Charlotte Allen wrote an absolutely absurd article that appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post. The title of her article: “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?” Her question: “What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental?” Her answer: Because women are stupid.
As you might imagine, Ms. Allen has been rightfully ridiculed throughout blogland. Bob Somerby, for example, had this:
For what it’s worth, Allen isn’t content to argue that women are stupid—she seems determined to prove the foolish claim herself. At one point, she says that she herself “can’t add 2 and 2.” After reading this passage, we believed her:
ALLEN: Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal.You probably noted what Allen (and her editor) did not; the statistic about driving “more miles per year” is (essentially) irrelevant to the finding that women get in more (slightly) more accidents per mile driven. Meanwhile, if women get in slightly more accidents, but men get in many more fatal accidents, is it clear that men are better drivers?