This review of Lionel Shriver’s novel contains some spoilers, but they’re handled lightly and this review does not give away all of the crucial plot elements. I believe anyone who reads this review will still enjoy the book, but if you want a totally not-spoiled reading experience, you should probably stop reading now.
Mandatory disclosure of biases affecting the review: the book seems to have as a fundamental notion the idea that IQ testing is a valid, reliable, and extremely valuable measure that accurately measures human intelligence. I do not believe this to be true to nearly the extent that the smart, sympathetic characters do (and presumably that the author does). I have had my IQ tested multiple times, and my scores have ranged from perfectly average (literally 100, the mean adult score) to the 99.4 percentile. To the best of my understanding, the variability was solely dependent on my mood state and where I was in my PTSD symptomology. Also, I suspect, I do better on tests that have a higher proportion of number play and pattern recognition problems, as those are my bailiwick. Thus, if I had to guess, neither of those extremes are accurate—I suspect that I have above-average intelligence but not 99.4th percentile levels of “above,” and that despite having taken a number of IQ tests, none of them have accurately placed me in the distribution as of yet.
My experience points to an extreme vulnerability of using IQ testing as a proxy for something important—testing someone on a bad day or when their psychological disorders are flaring up can present a false picture. Which is why I would adamantly oppose using IQ testing as a gatekeeping measure to anything important, especially for children.
At best, I see IQ testing as a badly calibrated compass — it points in the general direction of something important, but doesn’t really get us there with accuracy.
Trans Lies Are Lies
Lionel Shriver’s new novel, Mania, is an alternate history of the United States beginning in 2011, during Obama’s first term. She creates a world where a social movement sprang up and quickly overtook education, government, medicine, and other important institutions: the Mental Parity Movement. It sets up the pretense that there is really no such thing as variable human intelligence: everyone is just as intelligent as everyone else. There are some people who are “alternative processors,” but this is just a different kind of intelligence, equal to the intelligence of everyone else. The most egregious social sin imaginable is to express the opinion that there is anything such as a smart or stupid person.
This is so flagrantly ridiculous that sane people understand that everyone is merely pretending to believe it, in order to be kind and avoid accusations of bigotry. And yet, as it takes over the government, education, medicine, and society at large, people pretending more and more effectively becomes a social requirement.
People begin to stumble over their language, communicating their affirmation with buttons and yard signs like WE SUPPORT COGNITIVE NEUTRALITY.
In short, it is a pitch-perfect parody of the trans movement. Looking at the world around us and the way that people who know damn good and well that “woman” is more than a feeling in the mind of a man and that expecting gay men to go down on women to prove they aren’t bigots is, itself, homophobic insanity, it’s a direct parallel to the world of the novel. In the alternative version of our world that Shriver creates, elite universities proudly announce that their admissions will be done by lottery, apologize for their past bigotry in not letting everyone in, and the same types of people who chant “Trans women are women!” are the ones who pretend to not care where their surgeons went to med school.
The parallels are endless, including universities opening up offices of Cognitive Equality. They’re hilarious despite being very on-the-nose, up to and including the way that in liberal areas, parents have to pay lip service to the movement in order to avoid losing custody of their children. The protagonist is reported to Child Protective Services after using the S-word (stupid) at home, something that her youngest child, who is fully brainwashed by the movement, having been steeped in it since her first day of preschool, mentions to a teacher who has encouraged her charges to report their parents. In the mandatory parenting class she has to take to keep her kids out of foster care, there is an in-depth discussion of the need to change language to affirm the identities of alternative processors, including switching from “dimmer switch” to “switch that makes things more seeable,” the “deep end” of the pool to “the end with more water in it,” and changing “dumbbells” to “weights.” Sometimes “crash test mannequins” would be held in place with weights, especially when crash tests were done in a heavy (not dense and not thick, two words that become verboten for their implications regarding intelligence) fog.
Speaking as a uterus-having bleeder with a front hole, I think that was my favorite part of the book, next to the brilliance of the ending.
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