just like a woman

Having already said as much in a Harvard Crimson op-ed just after the Summers story broke, Stephen Pinker cashes in on his newfound political capital among the "moderate" right with this New Republic column. And indeed, Pinker "doesn't get it." Or if he does, he misrepresents what's really at stake here - his column is rife with bald assumptions utilizing the very things he claims Summers is misrepresented as having supported - namely the assumption of some kind of essentialized difference between 'the male' and 'the female.' Pinker, rather than ackowledge the gaps in his reasoning, instead seeks to mask them with flippant and pointless anecdotes "Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions," and then uses the scare tactics of the racist right "fatwa" to brand us all as crypto-islamofascists in a move worthy of Daniel Pipes. The incestuous reference to one's own published work as textual justification for essentializing categorizations is hardly demonstrative of academic rigor. I doubt the intersex movement would appreciate being offered up as evidence of innate gender difference, and Pinker's argument that this is the case seems to miss the mark completely. Perhaps he should read some Judith Butler. That Pinker sees a tenure clock ordered around the "biological clock" of a presumptive male subject as somehow outside the separate possibility of the bogeyman of gender discrimination makes clear the set of assumptions he seems to be working with, and his fundamental failure or refusal to acknowledge the contingency of his own exalted position atop Harvard's lofty ladder.



In the end, Pinker concludes by employing the oversimplified assumtions of a psychologist about human nature based on a colonial construction of the primitive and the fundamental. In doing so, he (perhaps not so) ironically returns to very old tropes about women as irrational creatures of whim and furor consumed by emotion and incapable of the higher reason enjoyable only by white male patriarchs. And this is hardly surprising.