Is Physics a Pissing Contest?

Does identity politics make you stupid or does it make you into a blithering fool?

Researchers in Australia  seem to have given up on actual physics, so they have put their pee-brains to work trying to figure out why boys do better than girls at physics. (via John Ellis at Pajamas Media.)

The reason: boys pee standing up. No kidding. You can’t make this stuff up. And no, they assure us, they are not writing for The Onion.

Note well: if you have to disclaim the possibility that you are engaged in self-parody, you should keep your research to yourself.

Of course, by wasting their time on such questions the politically enlightened physicists are showing us that they, two out of three of whom are female, prefer the fever swamps of gender politics to doing actual physics. Might that be the hidden explanation for their foolishness. 

Here, they explain their theory:

Playful urination practices – from seeing how high you can pee to games such as Peeball (where men compete using their urine to destroy a ball placed in a urinal) – may give boys an advantage over girls when it comes to physics. And we believe there’s something we can do about it.

No doubt you have some questions, the first is probably: what could possibly lead us to believe this?

Well, for starters, our recent analysis of the kinds of physics questions females generally do worse at than males. Add to that strong evidence for the widespread nature of certain kinds of pee-based game-playing among young (and not-so-young) boys. Finally, throw in our observations on curriculum sequencing and the ways in which formal, mathematically codified physics is often introduced to children and young people.

In truth, no law in the universe says that girls should be just as good as boys at physics. Or that boys should be just as good as girls on verbal aptitude. Why don't these these hand wringers and teeth gnashers do a pseudo-scientific study to show that girls do better at verbal tasks because they pee sitting down. Have you?

The researchers have been observing this phenomenon-- watching boys pee-- for some time now. But, don’t they have anything better to do with their time? And, doesn’t this intrusion into a private space constitute some form of child abuse. Allow them to explain:

Like many parents of small (and not-so-small) boys, two of us (KW and DL) have observed the great delight young males take in urination, a process by which they produce and direct a visible projectile arc.

The fact that boys (and men) play with their ability to projectile pee is hardly contentious. Boys are trained to pee into toilet bowls with floating targets, a huge variety of which can be bought on Amazon; Amsterdam Airport Schiphol famously cleaned up its urinals by encouraging men to hit flies etched next to the drain; and Peeball is now a worldwide phenomenon.

Meanwhile, YouTube videos explain how to write your name in the snow with your pee; and the post-match celebration peeing antics of sportsmen are widely reported in the media. Indeed, the very notion of a pissing contest – furthest, highest, most precisely aimed – is a deeply embedded part of some cultures. Alexander Pope includes a pissing contest in his narrative poem, the Dunciad. Our own children describe a stepped wall behind their primary school that’s used by male pupils for competitive target practice. And a colleague who grew up in the Canadian arctic describes boys competing to see who could perfect the trajectory so that what ascended as liquid fell as ice crystals.

All this is experienced up to five times a day, so by 14, boys have had the opportunity to play with projectile motion around 10,000 times. And 14 is when many children meet formalised physics in the form of projectile motion and Newton’s equations of motion for the first time.

Guess what, this activity is “self-directed and hands on.” You would never have guessed:

This self-directed, hands-on, intrinsically (and sometimes extrinsically, and socially) rewarding activity must have a huge potential contribution to learning, resulting in a deep, embodied, material knowledge of projectile motion that’s simply not accessible to girls.

One is amused to see that the pseudoscientists declare that this activity “must have a huge potential contribution to learning.” According to whom? What about the characteristically male activities of throwing balls—activity at which few girls excel or even want to excel? And, what about brain structure, the difference between male and female brains? The researchers do not care and do not recognize it as a reality.

Happily, our intrepid researchers have a solution to the problem. They want physics courses to begin with something other than experiments in projectile motion… because such a topic puts girls at a disadvantage. They do not consider questions of verbal aptitude, especially as it applies to math. Is there a correlation between algebra and peeing standing up? And they do not consider why boys prefer to play with trucks while girls prefer to play with dolls. Is there something in the brain of male and female humans that directs them in one or another direction?

Had they been as resourceful as some other practitioners of gender politics they might have suggested—as has been reported in Sweden—that boys must be forced to pee sitting down. There, that will solve the problem.