Just a woman NOT doing her job ('protecting the public')

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

"She sure showed you a thing or two, didn't she!" exulted a lady friend of Lynn Wade's comments on my March 17 column.

"We all agreed, you had the better of it," a male friend reported of the male consensus at the YMCA.

How dismaying! There's no objective truth after all, then. Truth is totally relative to our "gender" (sex).

In one way at least I'm vindicated: The "differences between the sexes" are greater even than I dreamt. To understand a piece of writing, don't bother trying to follow the writer's reasoning, merely ascertain his or her sex. All will then become clear.

It becomes at least understandable why some men have concluded that women are incapable of objectivity. Indeed, some feminists have agreed, to the extent of denouncing objectivity itself as a sexist plot! If women (and minorities) don't perform "equally" against objective standards, the politically-correct remedy is to abolish the standards.

Might as well fold our tents, then, we would-be truth-seekers, and go home. In a relativist, non-objective world, no more remains to be said.

Such at least is the conclusion I'm left facing after days poring over Lynn's words, trying to determine just what "thing or two" she showed me.

I've diffidently bandied such words as "incoherent," to the scandal of my female friends, to whom Lynn comes over as the acme of coherence.

She first complains that what she calls my "opinion" isn't based on science, only to concede that hers isn't either. Indeed! Opinions never are. But convictions are very often based on a more reliable ground, namely common sense.

But if she insists on troubling the scientists, it's soon done. According to two new books, "The New Sexual Revolution" and "Why Men Don't Iron," the latest scientific work reveals that sexual differences are greater than equalitarian ideology wants to admit, and that therefore recent decades of political correctness have taken us in quite the wrong direction.

I fail, Lynn says, to recognize that women come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and capabilities, and even cites my "parentheses for donkeys" (since she blanked out the common synonym) as somehow giving away the truth, yet finding it "irrelavent."

Whoops! I'm left all but speechless! 'Twould seem she's missed the whole point of the parenthesis. Only donkeys, was the assumption, would need even a parenthesis, the point was so obvious: i.e. that exceptions are indeed irrelevant, that in trying to reduce the chaos of reality to some kind of order in our minds, we simply must be guided by the general, not the particular, by the rules, not the exceptions.

And the generalization, the rule, in this instance is that men are bigger and stronger than women. That some women are bigger and stronger than some men is the exception. And to say it again, life must be ordered and governed by the rules, not the exceptions.

Tradition found the distinction between the sexes the reasonable, logical place to draw the line between occupations requiring physical strength and those that don't. Once an exception is made, in this case to let in women of unusual strength, the distinction, the rule itself tends to disappear, and you wind up with 5-foot deputies guarding 6-foot-1 violent offenders.

Just as in the military, the line between combat and the rear is impossible to draw with accuracy, and once women are in the service at all, the inevitable end result is cases like that of Jessica Lynch, a would-be noncombatant very much in harm's way.

"The accused shooter didn't discriminate," Lynn says. But, Lynn, that's exactly what he did do, in picking out the vulnerable woman to "overpower," not one of the men whom he didn't challenge (and incidentally kill) till he was armed with her weapon.

Men pilots also have cracked up airplanes, she points out, in defense of the woman pilot who did so. In law, this Tu quoque defense ("You do it too") isn't admissble. It's another case of stressing the exceptions (a few men have been known to crack up planes) at the expense of the rule (but most men, trained as intensively as that woman, don't).

If she were in that deputy's place, Lynn says, her answer would be, Yes, her "equality" was worth it "if I were committed to a career of protecting the public." But this is a startlingly self-centered answer! If the issue is "protecting the public," it can only be pointed out that, alas, she didn't. But the issue, to her, seems to be her "career," not the corpses in its wake. She's answering not just for herself but for them too. It was worth their deaths to me to advance my career, for which I had to fight on such a politically-incorrect battleground!

The rest of Lynn's column is devoted to anecdotes which can only be called irrelevant indeed: A male nurse is not "rejecting his masculinity." Of course not. A friend-of-a-friend was denied a job because there was an equally qualified male (a man, so far as I know, is still obligated by law to support his spouse and children; a woman isn't). Really! There's no disagreement whatsoever that women should enjoy the advantages Lynn concedes she enjoyed: to "choose any career for which I am physically, emotionally, educationally, and experientially qualified," to "have the chance to prove their suitability for a job." The disagreement, obviously, lies in defining and implementing those phrases. Was the woman deputy physically qualified? How does she "prove her suitability, or disprove?" By failing as catastrophically as she did, come the crunch? Or through the strict enforcement of a rule which would have kept her from such "on the job" proving in the first place?