OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
AP Photo/Don Ryan
Power lines from Bonneville Dam head in all directions in North
Bonneville, Wash.
Google’s war over the sexes
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
Trump wants to
M
steal Northwest
energy resources
A
s predictable as summer’s heat, another president tries
to appropriate the Pacific Northwest’s largest built asset.
As The New York Times reported some two weeks ago,
the Trump administration aims to sell the transmission lines
of the Bonneville Power Administration to the private sector.
That would assuredly raise energy bills throughout Oregon,
Washington state, Idaho and western Montana.
President Donald Trump follows George W. Bush and Ronald
Reagan in his quest to steal an asset whose value Northwest rate-
payers have paid for, at market rates.
This new scheme would penalize residents of the Pacific
Northwest in more than one way.
The Columbia River is our region’s most valuable natural
resource. The river’s dams and their electricity are the region’s
most valuable man-made resource. The Bonneville Power
Administration is the overarching authority that sets the opera-
tion of the dams and transmits the electricity. The BPA generates
more than $4 billion in annual revenue through sales of the sys-
tem’s electricity.
During the 1980s, President Reagan proposed to sell the
entire BPA system. Trump’s proposal is clever, because it avoids
the emotional alarm of selling the dams.
What is tactically more serious about the Trump idea is that
if you sell off the transmission of power from the dams, you
directly affect the way the river is managed. BPA’s management
of the dams recognizes there is a trade-off for how much water is
saved for fish, how cold and how deep that water is. Few people
realize that the BPA runs the largest fish conservation program in
the world.
In other words, when you sell the transmission side of the
dams, more than power rates is at stake.
Oregon U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden and Washington state U.S. Sen.
Maria Cantwell are the best positioned to fight the Trump pro-
posal. They are the most senior Democrats on the Senate Energy
and Natural Resources Committee.
“This is vintage highway robbery,” Wyden says. “The people
Trump says he cares about would be whacked around. It would
raise their utility bills. This is a transfer of values from people of
the Northwest to the U.S. Treasury.”
Congressman Greg Walden is a very senior Republican, but
he has not said much about the Trump proposal. It would, of
course, penalize Walden’s constituents. But Walden also thought
the House’s health care bill was a good deal for Eastern Oregon,
even though it would have eviscerated that region’s hospitals and
taken insurance away from thousands of his constituents.
Wyden says that Northwest Republicans cannot stand idly by.
“This will be a test of Republicans,” he says. “President Trump
shouldn’t be allowed to siphon assets paid for by Northwest
ratepayers.”
An excellent longterm solution would be for Bonneville to
buy itself, using bonds. Then it could become truly a regional
agency.
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en and women are dif-
ferent. On this, almost
everyone acquainted with
reality agrees.
How different is
the more contro-
versial question,
to which there is
one particularly
interesting answer:
A little more dif-
ferent than they used to be.
This growing difference seems
to be a striking aspect of modern
Western life. In societies where
both sexes have greater freedom —
and women have more educational
and professional opportunities rel-
ative to men than in the past — the
sexes’ academic interests tend to
diverge relative to more traditional
societies. And not only their inter-
ests but their personalities as well:
The more officially egalitarian a
society, a credible body of research
suggests, the stronger the differ-
ences in stereotypically male and
female personality traits.
Conservatives sometimes
worry that our society features
an unhealthy blurring of sexual
identities, an androgyne confu-
sion. The left tends to be more
optimistic about such blurring,
seeing it as a liberation from the
rule of patriarchy and the prison of
heteronormativity.
But the opposite trend, the
divergence of the sexes, might
be more important. Some of our
present difficulties may flow from
an excess of feminine and mascu-
line differentiation, from the sexes
growing apart and losing common
ground, from the decline of mar-
riage’s male-female partnership
and the rise of a singlehood that’s
often more sex-segregated than
family life.
Certainly the frontiers of
sexual license often feature strong
male-female differentiation rather
than androgyny or gender-neutral-
ity. Think of the clichés that prevail
in internet pornography, or the
gendered kinks of “Fifty Shades
of Grey.” Even our culture’s high-
est-profile gender transition had
a highly sex-specific presentation
— Bruce Jenner was the ultimate
male Olympian; Caitlyn Jenner, a
busty, hyper-feminized Vanity Fair
cover model.
So too with political trends. The
idea of a “Mommy Party” and a
“Daddy Party” goes way back, but
the Trump-Clinton election made
the increasingly gendered nature
of the parties seem ridiculously
stark. As Ed West, a columnist for
The Week, pointed out last week,
the social justice left and the alt-
right are among the most gendered
movements imaginable — “the
political equivalent of the Lego
Friends Heartlake Cupcake Cafe
and the Lego Nexo Knight’s Clay’s
Falcon Fighter Blaster, examples of
where greater freedom of associa-
tion and self-actualization has led
men and women.”
Consider it this way: If you
asked a right-wing misogynist
to craft a sexist parody of his
political opponents, you might get
something like the highly neurotic,
fainting-couch politics of recent
campus and online progressivism,
whose acolytes oscillate between
soft therapeutic language and mae-
nad-like frenzy.
If you then asked a left-wing
misandrist to do the same sort of
parody in reverse, you’d end up
with something like the online
far-right — nerds and autodidacts
obsessed with cuckoldry, fascist
AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez
Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google fired an em-
ployee who suggested women don’t get ahead in tech jobs because
of biological differences.
cosplayers eager for evidence
of their own racial superiority,
would-be lotharios furious at fem-
inism, libertarians with a ten-point
case for despotism.
The divergence of the sexes also
provides a useful context for think-
ing about this week’s culture-war
controversy, the high-profile firing
of a Google software engineer,
James Damore, for a memo he
wrote criticizing the company’s
diversity policies.
Damore’s memo argued,
roughly, that the tech world’s
conspicuous dearth of women is
quite possibly a consequence of
the trend I’ve just described —
that more men than women are
attracted to the kind of work that’s
done by programmers and software
engineers, and that it’s a mistake
to assume discrimination when
self-selection might be at work.
He also questioned why Google’s
official rhetoric and internal propa-
ganda focus on the diversity of sex
and race while ignoring the value
of political or ideological diversity.
The memo was sometimes tone
deaf, clinical, insensitive (in, well,
a stereotypically male sort of way),
understating the ways in which
self-selection and sexism can shape
an industry. Even if more men than
women are attracted to a particular
field, a male-dominated profession
can be distinctly unpleasant for the
women who work in it, in ways
that can justify special scrutiny,
recruitment and redress.
But Damore also made reason-
able points about different ways
to pursue diversity and the costs
and benefits thereof, in an earnest
and dialogic style that a healthy
corporate culture would have found
a way to answer without swiftly
giving him the ax.
At the same time, there was a
sense in which Damore had to be
fired, precisely because of the inter-
twined realities that he described.
Silicon Valley is a very male envi-
ronment, a land of nerd kings and
brogrammers whose deepest beliefs
tend to be the sort that men come
up with when they don’t have very
many women around — arch-lib-
ertarian, irreligious, utopian in a
mechanistic style.
But the internet industry is
also part of a wider elite culture
that is trending in the opposite
direction, becoming more femi-
nized and feminist, and inclined
to view male-dominated enclaves
with great suspicion. So Silicon
Valley’s leaders use corporate
wokeness, diversity initiatives and
progressive virtue signaling as a
kind of self-protection, a way of
promising that they’re mostly men
but they’re the good kind of men,
so that discrimination lawsuits and
antitrust actions and other forms
of regulation are less attractive to
their critics.
I strongly suspect that more than
a few Silicon Valley higher-ups
agreed with the broad themes of
Damore’s memo. But just as tech
titans accept some censorship and
oppression as the price of doing
business in China, they accept
performative progressivism as the
price of having nice campuses in
the most liberal state in the union
and recruiting their employees
from its most elite and liberal
schools. And for questioning
that political performance while
defending the disproportionate
maleness that makes it necessary,
the Google memo-writer simply
had to go.
This is not a healthy dynamic,
obviously. Indeed, part of why
the alt-right has such a strong (if
sub rosa) presence in Northern
California is because it’s a pre-
dictable kind of male response to
professional life under the rule of
political correctness — a response
that the Damore firing will only
make more attractive.
Meanwhile, the real truth
— which the memo at its most
sensible almost grasped — is that
Silicon Valley might benefit from
having a more female-friendly
culture because of the differences
between men and women, not
because those differences are all
somehow a misogynist invention.
The fact that the brave new online
world of social media may be par-
ticularly psychologically unhealthy
for young women, for instance,
seems like a telling indicator of
what can go wrong with a virtual
architecture built by brilliant and
obtuse males.
But since the usual way to
reintegrate the sexes is to have
them marry one another and raise
kids, what Silicon Valley probably
needs right now more than either
workplace anti-microaggression
training or an alt-right underground
is a basic friendliness to family,
pregnancy and child rearing.
This is why the new Apple
headquarters, which has a
100,000-square-foot fitness and
wellness center but no child care
center, is a more telling indicator
of what really matters to Silicon
Valley than all the professions of
gender-egalitarianism that have
followed James Damore’s heretical
comments about sex differences.
Those differences, the real ones,
have one common root: Women
bear children; men do not. Figuring
out how to respect that essential
fact and all its implications, while
also respecting the equality of the
sexes, is one of the great challenges
of our age. And it’s because we
are failing at it that the sexes have
begun to go their separate ways.