Men Are Extreme (What Can We Say?)

Danny G’s post on Mr. French and his antiquated views is the entry that keeps on giving. Today, “Gay Like A Fox” chimed in with this:

I suspect the dearth of top-level women creatives is rooted in nature. Looking beyond the realm of advertising we see that, historically, very, very few of the top contenders in any field have been women. In other words, there are relatively few women among the world’s best chess players, chefs, mathematicians, composers, painters, bloggers, web designers, etc… People who say this is because of discrimination might want to explain why FEWER women won Nobel Prizes in Mathematics between the years 1950-2000 than between the years 1900-1950, despite the mass opening up of educational and vocational opportunites for women in the 60’s and 70’s throughout the very countries from which most Nobel Prize winners are drawn.
Maybe it’s because women really just don’t have the same capacity for work-obsession that men do. Maybe women are more interested in personal relationships than they are in their own selves and their careers. Maybe there’s something to what Camille Paglia once said about there not being a female Beethoven because there is no female Jack the Ripper (i.e. that men naturally embody the extremes of human behavior much more frequently than do women, and thus have a much higher chance of being geniuses and serial killers). However you look at it, the reality of female underacheivement relative to men is a long-standing and universal phenomenon. Non-p.c. explanations for it shouldn’t just be shoved down the memory hole because they hurt your feelings.