What I say has just as much grounding as anything you say. Just because you are working off of some statistical figure does not mean it’s any more “logical.” When you claim to understand that 40% more muscle mass MEANS that women are more inept at war, you are making a claim that requires you to have some sort of divine understanding of the way God or Nature or whatever you believe in works. There is no direct connection between “less muscle mass” and “not as militaristic.” There is a logical leap required in that phrase that requires you to say “I understand what this evolutionary process means.” Most biologists aren’t even going to claim what you want to claim. The evolutionary process is extraordinarily complex, and to say that you understand exactly why it happened and what it means for society is a bit conceited…
You say that men were “naturally selected” to become stronger and better at war. Okay then, consider this thought experiment. Go back in history to the point where humans started fighting each other. Instead of men doing the fighting, women were chosen by the tribes to do the fighting. Thus, women were selected for their attributes such as strength and virility rather than more domestic qualities, and thus women evolved to be the stronger of the two. Do you not see how these things are just arbitrary? If you want to argue evolution, you have to consider that evolution could have occurred any other number of ways. The problem stems from the fact that you want to take and apply rules to society about who can do what based on these arbitrary decisions and evolutionary nuances. Okay, men are stronger and more suited to fight wars. But then is it fair to not allow women into the military because of these arbitrary happenings? All I’m trying to say is that in a fair society, the answer would be no. Society should work to even out the biological differences among people, not work to reinforce them. Again, I reiterate that biological differences only matter because the rules of the game have been set up arbitrarily by those in power to be advantageous to those in power. There is no direct connection between biology and inequality; whenever you have a group of people, you have a society created amongst them, and in that society you have leaders, and those leaders set up certain rules and guidelines of behavior, and those rules reinforce themselves and advantageously work toward those already in power. It is this level of society that comes in between biology and equality, and that is where you will find your answers.
And I’d just like to say that I have read Dworkin, and if you read beneath the lines of her insane political agenda, she says some very powerful things. I know of no feminists who agree with her overarching agenda, and most consider her pretty insane, but she nevertheless says some interesting things. And the fact is that mysogony IS prevalent everywhere and that a lot of people really do believe that women are just inherently less capable than men. But who understands humanity enough to know what is inherent in anybody? Nobody. Dworkin goes too far in claiming that men are “inherently” evil, when I would argue with her the same thing I am arguing with you, that really it’s just the arbitrary rules of society that are perpetuating the barriers; the fact that men are in power has TURNED many of them evil, corrupt, and mysogonistic, but nowhere do I see justification for a claim that they were born with those characteristics inside of them. Arguing that Dworkin speaks for feminists or even radical feminists is like saying that the cult of domesticity speaks for all males or conservative males. They might each say some interesting things, but in the end very, very, very few people are going to adopt their agenda.
Anyway, just a few comments:
I hate special priveledge feminism. Not traditional feminism or women in general. Those are great. Equality is great. Plundering every advantage the world has to offer through lies and manipulation isn’t great.
Do you have any ideas on how to achieve equality without offering some special priveleges? The only other way is to change the rules of the game. What do you consider “special privelege” anyway? I don’t know of that many special priveleges offered to women. They are still routinely discriminated against in the workplace. And those that decide to have families still generally end up screwing over their careers. Sure, we’ve outlawed outright discrimination against them, not allowing employers to fire women who get pregnant, but that does still happen reasonably often. But more importantly, the woman who decides to get pregnant is going to lose out on that promotion to a man. We consider raising a family to be one of the most divine decisions people can make in our society, but then we punish the women who do so. Would you consider it a “special privelege” to not discriminate against this? More importantly, would you consider it a “special privelege” to start paying women dollar per dollar what men make, rather than 71 cents to the dollar? I would just consider that equality.
Replace “sciences” with “reading,” “women” with “men,” and multiply the disadvantage by six. Then ask yourself if giving special attention to these “disadvantaged” girls is really in the spirit of equality. This is the problem with feminist citations. They can always be counter-cited with a more severe male example.
Fair enough, but I do think that if this were the case, we’d have something equally, if not MORE monstrous: masculinists.
Replace science with reading? Last I checked, literacy was a pretty universal thing. And the English or Social Science fields are hardly “dominated” by women as the scientific field is dominated by men. The fields are relatively more evenly split, though women are more attracted to them. But do you know why men aren’t complaining about this? Because these sorts of fields are considered less economically advantageous than the sciences. And because, arguably, the men in these domains tend to be a bit more liberal on the social agenda and are not going to cry afoul when women make their mark. But do you not see how the pieces of the puzzle just fall together? Men continue to dominate their highly prestigious and well-paying scientific fields. There is no masculinist movement in the humanities because the men who would start such a movement are not interested in taking over this less prestigious and underpaid field of study (note that I don’t believe it is any less prestigious or important, but they are when it comes to finding a job).
Are you arguing that the president of Harvard was actually right? That men are more naturally attuned to the sciences than women? There is a biological basis for that? If you understand that, then you must be some sort of divine being. The only basis for this judgement is “that’s the way it has always been,” but that doesn’t mean anything if the fields have been protectionist. There might be a biological basis for claiming women are less militaristic, but to claim a biological basis for saying that women are less attuned to science than men is a claim that nobody can make, because nobody knows that. All we do know is that girls, since the time they enter school, are just assumed to be worse at the sciences and thus are driven down the course of what we presume them to be better at. And the reverse happens for men too, and most likely some men get caught up in the opposite dilemma, being pushed down a path of study they might not necessarily enjoy but are assumed to excelt at, when in fact their true calling might be a poet. This type of system benefits no one in the end except the relative few who would go down these courses anyway. A system that did not have this “biological” bias would benefit man and woman alike, allowing them to more freely choose their calling in life and would certainly help out in terms of equality.