I understand where you're coming from here, but I also understand where he's coming from. If you're a well-meaning guy who investigates feminism, it's kind of difficult not to come away feeling that the basic idea="men:bad, women:good." and if you have any self-respect at all, you get tired of that.

I fully realize that intent may not be there, but a lot of the time that's the way it comes out sounding.

Wait, what?

I didn't read it yet... but he said women don't improvise when they play jazz? Seriously? Is he on crack? Sounds like he has no clue about the structure of jazz. Or women.

Yet in jazz, where the performer has to be creative while playing, there is a stunning imbalance: hardly any women improvise. Why? The ability is there but perhaps the motivation is less. They don’t feel driven to do it.

Yeah. Okay. So that's what he said. Hmmm. He's clearly a total and complete moron.

With that, I can't take a word he said seriously or give it any weight whatsoever. That statement could only be made by someone who is deaf, blind & knows nothing about what a jazz chart LOOKS like (basic chords with a melody nobody sticks to) compared to what musicians actually play.

That is all.

(Now I'M pissed off! Not to mention that he says only men are workaholics? Has he ever tried to be a single mom? Because I'm pretty sure those women work harder than a hell of a lot of men. Not to mention that I just worked a 50 hour week myself.)

Where the hell does he get such a generalization? Does he back up what he says or is he just going "men play jazz like this, women play jazz like this, all because I said so" ??? That's kind of ridiculous...

Obviously he has never met ME.

Improv queen!

I'd like to improvise a 12-bar sequence of bitchslap in 9/16 on his face.

Seriously, the guy makes it sound like women just sit there staring at the keyboard looking pretty.

Jazz improvisation is hard work, asshole. GRRRRRR.

On preview: what casarkos said.

yea, what casarkos said.

Baumeister needs to quit whining and grow a pair. Real men don't need defending, nor even justification. tee-hee

Not to mention that he says only men are workaholics?

I went on vacation last week and worked nearly every day of it. I regularly work nights and weekends (yesterday -- Saturday -- I went into the office from noon till 8 to work on a deadline I've got next week; I'd go back in today except that I've got to start packing for my move). Except for the recovery after my jaw surgery, I haven't taken off more than a week at a time since 2003. He can kiss my skinny workaholic ass.

It's entirely too early and I'm having entirely too nice a weekend to read that article, but the quoted bits reminded me of The Patriarchy Is Bad for Everyone:

So let's review: women are the only thing keeping men from devolving into a state of nature, but they also wouldn't have invented houses (I'm not sure why, probably on account of their girl brains not being good enough to do math.) Men are beasts, but brilliant, creative beasts who don't love their children and have no morals.

This is how conservatives argue gender in the patriarchy, folks.

Heh, actually my favorite quote from that Fecke article above:

...and so women, you need to remember to always put yourself behind your man, and accede to his every whim, or else he might leave, meaning you wouldn't have that subhuman, bestial man around to help you raise the kids.

The article is mostly rubbish, of course, but he doesn't actually say that only men are workaholics, so "I'm a woman and I work a lot" is not really a valid counter-argument (not to mention the fact that it confuses anecdote with data).

The Steven Pinker piece linked at the bottom of BtGoG's article is more worth reading/talking about.

Does anyone else hear Wives and Lovers playing in the background?

I've only skimmed the article.

I am sympathetic to evolutionary psychology because much of its findings seem consistent with my own experiences of life. Men are more physically violent than women. Men have a greater appetite for casual, no-strings sex. You can find these differences in just about every society you can think of, from peaceful, boring social democracies to anarchic failed states in the Third World.

That said, evolutionary psychology seems to have inspired an awful lot of stupid shit lately. We've gone from one extreme, of pretending that every aspect of human behavior can be attributed to nurture and that any attempt to address the nature side of the equation is reactionary and bigoted, to the other, of attributing everything to nature and ignoring the social influences.

I only read the part about jazz. I was thinking that maybe, if we gave him some serious benefit-of-the-doubt, we could figure that he means to say that women are underrepresented in the ranks of free improv players (think Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, that kind of stuff). I'm not sure that's true, but it's a whole lot more plausible than 'women jazz players don't improvise.'

Based on what everybody else is saying, though, maybe that kind of charitable reading isn't justified.

First of all, Mr Baumeister is one hundred percent entirely wrong about women not improvising when they play jazz. Mr Baumeister needs to go to any gospel music church or show in the United States, where he will be most summarily schooled.

Gospel and Jazz are not the same music.

True, but, as miss lynnster notes, basically everybody who plays jazz improvises.

This is a joke, right? Like that Riggs guy?

Just so y'all know, this was discussed at MetaFilter, too. So tiring.

From what I've read from and of David Buller he seems to be the antidote to the misogyny of a lot of EP. He doesn't dismiss EP, but he provides some sobering criticism of it. Especially the evolutionary part -- as none (that I'm aware. Pinker certainly isn't) of the EPers are evolutionary biologists.