http://www.nationalreview.com/node/447445/print
and
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/448360/print
...I wrote this one several years ago, actually, as a reaction to one of Wendell Berry's essays (cited within the poem), and to a college teacher who railed about the damage female students were sure to do to the sciences by earning degrees in them. It seems timely. I agree with Ben Shapiro, cited above, that men in et per se aren't the problem; Bette Midler was clearly just reacting to shock, and should be left to recover in peace. (If you read through to the last verse, that's the conclusion of this Bad Poem.) But as long as college girls have to endure twaddle about the hazards of "feminization" of the professions for which they have more natural talent than the half of humankind that seems more likely to have been designed to take out the garbage, women need to keep thinking this kind of thoughts, too.
SCIENCE
Time to move on over, guys;
The sciences must feminize.
We have a clear and pressing need
for scientists who understand
why scientific work must heed
the claims of earth and sea and land;
committed to relationships
that partner with the air and soil,
and knowing how it feels to bleed
and stop short of apocalypse
and turn again with loving hand
to labor to rebuild the land
before their industry can spoil
the commonwealth for the sake of greed.
Time to move on over, guys;
The sciences must feminize.
The time’s come to recheck the math.
If one man with a tractor moves
the timber out in 26 days,
dooms other trees to utter waste,
carves gulches deep into the hill,
leaves wild things nowhere to graze,
makes this year’s woods next year’s landfill;
while three men with five horses take
the same job in 65 days,
don’t over-fertilize the path
down which each load of timber moves,
take out each old tree without haste,
on only eight trees leave a blaze,
kill just one living tree, and make
of that some thing that’s useful still,
how much more profitable proves
the way of patience than of wrath?
Time to move on over, guys;
The sciences must feminize.
It’s time for scientists who feel
the pleasure of submissive love
to call us back to what is real:
science beneath, and faith above.
Irreverence is proper when
we think of our own past mistakes,
but when we study Nature’s ways,
reverence is required then.
Splice unrelated DNA’s?
Such mania science must not heed.
The scientist, with a heart that aches,
ponders the question: if we feed
gene splicers to some maggots, raise
those maggots to mature flies,
and feed the flies to farm trout, then
are those trout poisonous to men?
Time to move on over, guys;
The sciences must feminize.
Men say they think in pictures, like
the oddest of the female kind,
yet also claim to suffer from
such linearity of mind
they can’t see the big picture. Numb
to applications while they find
out theories, they try to prove
no God exists, nor Right, nor Mind
to ponder just what does exist.
Their logic is like Dawkins’, blind.
If neither Theol., Soc., nor Psych.
can verify we live and love,
we take as given what they’ve missed:
there are things science cannot prove.
Time to move on over, guys;
The sciences must feminize.
We murder to dissect; likewise
we murder when we generalize.
Real science is not gender-bound
and can be practiced by Real Men
who’re not afraid of common ground.
(Where was Curie, without Pierre?
Why, even in the verse above
the numbers came from Wendell Berry.)
Still, present dangers warn us fast:
if we survive, we must improve
on sexist science of the past,
progress to systems that outlast
technologies from time before
limits to fossil fuels were found.
Science can still be done by men;
they must think more like women, then.
Time to move on over, guys;
The sciences must feminize.
.The sciences must feminize.
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