Air conditioning is sexist, and you and I have been using it for decades without realizing the enormous discrimination women feel because of it. At least thin, feminist, crazy women who go to work half-naked. I found this out by reading the left-wing press, which is how I try to stop being a caveman and become civilized. To hell with the classics of literature, the philosophy of Greece and Rome, and 20th-century civility books. All the truth is in the left-wing press.
Today I read a feature in a European newspaper about the “gender gap in air conditioning.” I’m omitting the newspaper’s name to spare you the shock of reading it. What surprised me most was that the author is completely serious. I mean, it wasn’t a joke. In fact, she seems to be in a pretty bad mood. The central idea of the article is that air conditioning is sexist. That office climate-control standards were designed according to the rules of the patriarchy — in other words, around the needs of a middle-aged man wearing a suit and tie.
The young woman backs up her article with no fewer than four scientific studies and reminds readers that the controversy began in 2018, when Cynthia Nixon, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for governor of New York, complained during a campaign debate that the studio temperature was set 75 degrees Fahrenheit — a temperature she described as “notoriously sexist.” After making such an important contribution to the history of humankind, it’s hard to understand how the actress from Sex and the City (a series that wasn’t exactly hot) lost to Andrew Cuomo, considering that both put so much effort into competing over who could be the bigger idiot.
A study published in Nature claims that office climate-control standards are based on the metabolic needs of men weighing around 70 kilograms and dressed in suits and ties. Someone should explain to Nature that if someone weighs only 70 kilograms, it’s fairly unlikely that he’s a man, and that, in any case, menopausal women have metabolic climate-control needs quite similar to those of middle-aged, 70-kilogram men wearing suits and ties.
From this, we may deduce that air conditioning in the summer is part of a secret male plot to make women fail math exams and never become engineers.
Another study, published in PLOS One, enlightens us on another crucial point: women perform better intellectually in warmer environments. From this, we may deduce that air conditioning in the summer is part of a secret male plot to make women fail math exams and never become engineers. Or, to put it another way: men are sons of bitches, and until today, we had no idea.
Then there’s a hilarious study from Ohio State University titled “Thermostat Wars? The Roles of Gender and Thermal Comfort Negotiations in Household Energy Use Behavior,” and, surprisingly, the author isn’t National Lampoon from the late 1970s. The researchers claim that men exercise a “thermostat dictatorship.” Unfortunately, just when things start heating up, the study abruptly ends without much further discussion. I was expecting evidence of men threatening women with their fat, greasy fingers hovering over the “–” button on the air conditioner remote and things like that.
The funniest part is that this unhinged article — and the equally unhinged studies it cites — confirm what had long been obvious to everyone except left-wing journalists: sex isn’t a social construct; there is a clear biological distinction between men and women, although it is possible that this finding is merely collateral damage of the author’s rather diffuse intellectual capacity.
The article also takes for granted — and celebrates — that men no longer wear suits and ties to work, and that keeping the old climate-control standards even without suits is something they do exclusively to annoy women. Perhaps the writer is using her own newsroom as a reference point, but excuse me, ma’am, journalists haven’t worn suits and ties since at least Billy Wilder’s The Front Page. Not everyone is a journalist.
Some people want to travel to the ends of the earth, take a picture with a penguin, and come back home. Others want to go to China, eat exotic animals — perhaps even live ones — and trigger another pandemic. And some dream of traveling to the moon, joking that they’ve dropped the keys to the spaceship, losing them in space, and being devoured by a group of aliens. I respect all those travel plans, but I have a different dream. One day, I want to somehow get inside the minds of the people who write articles like this and actually believe them. That has to be quite a party. A wonder of nature. Inside that head, there could be half a dozen punks banging on guitars, three Salvador Dalís twisting their mustaches, and a woman, self-identified as a woman, insisting she is going to transition into a woman, a woman, a woman. And that’s just in the first of the brain’s 3,000 rooms.
READ MORE from Itxu Díaz:
The Classical Recipe for Persuading Without Becoming a Charlatan Selling Hair-Growth Tonics
Chronicle of an Immense, Colorful, and Illustrious Hangover
The Most Hostile Century Toward Men, the Worst Century for Women
