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by TeMPOraL
3947 days ago
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I'm going out on a limb here, but did anyone consider that some of those "social biases" you want to eliminate arise naturally from society exploiting comparative advantage of sexes? When women are on average better at doing X and men are on average better at doing Y, even if the advantage is very slight, it's beneficial to let women focus on X and men on Y. I think some of the customs may have arisen there. I'm not saying that they haven't become twisted or outdated and shouldn't be pruned - just that we should take a closer look before deciding to get rid of them. |
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However, you must be careful with your history, because many biases (such as the place of women in the workplace) have actually changed considerably through history and across different cultures, and many of them actually peaked in Victorian times, and it is mostly the Victorian biases that we in the West are left with.
Nevertheless, the origin of the biases says nothing about their benefit. Obviously, beneficial behavior in pre-historical times was very different from what benefitted it in classical times, medieval times, the early-modern period, and certainly after the industrial revolution.
Finally, it is very hard to define what you mean by "a benefit to society" by any objective means. For simple organisms, increasing the population count is beneficial (although even that is not clear because that's assigning a value judgment to a mere fact). But what does it mean for human society? Obviously many people thought for a long time that slavery is very beneficial, although the slaves obviously disagreed. So the basic ideology of feminism basically has one tenet -- that of fairness -- and says that power should be more-or-less equally distributed among social categories that are determined at birth (except for individual misfortunes etc., which is another matter).