in case it wasn't apparent...

this post was a parody: a parody of the endless, and endlessly infuriating, reports on studies that "prove" some claim about men and/or women based in totally unquestioned and unproblematized rhetorics of gender and sexuality - all of them, it seems to me, boiling down to a statement that goes something like, "(people categorized as) women are much more likely than (people categorized as ) men to behave according to normative conceptions of how women are."


Sunday's New York Times Book Review demonstrated, to my amusement and dismay, that my hyperbolic rendition of this kind of thing was even closer than I thought to reality. Harvey C. Mansfield, a viciously conservative and much-maligned professor at my own esteemed alma mater, has published his tract on Manliness, which claims, so dizzinglying uncritical as to be nearly non-sensical, such as: "Though it's clear that women can be manly, it's just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men."

Right. And that, right there, pretty much, is why I study what I study.