When facts meet feelings

Or: Panic in the Henhouse

About a month ago, Sir Tim Hunt, 71-year-old Biochemist who won the Nobel prize in 2001, said something that made women’s heads explode.

“Let me tell you about the trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.”

Naturally this did not go down well with the Henhouse. When pressed for an explanation, he added:

“It is terribly important that you can criticize people’s ideas without criticizing them. If they burst into tears it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth. Science is about nothing except getting at the truth and anything that gets in the way of that, in my experience, diminishes the science.”

When the yammering and the demands for his head subsided, he resigned from his post at the faculty of life sciences at University College London.

Some of the commentary is fascinating. The Henhouse mobilized with hashtags at the ready and Weaponized nagging fully engaged.

Here’s what we know:

• All three parts of the original statement are demonstrably true, though obviously not for everyone. Does this mean that all women are like this? Of course not. Was he saying that women should not be in STEM? Absolutely not. Was he saying that women were the problem? Not at all. All he was doing was drawing attention to problems that most have us have encountered at one time or another.
• The post that he resigned was an honorary one; his real job is in London Research Institute (Cancer Research UK). All of that complaining changed nothing.
• His main job appears to be finding cures for cancer. Strangely, there are folks out there who would have him removed from this worthy pursuit for the heinous crime of being politically incorrect.
• He is 71 years old, even if he was fired from his main job, it would be no great loss, as he is probably not far off from retirement.

This reminds me of a post that I saw about a year ago, in which a female CEO put up a post entitled “I Don’t Want to Hire Women“, in which she stated something similar:

“I have had women cry in team meetings, come to my office to ask me if I still like them and create melodrama over the side of the office their desk was being placed. I am simply incapable of verbalizing enough appreciation to female employees to satiate their need for it for at least a week’s worth of work… (but) when I have something to say to one of the men, I just say it! I don’t think it through – I simply spit it out, we have a brief discussion and we move on. They even frequently thank me for the feedback! Not so fast with my female staff…”

And yet nobody called for her head on a platter. Nobody asked for her resignation. I wonder why…

Returning to Sir Tim one last time, I particularly liked one of the headlines: Nobel Scientist Says Women Take Things Personally; Women Take It Personally

I could not have put it better.

Oh Rick!

This story came across my desk: Two words on my wedding night ruined my marriage, honeymoon.

To summarize:

• The heroine was previously in an “intense” relationship with “Rick”. After it ends  badly, one assumes – she swears off intimacy (i.e., “sex”).
• She meets “Tom”, and decides “no premarital sex”. Tom agrees (like he has a choice in the matter).
• Fast-forward to their wedding night, at a hotel before flying out to their honeymoon. while “getting to know each other”, she blurts out “Oh Rick!”
• Tom stops what he is doing, calls his parents and tells them that the marriage is over. He then calls her parents and asks then who “Rick” was.
• He gets dressed and leaves for their “honeymoon”, taking her passport with him, presumably so she cannot follow him.
• She then writes to an agony aunt as the aggrieved party.

This is a classic example of how women lie to themselves and each other. She did not “make a mistake”, she lied to her husband about her sexual past.

The fact that Tom did not know who Rick was shows that this was clearly a lie of omission. You don’t like it when that hot guy forgets to tell you that he’s married? This is no different. Why is it that a man who lies is a rat, but when a woman does it, it is somehow OK?

It is amazing to me how many women buy into the “I’ll-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too-and-what-he-doesn’t-know-won’t-hurt-him” meme, only to find the truth hitting them in the face at the most embarrassing possible time. Fortunately this time the truth came out before the man was trapped in a marriage with a woman who decided that a “very intense relationship with” with hot guy Rick somehow “didn’t count”. And women wonder why men are walking away from marriage.

Ladies, your sexual past is important to us. You don’t get to decide what is and is not important to us. You just don’t.

While it was wrong for him to take her passport, it is understandable – but that is relatively minor and is not germane to this story; funny how many people latched onto that one. It’s almost like they needed something to pin on him to cast him as the villain of the piece.

As far as I am concerned, justice has been served. She was ready and willing to start her marriage based on a lie. A lie of omission, to be sure, but a lie nonetheless.

It has been fun watching all the girlies circling the wagons and protecting the sistahood though…

When Inequality meets Injustice

Just stumbled across this story (original source). The short version: Couple has sex on the beach, in front of families. Folks get offended, they get arrested, and both end up in jail.

He gets two and a half years.
She gets time served and is released.

My thoughts:

• It takes two to tango, but only one gets to pay the piper. They both did precisely the same thing. Wassup wid dat? He was given the heavier sentence because of a previous drug-related conviction which was served in full. To me, this is just not right; this was not a second drug offense, this was an unrelated charge.
• Two and a half years? Some killers and rapists get lighter sentences than that.
• “Witnesses testified that a 3-year-old girl saw them” Chances are that a three-year-old won’t won’t understand what they are seeing anyway, and if they did, it would be a lot like watching a couple of animals mating at the zoo. This is sad, but kids see worse things on prime-time TV every single day.
• He was 40, she was 21. That dude has some serious mojo if he can pull a bird half his age and close the deal on the spot. Whatever vitamins he is taking, I want some o’dat.

I’ll end with a particularly bone-headed quote, from Assistant State Attorney Anthony Dafonseca: “If you think about 2:30 in the afternoon on a crowded beach. It takes a certain type of person to do that in front of children a few feet away,”

Er… no. it takes a certain type of couple.