UCLA Center for the Study of Women

What do we make of this striking dissonance between mood—emotional rhetoric aka spin doctoring—and math? Or put another way, how might gender and feminism help us to understand that mood and math? Math, or at least, layman invocations of 1%, 99%, 47% --statistical language to express discontent and sense of shrinking opportunity—were certainly crucial to the outcome of this election. For higher education in particular, the dueling arithmetic on which proposition (30 or 38) gave what percentage of revenue garnered from which formula of income or sales tax on which percent of the population filled the yahoo boards of bantering mommies, at least at my local public magnet, with confusion and minor disagreements. How do these local events draw upon and transform stereotypes of boys being good at math and girls at social and emotional intelligence, when the Biggest Boy Rove had clearly ignored the math and succumbed to his own rhetorical (terrorizing, falling of a cliff) spin on Obama’s stewardship of the nation and the American people’s lack of faith in it?