Battle Of Sexes Continues Ad Infinitum - Feminists Dreary Bores

As a general rule, I don't consider myself an enemy of feminism. Heck, as a committed Hegelian, I believe that society ought to be ordered in such a way as to allow individuals to achieve their most complete actualization possible - and, since feminism is to a large degree about pushing for societal conditions which allow women to achieve their maximum level of actualization, I'm entirely sympathetic.

But, of late, there has been one particular brand of feminism which has got my goat. And that's the fairly recent genre of criticizing men, as a class, for their poor conversation skills at cocktail parties.

Thus, in April, Rebecca Solnit described in the pages of the Los Angeles Times the sheer boorishness of a man she met at a cocktail party:

He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."
I replied, "Several, actually."
He said, in the way you encourage your friend's 7-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, my book on Eadweard Muybridge, the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"
So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingenue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book -- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.
Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, including a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me; with my infinitely generous younger brother; with splendid male friends. Still, there are these other men too.
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.
But he just continued on his way. She had to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a 19th century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless -- for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing.

Wow!

You know, maybe the circles I run in are just incredibly unsophisticated, but I for one had no idea who Eadweard Muybridge was before googling him. And you know, my humble opinion is that, were I an Eadweard Muybridge scholar and I brought Muybridge up at a party, I would be quite happy to find an interlocutor who was familiar with Eadweard Muybridge and - what's even better - was familiar with my latest book. Seriously, where the hell does Rebecca Solnit get off criticizing this guy!? How self-important does a person have to be to write a column in the LA Times denigrating a guy who only read a review of her book rather than the book itself?

Solnit obviously wrote this column thinking we ought to think poorly of "Mr. Very Important", but her "Mr. Very Important" comes across as well-read, intellectually curious, and, if he has a fault, it's that he's used to being the most well-read person in the room. Whereas, Solnit comes across as vain, preening, and generally annoyed that someone outside of academia wasn't willing to acknowledge her brilliance.

Well, to this latest feminist genre, today we added a column by Guardian columnist Sabine Durrant. She claims that "men are boring" and goes on to explore the scientific reasons why. Her conclusion: men are more egocentric then women.

Do these women genuinely expect us to take them seriously?