The other day I came across an article about genius, specifically how ONLY men can be geniuses.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483707/Only-men-geniuses--far-stupid-men-women.html
The author states that only men have the capacity for genius, but don't worry girls, we women occupy some sort of intellectual "middle ground" for the survival of the species. Um....ok. I find several things wrong with the title alone "Only Men can be geniuses...but there are far mores stupid men than women" First of all, other than being a writer there is no discernible reason for him to be able to make such a definitive statement. Secondly he disproves himself in the first few sentences, saying that for every two male geniuses, there is only one woman. Ok well, she still exists does she not? Already he is revealing his own misogynistic views that any females accomplishments are still less than a males. He also somewhat defends the actions of the Harvard President who said women were naturally bad a science. The general pompous, authoritative tone of his article just pissed me off. He stated no science or studies to back up his claim, although he did talk about one study where brothers and sisters who were raised with the same intellectual expectations were given tests in math and science and so on, saying only that the results were women did much better at languages. The source of this study was by an ALL MALE team of psychologists. The fact that they can't even see their own bias is just ridiculous. He also goes on to state that there are NO great women poets or playwrites, NO great women philosophers, NO creative women in visual arts, NO female inventors. He also states that of course there are women who are great in there fields of education and commerce, but I guess to him that in now way makes them GREAT? Now this article led me to try and search for female geniuses, which was sadly difficult to find when inputting "female genius" in google search, however I did find some interesting information. Including a list of top ten geniuses, with a woman occupying the # 10 spot only, but she's there isn't she, she exists, right? http://listverse.com/2007/10/06/top-10-geniuses/
What about Georgia Brown, recognized as a genius at age two? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-463539/Two-year-old-Matilda-youngest-girl-Mensa.html Does she not qualify for some reason, her IQ is 152 and she was invited to join MENSA, by now she is only five but give her some time to produce some great masterpieces in music, or hell I don't know cure cancer. As to the authors previous assertion that there are NO great female philosophers, here is an article of the top ten female philosophers http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/ten-great-female-philosophers-the-thinking-womans-women-498733.html
Sadly, I am not very familiar with most of the women on this list, so its no wonder why people don't think there is such a thing as female genius, when all we hear about is Einstein and Sartre and never is a woman thrown into the mix. Lastly, this woman has another theory as to why there are no female geniuses, what she calls a "numbers game" http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16331-the-lack-of-female-einsteins-is-all-down-to-numbers.html The author of the "Only Men Can be Geniuses....."article feels that as women we have had ample time to stand out a geniuses, so where the hell was Shakespeare's female counterpart. Probably squeezed into a corset and being told to shut the hell up by the men in her life. In looking up female genius I found another article that found that women had to publish twice as many articles in there scientific or mathematical field to be considered on equal footing with men. The fact is we have only been allowed to vote for a little under a century and for many years have had to beg, borrow and steal to get anywhere near a university, we have only been freed from the kitchen for about fifty years. So how about we wait a couple thousand years before we definitively state that women can not be geniuses. The last article I looked at was one about a study that showed that the mere suggestion to a female that she will do worse in one subject, will in fact make her do worse in that subject. I absolutely believe this is true, when I was in third grade my mom sent me to a Private Christian school, for K-2nd I had been going to a Catholic school, so when I went to my new school, they were way ahead of me in math, instead of the teacher trying to help me she basically threw a pencil at me, told me to figure out a mathematical problem, without giving me the tools to figure it out. She then insisted to my mother that I had a learning disability and was possible retarded (seriously) she harassed my mother until she took my to a psychologist to be tested. I went through the whole IQ test, nervous as hell that I wasn't doing the right thing, and after a couple of hours he told my mom I had a perfectly normal IQ, that I may have trouble with math but I was fine. Still, that incident with an uncaring and lazy teacher colored my whole school life. I still have a sort of "fear" of math, anything with numbers just confuses me. I actually started to do a lot better in math when I had a tutor for a few years, she was very encouraging and told me everyone could do math and I flourished but once I was on my own again, one little wrong answer and that was it, I just told my self I was dumb and that was that.
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