The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny, especially in social interaction. The roles we play and the relationships we have with each other aren't a mere clockwork expression of our chromosomes. They are far more memetic instead.
You can't point to a spot on the Y chromosome that is responsible for unequal pay.
Edit: I know it's frowned on to complain about downvotes, but would people at least try to understand what the nature and purpose of gender studies is before dismissing it?
Oh yes you can: men have testosterone, so they're more aggressive, which turns out to translate to asking for more pay raises more often and changing jobs more quickly if unhappy with their pay. Hey presto, a biological basis for unequal pay. Now obviously this doesn't explain everything about unequal pay -- but it would be foolish to ignore entirely, no?
Okay, what does this have to do with what she said?
> We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude toward nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man.
She's not saying that biology is the sole factor that determines how we behave. She's saying that we need to understand it and integrate it into our understanding of cultural, psychological, sociological artifacts. Or more importantly, we can't understand them without taking into account biology. I don't see anything wrong here.
>There are matrilineal societies where competitiveness is considered a feminine trait.
Are we talking about outliers or are we talking about the vast global and historical populations. These kinds of examples usually point to some small tribe in Africa, or some matrilineal or matriarchal property in some civilization (e.g. Spartan inheritance laws) as a counter-example, but miss that you still need to explain why the vast majority of civilizations and societies independently ascribed the same properties to men and women.
That wasn't the best phrasing on my part. Quoting the abstract[1]:
We use a controlled experiment to explore whether there are gender differences in selecting into competitive environments across two distinct societies: the Maasaiin Tanzania and the Khasi in India. One unique aspect of these societies is that the Maasai represent a textbook example of a patriarchal society, whereas the Khasi are matrilineal. Similar to the extant evidence drawn from experiments executed in Western cultures, Maasai men opt to compete at roughly twice the rate as Maasai women. Interestingly, this result is reversed among the Khasi, where women choose the competitive environment more often than Khasi men, and even choose to compete weakly more often than Maasai men.
>The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny, especially in social interaction.
No, that's a modern fashionable idea IN gender studies.
Doesn't mean all gender studies should (or does) bow to this idea. And even when they do, it's far more nuanced than that, as there's an interplay between biology and social elements. (Paglia doesn't say biology is destiny itself -- but parts of biology ARE destiny -- for example, death is).
> parts of biology ARE destiny -- for example, death is
Substantial parts of HN think this is something that could be rectified technologically. And there are a few species that are "biologically immortal"; lobsters don't have telomere aging, for example.
>Substantial parts of HN think this is something that could be rectified technologically.
Well, until they manage to rectify that, it is. I will update the comment when that happens (assuming it's not so far in the future that me and those substantial parts of HN are all dead, in which case it wont matter).
>And there are a few species that are "biologically immortal"; lobsters don't have telomere aging, for example.
Good for them, but still not applicable to humans as of yet (or at any point in our past).
>The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny
That's the whole point? Because I think this is the sentiment of pretty much every rational person, and heck, every non-rational person. Nobody argues biology is destiny. Even the most stringent materialists won't argue that physics or chemistry or biology is the best way to understand interactions between people. This is why biologists don't necessarily make good therapists. That doesn't mean humans are complete free agents that can violate laws of physics and chemistry and whose biology plays no part in their development and behaviour.
>You can't point to a spot on the Y chromosome that is responsible for unequal pay.
No. But we can do in depth economic analysis. And in fact, we can explain unequal pay quite well, and it has very little to do with discrimination. On the other hand, can gender studies explain unequal pay, or can it only provide an unsupported, a priori, ideological-based conclusion? I suspect the latter is closer to the truth.
Gender studies doesn't strike me as an area of scholarship that is self-critical, self-reflective, and scientifically rigorous. And yet, it is perfectly fine with making overarching conclusions about complex, chaotic systems.
Fair warning, this topic has been beaten to death and is now radioactive and everyone has settled in their tranches. But just Google around and you'll find tons of resources, though the wikipedia page[1] has a good overview of some of the subtleties, and some good examples (the recent Uber study is referenced on the page). And the fact that there are deep, nuanced, subtleties that require context to properly digest shows you that activists are really dishonest whenever they make shallow claims of wage discrimination.
For the sake this next example, grant me that difference in wages is due to life choices, even in that case, you can reach a state where things are, on the surface, unfair, like for example the fact that the pension will be greater for men than for women (or vice versa if we're talking about a female dominated field). You can take a shallow view and look at the raw numbers and assert bigotry. But that misses something, because it isn't quite the same as a government having a policy where, even when all things are equal, women get a low pension rate.
Almost every single explanation or example has this kind of nuance. It is almost never the case that someone just decided that Jane should make less than Bob because he's a man and she's a woman (though I'm sure in a country of 350 million, you can find plenty examples of that too). Furthermore, no company, and no government department has policies on the books that mandate one gender should be paid more than the other, and in fact they all have policies to disallow that - which really cuts against the claim of systematization (how can it be systematic if everyone is actively against it).
> It is almost never the case that someone just decided that Jane should make less than Bob because he's a man and she's a woman
That used to be the case until the equal pay laws came in, though. And that change was historically recently - within Paglia's lifetime, for example. It has hardly been eradicated from thought simply because the law changed.
>That used to be the case until the equal pay laws came in, though.
Right. As a society, we should pat ourselves on the back. It was the right thing to do.
Having said that, nobody actually disputes that there was active, direct, and systemic discrimination against women in the past. Or even that it doesn't exist today in some isolated cases (the recent case in Japan where female applicants were denied medical school admission solely due to their gender is one such example).
That's not the same as saying this is broadly the case today.
>It has hardly been eradicated from thought simply because the law changed.
You're right. It wasn't eradicated because the law changed. It was eradicated because society changed which enabled the law to change.
I'm not well-informed enough to say that this is an accurate summary of the current understanding, and certainly not in a position to say it will convince you!
The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny, especially in social interaction. The roles we play and the relationships we have with each other aren't a mere clockwork expression of our chromosomes. They are far more memetic instead.
You can't point to a spot on the Y chromosome that is responsible for unequal pay.
Edit: I know it's frowned on to complain about downvotes, but would people at least try to understand what the nature and purpose of gender studies is before dismissing it?