From the people who brought you Libertarian Troll Bingo, it’s time for a spot of gender essentialism!
Now you can back up all of your sexist ideas with something that sounds a bit like science. Feel free to tell me that I’m just going against nature here.
With thanks, as always, to zingerella and apperception.
This is HILARIOUS! Thank you so much! My personal favorite is “Women like pink things, possibly because of berries in a forest”. Oh so funny!
Oy. The problem with the “more men are geniuses” trope is that it’s canceled out by the FACT that “more men are idiots”. Females tend to huddle slightly more on the bell curve, while males are slightly more spread out. But unless a study is actually researching the socialization of gender, all of these types of studies fail to control for socialization. If you really want to meaure what females are like, you’d have to account for all the gender brainwashing first.
If scientists were attempting to quantify the innate differences which are assumed to exist between ethinicities and failed to account for socialization, it would be an obvious failure. After decades of such studies which did try to prove the inferiority of non-whites, it finally dawned on scientists that they were ignoring socialization. As soon as they started controlling for that, bingo, all the “innate differences” disappeared.
Which is why Pinker is a backwards sexist asshole. He’s not controlling for socialization.
To clarify: For every quality which is considered “positive” and for which men on average tend to excel “slightly”, there is a coresponding quantity of men who do even worse than women.
Men want to notice who’s at the front of the bell curve, and forget who’s dead last (men). Women are bunched slightly more in the middle. We have slightly less geniuses, but also less idiots.
If the upper echelons of the male gender are smarter then the upper echelons of the female, does it not make sense for men to assume all leadership roles in society?
You’re not going against nature at all. You’ve literally centered your argument on your assessment of the sexual fitness of your opponents.
There are more phenotipic differences between men and women than there are between ethnicities. When looking at the presence of an entire chromosome setting them apart, one can see that there is considerable genotypic difference as well. The sexual dimorphism appears long ago in the phylogenetic tree, predating the Cambrian explosion, while divergence into separate elasticities is incredibly recent with relatively week evolutionary drive.
I’m just saying that it makes more sense for there to be innate differences between sexes than to be between ethnicities.
Sex differences vary a lot between species and so using animal models to determine them in humans is not a good way to go. Obviously we cant conduct experiments in humans while controlling for socialization, as was pointed out, and socialization influences all these measures (pink things, breast-fetishism) so we can’t answer the question through direct experimentation. Because of this I may never know if my attraction to big breasts is due to everyone else liking them. I can accept that.
My real point is that there may very well be innate differences between the sexes, influencing things like temperament, attitude, and value set, and that the important critique should look at the way society appreciates both sides of that difference. Maybe all gender characteristics are important for society and they should all be appreciated regardless of how they might map onto sex.
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