I think your perspective on your own education is probably accurate. One victory for feminism in the past 40 years is that I think we have pretty successfully made undergraduate educational environments for students mostly bias-free. That’s not to say that there isn’t any gendered axe-grinding–just that it seems for the most part to be confined to the faculty and perhaps in graduate education. (At least, like you, I feel like my college and even grad school experience was egalitarian; my life as a faculty member, not so much.)

…most of the culture puts tremendous amounts of energy in to maintaining.

Actually, it’s seems to be mostly men who are trying to desperately maintain this fantasy, including a few male commenters on this website.

Can I just express how maddening it is to read in this thread about traumatized men and poor elementary school boys who were laughed at by some girls at some point in their lives? Sure enough, Historiann, it’s only provocation for the boys if blah blah blah, but really? A girl does not even have to leave the safety of her own home to be laughed at or otherwise reminded that she will never measure up. Just turn on the television, just open a popular magazine, just read the city newspaper.

I was half way through my second senior year as an undergrad in an engineering program (there were interesting classes yet to be taken, really) when this happened. Back in junior high school, we girls interested in science & engineering learned at our gender-segregated “career day” that the future was bright in keypunch data entry. A high school science teacher told me I’d never be able to compete in science. It was a relief to get to college and find professors who cared first and foremost about the quality of my work. (At least it seemed that way. Now that I see how some of my peers in the professorate carry on, I’m less sanguine.)

Please, can’t I have just one day to reflect on the challenges those young women had already overcome and how pointlessly it was taken from them without being told that it’s all my fault?

Ahem. Carry on.

New Kid wrote, “Of course if someone has a mental illness they deserve treatment–I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Nor am I saying it’s okay for children to humiliate each other. It just seems to me that if this kind of an experience is traumatic enough to prevent romantic relationships for life, there’s something else going on. The girls laughing is a catalyst, not a cause.”

Right on. Girls laughing at boys is a provocation only if the boys think they’re entitled to something else from the girls. It’s this sense of entitlement, not the hurt feelings, that is the problem.

I don’t think that there’s any causal link between this logic and homicidal rage. I do not, for instance, think that Larry Summers poses any threat, even though I think he subscribes to modified versions of these views. But for already disturbed individuals nurturing grievances about how the system is harming them in particular, I think this dynamic can help convince them that women are appropriate targets for their violence.

With all due respect, hasn’t everyone experienced something like this? I mean, seriously, I don’t know anyone who perceived their romantic experiences (while going through them) as smooth sailing, or felt that they always got the attention they wanted from the people they wanted it from, or didn’t feel humiliated about something in elementary school. But people get over these things, if they’re not somehow otherwise damaged.

Of course if someone has a mental illness they deserve treatment–I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Nor am I saying it’s okay for children to humiliate each other. It just seems to me that if this kind of an experience is traumatic enough to prevent romantic relationships for life, there’s something else going on. The girls laughing is a catalyst, not a cause.

I also suspect many choose science because it satisfies their needs for logic and rationality.

ummmm…….science is no more logical than an other area of expertise or occupation. That’s just another male fantasy that women have bought into. Very similar to the ‘men are logical and women emotional’ silliness.

I also suspect many choose science because it satisfies their needs for logic and rationality. Many men perceive women as extremely irrational. An overemphasis on the faculties of reason is often the result of their inability to cope emotionally.