We’ve already heard from the so-called Thinking Housewife on the subject of Sally Ride. Meanwhile, over on The Spearhead, the regulars also have opinions about Ride. Regular commenter Keyster has this to say about Ride’s work in promoting science and technology education for girls:
She was supposed to have inspired a generation of girls to take science and math. While she may have inspired the “Grrl Esteem” movement, very few girls went on to get degrees in math and science as a result of Sally Ride … .
She was frustrated by the fact young girls were very interested in math and science initially, “…but for some reason we lose them around the age of 13.” MMmmm…I wonder why that would be. Because they discovered an interest in boys? Not surprisingly, Sally was able to keep her interest.
That’s right: girls are incapable of thinking about both math and boys. Lesbians are the only women who can sustain an interest in math, because their brains aren’t cluttered with thoughts of Justin Bieber. (Ok, bad example.)
In another comment, Keyster expresses his annoyance at the fact that Ride turned out to be capable of astronautery despite being a woman.
Sally Ride proved that a woman can have “the right stuff”, like Amelia Earheart proved a woman can fly long distances.
OK so now that we know she won’t become hysterical during her period while in outerspace and allow her used tampons to clog the toilet, what do we do with this information? Just because a woman accomplishes something normally associated with men, is this inspiring young girls to spontaneously excel en masse and compete against men in male dominated arenas? Or are women like Sally Ride the exceptions that prove the rule?
You know, “exceptions that prove the rule” aren’t actually a thing. The fact that Ride was a capable astronaut doesn’t actually “prove the rule” that women aren’t capable as astronauts, but instead suggests that this particular rule is not a real rule. You would think that Keyster, as a logical male, would understand this.
Also, obviously, just because human behavior has an evolved component doesn’t mean that component says “have stereotypical 1950s gender roles.”
In todays daily dose of MSM hatred of men you find out why man and women kill….
“In the midst of all the horrendous stories in the news recently, HLN’s Dr. Drew welcomed clinical psychiatrist Dr. Dale Archer who explained some of the basic differences between male and female killers.
Dr. Archer says men are 10 times more likely to murder than women, noting their motives are vastly different.
“Men typically kill for money, revenge and power,” he said. “With women, it is about love — either someone they have loved, someone they currently love… their kids. So it’s much more emotional when it comes to women.”
http://www.hlntv.com/video/2012/07/24/why-are-so-many-mass-killers-men
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Ya gotta love how men kill about power, money and revenge and women kill for love. Awwwwww, women are good. Or if that doesn’t float your boat, how about if ya wanna know if men are moral bums?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicole-balin/morality_b_1711563.html
Surely we know the answer.
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If ya wanna list of sites surrounding the recent shooting Aurora shooting, this gilrs got her act together with the title the overwhelming maleness of mass homicide. She gives a shitload of links.
http://ideas.time.com/2012/07/24/the-overwhelming-maleness-of-mass-homicide/
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If feminism is your thing and ya like hot guys, good old feministe explains how girls looking at guys is good in a good way, but bad men objectifying women is bad in a bad way. Cause ya know, power dynamic and stuff.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/07/30/the-best-thing-about-the-olympics/
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I could on forever with the daily dose of MSM bad man good woman truth, but too many links spoil the manboobz stew. I wonder what the result of boys/men being demonized, while girls/women being angelized does to a society? Particularly when angelizing girls/women always incudes being better and demonizing boys/men?
Toss in our schools preaching the same message every day, and of course let’s not let the lads rough-house and blow off some much pent up steam. Hell, let’s take away their opportunity for sports, that’ll teach em. Plus our politicians preaching more of the same. The only help any boys/men can get is to help them be either gay or more like women.
Hmmmmmmm, I wonder what the result of this massive effort will be? I’m gonna go way out on a limb here and say a shit-ton of of superduper violent men. It must be what women want. Why else would they devise a system of such hatred?
If it’s hard wired, it is universal. THat’s why Evopsych is just so stories. Shit, you just cited an untrue myth to establish it (That of the mass gender segregation amongst cave people). If you want to know what’s evolutionarily adaptive, you have to do a fitness test of a broad population, which evopsych doesn’t do. You know why it has to be of a population? Because it doesn’t matter how many kids X Trait brings Y people, but of how many people survive, as an aggregate; resource pressures exist, even now, for huge swaths of people.
All evopsych can tell is us what some white people (happily, not just white dudes now, it seems) think caused white people society. At least Rudyard Kipling was quaint when he did that, but he wasn’t really telling us how things worked.
…is it a peer reviewed study y/n?
Not necessarily. Sexual orientation is (at least sometimes) hard wired and also diverse. Behavioral traits vary just the same way physical ones do.
…Which is yet another reason that “evo psych means we all secretly want to be 1950s housewives” thinking is such tripe.
The issue is that there is almost exactly zero evidence that any of the various gender stereotypes espoused by evo-psych are ‘hardwired’. There’s no reason, therefore, to favor a biological explanation over a sociological one. We aren’t peacocks.
Not to mention, if women are hardwired to marry men and have babies and suck at math or something, why are there women who don’t marry a man, don’t have babies, or don’t suck at math? If there were a subset of peahens that did not select for good plumage in a mate, evolutionary biologists wouldn’t say “Well, those peahens are just doing it wrong”; they would have to explain that behavior.
Oh yes, instinct matters much less, but it is by no means irrelevant. How many of you chose to have a sex drive or chose your sexual preference. Does the occasional pairing of 2 peahens mean that tail preferences are not hard wired? Homosexuality has about a 5% prevalence last I checked, not enough to negate the model. There are also few heterosexual men who find an apple shape more viscerally appealing than an hourglass. I did not choose to be sexually attracted to my husband, though I did choose to cultivate it. Not everything starts out as a rational decision. We do, however, have the ability to override some of our less desirable instincts, and this is where humanity and as an extension feminism come into play.
And true enough, we see people of all orientations basically everywhere. As I said.
I also did not argue that women are hard wired to have babies or suck at math. People are hard wired to like sex, which often produces babies. I have never seen the math thing in any reputable publication. I rule at math.
Evopsych likes to downplay the enormous plasticity of the human mind. And also ignores the fact that people are usually of two minds about everything.
There is a possible way to test evopsych. It would involve a huge group of feral children though, and that would be utterly repugnant.
Mrs Bennet, MRAs and neo Christians have taken evo psych to its farthest extremes.
The majority of men probably prefer the hourglass over the pear-shape, too, even though hip width affects the ability to birth and breast size does not (breast size is not correlated with milk production). So, really, if it was evolution, men would prefer the pear-shape, as well as prefer women with relatively high BMIs because it means they’re more likely to survive.
Also, many societies did not prefer the hourglass. In ancient Egypt and Greece women bound their breasts because they were considered unattractive.
It’s like, I get that you see something in society and want to work to fit it into your model, but you end up just ignoring history, archaeology and biology to make the model work.
And yes, people are hardwired to like sex, in the sense that there are nerves in our genitals that give us a lot of sensation. However, anything beyond that is impossible to prove as a constant over time and space. All the meaning and feelings of sex are massively variable among people and societies.
Human instincts are not specialized, this is why I say MRA’s torture the field to death. Evolutionary Psychology does not mean that women should be house wives. No one is hard wired for that. That would be an extremely specialized activity, like bird nest making. I believe that women are hard wired to want their husbands (or wives) to do their fair share. I believe this goes some way to explaining why women who choose o be stay at home mothers are willing to do most of the housework, whereas working mothers, like me, expect their husbands to do half of it. I guess if we just take the word instinct and replace it with the word desire, we’ll have less to argue about.
I do have a sex drive, but unlike most animals, I have the capacity to supress mine.
I think the word that you need to reconsider is “hardwired”, actually.
You don’t think there’s social conditioning at work with how much work a person thinks their partner should do? That it’s hard wired?
Also, the idea that women are hard-wired to want equality would be news to the world’s most famous evo psych guy:
http://www.thenewagenda.net/2011/05/24/29600/
[Article by Satoshi Kanazawa on the subject: “Are all women prostitutes?” Guess what the answer is]
^This!
This is what frustrates me about evo psych so much. It could be a valid area of study. Our evolutionary history probably does affect human psychology and society. By looking at history and sociology, by comparing different societies, we could figure out what traits seemed nearly universal. We could then take what we’ve learned from biology and preform studies to see if those traits are adaptive. And that would be interesting. We could learn a lot.
But instead, evo psych often seems to ignore all these other fields. Instead of looking to other societies and cultures to determine if a trait is universal, evolutionary psychologists all too often seem to just assume that what we take for granted in our culture must be universal. Instead of taking what we know from biology to preform studies on to see whether or not a particular trait is adaptive, evolutionary psychologists all too often simply assume that a trait is adaptive and launch into armchair explanations as to why that is.
So while we could have a really interesting area of study in evo psych, that’s not what we actually have right now. Right now we get “women like pink because berries are pink!” and other demonstrations of a complete ignorance of history, sociology, and archaeology.
Don’t tempt me to go all “this is why you desperately want to believe the pathetic things that you claim to believe, based on what we know about you” about Kanazawa. I still remember the response I got to saying that I don’t find Russell Brand all that attractive.
Beauty and fashion are also really hard to tease apart. Beauty is more or less innate and has very few criteria, whereas fashion is much more of a social construct. Nancy Etcoff explained it fairly well. There actually were several studies on hip to waist ratio preference that showed a very strong correlation across cultures, breast size was not nearly as universal.
Sigh. Really, if you don’t understand why people consider evo-psych to be inherently tainted with so much sexism that it’s worthless, ask yourself why waist to hip ratio in women as a predictor of attractiveness has been studied so often, and shoulder to waist ratio in men so few times (at all?).
I usually check Manboobz after checking reddit for poop. Thanks, Spearhead, for reminding me what the bottom of the barrel looks like!
The internet is just chock full o’ horrible, but these guys are truly the dregs.
@Anathema
I feel they really could use some outreach to the humanities, or people in general.
My personal favorite was an evo psych project that was a three years study to determine if girls prefered pink and red shades over blue shades of colors.
As their “control” they did tests on babies in China where pink is not the girl color. They found that girls still liked reddish shades more and called it a day.
Apparently at no point in the three years of this study did they bother to ask anyone what the cultural color for girls in China is. It’s red.
It might be impossible to prove, but I still think that there might be certain sexual preferences that we might have good reason to suspect are hardwired. If we were to compare as many different cultures as we possibly could and noticed that there were certain sexual preferences that held true in all (or even almost all) of these cultures, I think that that could count as evidence of hardwiring.
Of course, that would require actually doing a great deal of research into other cultures. It would also require understanding history and archaeology.
Red is also associated with both money and luck in China. Big surprise that it’s so well liked.
I fully understand the tendency for people to armchair everyone into pigeon holes. In fact, then tendency can be explained using evospych (lol). I have, however, found it to be helpful. Ironically, the most important lesson I garnered from it is that humans have a tendency to judge groups of people based on the behaviors of a few or based on what you are used to seeing (in other words, we have a tendency towards prejudice). I took this information and started using it to make a conscious effort to overcome the tendency towards prejudice.