Steve Stewart Williams

Quotes

1. In some frog species, females fake their own deaths to escape unwanted male attention; males, on the other hand, never fake theirs to escape female attention.

   p. 139

2. 

   We often view sexual victimization and partner abuse as women’s problems, rather than more-women-than-men problems. In doing so, however, we once again treat a statistical sex difference as a Mars-and-Venus difference. Ironically, the tendency to polarize sex differences in this domain is particularly common among gender-role progressives, who usually downplay female-male differences.

   p. 249

3. 

   I once spotted an article in The Daily Mail with the rather striking headline: “How did I raise such a girly girl? Feminist mother cringes at her three-year-old daughter’s love of princesses, frills and pink – and wishes she was into toy cars instead.” I remember thinking how strange it is that people who wish their daughters were less girly, and more like boys, are viewed as pro-female, rather than anti.

   p. 253

4. 

   The most violent category of human being is the toddler, and the only reason we don’t worry more about the epidemic of toddler violence is that toddlers are small and cute, and can’t do much damage with their tiny fists.

   p. 169

5. 

   We should treat individuals as individuals, rather than as instantiations of the statistical properties of the groups to which they belong. In other words, we should judge people by the content of their characters, not their sex chromosomes.

   p. 276

6. 

   Men are naturally more violent than women, and male violence is the cause of much needless suffering in the world. We therefore have every right to stifle it, in the process narrowing the sex difference. Again, though, the rationale for this isn’t that sex differences are bad; it’s that violence is bad. After all, another way to narrow the sex difference would be to ensure that women are as violent as men. But that wouldn’t make the world a better place; it’d make it a worse one.

   p. 274

7. 

   There are no average sex differences in IQ, for instance (much to the surprise and disappointment of both sexes).

   p. 25

8. 

   On the rare occasions when women get into physical fights, it’s commonly triggered by one woman calling the other promiscuous, albeit usually in less polite terms. When men get into physical fights, on the other hand, it’s rarely triggered by one man calling the other promiscuous. It’s fair to say that such an insult would lack bite. In fact, yelling at a man that ‘You’ve slept with hundreds of women!’ probably wouldn’t be an insult at all.

   p. 189

9. 

   Strictly speaking, the goal of these efforts isn’t a 50:50 sex ratio in every field. If that were the case, policymakers and activists would be just as worried that more women than men go into the social sciences, health sciences, and humanities as they are that more men than women go into computer science, engineering, and physics – and they’d be just as worried that more men than women work as garbage collectors as they are that more men than women are CEOs. Clearly, they’re not nearly as worried. This tells us that the implicit goal isn’t 50% men and 50% women in every field; it’s at least 50% women in every desirable field.

   p. 267

10. 

    Even though the risks are real, the sexes do differ on average, and we can’t just lie about that. What we should do instead is tell the truth carefully.

    p. 27

11. 

    Rather than being indicators of a sexist or oppressive society, sex differences may sometimes be indicators of the opposite: a comparatively free and fair one (emphasis on the “comparatively”).

    p. 30

12. 

    The fact that more members of group X than group Y suffer problem Z is a bad reason to act as if only members of group X suffer problem Z.

    p. 251