Pen-Elayne on the Web

On Girls Being Smarter, or Men Being Whinier

I'm glad one of our building tenants came in to pass out copies of a joke she really liked, Eve's Talk With God, first seen in the blogosphere a little over a year ago according to Blogsearch but of course much of the office world still revolves around the Land of Funny Photocopies. Anyway, if she hadn't stopped by, goodness knows how long it would have been before I realized Pandagon had mysteriously disappeared from my Bloglines subs. Because the Eve joke contains God's caution about Man, "He won't be as smart as you (Woman), so he will also need your advice to think properly." Which in turn reminded me of Amanda's terrific fisking post Daring white boy rebels strike for stupidity, which lots of other bloggers had referenced but which I couldn't remember reading despite being a faithful Pandagonian for quite awhile now.

In any case, I've resubscribed to Pandagon's feed so I could catch up with Amanda and Pam and Jedmunds, and here's what I want to say about the situation Amanda discusses, because I haven't seen this conjecture raised by anyone else yet. Could it be that girls are doing better in school in part because in large measure society still expects girls to be docile and obedient, whereas boys are encouraged to be rebellious and boisterous, and therefore on average girls are likelier to do better than boys in an atmosphere that rewards obedience? In any case, Amanda's post is terrific; here are a couple good quotes from it:

If there isn’t a better symbol of male privilege than giving all the boys in a high school extra points on their report cards just for being male, I don’t know what is.

What’s distressing about this is how anti-feminists describe a real gap in the average work ethic between boys and girls, but because of their belief in male superiority, they have to cast boys' behavior in flattering terms. What should be characterized as slacking off is characterized as charming rebellion. And what would be characterized as an admirable work ethic in boys instead is now obsequieous teacher’s pet behavior in girls. More than one feminist has described how behavior patterns get judged positively or negatively according to the sex of the person performing them.

I'm delighted to see the Pandagon commenters, always interesting and thoughtful, echo my thoughts about the situation with observations like "what does this say about the relative social status of girls and boys, that girls have been successfully trained to do what they’re told while boys demand to do what they want?" and "women are raised to serve authority, boys are raised to be authority and not accept anything less."

Update: Iocaste does the legwork.