By David Harsanyi
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Elizabeth
Warren says Bernie Sanders once told her that a woman couldn’t win the
presidency. Bernie Sanders says Elizabeth Warren is lying about the encounter.
I have no idea whom to believe.
Some notable people on Twitter have wondered if maybe,
considering all that happened during the #MeToo movement, society has a moral
obligation to believe women in these male-female disagreements.
Well,
whenever I try to make sense of these cultural dilemmas I turn to the
always-dependable disciplines of social science. And studies have concluded
that women — or is
it men? or is
there no difference? — are
more likely to fib. One study that
confirms my preexisting prejudices says that women might lie more, but they lie
about all the right things. Men’s lies, for example, tend to be more
“self-oriented” (“I have slept with dozens of women!”), while women’s lies are
more prone to be “other-oriented” (“No, no, no, you look great in that
sweater.”)
But
this doesn’t really help me, either. Because even if someone could provide me
with conclusive evidence that one gender lied more often than the other, there
are still thousands of overriding factors that would make that fact irrelevant.
I’ll
give you an example: A woman politician is surely more inclined to lie than a
male podiatrist, because deceiving people is a skill that is more often, and
effectively, utilized by elected officials than foot doctors. And Hillary
Clinton, the highest-profile woman politician of our era, has already proven to
be a far better liar than, say, Mitt Romney, and yet I still don’t assume women
are less truthful than Mormons. (Here’s a study, by the way,
that finds religious people are less inclined to lie, and here’s one that says
they lie more often.)
Warren,
of course, has been already been caught pushing a “self-oriented” lie that was
used to bolster her career for decades, so she is clearly not above being
dishonest. Then again, maybe we should just take each case individually and
weigh the evidence in front of us?
This
is why I will never believe “all women.” My baseline assumption is that
everyone in the public square (52 genders and counting) is probably lying to
me. Even in general, I refuse to accept the notion that men have any special
standing ethical obligation to accept the veracity of a woman’s word over
another man’s. To do so would be denigrating to men and patronizing to women,
and completely irrational.
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