The Creature Politic

If I were inclined to to support Charlotte Allen’s Washington Post editorial claiming that women are actually stupider than men, I would say that she is the best existing evidence in support of her own thesis.

Among her arguments, we hear that men must be more intelligent since they have larger brains:

The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents — is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men’s and women’s brains not only look different, but men’s brains are bigger than women’s (even adjusting for men’s generally bigger body size).

Keep in mind that brain size does not correlate with intelligence any more than skull shape determines personality. She also argues that men are objectively better drivers:

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, even 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.

Note that part of her argument for why men are better drivers hinges on women being less likely to get into fatal car accidents and that the difference she points in the overall rates by gender is miniscule. It also doesn’t make any sense to point how many more miles men generally drive when quoting a rate per hundred miles.

It’s not really worth taking the time to refute this kind of misogynistic idiocy point-by-point, especially when Jill at Feministe does it with more style than I could ever muster. I would like to reinforce what many others commenting on this article have pointed out, namely that had Charlotte Allen chosen to write about any group other than women, this article would never have made it to print.