Every now and then the world is trying to tell you something, and events conspire in a flash of synchronicity to reveal a truth so deep and powerful that ordinary genius alone would have been insufficient to figure it out. Such was the case recently, when I was leafing through Garry Wills' New York Review of Books article on Harvey Mansfield's studly paean to all that is virtuous and masculine, entitled simply Manliness. (Now, it's true that the sight of Professor Mansfield giving a high-five to Stephen Colbert demonstrated pretty clearly that, on the electrical-appliances scale of manliness, Harvey is less of a drill press or band saw and more of a cappucino maker or perhaps a motorized salad spinner. But that doesn't affect the persuasive grandeur of his argument.) At the same time, I was mulling over the implications of An Inconvenient Truth, the global-warming scare-movie from noted beta-male Al Gore. Mr. Tree-Hugger himself would prance about in front of his fancy charts and graphs that looked like this:
And then, girly-man that he is, he would act all scared that the world was going to melt or some such nonsense. Crazyalarmist. In a flash of insight, it hit me: this must be feminism's fault, somehow. Those pushy women have tipped the balance of the universal order, and thrown Nature's intricate equilibrium out of whack. Fortunately, I was handed just the tool I needed to prove this obviously-correct hypothesis by Brad DeLong, in the form of Gapminder World from Google. Check it out, peeps: here is a graph of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, as a function of the ratio of girls to boys attending school in different countries.
You can see it right there, science doesn't lie. The correlation is clear as the Los Angeles haze -- countries that educate women are dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, unless you're crazy enough to think that it's the CO2 that is causing all those girls to go get themselves an education, I think the implication is obvious: feminism is destroying the planet. We can now add this to Professor Mansfield's insight that gender equality leads to less exciting sex lives, as one more level-headed condemnation of these tiresome females and their outdated Enlightenment aspirations.
