For the record, I didn’t like the Noer piece either, okay? I thought it was needlessly provocative and overly reliant on the kind of inconclusive social-science research that the media in general are so prone to taking too far. But when people at Salon are writing things like, “It was easy to wonder how we had traveled… to a moment at which it was OK to publish this kind of thing,” we’re in Larry Summers territory.

Summers was not needlessly provocative, nor was he using sketchy surveys to justify a sweeping prescription like “Don’t hire female math and science professors.” He was asked about a phenomenon and offered several different hypotheses based on the available data.

The resulting outcry was similar to this one, with enraged writers and academics arguing that it wasn’t even OK for this guy to suggest that standard deviations on test scores might have biological origins. Summers’s style and approach couldn’t have been more different from Noer’s, but he suffered the same fate.

Why? I think it’s because certain presuppositions are so near and dear to the feminist movement that questioning them in any way is enough to provoke the kind of angry, defensive reaction we witnessed last week. One of these is that innate biological differences between the sexes don’t contribute in any significant way to our aptitudes in certain fields. Questioning that one was Summers’s crime.

As for Noer, there is a real debate to be had about the issues that motivated his clumsy diatribe. I just get the feeling — and Summers’s experience teaches us — that a smarter, more nuanced article would have generated a similar response.

UPDATE: I should add that I am happily married to a career woman, so I obviously disagree with Noer’s thesis, too. That doesn’t mean that the issues he raised should be off-limits.