Pegs and Holes

I mentioned 4 months ago a controversial post by the Dilbert cartoonist, Scot Adams. He has done it again, with this:

If you have a round peg that doesn’t fit in a square hole, do you blame the peg or the hole? You probably blame neither. We don’t assign blame to inanimate objects. ...

Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior.

The feminist blogs have posted scathing attacks, and Adams has defended himself.

Dilbert is not hard to understand. He is a cartoonist. He tries to be thought-provoking and entertaining at the same time. He finds humor in looking at the world in unconventional ways. He is often trying to make a point, but he does not have a larger agenda.

And yet the feminists who attack him cannot seem to understand what he is saying. Some were offended that he might be making excuses for the French Socialist IMF banker DSK who was accused of rape, but DSK was released today based on evidence that the accuser was paid to frame him.

I think that the attacks on Adams have only proved the validity of his points. His latest post has a disclaimer for the feminists who do not understand him, but I doubt that it will make any difference.

The pegs and holes problem starts in kindergarten. I have girls, not boys, so I was not complaining. Their schools were structured around things that girls want to do, not boys. Only about half the time was devoted to some sort of learning. The rest of the time some female teacher was leading an activity that was primarily of interest to the girls.

Needless to say, the problem extends to the family court, and all of its psychologists, social workers, mediators, etc.