{"id":852,"date":"2006-06-01T09:22:44","date_gmt":"2006-06-01T14:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2006\/06\/01\/feminism-destroying-the-planet\/"},"modified":"2006-06-01T09:22:44","modified_gmt":"2006-06-01T14:22:44","slug":"feminism-destroying-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/01\/feminism-destroying-the-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminism:  Destroying the Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Every now and then the world is trying to tell you something, and events conspire in a flash of synchronicity to reveal a truth so deep and powerful that ordinary genius alone would have been insufficient to figure it out.  Such was the case recently, when I was leafing through Garry Wills&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/contents\/20060608\"><em>New York Review of Books<\/em><\/a> article on Harvey Mansfield&#8217;s studly paean to all that is virtuous and masculine, entitled simply <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0300106645\/\"><em>Manliness<\/em><\/a>.  (Now, it&#8217;s true that the sight of Professor Mansfield giving a high-five to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.comedycentral.com\/sitewide\/media_player\/play.jhtml?itemId=61315\">Stephen Colbert<\/a> demonstrated pretty clearly that, on the electrical-appliances scale of manliness, Harvey is less of a drill press or band saw and more of a cappucino maker or perhaps a motorized salad spinner.  But that doesn&#8217;t affect the persuasive grandeur of his argument.)  At the same time, I was mulling over the implications of <a href=\"http:\/\/climatecrisis.org\/\"><em>An Inconvenient Truth<\/em><\/a>, the global-warming scare-movie from noted beta-male Al Gore.  Mr. Tree-Hugger himself would prance about in front of his fancy charts and graphs that looked like this:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cmdl.noaa.gov\/gallery\/spo_overview\/Slide23?full=1\"><img class='center' src='http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/uploads\/CO2.png' alt='CO2 concentration' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And then, girly-man that he is, he would act all scared that the world was going to melt or some such nonsense.  <a href=\"http:\/\/majikthise.typepad.com\/majikthise_\/2006\/05\/an_inconvenient.html\">Crazy<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realclimate.org\/index.php\/archives\/2006\/05\/al-gores-movie\/\">alarmist<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In a flash of insight, it hit me:  this must be feminism&#8217;s fault, somehow.  Those pushy women have tipped the balance of the universal order, and thrown Nature&#8217;s intricate equilibrium out of whack.  Fortunately, I was handed just the tool I needed to prove this obviously-correct hypothesis by <a href=\"http:\/\/delong.typepad.com\/sdj\/2006\/05\/fun_with_graphs.html\">Brad DeLong<\/a>, in the form of <a href=\"http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/mdlyl\">Gapminder World<\/a> from Google.   Check it out, peeps:  here is a graph of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, as a function of <em>the ratio of girls to boys attending school<\/em> in different countries.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/mdlyl\"><img class='center' src='http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/uploads\/womenco2.jpg' alt='Women in school and CO2 emissions' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>You can see it right there, science doesn&#8217;t lie.  The correlation is clear as the Los Angeles haze &#8212; countries that educate women are dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Now, unless you&#8217;re crazy enough to think that it&#8217;s the CO2 that is causing all those girls to go get themselves an education, I think the implication is obvious:  feminism is destroying the planet.  We can now add this to Professor Mansfield&#8217;s insight that gender equality leads to less exciting sex lives, as one more level-headed condemnation of these tiresome females and their outdated Enlightenment aspirations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every now and then the world is trying to tell you something, and events conspire in a flash of synchronicity to reveal a truth so deep and powerful that ordinary genius alone would have been insufficient to figure it out. Such was the case recently, when I was leafing through Garry Wills&#8217; New York Review [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-humor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}