Everything Also Complain

From ‘Mum’s the word on smarter children’, 21 Sept 2011, ST Forum

(DR Lee Siew Peng): THE announcement of my engagement to a Caucasian surprised many who had accepted my status of being ‘on the shelf’ (‘A PhD’s fine, but what about love and babies?’; Sept 6).

It is my PhD that is currently on the shelf as after more than 10 years as a full-time mother, it is almost impossible to return to academia. Many intelligent Singapore women will recognise this problem: most Singapore men are not inclined to marry women they consider to be cleverer.

This letter not only deserves to be reproduced in full, but given a piece of my Singaporean MALE non-ANGMOR, non PHD mind every couple of paragraphs. It’s baffling how such a piece of self-trumpeting, indulgent, I would dare say vulgar display of blinkered arrogance eluded the forum editor’s brainstem, an organ that Dr Lee herself probably left ‘on the shelf’ along with her PhD. The word ‘Caucasian’ appears only once in the entire article, the first line in fact, which pretty much sets an unnerving, emasculating tone for the remainder of the letter if you suffer the misfortune of being an egotistical Singaporean male who’s uncomfortable with smarter women. Coupled with the location where Dr Lee is based (London) in the sign-off, what we have right at the outset of this letter is an all too familiar scenario of an educated housewife married into a cushy foreign family, living in a foreign land, and telling Singaporeans,most of whom can’t afford to live comfortably off a sole breadwinner, how to choose their mates or raise smart children when she’s thousands of miles away and not adding her prodigious offspring to OUR gene pool instead.

I remember the look of one man who chatted me up after I had made a witty remark at a lecture. When I told him I was (then) a master’s degree student he – literally – turned away. Spot the difference: My husband (who holds a Bachelor of Science degree), tells people he is clever enough to have married me.

Here we are given another unwanted glimpse of the writer’s solid credentials through a rather useless anecdote. A pHD AND MASTERS holder. And she’s speaking on behalf of her husband, who ONLY has a BSc. Most people use emotional language when asked why we choose to spend the rest of our lives with someone, like ‘She makes me happy’, ‘She’s my soulmate, or the easy way out – ‘Because I love her’. When a man says he’s ‘clever enough’ to marry you, it suggests calculatedness and ulterior motive, especially if you’re a double degree holder and potential high earner. It’s fortunate that in this case, Dr Lee isn’t being treated like a sugar mommy, though the reason she gives for her man marrying ‘upwards’ isn’t the first thing men would consider when it comes to dating smarter women. Evolutionary scientists have their own theories on our aversion towards smart women, that men are hardwired providers and are attracted to women who appear to need our protection, though that’s still debatable considering how rampant gender reversals has become in recent years. But why pick on guys only? How about women refusing to marry ‘downwards’? What if smarter women just happen to be ‘pickier’?

Studies have shown consistently that a child’s educational attainment correlates with that of his mother’s. My son’s IQ is significantly higher than that of either of his parents. (I am convinced that 11 months of breast-feeding also helped.)

I might have opted out of a career where I could inspire many young people on to their own doctorates, but my son has also benefited much from our discussions on the scientific method, statistics in research, Descartes, splitting an infinitive (and atom), and so on. He is so far ahead of his cohort that he has skipped one year in Maths and is being ‘extended’ in other subjects within his normal classes.

There’s no mention of how old Dr Lee’s son is and he could well be a amateur professor of Nuclear Physics who splits atoms as a hobby for all we know, though what’s suggested here is that forsaking her career and focussing on bringing up a Megamind at home is well worth the sacrifice. What’s totally missing really, besides all the motherly nurturing, reading scientific journals instead of bedtime stories and 11 months of breastmilk, is the role of the FATHER in raising an intelligent child. That aside, more bragging here not just of her son’s achievements and the fact that he knows what an infinitive is (What the hell is this, Forum editor, a letter or a grammar thesis?), but also the IQ-boosting powers of her breast milk. Trust a pHD to summon the  ‘Studies have shown’ fallacy as nonchalantly as saying ‘The sun has been known to rise from the east’. Show me the studies before you tell me what they show.Does this apply across the board in societies where men are still predominantly the bread-winners i.e better educated ones? Have these studies factored in median income as a possible determinant? Perhaps the writer means ’1 STUDY has shown’, the one that she has conducted on her own son.

My points are:

• First, Singapore men who wish to have clever children should consider marrying women who are better educated or cleverer (remember, one does not always imply the other), just as short men should marry taller wives if they want taller sons because sons are rarely shorter than their mothers.
• Second, it is all right for well-educated mothers to stay at home to care for their children. Their education will not be wasted in the instruction of their own children.
• Third, Mr Lee Kuan Yew first alerted us to our limited gene pool in 1984.
• Fourth, what has been done since to preserve and enhance this gene pool? Has the foreign talent initiative superseded this urgency?

Finally, a lack of support for well-educated mothers who wish to take career breaks – which can only benefit their offspring, with or without breast-feeding – is myopic.

If a genetic defect suddenly struck the Y chromosome and all men went extinct, Dr Lee here stands a good chance of being Empress and Queen Mother of the world. She doesn’t need the male phenotype, the brawn, the musk, the low voice and hairy chest. She just needs a cupful of sperm of minimum BSc calibre to manufacture her little baby geniuses.  Though there may be some truth in  smart housewives raising smart children, this may not correlate so much with intelligence or educational status as much as the greater time housewives spend IN GENERAL on their own children compared to men. Who’s to say that a pHD househusband wouldn’t raise a genius as well?  Dr Lee has completely ignored the roles of society, nutrition (other than breast milk) and even luck in determining successful offspring, which is in line with LKY’s ideas on social engineering and why he urges pHD female students to get boyfriends. In fact, she has one-upped LKY’s call to propagate, by saying that not only should pHD women marry, but they should be stay at home moms/tutors as well. The fact is, you don’t need a damn pHD to teach your kids who Descartes was. Google nanny can jolly well (split infinitive) do that just fine.

Short men don’t marry tall women just to have children taller than them, nor do they marry smarter, more successful women just so they can have precocious kids to brag about in the ST forum page.  Men marry the woman they love, probably  just as often the woman they most want to have sex with, not just for her tall or smart genes but rather those that signal a state of physical health (i.e looks good, or at least looking like a human female) or a personality trait like kindness, though LKY’s daughter Lee Wei Ling would beg to differ, having deduced that men value intelligence more than looks. And it’s rather disappointing for all of the writer’s theories on breast milk and split infinitives, she’s hasn’t the slightest clue of how we men tick at all.

Filed under: 2011, Babies, Kids, Marriage, Parenting, Singaporean men, Singaporean women | Tagged: ang mor, Caucasian men, education, Kids, parenting, Singaporean men, Singaporean women | 7 Comments »