America bombs a village, doesn't provide health care and some reflections on misogyny

Some news of the day..

America decided to bomb a somali village using a Hercules AC-130. Those planes are generally not used for precision bombing. Score: 2 women and 2 children dead, 20 people wounded.

Americans are now getting health care provided for them by charity.

A war is erupting between Equador and Venezuela on one side and Colombia on the other. My first reaction was; wow a war in the world that America is not part of.. But the conspiracy nut in me couldn't completely rule it out.

Finally, Charlotte Allen in the Washington Post wrote an article asking why women are so stupid:

I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial.

As you can understand this struck a nerve in our friendly feminists. Jessica at Fiministing had this to say:

Charlotte Allen - a professional woman-hating hack from the Independent Women's Forum who has also oh-so-bravely attacked transgender rights, said that the answer to women's potential financial woes is marriage, and suggested that Hurricane Katrina might have been "the best thing" to happen to New Orleans which is full of "whiners...chisel[ing] us taxpayers" out of money - has outdone herself in an article that is all about what dumb fucks women are.

You can see where this is going:

I could go on and on, because Allen certainly does provide ample fodder for fisking, but there's no real point. Professional anti-feminists make too much bank to ever stop writing sexist drivel.

I made that part bold because I think that part is the most important, Allen doesn't just mention anecdotes and vague beliefs, she mentions scientific studies. And thats what this question ultimately is: a scientific question. Everybody I know would readily accept that women and men are physically different, why is it so hard to entertain the notion that women and men are also mentally different? Maybe its just me but I've always found feminists to be a strange type of woman; trying very hard to be like men. I've never heard of men voluntarily trying to get in touch with their feminin side. We are all different in a lot of ways, please stop confusing equality with similarity. We are equal and different.

So what were those studies that Charlotte refered to? These are the quotes:
- "A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women." article

- "a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness" article

- "Men's and women's brains not only look different, but men's brains are bigger than women's (even adjusting for men's generally bigger body size)." website website

- "While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid." article

Its not very conclusive in my mind but it does clearly show difference. I especially like the last one where men stick to the extremes and women are more in the middle. So Jessica, do you have any criticisms of these papers? In the interest of furthering the debate this seems like a good place to start.