A common staple of Feminist nonsense is the idea that some (wholly or predominantly) female problem would have been long eliminated, had it applied (at all or equally) to men.
For instance, I just encountered a text in the usually reasonable-for-a-newspaper Telegraph, claiming that If men suffered morning sickness, we’d have had a cure years agoe.
The short text gives no justification for this claim, nor does it truly deal with the issue of morning sickness. The entirety of the reasoning seems to be that “something tells me”:
Great stuff, but the question remains: how have we made it to 2023 with the most horrible, debilitating nausea and sickness remaining a totally accepted – untreatable – part of pregnancy? If it were men, something tells me the riddle of morning sickness – and indeed pregnancy suffering – would have been solved eons ago.
The usual implication is presumably supposed to be that men do not care about women’s problems, have not prioritized (in this case, medical) research relevant to women, or similar.
However, what comes over is something entirely different—the message that “We poor women cannot be expected to solve our own problems! We have to wait for men to solve them for us!”.
Looking specifically at medicine, a very large proportion of physicians and medical researchers are women (especially, in areas like gynaecology, obstetrics, and similar), Nobel Prizes in medicine and chemistry are awarded to women, and commercial research on medical issues is to a large part based on the hope of profit—and there is more profit to be made of women than men. The conclusion then must be some combination of “women in medicine are incompetent”, “women in medicine do not care about women’s medical issues”, “women in medicine find other research problems more interesting”, “this-or-that problem is actually hard to solve”, “there is too little money in solving this-and-that problem”, or similar—not yet another variation of the “evil men” theme. (Note that I do not claim e.g. that “women in medicine are incompetent” but point to it as a consequence of the Feminist premise that “If men had ..., then ...”. If men would have solved “the riddle of morning sickness” “eons ago”, surely women should have been able to do so these eons later.)
I rarely see statistics on these issues and the numbers can vary noticeably from country to country. However, the last numbers that I saw for my native Sweden, within the last few years, showed a roughly 50–50 division into men and women among physicians, an overweight of women among newly graduated physicians, and, obviously, a clear dominance of women in medical professions as a whole.
Nobel Prizes are easier to track. For the last ten years (up to 2023), Wikipediaw gives female winners in chemistry for 2018, 2020, 2022 and physiology or medicine for 2014, 2015, 2023. While a minority, this points to the existence of a great many competent female researchers who simply have not focused on (or have failed to solve) various women’s issues. The alternative would be to scratch the “competent” and to assume that these Prizes were either undeserved or not representative of the competence levels of female researchers—and we are back to “We poor women cannot be expected to solve our own problems! We have to wait for men to solve them for us!”. Take your pick, Feminists!
From another angle, there seems to be a great amount of naivety about what science can and cannot do how fast. I note, e.g., that hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of men are caught by the common cold every year, many repeatedly—and that no cure for the common cold is available. In fact, the world is full of problems, medical or otherwise, ranging from the trivial to the deadly, that strike both sexes more or less equally and that have yet to be resolved.
Then there is the typical Feminist hypocrisy and blindness for male problems: Prostate cancer and baldness, e.g., still do not have miracle cures. What if I were to proclaim, echoing the above quote, that “If it were women, something tells me that the riddle of baldness would have been solved eons ago.”?
In all fairness, I do not personally see the big deal about male baldness, maybe because I began to lose hair so early; however, others seem to take it much more seriously. In particular, it is a very common male complaint in fiction, where it is one of the few things that can bring a man to a stereotypically female reaction of panic, depression, loss of self-confidence, or similar. Jokes about bad toupees abound and presuppose that the wearer prefers the toupee to a bald head. Etc.
Of course, solving the riddle of something does not automatically provide a cure—there can still be a great amount of research necessary to reach that cure. However, the premise of a cure was established with the headline of the Telegraph text and, for the purpose of compatibility, I ignore a difference that the author of that text likely did not comprehend.
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