This week's episode of "The Simpsons" dealt with the stereotypes of learning math. A new principal is appointed and she instantly divides the school along gender lines. The girls' side of the school is "unicorny" and arty (Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keefe hang on the walls). The grounds are clean and imply Cinderella's castle. The furniture is comfortable and modernistic while the math lessons are about feelings. "Is 7 an odd number or is it just different?" asks the principal. When Lisa asks if they are going to be actually solving any problems, Madam Principal pooh poohs the idea and has the girls join in a conga line and sing the "self-esteem" song. Disgusted, Lisa escapes to the boys' side to be challenged by math, only to be kept out because she is a girl. The boys are depicted as violent, rude, slovenly yet smart enough to take the extra challenging math class. Their school grounds are reminiscent of riots with a burned out school bus smoking outside the window. During recess they play "punch for punch" and beat up on the smaller kids. With Marge's help, Lisa disguses herself as a boy. Bart teaches his sister to behave like a boy, including making herself cool by beating up on the weakest boy on the playground. At the end of the year, the award for best math student is given to Lisa who unmasks herself in triumph cheering, "I won because I'm the best and I'm a girl!" Bart derides her by saying, "She's the best because I taught her to be a boy." The disturbing undercurrents of this episode give pause. Stereotypes come from somewhere, but they are twisted and distorted out of proportion and applied to an entire class of people. They are gender, race and age specific and they are mean and wrong. Not all women find math hard (present authorship excepted, of course). What of Marie Curie, Countess Ada Lovelace, Eileen Collins or Mae Jemison? Yes, physiologically there are reasons that more boys than girls succeed in math and sciences. [Note: I have since been brought to my senses by statements to the contrary made in the comments and a tiny bit of research, which I should be doing before I make sweeping generalized statements. TN] But, that doesn't mean that girls should be left out in the cold when it comes to those subjects. They should be exposed to it and encouraged to explore it. Just as boys should be exposed and encouraged to subjects that girls typically excel in. There is a reason I work in SpecOps, saving literature's plots from ne'er do wells. My brain just does not grok math or science, believe me I have tried. My pet dodo Pickwick has more chance of doing long division of polynomials correctly than I. I wasn't insulted when Barbie said, "Math is hard," because it is, for me. But not all women fit into that category, nor should they be forced to. Shame on Matt Groening for going over the top and missing the point he was trying to make. And shame on Lisa Simpson for foregoing her usual activist instincts and pandering to the stereotype that says only boys (or girls in disguise as boys) can do math.