January 06, 2012
What mystifies Dr. Hawking? Women
From MSNBC:
As famed physicist Stephen Hawking turns 70, the subject that most occupies his thoughts is not how the universe arose from nothing, or how he's been able to live with neurodegenerative disease for so long. Here's what he thinks about most: "Women. They are a complete mystery." That's the bottom line from New Scientist's interview with Hawking, timed to coincide with this weekend's birthday celebration at Cambridge. The theorist is almost completely paralyzed due to his decades-long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, and had to provide his answers by laboriously twitching his cheek to operate a computerized speech-translation system. Hawking also listed what he saw as his "biggest blunder in science" (his now-repudiated insistence that information was destroyed in black holes), the most exciting development in physics during his career (the discovery of the big bang's imprint in cosmic microwave radiation) and the potential discovery that would do the most to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos (discovery of supersymmetric particles at the Large Hadron Collider). But it's his brief comment on women that attracted the most attention: How could it be that a scientist who has plumbed the deepest mysteries of the cosmos finds himself mystified by women?
Based on the view most folks have of geniuses, how could it not be?
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:51 AM | Permalink
Comments
If Hawking could amend that to "humans are a mystery" I would have more respect for his position. Humans are a mystery as much as the universe is, which is not surprising since the universe produced us. Think of the range - Pol Pot to Mozart. Amazing.
Posted by: reader | Jan 6, 2012 9:41:04 AM
I would imagine Hawking had tongue firmly planted in cheek when he made that remark!
Posted by: Haymoon | Jan 6, 2012 11:00:08 AM
It shows how sexist society still is, from Hawkins to New Scientist, to MSNBC to 3QD (sorry). I don't even see the humor or that it is worth mentioning or reporting. It is a non-event. Also implied in the article is that geniuses are mostly Men.
Posted by: Raza | Jan 6, 2012 11:35:32 AM
Haymoon,
I agree.
Raza,
Geniuses are mostly men, for whatever reason. That's not sexist, but fact.
Posted by: reader | Jan 6, 2012 11:42:35 AM
I believe that Hawking was riffing on Freud's observation -- that the insoluble mystery, after years of study, is what it is that a woman wants. Consider Hawking's age and frame of reference, and don't blame him for institutions and attitudes that are generational. Does he have to be a pioneering feminist too? Or has he done enough? Also, there's the matter of tone -- there are no voice cues to how he may mean a thing, only the words to say it. Why not just hope he meets the right girl at age 70, and that they enjoy one another?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 6, 2012 1:01:58 PM
I also agree that Hawkins comment was probably tongue in cheek, like dumb blonde jokes, but is still sexist. If geniuses have been mostly men, it is because women have been historically oppressed and given household and child rearing roles. To imply that geniuses are mostly men as a fact (as if everything else is equal) is also sexist. To find humor and lightness in all this (I presume that's why it was reported) is also sexist and good for Jay Leno and John Stewart type shows.
Posted by: Raza | Jan 6, 2012 1:23:16 PM
Men's jokes about the supposed "mysteriousness" of women are usually thinly veiled swipes at women's capacity for rational thought, self-expression, or honesty.
Describing women's behavior as "mysterious" is usually shorthand for "irrational," "silly," or "beneath me."
Sometimes men call women "mysterious" to poke fun at themselves, i.e. to say "Women are a complete mystery to me because I'm obtuse. Ha, ha."
I don't know what Hawking was getting at.
Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | Jan 6, 2012 1:48:42 PM
Elatia, "what it is that a woman wants" (that goes around all the time) is also a sexist phrase, be it Freud who originally said that. Why don't we have "what it is that a man wants"? Your comments about Hawkins are too patronizing and unnecessarily hint at his handicaps. Why don't we just say that Hawkins, like most men, even if they are genius, made a remark that was sexist. Besides, we would not be even having this discussion if a sexist media was not reporting it. Sexism in society has persisted because women have tolerated it.
Posted by: Raza | Jan 6, 2012 2:05:59 PM
True, it's like when people talk about the "mysterious East" as though Asians are quite different from other people. But it is a fact that, historically, the great majority of geniuses in art, music, science, etc have been male. This may be due to cultural factors or other factors. I believe there have been studies that find men skew more to the extremes of the bell curve in intelligence than women. I certainly don't take this as implying that men are "superior" to women.
Posted by: reader | Jan 6, 2012 2:11:03 PM
There is some statistical evidence that men display a greater variance in many qualities. So, if more men are geniuses, it is also true that more men are imbeciles. Some men enjoy great reproductive success while others die without progeny.
Nature seems to view men as high gain/high risk wagers.
Posted by: Ajit | Jan 6, 2012 2:33:52 PM
Nobody thinks it's a mystery what men want.
Hack network comedy writers aside, we don't assume that men are easier to understand because their wants are uniformly simpler than those of other humans.
We take it for granted that men are capable of articulating their own wants and needs.
We assume that men are individuals whose wants can't be neatly subsumed under the heading of "What Men Want."
Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | Jan 6, 2012 3:10:05 PM
Obviously, the phrases "what do women want" and "mystifying women" are sexist, but it is very likely that someone as smart as Hawking was being tongue in cheek. Is this humor a bit sexist? Yes, but he did go through a bad divorce. Truth is, the most interesting thing about women is how different they are from each other and the same applies to men. People are all very similar at the superficial level, but very different just below the surface.
Posted by: reader | Jan 6, 2012 3:18:05 PM
Why don't we have "what it is that a man wants"?
Well we do, sort of, it's just the reverse. "Man wants nothing more than: Beer, Sex, a Sandwich, and a Nap." "Men: One Mood. All the Time." "Men don't have enough blood to keep their reproductive organs and their brains adequately supplied at the same time,"
Shit like that. Yes, it's "sexist," but so what?
Posted by: Carlos | Jan 6, 2012 3:35:00 PM
Right. Men just want beer, sex a sandwich and a nap. And some do other stuff like write symphonies, discover evolution, design spaceships. What would stand up comics due without their stereotypes?
Posted by: reader | Jan 6, 2012 3:42:43 PM
If Stephen Hawking, at age almost 70, observes that he has encountered in daily life a bigger mystery than the cosmos otherwise offers, why over-read it? We live in an era that is torn up by gender wars -- it is one hopes part of an evolution to an era free of gender bias. Here you have one of the titanic intellects of our time, making what is probably a little joke, within which is buried a truth -- he finds women hard to understand, as his two marriages and recent divorce attest. Could it be he means his understanding is limited, and not that women are too zany for -- even -- him to figure out? Donnez-lui un break! Raza, Happy New Year -- again.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 6, 2012 3:50:25 PM
Carlos, since you brought this up :-)
Posted by: Ruchira | Jan 6, 2012 5:03:42 PM
Elatia, I'm happy to assume that Stephen Hawking made a mildly sexist joke and leave it at that. I don't look to him for comic stylings or advice on women's liberation.
I'm pushing back against the other poster's suggestion that it wasn't sexist because Hawking was joking. Hawking doesn't literally believe that women are more mysterious than any other cosmic phenomenon, he was just saying it to be funny. But when he cracked that joke, he was probably drawing on a long tradition of sexist humor.
In my experience, a lot of guys who make jokes like that don't realize those jokes are sexist. Even guys who are generally pro-equality sometimes indulge in this kind of humor without really examining the assumptions behind it.
I've found that a good way to get them to lay off (at least around me) is to casually tell them that those jokes make me uncomfortable because they make me feel like I'm being caricatured as less than a rational equal.
I wish that whole dated, sexist genre of jokes about how women are mysterious and men are childlike animals would die already.
Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | Jan 6, 2012 7:26:43 PM
My sincere apologies
Posted by: Carlos | Jan 6, 2012 8:03:08 PM
Lindsay, I love your riposte! I think that type of humor IS dying out. And a good thing too. If anything, it operates only to make sexism more palatable and to cloak aggression. But, somewhat uncharacteristically, I would like an exception to be made for Stephen Hawking -- my limitation perhaps but I cannot conceive of his being held to the same standards as other elderly and marriage-challenged professors. Richard Feynman made some astonishingly sexist observations -- I didn't want to let them in, didn't want him to have lowered himself thus, and put it down to age and culture, not to personal cussedness. With regard to some people, men and women, I'm just glad they were born and lived to think and write. Does that mean they get a free pass (from me at least) on the odd weird utterance? It probably does.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 6, 2012 8:56:16 PM
I think often when you hear men making jokes about women being mysterious it's specifically in the context of romance, particularly about the man's difficulty reading women's signals or knowing what the women expect of them when it isn't spelled out explicitly, both in courtship and in a relationship. (as someone with sort of borderline asperger's I tend to feel this way about all normal-brained humans, regardless of gender!) And certainly Hawking has had his share of relationship troubles, from what I've read. So I don't know if that's what was on his mind, but if so then to me it would be less sexist (falling into the tradition of hackneyed relationship humor, which plenty of women engage in too) than if it's more of a broad statement about female psychology (extending to, say, his female colleagues in physics, or female public figures).
Posted by: Jesse M. | Jan 6, 2012 10:58:19 PM
Good way to look at it, Jesse M. If a pre-eminent woman of 70 were to remark that her most challenging difficulty had been living peaceably on domestic terms with men, and that, after two marriages and two divorces, she saw that she had not really risen to the occasion, or even understood much about it, and that the discipline wherein she had covered herself with glory was a walk in the park compared to the imponderables of life with a man -- we would probably find her observations rueful.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 7, 2012 12:22:28 AM
I read a joke a long time ago about a female physics professor who was asked if she wanted to be addressed as "Dr." or "Mrs." She answered, "Mrs." because she had worked much harder for that title.
I don't know what exactly was on Hawking's mind but Jesse M's explanation sounds very plausible.
Posted by: Ruchira | Jan 7, 2012 12:34:29 AM
Hawking is kept from ordinary social interactions by two great barriers. His intellect and interests would alone have made it hard for him to develope social skills, and on top of that he suffers from a very isolating grievous physical disability.
Understanding other people is not some abstraction that can be achieved on a desert island. You have to interact with the complex beings represented by other people in order to learn the skills required to understand them. It takes practice, lots of practice.
Want to understand women (or any other group of people)? Spend time with them. You will get the hang of it sooner or later. I am personally making some progress in understanding people, but I admit that I have just scratched the surface of the "other."
Hawking could just as easily have said that he doesn't understand surfing.
Posted by: Mark | Jan 7, 2012 11:15:51 AM
Raza is just the type of feminist dipshit that will help fuel the fires that keep the sexes walking on eggshells for another 50 years.
Posted by: dragline | Jan 16, 2012 8:29:31 PM
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