Recent discussion in some comments brought up the nature/nurture question and Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate.
There is one part in the book which I remembered distinctly as a muddled-seeming swat at feminism. But, at the time when I read the book (2002) I didn’t really care very much because I interpreted Pinker as taking sides in a theoretical point between feminists. So, I blew past his argument but its existence stuck in my memory; I was mostly paying attention to see if he offered a good defense of evolutionary psychology.
I thought, as an exercise, perhaps we could collectively take a look at a few specific pages from Pinker – the ones I remembered – and see what’s there. Since I know FtB’s own H.J. Hornbeck is also interested in this topic, I’ve hinted broadly that he might also wish to take a look at these specific pages, since I value his thoughts greatly. Update: H.J. got hung up on the first sentence [reprobate spreadsheet]. He did a much more detailed reading.
We’re going to focus here on Pinker’s characterization of feminism, found beginning on page 341 and ending on 343.[of the 2002 edition] I will include those pages below, so that you can review them. (don’t read the pictures, there’s actual text, those are just there for decoration)
Pinker writes:
Feminism is often derided because of the arguments of its lunatic fringe – for example, that all intercourse is rape, that all women should be lesbians, or that only 10 percent of the population should be allowed to be male.Feminists reply that proponents of women’s rights do not speak with one voice, and that feminist thought comprises many positions, which have to be evaluatedindependently.That is completely legitimate, but it cuts both ways. To criticize a particularfeminist proposal is not to attack feminism in general. Anyone familiar with academia knows that it breeds ideological cults that are prone to dogma and resistant to criticism. Many women believe that this has now happened to feminism. In her book Who Stole Feminism? the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers draws a useful distinction between two schools of thought.Equity feminism opposes sex discrimination and other forms of unfairness to women. It is part of the classical liberal and humanistic tradition that grew out of the Enlightenment, and it guided the first wave of feminism and launched the second wave.Gender feminism holds that women continue to be enslaved by a pervasive system of male dominance, the gender system, in which bi-sexual infants are transformed into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command, the other to obey.It is opposed to the classical liberal tradition and allied instead with Marxism, postmodernism, social constructionism, and radical science. It has became the credo of some women’s studies programs, feminist organizations, and spokespeople for the women’s movement. Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. Gender feminism is an empirical doctrine committed to three claims about human nature. The first is that the differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety. The second is that humans possess a single social motive – power – and that social life can be understood only in terms of how it is exercised. The third is that human interactions arise not from themotives of people dealing with each other as individuals but from the motives of groups dealing with other groups – in this case, the male gender dominating the female gender.In embracing these doctrines, the genderists are handcuffing feminism to railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down. As we shall see, neuroscience, gene tics, psychology, and ethnography are documenting sex differences that almost certainly originate in human biology. And evolutionary psychology is documenting a web of motives other than group – against – group dominance (such as love, sex, family, and beauty) that entangle us in many conflicts and confluences of interest with members of the same sex and of the opposite sex.Gender feminists want either to derail the train or to have other women join them in martyrdom, but the other women are not cooperating. Despite their visibility, gender feminists do not speak for all feminists, let alone for all women.To begin with, research on the biological basis of sex differences has been led by women. Because it is so often said that this research is a plot to keep women down, I will have to name names. Researchers on the biology of sex differences include the neuroscientists Raquel Gur,Melissa Hines, Doreen Kimura, Jerre Levy, Martha McClintock, Sally Shaywitz, and Sandra Witelson and the psychologists Camill a Benbow, Linda Gottfredson, Diane Halpern, Judith Kleinfeld, and Diane McGuinness. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, sometimes stereotyped as a “sexist discipline,” is perhaps the most bi-gendered academic field I am familiar with. Its major figures include Laura Betzig, Elizabeth Cashdan, Leda Cosmides, Helena Cronin, Mildred Dickeman, Helen Fisher, Patricia Gowaty, Kristen Hawkes, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Magdalena Hurtado, Bobbie Low, Linda Mealey, Felicia Pratto, Marnie Rice, Catherine Salmon, Joan Silk, Meredith Small, Barbara Smuts, Nancy Wilmsen Thornhill, and Margo Wilson. It is not just gender feminism’s collision with science that repels many feminists. Like other inbred ideologies, it has produced strange excrescences, like the offshoot known as difference feminism. Carol Gilligan has become a gender-feminist icon because of her claim that men and women guide their moral reasoning by different principles: men think about rights and justice; women have feelings of compassion, nurturing, and peaceful accommodation.If true, it would disqualify women from becoming constitutional lawyers, Supreme Court justices, and moral philosophers, who make their living by reasoning about rights and justice. But it is not true. Many studies have tested Gilligan’s hypothesis and found that men and women differ little or not at all in their moral reasoning.So difference feminism offers women the worst of both worlds: invidious claims without scientific support. Similarly, the gender-feminist classic called Women’s Ways of Knowing claims that the sexes differ in their style s of reasoning. Men value excellence and mastery in intellectual matters and skeptically evaluate arguments in terms of logic and evidence; women are spiritual, relational, inclusive, and credulous.With sisters like these, who needs male chauvinists? Gender feminism’s disdain for analytical rigor and classical liberal principles has recently been excoriated by equity feminists, among them Jean Bethke Elshtain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Wendy Kaminer, Noretta Koertge, Donna Laframboise, Mary Lefkowitz, Wendy McElroy, Camille Paglia, Daphne Patai, Virginia Postrel, Alice Rossi, Sally Satel, Christina Hoff Sommers, Nadine Strossen, Joan Kennedy Taylor, and Cathy Young.Well before them, prominent women writers demurred from gender-feminist ideology, including Joan Didion, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Cynthia Ozick, and Susan Sontag. And ominously for the movement, a younger generation has rejected the gender feminists‘ claims that love, beauty, flirtation, erotica, art, and heterosexuality are pernicious social constructs. The title of the book The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order captures the revolt of such writers as Rene Denfeld, Karen Lehrman, Katie Roiphe, and Rebecca Walker, and of the movements called Third Wave, Riot Grrrl Movement, Pro-Sex Feminism, Lipstick Lesbians, Girl Power, and Feminists for Free Expression.The difference between gender feminism and equity feminism accounts for the oft-reported paradox that most women do not consider themselves feminists (about 70 percent in 1997, up from about 60 percent a decade before), yet they agree with every major feminist position.The explanation is simple: the word “feminist” is often associated with gender feminism, but the positions in the polls are those of equity feminism. Faced with these signs of slipping support, gender feminists have tried to stipulate that only they can be considered the true advocates of women’s rights. For example, in 1992 Gloria Steinem said of Paglia, “Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they’re not anti-Semitic.” And they have invented a lexicon of epithets for what in any other area would be called disagreement: “backlash,” “not getting it,” “silencing women,” “intellectual harassment.”All this is an essential background to the discussions to come. To say that women and men do not have interchangeable minds, that people have desires other than power, and that motives belong to individual people and not just to entire genders is not to attack feminism or to compromise the interests of women, despite the misconception that gender feminism speaks in their name. All the arguments in the remainder of this chapter have been advanced most forcefully by women.Why are people so afraid of the idea that the minds of men and women are not identical in every respect? Would we really be better off if everyone were like Pat, the androgynous nerd from Saturday Night Live? The fear, of course, is that different implies unequal – that if the sexes differed in any way, then men would have to be better, or more dominant, or have all the fun.Nothing could be farther from biological thinking. Trivers alluded to a “symmetry in human relationships,” which embraced a “genetic equality of the sexes.” From a gene’s point of view, being in the body of a male and being in the body of a female are equally good strategies, at least on average (circumstances can nudge the advantage somewhat in either direction). Natural selection thus tends toward an equal investment in the two sexes: equal numbers, an equal complexity of bodies and brains, and equally effective designs for survival. Is it better to be the size of a male baboon and have six-inch canine teeth or to be the size of a female baboon and not have them? Merely to ask the question is to reveal its pointlessness. A biologist would say that it’s better to have the male adaptations to deal with male problems and the female adaptations to deal with female problems.So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species. Men and women have all the same genes except for a handful on the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed neuroanatomist to find the small differences between them. Their average levels of general intelligence are the same, according to the best psychometric estimates, and they use language and think about the physical and living world in the same general way. They feel the same basic emotions, and both enjoy sex, seek intelligent and kind marriage partners, get jealous, make sacrifices for their children, compete for status and mates, and sometimes commit aggression in pursuit of their interests.But of course the minds of men and women are not identical, and recent reviews of sex differences have converged on some reliable differences. Sometimes the differences are large, with only slight overlap in the bell curves. Men have a much stronger taste for no-strings sex with multiple or anonymous partners, as we see in the almost all-male consumer base for prostitution and visual pornography. Men are far more likely to compete violently, sometimes lethally, with one another over stakes great and small (as in the recent case of a surgeon and an anesthesiologist who came to blows in the operating room while a patient lay on the table waiting to have her gall bladder removed). Among children, boys spend far more time practicing for violent conflict in the form of what psychologists genteelly call “rough-and-tumble pay” The ability to manipulate three-dimensional objects and space in the mind also shows a large difference in favor of men.
One more observation then we can start to look at what Pinker’s saying: there are substantial differences between the text (which I pulled and reformatted from a PDF of a more recent E-book edition) and the 2002 version. It shows some effort that I interpret as an attempt to shore up his argument, or tone it down, in various spots. For example, in the 2002 edition he writes:
It is not just gender feminism’s collision with science that repels many feminists. Like other inbred ideologies, it has produced strange excrescences, the the offshoot known as difference feminism.
It seems to me that there is a great deal of well-poisoning and strawmanning going on, here. Also, some appeals to dubious authority Christina Hoff Summers and Camille Paglia being two that I would be cautious about labelling at all.
We must also note that Pinker is using Christina Hoff Summers’ labels “gender feminism” and “equity feminism” which are, I would say, well-poisoning right there. The form of feminism that Pinker seems to be describing as “gender feminism” appears to me to be an outright caricature of an amalgam of extreme feminist/separatist views. It seems to me that often, when men write about feminism, they fall for the trap of caricaturing an extreme feminist viewpoint as – basically – Andrea Dworkin. But, they don’t want to come out and say they are using Andrea Dworkin as a strawman caricature of radical feminism. Why not? Because, if they do, it’s pretty easy to dismiss the whole argument by pointing out that Dworkin (though she made some very interesting points, I must say) was hardly mainstream.
It seems to me that Pinker is doing a sneakier version of a form of anti-feminist maneuver that consists of saying “well, there are some really extreme feminists, and, uh, cultural marxism, political correctness, and therefore these people are anti-science.” That maneuver also depends on Pinker’s fallback that, you know, speech is being suppressed by radical thinkers who are yelling at people about things:
It has became the credo of some women’s studies programs, feminist organizations, and spokespeople for the women’s movement.
Basically, what Pinker is doing here is like saying that Alex Jones is a great example of the republican base. Anyone saying that would be dishonest – Jones is a great example of the lunatic fringe of the republican base but when Pinker is obliquely referring to Dworkin he’s saying, in effect, that the person jamming open one end of the Overton Window defines the window.
What’s most bizzare about this, to me, is that Pinker’s trying to pretend to be all sciency but instead he just charges in and starts waving his hands and supporting his hand-waving with assertions supported by dubious authority. I think that, somewhere in his mind, he is trying to say something profound about feminism, but he has failed to understand even the most basic problems of labelling: that people lose track of your argument because they start using your labels – and labels aren’t an argument.
Men and women have all the same genes except for a handful on the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed neuroanatomist to find the small differences between them. Their average levels of general intelligence are the same, according to the best psychometric estimates, and they use language and think about the physical and living world in the same general way.
Did he just throw Evolutionary Psychology under the bus, so he could take a halfhearted poke at feminism?
Now, I remember why this piece of Pinker made me go “huh?” and keep reading: I’m not sure what he is trying to accomplish with this bit other than to poke at a caricature strawman of feminism, and show that he understands damn little about feminism. Feminism is not some great post-modern cultural marxist WTF that comes in with a book of rules for proper thought and torments everyone who doesn’t think right. It’s a very big, broad, belief system that is fractally complex and which absolutely does not caricature easily; I remember asking a friend of mine, a professor who teaches gender studies at a notable university in Massachusetts, about Dworkin – because the things she said sure seemed a bit radical to me – and I got what I thought was a fairly good answer: it’s complicated, like all belief systems, even a single individual who is part of an overall movement can hold views that are all over the place, in terms of that movement. I’ll also say that that friend thinks Camille Paglia is an attention-seeking contrarian who is attempting to be a glittering pseudo-intellect but hasn’t got the chops for it. That’s about my assessment, too.
Pinker seems to be pointing at this radical fringe, as defined by Christina Hoff Summers who is also a dubious character who is more or less a radical fringer, in her own right. That’s not how to define the landscape of a field of thought.
What do you think?
The “feminist who thinks the male population should be reduced by 90%” is another caricature of radical feminism [vice]
It says something not particularly good about Pinker’s honesty that he’s even pretending to take that seriously.
Here’s a problem with all such caricatures: I can say “that’s stupid, and here’s why” without being labelled a tooth-gnashing reactionary. Can’t I? There are plenty of reasonable arguments that can be made, I think (I won’t bother with them here) against that idea, without foaming at the mouth even the slightest bit.
The vast preponderance of feminists I’ve met and talked to are concerned with gender and equality, where “equality” means political, economic, and social equality.
Can anyone here reference me a feminist who believes that actual physical and mental equality are a goal, let alone an achievable goal? There’s a caricature out there of a feminist who thinks Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron is a documentary – but I have literally never encountered such a person.
Pretty much every feminist I’ve ever met is interested in basic, you know, social equality: equal pay for equal work, equal political representation – you know, “equal rights.” I have never encountered anyone saying, seriously, “if we can send one man to the moon, why can’t we send them all?”
I haven’t ever met a feminist who says there ought to be reparations (probably ought to be, actually…) and expect to see that happen.
Why does Pinker need to caricature positions so badly? Could it be that he simply hasn’t got a point?
I should point out that there’s some evidence that “Femtheist Divine” is actually an anti-feminist “satirically” trolling feminists, and Pinker is almost certainly talking about someone else; his footnotes cite this book as a source.
That passage sure was painful to read. There were a whole lot of lists and details without any context, seemingly to give the impression that he know’s what he’s talking about, so we should take his word for it. Certainly we can’t judge it on the basis of his arguments, since he doesn’t offer them.
The best defense of Pinker I can come up with, being very charitable and giving him the benefit of the doubt wherever possible, etc., is that he was being totally irresponsible as an academic and clearly had no business whatsoever writing about the subject. He should’ve apologized, retracted it and just started over if necessary (but publishers wouldn’t like that). As he said, he needed to approach certain topics in The Blank Slate and provide the reader with some cultural background in order to move, which meant that he had to get over this hurdle somehow or another. But he ended up falling flat on his face — without realizing it, obviously, and even today I’m assuming he’d want to defend his book….
So (at best) he was confused and ignorant, talking out of his ass based on a horribly misleading impression of the serious disagreements that arose within (and without) feminism over the previous several decades. Granted, trying to summarize all of that in just a few paragraphs wouldn’t have been easy or likely to produce anything very coherent/fair/respectable, even for someone who (1) did know what the fuck they were talking about, and who (2) had no prior interest in quickly/casually dismissing objections to the theories/explanations presented in TBS (these are I guess Pinker’s primary failings here). But it’s not like he aimed high and merely missed the mark just a little bit. He failed spectacularly at the simple task that he knew (and explicitly said) was his job at this juncture, of properly setting the stage for his own arguments.
He apparently does genuinely hold some basic feminist positions, that women ought to be treated fairly, that they’re just as capable (if perhaps different) as men in various respects, and so forth. Also, in many other ways, he is mostly a liberal/progressive, perhaps too much of a libertarian at times but not much of a traditionalist/conservative as far as I’m aware. Nonetheless, all of this stuff is well outside his area of expertise, not to mention significantly colored and limited by his experiences as a straight white dude.
Still, he’s also pretty transparent about cranking up the supposed differences between “gender” and “equity” feminism, all of the way up to fucking eleven. One’s a moral doctrine with (somehow) no empirical commitments; the other is about three very specific (and very dubious) empirical claims. One is anti-science; the other is not — no argument necessary for that claim, I suppose. One is most emphatically not thoroughly supported by all women, while the other … well, we’ll just remain silent about whether or not all women support it (but obviously they don’t, hence the two camps). One will receive an explicit objection that it might be understood to disqualify women from certain careers; and again the other will not be analyzed or criticized in that way at all, even though it might also be thought (correctly or not) to imply exactly the same things. He’s really pushing on this fucked up distinction hard, from just about every angle he can, but at the same time, he doesn’t seem to think it’s worth it to actually ask the question of whether any of it holds up to the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Siggy@#4:
Certainly we can’t judge it on the basis of his arguments, since he doesn’t offer them.
It’s a relief to me to be able to have you confirm that there doesn’t appear to be an argument there. I read and re-read what Pinker wrote and it seems like he’s walking in and saying that both sides of a dichotomy are wrong. Therefore: stuff!
I find Camille Paglia to be a very entertaining writer, even when I disagree vehemently with what she is saying. I’ve never been that interested in Christina Hoff Summers, as I’ve never felt she has anything interesting to say.
It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!
This linking of Marxism and postmodernism is always a red flag for me, since Marxism is about as modernist a political philosophy as it’s possible to get. This is basically just a random grab-gab of snarl words – he might as well have said it’s allied with mosquitoes and people who talk at the theatre.
Also, [citation needed]. For example, in what manner, exactly, is “gender feminism”* “opposed to the classical liberal tradition”? What does that even mean? And so on and so forth…
Also also, what the actual fuck is “radical science”?
And that’s just one sentence…
* Assuming, for the sake of argument, that “gender feminism” is even a thing that’s been adequately defined at some point – which I’m not at all convinced about, to say the least.
I spent some time contemplating that before I realized it’s just a transcription error.
Wouldn’t that point be better served by some serious statistics than a random anecdote?
Not to worry, he contradicts that argument in the very next paragraph.
Man… this is all just a mess. What got me was somehow sneaking in “Third Wave” as a movement to be proud of in the revolt against “Gender Feminism,” yet the likes of Christina Hoff Summers criticize Third Wave feminism as being the feminism that went off the rails in comparison to the more valid First and Second waves. Pinker really is talking about this stuff second-hand.
Also, this section:
is just so odd to include. Somehow “Gender Feminism” and offshoots of such are responsible for all extremist thinking about gender, that men and women are totally different biologically AND that men and women are totally identical biologically. Super easy to knock down that strawman with totally reasonable statements that are precisely the sorts of things those wicked “Gender Feminists” would support.
And if only he had read some of that “Gender Feminist” stuff himself rather than apparently just reading Christina Hoff Sommers and calling it a day, he’d realize that this:
may be true in terms of finding differences between genders, but part of “Gender Feminism” is asking the question of whether it is innate or learned. No, not assuming it is learned rather than innate, but trying to parse out the difference. And I’d hazard a guess that Pinker would be on board with that question being answered accurately.
Pinker’s a popular target at the moment.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/driventoabstraction/2018/02/enlightenment-problem-steven-pinker/
Yeah, I’m not reading Pinker. It gets to the point where I’d be doing violence to my intellect.
I read this book in 2012 (in 2002 I was 10 years old). Back then I didn’t know that much about feminism, so I didn’t pay much attention to the quoted pages. Now that I’m rereading it, oh crap, I didn’t even remember that it was so bad.
I certainly struggled with finding an argument hidden somewhere within that mess. It was such an obvious strawman. Still, if I had to make a guess, here’s my attempt at reconstructing an argument that could be hidden within those pages you quoted: There are feminists with various opinions. Some feminists argue in favor of equal rights. Others instead argue that all babies are born the same and all currently existing differences between the sexes are the result of 100% nurture (no nature involved). The other type of feminists are wrong, because: genes and testosterone.
I can think of a cultural explanation here. Men do not experience slut shaming. A promiscuous man with many girlfriends is culturally perceived as successful. A woman with many boyfriends is perceived as a slut. As people get older, it gets only worse. Over 35 years old male bachelor is perceived as perfectly normal. Over 35 years old female in an identical situation is perceived as unfortunate and deserving pity at best. At worst, people will be gossiping that there’s something wrong with her, some sort of fault that must have caused her inability to keep a single partner.
Regarding porn: it is usually filmed for the male viewer. I’m aware of the “Rule 34,” I know that there’s porn for every imaginable audience. So here I’m only talking about the characteristics of what constitutes majority of available porn. If I open a search engine and type “porn” and look at the first few results, I’ll generally encounter something that was intended for the male audience. Male actor will be calling his partner “slut”, “bitch” etc. There will be subtle signs that the female actor is there for the male’s pleasure—the way how the male actor treats her, the way how the camera is angled. This stuff could be potentially alienating for the female viewer. I know that you can look around and with a bit of patience you will find different movies. They exist. It’s just that they aren’t the first results you’ll find.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with BDSM or movies where one partner is controlling the other. My problem is when the male actor is rude towards the female actor (or vice versa, but it’s normally the male actor who is rude). Whenever I hear words like “bitch” or “slut,” something clicks in my brain and it gets mildly uncomfortable for me. Derogatory language, scorn, any signs of disrespect bother me. If you don’t like this person, what are you doing having sex with them in the first place? Nowadays, when I’m in the mood to jerk off and watch some random porn, I tend to narrow my search results to lesbian porn. If I click on some random lesbian porn video, the chance to see this kind of crap (where one of the actors is treated like an object, which is located there just so that the other one has a hole where to stick their genitals) is much smaller. It’s funny how nowadays I watch mostly lesbian porn despite the fact that generally I’m more attracted to masculine people.
Again, I can think of a cultural explanation. When a man displays anger and acts violently, society perceives it differently than when a woman does the same. A woman will be either perceived as hysterical or she will be laughed at. Neither is beneficial for her. There’s a strong incentive for women not to behave violently.
When I was a child, I fought with my fists a lot. I was the tallest person in my class, all the boys where shorter than me. I could defeat other kids in fights, and I loved it. For example, once I was in a park in winter and another kid hit me with a snowball. My response was to chase and catch that boy and throw him face down into snow (after all, revenge is best served with an extra helping). My female cousin was even more violent than me. The two of us fought often. Those were some good old times when I was strong and capable of beating up other kids. Then came the bitch puberty. Every single boy in my class grew up to be taller (and stronger) than me. I could no longer reliably win fights. In fact, I was bound to lose any fight I started. Which is why I had no other choice but to search for non violent methods for solving conflicts. When you are physically weak, initiating (or even getting into) a violent competition is plain stupid. You are bound to lose; you will get injured, maybe even killed. Thus I had to learn to defeat others verbally, because my fists weren’t any good anymore. Sure, I have practiced martial arts for a few years, I have a chance of winning even against a physically stronger opponent, but the risk that I might lose is still pretty high. It would be insane for me to start a fight.
I even react differently to other people’s violence. When a woman (or a short and physically weak guy) starts yelling, displaying anger, threatening to hit me, I don’t feel like I’m in danger. I know that if they attacked, I would probably win. My reaction would differ based on the situation (slam the doors in their face, tell them to get lost, mock them, have fun and further provoke them, ignore them), but I would feel safe to just not care about their emotional state and the risk of getting into a fight. However, my reaction would be totally different if the potential opponent was a physically strong guy. Then there would be the very real risk of me getting injured. I’d have no other choice but to do everything possible to avoid a potential fight.
The point is: strong people can get away with violence in the same situations where weak people cannot do so.
I wish I was taller and stronger. Well, frankly, I wish I was born with a male body. I’m such a cautious coward nowadays. Practicing martial arts has actually made me more cautious. As a child, I used to confidently fight against people who were stronger than me. I have never been spanked in my life (that’s actually illegal in my country). When I was about 10 years old, my mother tried doing that for the first and only time. I fought back and I know that I must have hit her pretty hard. My fists hurt a lot more than injuries from any of those hits she managed to land on me. When fighting, I always hit as hard as I could and I never cared about injuring my hands. After her failed attempt at disciplining me, my mother never tried that again. On another occasion I managed to successfully fend off my classmate’s grandmother. She grabbed me for a beating; I fought her off, freed myself from her grip and ran away. Being elderly, she couldn’t catch me. Back then, despite being weaker and less skilled than I’m now, I still felt more confident to start a fight, because I usually won fights.
By the way, I’m not claiming that there are no genetic differences. I’m just not comfortable with Pinker simply attributing any measured differences to nature rather than nurture.
The things I want would be: equal pay, equal job opportunities, no slut shaming, equal access to healthcare (how comes getting a vasectomy is simpler than getting yourself sterilized?), equal attitudes (I’m so sick of hearing “all women want babies”), non gender segregated education, the right to wear male swimwear in beaches and swimming pools (aka topfreedom), non gender segregated toilets and hostel rooms. Basically, I don’t want the physical appearance of my body to determine what I can or cannot do in my life. And I don’t want to constantly get annoyed by other people’s gender stereotypes (“Wow, you really are interested in woodworking? How interesting. I didn’t expect that from a woman.”)
Personally I haven’t met feminists with particularly weird views. At least not in real life. Online you can find all kinds of weirdness and often you are left wondering whether it’s real or a parody. In Latvia we have some quite outspoken feminists who argue that sex work should be banned (they want the Swedish model with only the client getting punished), and porn is bad (they don’t offer a workable law proposal for how to ban it, but it should be discouraged). The idea is that pornstars and sex workers are forced into this job, which in inherently objectifying and derogatory for the women (what about all the male sex workers and porn stars?). I have argued against them about these topics, so basically we have another round of feminist sex wars here. Other than this disagreement, I find the opinions of Latvian feminist activists pretty reasonable. Equal rights, equal attitudes, that sort of stuff.
Hi! Long time lurker here, just reset my forgotten WordPress password.
I am confused by the presumed ideology of G. F. Strawperson here. First, Pinker is saying that “gender feminists” think there is no biological difference between male and female brains, but in the next paragraph he seems to be ascribing a gender essentialist viewpoint to them. I agree that there are both ideas floating around – I spent a lot of time on Twisty Faster’s IBTP blog back in the aughts and there are certainly many flavors of rad fem. Leaving aside the obvious “those are both drastic oversimplifications of people’s actual stances”, this is pretty sloppy straw sculpting on Pinker’s part.