One one hand, I want to say to Pye, go spend a little time at a daycare and really watch the boys and girls. They're different. And it is simply not true that the parents have already tamed the little beasts away from their natural proclivities. In fact, many liberal parents have tried to do the opposite - give the kids access to both genders of toys, and find themselves quite puzzled that it doesn't work, not even with encouragement.
Jason's denial of having role models, even in childhood is odd. Somewhere on this site a few years ago it was pointed out how strongly boys adore role models and have heroes, and this was put forth as evidence of the masculine drive to achieve, which for boys starts by looking at adult male role models. Nor do I agree that men really don't need it - but they definitely have a leg up, and don't need it as much.
On the other hand, I do agree that lack of role models is very imprinting upon one's psyche. And, I have read some pretty compelling essays about how when women do achieve, it tends to not get reported, or not get reported in her name but in a man's name, or gets reported in her name briefly, and then it gets dropped. There is definitely a quite STRONG tendency to negate women out of achievement history.
What is really tough is to decide how much of this sort of thing is part of the bullying of men, and whether women really are victims to the extent that feminists, and Pye, seem to want to suppose. Pye, I feel you go way to far in deciding that it is all nurture, and that innate differences are not real. At the same time, pushing the envelope, for any particular person, ought to be done, encouraged, and seen, even if it is the minority.
But in the end I am disappointed in Pye's whole approach, which is one of resentment for the achievement differences, the assumption that where women and men differ it is men who are to be preferred, and therefore the negation of womanhood as almost worthless.
I do not think we can negate the brain differences between men and women, which have been shown to exist from birth. When a small girl hears a baby cry, her brain gives her a jolt of pitocin, she has a much larger area of her brain that is functional in that regard, and the boy gets a far smaller stimulus. Of course, we cannot generalize. My son, I have always considered a very masculine boy, yet very sensitive. On the day his sister had been born and she cried, he woke from his nap, at two years old, and came in and asked me why I was hurting the baby.
The books which have been written about these things are too good, and cannot be easily dismissed. I also read an amusing essay about how hard the gaming industry, I mean pinball and nintendo and arcade type games, have tried to invent games that would hold girls attention and they just cannot do it. And yet they are often there, hanging out with their boyfriends.
I am searching in vain for a genuine feminism that does not negate womanhood and yet has something relevant to offer.
As for Hillary Clinton, she's a scary bitch. I would love to have a good woman candidate, and there have been several really fine women congresspersons, but not her. The fact that people are going for a black man rather than a white woman shows that it is her personality and not her gender that is her main impediment.
Not to mention the complications of having Bill back in the white house and a co-presidency.
And I can't help but think that the old fashioned way, while more restrictive sexually for women and which could land her stuck in a bad deal, was also more pandering to women's preference - to have sex in the context of emotional safety and security rather than the heartbreaking jungle they now put up with, and which would have made earlier generations of kindhearted parents recoil in absolute horror at subjecting them to. Men's need for sex outside of marriage may have been somewhat pandered to, but the entire arrangement was to the advantage of the woman, by making sex scarce without caring and commitment."And I'm not so sure the social conditioning to immanent roles is not just as keenly aimed at males, whose sexual appetites are pandered and propped, and whose social identity is so often tied to his sexual success. Not to mention the patriotic notion of being the good family man; the loyal working stiff."
The fact that men have made so many rules controlling women, have cheated against recording their real achievements, and have punished and ridiculed women for stepping out of line obscures the reality that in the main, women really do have differing agendas than men.
A huge difference between men and women is that men manage to carry on dialogs that go unabated century after century, wheareas women seem to reinvent themselves with every generation.
And that appears to be because the sphere of womens operation is narrow. If women really wanted to, even while living in harems, they could have kept their own records, they could have invented algebra or Pythagoras' theorem, but they have not.
They often make fine scientists, finer doctors, and can have leaps of insight and solve problems, but I think it is usually in the sphere of fitting into the man's world, that he has created, and the particular woman being intelligent and taking an interest.
Well, perhaps now that is no longer entirely true.
Yet this fierce determination (and I admire it!) contains the underlying assumption that you can overcome something. In other words, that the male brain is superior. For if you did not think that, why the determination?"Whilst the scientists are creating their paradigm, and the social psychologists are writing their copious best sellers about irreconcilable men and women, I am living on the edge of existence, it's immediate edge, where malleable conditions stand taller in evidence than any brain scan they can show me. Time's a'wasting anyway, while they fiddle around."
I wonder if women have a completely different path in life. If women even in patriarchal culture were trying to have their spirituality in a man's way, by his dictates, which never quite made sense to her. Perhaps an enlightened woman's brain and an enlightened man's brain aren't going to be the same. Or, perhaps, I shouldn't use the word enlightenment at all, since I agree with Alex' recent statement that we are all speaking of different things anyway, and maybe none of us knows what it is. Let me just say a spiritually transcendent man and woman - might they be different? And might there be a kind of power in the immediacy of a woman's agenda, if she should actually arrive at a high destination?
The problem is, as Thomas Kneirim once pointed out, that the masculine is by its nature open to investigation, while the feminine is not, thus always stymies us (although the QRS and sycophants deny it).
