Comfortably dumb

So, David Gilmour is a bit of a dick, eh? No, not that David Gilmour, another one.

"Who is he and what has he done?" I hear you cry. Well, he teaches literature at The University of Toronto and has recently revealed in an interview that he refuses to teach books by women authors. So, like I said, a dick. That's not what prompted me to take up my metaphorical pen, however. No, I'm more interested in another question.

Men, in general, (it is my observation) do not write female characters particularly well. It has been pointed out to me that this is improving and whilst I would agree with this I think my original thesis still stands. Now it could be argued that this is because men don't think like women. I'm not sufficiently well up on my neuroscience to know if this supposition could have any basis in biology, although I suspect (granted this is only a gut feeling) that it may. So my question is this: given that men, in general, don't understand women sufficiently well to write them convincingly, is it okay for men to choose not to teach things women have written for the same reason? I can't decide.

Can you? Note: even if the answer is "yes, it's okay" the above logic doesn't apply to Gilmour. He's still a dick.

I believe that this is a complicated question whose very validity rests on supposing that men and women do indeed think, in some real and fundamental way, differently. And this, in turn, comes down (eventually) to a question of free will. Consider: assume for a moment that we do not have free will, that each and every one of our actions arises directly from the hard-wired structure of our brain. It seems to me that, since this structure is DNA-dependent, and also that since this DNA differs by a whole chromosome between men and women, it logically follows that men and women do, fundamentally, think differently. If, however, we do possess free will then this house of cards collapses. From whence does this free will arise? That's a question for another day.