Call me a dummy feminist
Timothy P. Carney
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Feminism has had a hundred different incarnations in America. The worst version these days is the ideology that claims the mantle of feminism yet denies there are any differences between men and women — or even claims that a man can become a woman by declaring himself one.
There’s another kind of feminism that I have long embraced and which I think every conservative ought to embrace. I used to call it “Bathroom Feminism” because it first occurred to me during a conversation about the bathrooms at the United Nations.
YES, YOU SHOULD STAND UP WHEN YOUR PLANE LANDS
A left-wing feminist lobbyist at the U.N. was explaining to me how sexist the U.N. was. She gave the example of the bathrooms. The men’s room and the ladies’ room were the exact same square footage and the same shape. This was obviously stupid, she explained, because men have urinals, which take up less square footage, meaning the men’s room can accommodate more customers at a time.
Also, she pointed out, women generally take longer in the bathroom for a variety of reasons. For the sake of fairness, the ladies’ room ought to be bigger than the men’s room.
I was sold. Men and women are different. Men often are the ones designing institutions and systems in this world. Often those men don’t take into account women’s different needs, and so the world ends up rigged against women.
Now, the first premise there, that men and women are naturally different in meaningful ways, is one sometimes rejected by the legacy media and many Democratic politicians. But it’s true, and the way 99% of us live our lives 99% of the time — that includes even the deniers — reflects that truth.
Which brings us to crash-test dummies.
Plenty of online conservatives, maybe sick of the way politicians and the media are obsessed over “representation” and attempts to gender-neutralize the Spanish language, rolled their eyes at the notion that the federal government should care about the sex of crash-test dummies.
But the federal government is already very involved in the crash-test dummy game. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires cars to test their crashworthiness with dummies. The dummies are heavily engineered products that try to emulate humans’ weight, limbs, size, joints, and flexibility.
But to date, the dummies used in the United States are basically all modeled after men. Why does that matter? Let crash survivors Maria Kuhn and Hana Schank give just one example: “The neck musculature of an average woman contains far less column strength and muscle mass than a man’s, making women 22.1% more likely to suffer a head injury than men. The current standards are designed to prevent men’s heads from smashing into the dashboard and do that quite effectively, reducing 70% of whiplash in men. For women, however, the seat belts and airbags that protect men can actually cause additional injury.”
Does this have real-world consequences? It seems so. Women who are in a car crash are much more likely to die than men who are in car crashes. “Fatality risk is, on average, 17.0 … percent higher for a female than for a male of the same age,” NHTSA reported in 2013. (Yes, more men die in crashes overall, but that’s because men get into many more crashes. Men and women drive differently thanks to the meaningful natural differences between the sexes.)
Some of women’s higher crash-fatality rate is probably due to women generally driving smaller cars. But the fact that automakers engineer their crash protection for male physiques seems very likely to play some sort of role.
There’s a sad phenomenon on the Right that I’ve noticed for nearly 20 years. You could call it gender-symmetry-misogyny, though maybe misogyny is too harsh. It’s the phenomenon of conservative-leaning men decrying any accommodation for women, even holding open a door or paying child support, and citing “equality” as the reason.
Yes, there are some feminists who deny that men and women naturally have significant differences in personality, emotionality, and physiology, and so that our behaviors and culture shouldn’t differentiate between the sexes. But those feminists are wrong. And it makes no sense to refuse to be a gentleman just because there are some prominent and very wrong feminists.
Likewise, we shouldn’t have knee-jerk negative reactions to liberal feminists such as Rosa DeLauro pushing for better accommodation of women. Sure, maybe you could prove that some female-dummy advocates preach radical gender equity elsewhere, but then they would only be wrong elsewhere, not necessarily here.
When someone who is often wrong says something right — in this case, that the differences between men and women are natural and significant — we should agree with that person.