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| Re: Hey, Zseni! by Zseni 02/09/2007, 10:11pm PST | ||||
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laudablepuss wrote: I got a paragraph into the article before it made my vodka taste funny. Frightened and delirious, I could not go on, so instead I filled my cubicle with kitten stickers and potted plants. Always so many studies about how women are different than men, and by different we usually mean inferior. It's as though people found it insufficient to let nature - in the sense of naturally observable phenomena - take its course; the weaknesses and inabilities of women must be constantly and concretely demonstrated by research. What falls under the purview of science and what doesn't? Some dude has made quite a name for himself with a book about how food science is basically wrong. He explains that food scientists keep deciding that whatever they are studying is the most important of all possible food attributes: first macronutrients, then vitamins and minerals, then more abstract nutrients like bran or omega-3 fatty acids. We are undoubtedly getting somewhere important as far as knowing what food is and isn't, and what it can and can't do, but in the interim food science and its ol' buddy, the tragedy of the commons, have created all kinds of problems - diabetes epidemics, hyper-processed foodstuffs, the neglect of the humble yam. Etc. In an optimistic sound-byte sense, I feel that this is also happening with women. Woman science continues to narrow down what is and isn't a women, although they also continue to create undue hysteria and ridiculous hypotheses. In a less optimistic sense, I can't stop thinking about how science itself is a repressive force which continually chains the individual woman to the (perceived) abilities of Women As A Whole. An individual women is always better-than or worse-than Women in a way which seems to defy statistical assortment: that is, no matter how large a group of similar women is, they have little impact on the perception of Women until science says so. It's like racial profiling, and it is completely pervasive. I am very tired of being a woman who is Not Like All Those Other Women. At first I was wonderfully flattered by the Not Like All The Other Women comparisons, but now I understand that by making an exception of me, people (men and women both) continue to retain the same old narrow expectations and allowance for women in general. There aren't very many people like me at all - men or women - and certainly no more men than women, but I'm a woman all the same. How can I - a woman who is exceptional - demonstrate this entire set of beliefs to the world in a way which doesn't cause the world to say "what an exceptional woman!"? Slate is a beigeist tragedy. There isn't a man alive who has lived a woman's life, so it's absurd to continue to expect note-for-note congruity between women and men. Still more absurd to set up one group as "better" than the other in a domain like "handles stress" - what if women cried less, but men got heart disease less often? Which one actually handles stress better? This sort of experiment is radically different than something like "which chemical catalyzes a hydrogen-producing reaction better" for reasons I shouldn't have to explain to you. Further: men as a whole don't evince the same response to all stimuli, but a paper about how, of two groups of men, group A handled stress better than group B, is a mere statistical anomaly, and nobody would presume to say that it said something about men as a whole other than that they're different from one another individually. I'm not saying the scientific exploration of gender differences is a dead zone of no utility, but I am saying: don't take this or that report as some kind of gospel. Be always prepared to think critically, even destructively, of this sort of report, and think always of the actual women and men in your life. There's your rebuttal. |
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