The scholars conducted in-depth interviews with 74 physicists and biologists who are graduate students or faculty members at prestigious universities, and the results illustrate options that male scientists have that many female scientists who have or want children lack. A majority of men studied who have families organized their lives in decidedly unequal ways with regard to family and home duties. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most traditional male scientists are older (and more successful). But the study finds that many male scientists starting their careers (and whose wives work outside the home) do not attempt to have equal responsibility for raising children or managing homes.
Well, if one wants to remain an immature little boy who is incapable of having a life partner and needs a Mommy and whose children resent and despise him, one should absolutely pursue this course of action.
I have noticed, though, that there is a certain vein of immaturity that is very present among men in the sciences. In the Humanities, most men I know (even the ones who are older) are aware that being a walking stereotype of a male chauvinist pig and a Mommy’s boy incapable of growing up makes one look ridiculous and undermines one’s life. In sciences, it’s a lot more often that you meet men who seem completely stunted in their development. Read the linked article and you will be shocked at how these “scholars” blabber on incoherently, incapable of expressing (or probably even forming) a single thought.
There are very intelligent, progressive and anti-chauvinistic men from sciences who read this blog, so exceptions from this sad rule exist. Yet I do believe that many men in sciences lag behind developmentally and intellectually. This probably happens because in the course of their studies they do all they can to avoid taking courses in the Humanities and not everybody is enlightened enough to educate themselves. As a result, we end up with people who are very good at their own limited field of knowledge but exhibit all of the characteristics of an idiot savant outside of it. (Seriously, read the quotes in the linked article, if you don’t believe me.)
Again, if you are a male scientist who reads this blog, this post is not about you. You wouldn’t be able to get through a single post of mine if you weren’t completely different from those sad creatures.
Clarissa's Blog 
I like the part in the article where it says, “The findings are significant, the authors write, because scientific disciplines are “greedy” about time commitments, and young scientists in particular are expected to work well above 40 hours a week.“ Implying not like those humanities slackers. LOL
LikeLike
Good point.
LikeLike
The arrangement I find saddest are the cases where the men works, wife stays fully at home but ACTUALLY has an academic track record comparable to the man. She looks sad and insecure, while the men look very happy and self-confident and flirt with their female PhD students, and say that their wives ‘wanted to stay at home’. I know a few such examples. My guess is that the man has been undermining the self-confidence of the wife already prior to having children, to prepare her to leave her job. Utterly disgusting.
LikeLike
Such guys get their just deserts, believe me. Their marriages crumble, the sex lives dry up, the perennially depressed weepy spouses and hugely problematic children get to them. I try not to indulge my Schadenfreude when I see this happen.
I’m such a liar. Of course, I always allow myself to feel happy seeing them squirm in misery.
LikeLike
(I also always allow myself to feel happy when someone manages to work “Schadenfreude” into a normal sentence, because it’s such an awesome word/concept…);-)
LikeLike
I think you need to get to the root of this. Who is creating these ”Mommy’s Boys”??
LikeLike
Daddies who don’t spend times with them, leaving the entirely to the care of Mommies. 🙂
LikeLike
Lol, so its the parent that doesnt spend time with them that instills these dysfunctional traits. Hmmm, interesting hypothesis. 😉
LikeLike
Our relationship with the parent of the same gender is responsible for our own socialization. This is as much of a hypothesis as that today is Wednesday.
LikeLike
Interesting. So how does it work if your same gender parent dies when you are a baby and you are then raised exclusively by a female parent?
LikeLike
People look for substitute parental figures. Are you really telling me this is all new to you? 🙂 🙂
When a relationship with one of parents is completely lousy, it’s always a good idea to look for a substitute figure. Unless one does that, one is likely to start looking for such a figure in one’s sex partners and that always is very unhealthy.
LikeLike
“Such guys get their just deserts, believe me. Their marriages crumble, the sex lives dry up, the perennially depressed weepy spouses and hugely problematic children get to them. I try not to indulge my Schadenfreude when I see this happen.”
Yeah, this is a principle basic to shamanism. If you undermine the health of another, you will end up being burdened by their lack of health. You need to work to make the people around you healthy, so that you too can be healthy.
LikeLike
I really like this!
LikeLike
Modern science gave up the pursuit of knowledge some time ago and has returned to its Enlightenment roots of genteel patrician fascism. At the same time, feminism has been coralled into a Marxist ghetto; put both together and you see that when women won the right to put a cross into a box every few years their fight for equality didn’t actually advance that much.
LikeLike
“when women won the right to put a cross into a box every few years their fight for equality didn’t actually advance that much”
– Something tells me you are not a woman. 🙂 🙂
LikeLike
I am now a biology student, having started an English major and spent several years (good years!) in between as a philosophy major. I definitely notice a difference. My science major really does demand a lot more time than my previous majors and the result of taking time to follow other interests can be extremely punitive.
At times, I think about leaving it, as much as I love the knowledge.
There’s little or no time spent conversing with other human beings or having debates, and I miss that from my time studying philosophy. And everything to do with society isn’t part of biology or chemistry, so it disappears off the radar. I’ve known other students, like me, who looked for balance by taking on a double major. It’s common to hear people resist the suggestion that we should take more non-science electives, though, because any course we take that doesn’t teach lab technique and open new areas of research to us can be seen as making us more scientifically ignorant and less qualified for future work. So yes, a lot of people get steered into very narrow focus on their research and a total disengagement with other people, and they tend to be the folks who succeed – and get divorced three times and their kids never call them any more, but we tell ourselves – as we watch our seniors tell themselves – that the fruits of the research (higher yield drought resistant potato crops to offset famine and save lives, say) is worth the price of being a complete jerkwad who alienated everyone he knew and doesn’t understand the world outside the lab, the granting agencies, and the corridors of power that finance the granting agencies.
Does that trouble me? Oh yes, it does. If I knew how to solve systemic, institutional social justice problems, though, I wouldn’t have switched into biology. I’m not good at solving systemic, institutional social justice problems, even though I keep reading about them. I study plants now.
LikeLike
Thank you for this fascinating comment, Scott!
LikeLike
Perhaps I am showing my selfishness but I’d rather have a socially clueless technological master designing my silicone wafers than a socially “normal” person. Say what you want to about the shattered minds of socially repressed geniuses who come up with all the great ideas of tomorrow, their broken personalities help keep them isolated and working. Some of us just weren’t cut out to “mingle” with the general population and for those not working on problems that involve “people”, why force them too ;).
LikeLike
My friend, I’m autistic, so there is no need to convince me of the value of people who hate mingling. I’d rather eat rat poison than leave my happy isolation. But in this post I talked about people who made a choice to start families yet are so profoundly immature, selfish and stupid that they treat their family members like chattel. Everybody should feel free to live as isolated as they want. But if one chooses to bring people into one’s life and then walks all over them, that person is not a genius. He is a stupid jerk.
LikeLike
In all, there is no logic in the idea that one must be lacking in one part of one’s personality in order to be a genius. I’ve seen this formula used to justify male stupidity too many times. Some would have it that it’s needful for men to be clods, because without that they would not be able to express a creative spark. That’s fine. Let them be oafs, and to the degree they are oafs, I will treat them as such. To the degree they are creative, I will delight in that. But don’t pretend that being heavy-footed is a sign of creativity. I’ll take the creativity in a guy and leave behind the oaf, the clod, as useless remains.
LikeLike
I highly doubt that the male scientists questioned for that article are gifted in anything. Like in any discipline, most of them are boring plodders who appear as the 17th or 25th name in a few articles.
LikeLike
Hence their dire need for compensation in the form of proclaiming their difficult personalities as a feature of their identities.
LikeLike
Are u, Clarissa, really autistic, or are you in an environment, an era – where it is typical and quite common for people to intone, I’M AUTISTIC.
These few things might help you snap out of it.
1) CNN doesn’t stand for Cable Network News – it stands for See Nothing Nothing
2) There is a statue of John Lennon in Cuba – it has been there for over 10 years.
3) There is a radio station in Cuba called “Radio havana Cuba” and they have been broadcasting in english everyday since the 1960s. I used to listen to it during the Vietnam War and hear the most outrageous things. I used to call people over to hear it and people would say “Oh, I don’t want to listen to communist propaganda.” What would they rather listen to? Scareface Propangda?
LikeLike
Thank you, I’m neither looking for help nor intoning anything. Both your unwarranted aggression and your weird collection of trivia seem quite misplaced.
I will refer to my way of being in any way I see fit. You have the right to do the same, so go and enjoy it.
LikeLike