Yesterday I posted about Psychology Today blogger Kanazawa’s argument that feminism was unnecessary because women’s sexuality gives them absolute power over men (or at least the pretty ones do—I guess the ugly ones are supposed to be content as body slaves or something). The best response, from one of the commenters on the echidne blog (scroll down for the posts): “So looking hot and having power over men because of that is equivalent or even better to having wealth and political power? Then it’s astonishing we don’t have paid parental leave, free and easily available childcare, an equal rights amendment, and all the other things polls show women want. Just offer to f*** a congressman, and he’ll do whatever you want, amirite? Sexual attraction is such a great power.

And of course men have no sexual power over women, women never do foolish things to get a gorgeous guy, only men have such powerful sex drives.”
Echidne does an amazing job deconstructing Kanazawa’s sexist pseudoscience, as do her commenters, so I won’t repeat most of it here.

Satoshi Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist and the author of a Psychology Today blog which the headline informs us presents “the hard truths about human nature.”
The hard truth is, Kanazawa is a sexist finding the science to satisfy his personal beliefs. As witness the title of his latest opus, ” Why modern feminism is illogical, unnecessary, and evil.”
According to Kanazawa: “modern feminism is illogical because, as Pinker points out, it is based on the vanilla assumption that, but for lifelong gender socialization and pernicious patriarchy, men and women are on the whole identical. An insurmountable body of evidence by now conclusively demonstrates that the vanilla assumption is false; men and women are inherently, fundamentally, and irreconcilably different. Any political movement based on such a spectacularly incorrect assumption about human nature – that men and women are and should be identical – is doomed to failure.”
Wrong. In the first place, many feminists don’t think men and women are identical; some think women far superior, nobler, more compassionate, etc.
In the second place, the basis of feminism isn’t whether they’re identical; it isn’t whether or not men naturally want more money, more power, more success than women; it’s that if a woman does want those things—and there are plenty who do—she should be treated equally to a man who has the same abilities. Arguments over difference mostly come up because the standard antifeminist argument is that women don’t want those things. Or they don’t want them as much as men. So there’s no need to go asking whether there’s discrimination, because it’s irrelevant.
Kanazawa again: “It is also not true that women are the “weaker sex.” ”
Well, feminists would agree: They’ve been fighting against that one for years. The argument women were delicate creatures who needed nurturing was one sexists have been using to explain why women shouldn’t be exposed to the harsh world of business—rejecting it is hardly proof that feminism is wrong.
Kanazawa: “The fact that men and women are fundamentally different and want different things makes it difficult to compare their welfare directly, to assess which sex is better off; for example, the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women. ”
Umm, let’s think about this … I have lots of shoes but no money. Another guy has lots of money, but no shoes. Objectively I AM worse off.
Kanazawa: “Another fallacy on which modern feminism is based is that men have more power than women. Among mammals, the female always has more power than the male, and humans are no exception. It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige. They do, because they have to, in order to impress women. Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to. What do women control? Men. As I mention in an earlier post, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.”
And if a woman doesn’t want to be confined to batting her eyelashes to get men to do things, she’s out of luck?
And if she’s not “reasonably attractive,” what happens then? No power either way—but I guess in Kanazawa’s world, she’s disposable.
And even a cursory look at human history–or around the world today–mocks Kanazawa’s premise. If women were running Afghanistan, I think they’d have a much better deal there. Heck, they’d have a better deal here if they had as much power as he imagines.
I’ve heard this argument 20 years before. It’s still nonsense.
Kanazawa: “Finally, modern feminism is evil because it ultimately makes women (and men) unhappy. In a forthcoming article in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania show that American women over the last 35 years have steadily become less and less happy, as they have made more and more money relative to men.”
So since it makes me unhappy that a major magazine is giving online space to someone so full of bull, does that mean Kanazawa’s evil?
And again, his basis is flawed: Women do not make as much money as men (which he claims further down in the post). And the study authors specifically reject the idea that women working or making more money have anything to do with unhappiness (among other things, unhappiness also affects stay-at-home moms who haven’t gone out into the workforce).