None of this complexity is ever discussed by the postmodern/Marxist
thinkers. Instead, their ideological approach fixes a point of truth, like the
North Star, and forces everything to rotate around it. The claim that all
gender differences are a consequence of socialization is neither provable, nor
disprovable, in some sense, because culture can be brought to bear with such
force on groups or individuals that virtually any outcome is attainable, if we
are willing to bear the cost. We know, for example, from studies of adopted-
out identical twins,^190 that culture can produce a fifteen-point (or one
standard deviation) increase in IQ (roughly the difference between the
average high school student and the average state college student) at the cost
of a three-standard-deviation increase in wealth.^191 What this means,
approximately, is that two identical twins, separated at birth, will differ in IQ
by fifteen points if the first twin is raised in a family that is poorer than 85
percent of families and the second is raised in a family richer than 95 percent
of families. Something similar has recently been demonstrated with
education, rather than wealth.^192 We don’t know what it would cost in wealth
or differential education to produce a more extreme transformation.
What such studies imply is that we could probably minimize the innate
differences between boys and girls, if we were willing to exert enough
pressure. This would in no way ensure that we were freeing people of either
gender to make their own choices. But choice has no place in the ideological
picture: if men and women act, voluntarily, to produce gender-unequal
outcomes, those very choices must have been determined by cultural bias. In
consequence, everyone is a brainwashed victim, wherever gender differences
exist, and the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them
straight. This means that those already equity-minded Scandinavian males,
who aren’t much into nursing, require even more retraining. The same goes,
in principle, for Scandinavian females, who aren’t much into engineering.^193
What might such retraining look like? Where might its limits lie? Such things
are often pushed past any reasonable limit before they are discontinued.
Mao’s murderous Cultural Revolution should have taught us that.
Boys into Girls