There’s nothing a lady likes more than a good compliment. So imagine my joy upon reading the praise heaped upon my gender (or, given his embrace of biological determinism, I ought to say, my sex) by Emory anthropology and behavioral biology professor Melvin Konner in an adapted book excerpt in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “[W]omen are fundamentally pragmatic as well as caring, cooperative as well as competitive, skilled in getting their own egos out of the way, deft in managing people without putting them on the defensive, builders not destroyers.” How pleased I was to hear about “women’s superiority in judgment, their trustworthiness, reliability, fairness, working and playing well with others, relative freedom from distracting sexual impulses, and lower levels of prejudice, bigotry, and violence.” And how delighted I was to learn, from this learned man (A professor! With a named professorship and everything!) that the tears we women cry at the end of especially touching detergent commercials are doing no one any harm:

Contrary to all received wisdom, women are more logical and less emotional than men. Women do cry more easily, and that, too, is partly biological. But life on this planet isn’t threatened by women’s tears; nor does that brimming salty fluid cause poverty, drain public coffers, ruin reputations, impose forced intimacies, slay children, torture helpless people, or reduce cities to rubble.

So moved was I by this flattery, I could have wept.

It seems unlikely that Konner’s musings on the females will inspire the same student outrage as Laura Kipnis’s February Chronicle piece arguing—among other, less provocative things—that student-professor romance is no big deal. From a feminist perspective, Konner’s essay may in fact be the more worthy of rebutting. Were this just some random Internet dude calling women the more dainty sex, I’d have no interest in offering up a takedown—privately, in conversation among friends, perhaps, not for publication. But this is a serious scholar using a serious platform to present women-are-daintier as a research discovery.

The problem is not, to be clear, that Konner has dared to cast doubt on whether gender is a construct. It’s that he doesn’t even reckon with the notion that it might be one. Rather than enter into an existing conversation about gender essentialism versus culture, and about what biology can and can’t tell us about human behavior, Konner launches right in with his women-are-like-so, opening the piece as follows:

Women are not equal to men; they are superior in many ways, and in most ways that will count in the future. It is not just a matter of culture or upbringing. It is a matter of chromosomes, genes, hormones, and nerve circuits. It is not mainly because of how experience shapes women, but because of intrinsic differences in the body and the brain.

After a perfunctory disclaimer (“Do these differences account for all the ways women and men differ? No. Are all men one way and all women another? Also no.”), Konner makes the most controversial claim of his entire essay: that he’s not being patronizing.