| I'm going to stop arguing with you because it seems you're either trolling or being intentionally ignorant. A couple of simple Google/Google Scholar searches would show you that I'm right and it is you who may have read something online and extrapolated from it, rather than studied this subject seriously. Of course I'm an ideologue pushing an agenda! (Who isn't?) I think it's our moral obligation to push this agenda. But in order to actually make society better rather than just talk about it, research is crucial, and thankfully a lot of research into this has been done over the past three or four decades, and we now know a lot more about how sexism works. What some people are doing though is using the real fact that there are biological behavioral differences between the sexes to hide the equally true fact that cultural effects have been shown to dwarf them by orders of magnitude. It has also been shown that humans -- like many other animals -- have instincts driving them to subjugate others. Still, we've abolished slavery to alleviate the painful conscience of hyperliberal babies, and I think society is better for it. Some (most famously Freud in the very unscientific but thoughtful and fascinating Civilization and its Discontents) believe that all of civilization is one big mechanism for exerting control over our instincts, a mechanism that's even been internalized by us (see Norbert Elias for a demonstration on the power of this internalization). Most recently, this view has been modified (mostly by conjectures made by evolutionary psychologists) to say that civilization is some instincts overruling others (many instincts clash with one another: our desire for sex sometimes overpowers our fear of strangers and is sometimes overpowered by it). Power and influence in society is objective reality. That women possess less of it is as objective as the Sun fusing hydrogen into helium. Perhaps you think that's fair. The fact that men have more power does not imply that every man has more power than every woman. Of course, if we're to be totally honest, we must admit that both research into biological differences between the sexes as well as cultural researches is not up to the highest theoretical standards in experiment design and statistical rigor, so whatever it is we know (i.e. that both are real, but the cultural difference is a lot more prominent) is suspect. But hey, this is HN and geeking out is the name of the game. Anyway, it's been fun arguing over this. If you want to learn more about the subject, I suggest you look up Susan Fiske. Yes, she's a hyperliberal baby crying for her quotas, but a good researcher nonetheless. |