The ERA today

Many editorial pages this year have predicted that a new era has opened, one in which important men will increasingly be called to account for the sexual abuse or harassment of women. A sharp acceleration of accusations as the year progressed has made the prediction plausible.

I agree entirely—well, almost. We’re not in the vortex of a revolution; rather, a change has been building for a very long time. In 1963, The Feminine Mystique was published, documenting widespread feelings of unfulfillment among American women. A decade later, I recall a very sober meeting at work. My uber-boss told us that referring to the women in our organization as “girls” was taboo. And further, an affirmative action program was being rolled out so that women would be matched with more challenging jobs and helped to appreciate their worth and potential. At about the same time, Helen Reddy’s song “I Am Woman,” a hymn to the power of women, shot to the top of the pop music charts.

Throughout the 70’s, support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) grew. The ERA proposed to grant equal rights to men and women in matters of divorce, property, employment, and much else tainted by sexual discrimination.

Congress passed the ERA and sent it on to the state legislatures, where it had a rush of successes. In just five years, it had 35 of the 38 state ratifications it needed. But it would budge no further, even though Congress extended the ratification deadline by three years. Conservative America spoke, issuing dire warnings of women forced to enter the draft and the inevitable shame of being a housewife.

Still, the approval of 70% of the states is something to reckon with. A movement like that doesn’t vaporize. On the contrary, a “virtuous circle” was born, a spiral in which beneficial events pile on one another and undergird more beneficial events to come. Affirmative action programs grew more common. Women continued to press for wage equality. Their numbers rose in elective offices, at the local, state, and federal levels. Glass ceilings shattered. A woman was nominated for the presidency. This year came the tipping point.

Last night on the news, I heard the story of Gitanjali Rao, a 12-year-old girl from Denver, who won the Young Scientist Challenge and $25,000. She had been upset on hearing about the high levels of lead in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water. It wasn’t just the harm lead does to the growth and brains of children, it takes days for a lab to report that a suspected water sample has been poisoned. So Gitanjali invented a device and a companion mobile app that can detect lead-contaminated water in seconds. Imagine the incredible rate of water sampling that can now be done anywhere in the world!

When Gitanjali’s science teacher was asked what made her special, she answered, “Gitanjali’s a risk taker; she’s not afraid to fail.” We should now say the same of tens of millions of girls and women, to the great betterment of us all.

Beautiful women

A while ago, I saw Charley Rose interview Gisele Bündchen, the Brazilian supermodel. Her career has been filled with superlatives and hyperbole. In 2000, she was the “Boobs from Brazil,” inspiring 36,000 breast enhancements in Brazil, in that year alone. Plastic surgeons worshipped her. Rolling Stone proclaimed her “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” AskMen.com ranked her at or near the top of their “Most Desirable Women” list for 10 years running. Anna Wintour of Vogue called her the “model of the millennium.” In 2013, GQ Magazine put her on its list of “The Hundred Hottest Women of the 21st Century.” And me? She’s certainly appealing, but I stop well short of awe. Look at her pipe-cleaner arms and angular face. Too many long, straight lines for me. I want more meat, more roundness. My favorite Greek letter is pi. My favorite architect is Frank Gehry. I think Tom Brady could have done better, but then, he likes his footballs deflated.

I had to wonder, If Gisele Bündchen isn’t a paragon of female beauty, who is? Before long, I realized that this is the wrong question. The right one is, What is female beauty? After much diverting analysis, I concluded that beauty is not a singular thing: it comes in varieties! The first variety is the one that Hollywood loves to show us: Earth Mothers, full-figured Circes who beget waves of lust. The second is Royalty, women of a majestic mien who project composure. The third is Sweethearts. They all have a kind of lovable vulnerability. They inspire an impulse to embrace and protect. The last is what I call the Obsessions, women you can’t get out of your mind, for unclear reasons. Undoubtedly, it has something to do with a joie de vivre and intelligence that complement their looks. Of course, this variety is the most subjective of all.

To make my idea of female beauty concrete, I’m going to name names for each variety. You’ll recognize the names and invoke a corresponding image in your head. Nonetheless, I want you to compare your image to mine, so I’ve linked each name to a photo. Happy viewing…

Earth Mothers. Ava Gardner, Kim Novak, Elizabeth Taylor, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, Vanessa Williams, Kim Kardashian, Sofia Vergara, Kate Upton. (Honorable mentions: Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield.) My favorite, across generations of Rubenesque beauties, is Sophia Loren. She stunned me in Arabesque, where she casts steamy glances at Gregory Peck. I wondered how many takes he ruined by choking on his own saliva.

Royalty. Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Greer Garson, Grace Kelly, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett. Here I favor Ingrid Bergman, based on two performances—as Ilsa Lund in Casablanca and as Anna Koreff in Anastasia. Near the end of the latter, she descends a staircase, elegantly attired. A party of doubters below is transfixed by her charisma.

Sweethearts. Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, Mitzi Gaynor, Shirley Jones, Audrey Hepburn, Meg Ryan. Emma Stone. I can’t choose between Mitzi Gaynor (in South Pacific) and Shirley Jones (in Oklahoma), but the choice among boys in the 50’s—when I was a teenager—was Doris Day, hands down. One of my brother’s friends used to spontaneously rhapsodize about her. He’d close his eyes, moan, and have a kind of seizure. Amazingly, he wasn’t the least embarrassed when he snapped out of it.

Obsessions.  Tea Leoni, Debra Messing, Tina Fey, Scarlett Johansson, Sarah Silverman. They are my obsessions. I became a dedicated Tea Leoni fan after seeing The Family Man, an unheralded movie in which she played opposite Nicolas Cage. She was simultaneously smoldering, smart, and amiable, a devastating combination. What’s  confounding is that she seems to have little in common with Sarah Silverman, who is brilliantly funny and almost in denial about her sexiness. She has an ethnic beauty that I respond to as an ethnic Jew. I think it’s mostly her eyebrows, which rate a 12 on a 10-point scale.

Even though our ideas about female beauty are undoubtedly different, I think we can agree that the mere fact of its existence is a kind of miracle. On this Thanksgiving holiday, please join me in enjoying Stephen Sondheim’s “Pretty Women,” from Sweeny Todd. I think of it as a hymn of thanksgiving.

Congratulations, old fella!

Linda and I went shopping today for a new toilet and a bathroom cabinet. It was tough work, and when we were done, it seemed a good idea to get lunch at a restaurant we frequent. We were seated in a booth, and across from us three tables had been joined to accommodate a party of 12. It looked as if most were in their 80’s, with some spillover into the 90’s. The youngest looked like “minders,” leading me to speculate that they’d all been let out as a treat from a home for seniors. Linda demurred. “I think they arrived in separate cars,” she said. (Well, of course they did, I thought. Only 12 clowns could arrive in the same car!)

Anyhow, the gabble was distracting to the point of irritation. All but one of them were women, naturally. Past a certain age, the population transforms into a single gender. And I have a theory that the impulse to chatter and to do it volubly increases with age, so that by the time women get to their 80’s you get a stereophonic hen house. The lone man, however, didn’t say a word. He sat quietly, moved his eyes, occasionally his entire head, and attended to his food.
I felt sad for him. I wondered whether there were any men in his life of his age. We don’t have a word in English—maybe not in any language—for “age solitude.” We ought to have one. “I hope he has some children,” I said. “Ones that aren’t in another state and can visit.”

Then one of the women announced, “I’m going to live dangerously. I’m ordering mashed potatoes!” I had to laugh at that. So this is what becomes of the concept of “danger” as we age. From bungee jumping to mashed potatoes. And really, when we enter our 80’s, how much danger is left in our lives? After you outlive the possibility of a young or middle-aged death, doesn’t danger get a demotion? Think of someone who’s 102 who says, “I could die any minute.” I don’t think I’d reply, “Well, then you’d better be careful.”

For some reason, they got on the subject of birthdays. It began with a mention of people not present and how old they were. The first age mentioned was 90-something, and then someone said so-and-so would soon be 105. This tickled many of them, and they began calling out their ages. A woman near me, the one who ordered the mashed potatoes, declared proudly that on May 2nd she would be 83. Clearly, something happens in the female brain in late middle age that causes women to lose any reluctance about giving out their age. I think it must be a kind of defiant resignation to nature: “OK, I admit it. Youth has fled. I’ve lost my shapely body, and I’m no longer alluring. But dammit, I’m a realist now, and I like who I’ve become!” Bully for that.

As we were finishing our lunches, I heard someone ask, “Who here has had cataract surgery?” Then someone replied, “Well, we all have, of course!” I thought that surely a few hadn’t, but they weren’t speaking up. Could it have been from embarrassment, as when the sailor says to his buddies, “We’ve all been to a whore house, right?” For sure—rite of passage.

I paid the check and told Linda I wanted to stop by the old guy on our way out and congratulate him. In a way, he was a kind of hero, like the last living marine to have fought on Iwo Jima. “OK,” Linda said. “But after I’m out the door.”

The superior sex

Are men superior to women, or is it the other way around? Or is this a dumb question that we shouldn’t waste time on? Well, I do think it’s worth considering, obviously, because I’m raising it here. I’ll say why later, but first it’s important to clarify the question. This is a better way to ask it:

Is one sex superior to the other in all respects, or does superiority depend on which respects we’re talking about? And if the latter, is one sex superior in a preponderance of respects?

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the answer is the latter. Men are bigger, stronger, faster, and more physically mobile than women. That’s why men have exclusively, until very recently, been the defenders and hunters in a society. That’s why jobs defined by physical exertion have gone to men. That’s why athletically gifted women can’t compete against athletically gifted men of the same age in any of the major sports. On the other hand, women live longer than men, in most countries by an average of 4 to 5 years. They show greater resistance to fatigue, have better social skills, score somewhat higher on intelligence tests, and are better educated.

On the “preponderance” question, I think it’s helpful to first consider the value to society of each area of superiority. For example, battles are no longer fought with clubs, spears, broadswords, or bayonets. Having an aptitude for using advanced weapon systems is more important today, and men have no advantage here. Likewise, in an age of mechanization and robotics, “hard labor” is a concept that applies to prisons and little else. So being big, strong, fast, and mobile gives men an advantage only in athletics, which basically means that sports fans find them more fun to watch.

What value do women’s areas of superiority bring to society? I think we can agree that greater longevity is a blessing to women but has no societal implications. (Perhaps as we understand the health benefits of having two X chromosomes, we’ll learn what gene therapies, if any, might compensate for having an X chromosome and a runty Y chromosome.) We can also discount the value of tiring less easily for much the same reason we discounted the value of size, strength, etc. The world generally presents us with no crises that demand tirelessness.

The consequential areas of superiority are in social skills and intelligence. At every level of society—in the home, on the job, in local politics, national politics, and international diplomacy—interpersonal skills are critical in creating cooperation and working toward constructive outcomes. Women excel in these areas. They fall short of men’s test scores only in dealing with stress and having self-confidence [source]. However, in these two areas, women are in transition. Only in the last generation or so have women found the models and encouragement needed to become top-level leaders. Along with this shift, they’ve made gains in their IQ scores and college graduation rates. Their IQ has surpassed men’s for the first time in a century [source].
We can only guess where the trend line will level off. Their graduation rates surpassed men’s in 1978, and the gap has been widening ever since. This year 140 women will graduate with a college degree for every 100 men [source].

Do I then conclude that women are superior to men? In endeavors that matter most, yes. That’s not to say that all women are superior to all men; there is no doubt considerable overlap in the accomplishments of both sexes. But if I concede that, does this inquiry become pointless? No, because it helps us imagine what the world might be like if it weren’t male-centered. For example, women now hold 20% of the seats in the U.S. Senate and 17.9% of the seats in the House of Representatives. What if they held half of the seats in both? Would our Congress then work more harmoniously and productively? Practically all the top positions in our banking and brokerage industry are held by men. Wall Street is awash in testosterone and beset by a dog-eat-dog mentality. If men and women held these positions in roughly equal numbers, would we have seen the financial malpractice that took the country down in 2008? We’ve been continuously at war for more than 12 years. Our appetite for military intervention has receded but not disappeared. Would this recent history have been the same under female leadership? Would the state of medical research be more advanced if women’s leadership didn’t lag behind men’s [source]? Would our courts be fairer if more that 27.1% of state and federal judges were women [source]? And this is just the beginning of what we might conjecture.

In the 19th century, women’s suffrage became an organized movement in Western Europe and the U.S. Then and ever since, the case for women’s rights has been based on ethical grounds: women and men are equal partners in humankind and, as such, the liberty and opportunities that life affords must belong to both equally. Only the most backward people dispute this. Nevertheless, women still do not have equal representation at the reins of our society. So long as men dominate decision making in politics, business, finance, law, medicine, and countless other professions, we will stumble into the future with our best resource mostly under wraps.