Here's another article that's interesting. It's a little condescending at some points, but there is also some good information.
cheesecake ice cream wrote:Damasta and Vorpal: Some gender roles serve practical purposes based on innate differences, but some are arbitrary and based on false perceptions. It is difficult to tell which is true. You can’t tell without testing it, which many conservatives oppose.
We oppose it being tested
on us. Especially since it's difficult to test things on a small scale anymore. If one party or the other doesn't like it, it gets swept up to the Supreme Court or the U.S. Congress and then there's a judicial precedent/national law mandating that it either can't be tried at all or that the U.S. as a whole has to try it. The Founders of the Constitution set up a system of federalism (balance of powers between the national government and state governments) so that the states could be testing grounds for new ideas. But many things have taken place to erode federalism in the U.S. (e.g. the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the 16th and 17th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution). So until such time as federalism is restored, (like you suggested) you'll have to create an entirely willing community from scratch and then proceed with the experiment(s). Unfortunately, that hasn't worked so well for the libertarians (
clicky clicky).
cheesecake ice cream wrote:In various areas, differences between men and women don’t exist, at least nowhere near the extent that tradition said, and we’ve proved it by trying it in society, yet gender roles persisted for a long time.
Examples?
cheesecake ice cream wrote:We didn’t educate women for thousands of years because rich, white, Christian men held all the power absent universal suffrage, universal education, separation of church and state, and other economic rights. Are women not the intellectual equals of men? Or did they have no interest in being educated or having control over their lives?
That's an easy one to test. Try to educate some women and see if they perform, on average, as well as their male peers. Then it ceases to be a wild claim; either it's true or it's false.
cheesecake ice cream wrote:Some women choose tradition, but some are coerced by tradition.
And some choose/are coerced by non-tradition, or rather, the new feminist tradition. Until we really know what really is learned and what really is innate, such statements don't really mean much.
cheesecake ice cream wrote:I don’t think that women are lesser at managing family finances either, yet often that is the man’s exclusive responsibility. I don’t get why women do that. They surrender all their power when they don’t help manage family finances.
I'm afraid I don't know where you're coming from on this one. Most of the couples I know (and most of their parents for that matter), it's the woman who (primarily) manages the finances.
cheesecake ice cream wrote:I support the freedom to live life on your own terms, not majority culture. Don’t restrict my freedom unless it is to protect someone else’s rights.
What if children had a Constitutional right to be raised by their mothers and not by daycare workers? Would you lie down and meekly submit? I suspect not. (And that's not a criticism.) Really this would be a fruitless discussion since we'd probably also disagree about what constitutes legitimate freedoms and legitimate rights.
cheesecake ice cream wrote:Let the free market determine the value of female labor.
Really? I think that would be great! Stop using legislation and judicial fiat to force women into the workplace, let them get in on their own merits! Though I can't be sure, I suspect that this is a hypocritical statement on your part. If the free market determined that a workplace with a balanced male-to-female ratio was more optimal than a male-only workplace, I'd accept it with no qualms. But if the free market found that a male-only workplace was more efficient and more profitable (and some would argue that it previously has), I suspect that you'd rescind your esteem for the free market and demand governmental intervention—
in defiance of the free market (which would no longer be free). Or if the free market determined that paying men and women equally and providing maternal benefits to women was more optimal than paying women 70% the salary of men, I'd accept it with no qualms. But if the free market found that paying women 70% the salary of men was more efficient and more profitable, again I suspect that you'd rescind your esteem for the free market and demand governmental intervention.
Personally, I believe in the freedom of a company to choose who it hires. If company A only hires men, then so be it. There is no such thing as a right to work at company A. If company B hires both men and women, then so be it. If hiring both sexes is really superior, then company B will out-compete company A and company A will will either have to change its policies in order to survive or go extinct.
That is a free market. But if company A out-competes company B, company A shouldn't be forced to change their policies just because someone outside of company A dislikes said policies.
cheesecake ice cream wrote:I appreciate and agree with your fervor for research methods, but are the claims made by scientists completely useless unless you’ve read the primary sources for everything? That would take an entire lifetime. It took 4 years to read all my psych books.
If they're claims and nothing more, then yes they're pretty useless. If they're conclusions based on carefully designed and properly controlled experiments, then they're useful. But when someone (from either side of a disagreement) comes in here and states something as fact which is unfamiliar or controversial, those statements are automatically going to be suspect. For
those statements the primary sources would be valuable. And if the science turns out to be sloppy, then their conclusions are going to be dismissed.
krebscout wrote:And some of the boys=blue/girls=pink stuff is just useful. Babies come out looking ambiguous. If just for the sake strangers who ask, "How old is he?" or "What's her name?" it's handy to have your baby dressed in the expected color.
The only way I could tell the sex of the babies in Mexico was that the baby girls had their ears pierced and the baby boys didn't. Otherwise they looked totally androgynous.
I am Ellipsissy...