitman as a ceo didnt build any company, just run it. With years of business school and social maneuvering, ill add. Most men at the top work their way there, most women sleep their way there.

Oh dear. Where do I even start? "Men are more apt as a rule" or "Most men at the top work their way there, most women sleep their way there"? I think I'd like to vomit. As for his argument that you never see a female Bill Gates, there is only one writer whose writing has made her a billionaire-- JK Rowling, a woman. Does that mean that men just plain suck at writing? How logical!

At this point another friend jumped into the fray. Martha asked if our cheerful chauvinist was actually saying that men are smarter than women, and if so, he was only proving his own stupidity. His response is my third quote:

No. I never said that martha. I said women use their intelligence in a different way, to reap the seeds sown by others, and that women's suffrage discriminates against unmarried men, by getting rid of the more fair one household, one vote.

So women can be smart, but they only use that intelligence to take advantage of things that men have done? And how exactly does giving EVERYONE his or her own vote discriminate against unmarried men? What, does he think that married women only vote like their husbands tell them to, giving the married man an "extra vote"? I have to laugh about the one household, one vote being fair. So if he was unmarried but living with a roommate it would be fair if his roommate got to vote but he was barred from it? This was making less sense by the minute. He goes on to explain a bit further. Quote number four:

My point was never that women are unintelligent, but that they use it for social maneuvering rather than for contributing to humanity.

Best of all. Women don't contribute to humanity. I guess he never had a mother. He must have sprung fully formed from Zeus' head or something. (And by the way, I left his spelling and punctuation just as he wrote it. I got a kick out of it. Apparently grammar usage is not related to intelligence either. Or it matters only to those docile, obedient women who do well on standardized tests.)

Terence says I'm too easy to rile. In his opinion the guy was just getting a rise out of my friend on purpose, making this statements just to see if he could get all the women up in arms about it, but not seriously believing it. Well, if that was the case he clearly succeeded. My friend's responses were angrier and angrier. And he never said anything conciliatory or gave an "Aw, you know I'm just joking" at the end. So I have a hard time believing it. Believe me, if he was my facebook friend, I think at the end of the conversation he would have been dumped from my friends' list quickly and without fanfare. Terence says that's just another manifestation of my competitive need to be right. Maybe so, but I still don't think I would want to keep up a relationship with someone who openly disdains my sex.

What do you think? Would you unfriend someone in such a case as this? Or in a similar situation where you disagree with the friend? Vote in my poll and let me know.