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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: innate passiveness? (and 10000 similar discussions)
Message-ID: <864@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Jul-83 04:41:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.864
Posted: Fri Jul 22 04:41:09 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Jul-83 21:05:02 EDT
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Several articles posted here recently bring up a point that some of the
posters have missed.  Namely:

To what degree can you speak of a particular trait as "male" and "female" when
the intra-group differences with respect to this trait are great?

Consider passivity and agression.  How meaningful is it to ask whether males
are innately agressive and females are innately passive when you can go
anywhere between the two-fisted macho man subject to raging hormonal influences
to Caspar Milquetoast?  An extreme example, to be sure, but how many of you
would say that there was more difference between the "average" or "typical"
female and the average/typical male than between, say, you coworkers of a
given sex?

There may be sex-linked differences in these traits, but I strongly suspect
they're not of major importance relative to the total human variation in
those traits.  Several people have pointed out that the female political
leaders that come to mind are not passive and unaggressive; quite the
contrary.  I am suspicious of broad sweeping statements about "women" or
"blacks" or ...; usually, they merely reflect the prevailing cultural
stereotype of the group in question.  Consider the support those stereotypes
get from our culture.  I am a faithful reader of the daily funnies, and I
get megadosed with the "typical household" with the flighty female and the
male with the roving eye.  We no longer have the blatant racist stereotypes
of the type we had in comics earlier in the century, but how many action
heroes are young white males?  In short, before jumping to a conclusion
about how "women are ..." check whether you're truly giving a reasoned
response or merely repeating a cultural prejudice.  (Thank you, Ginger @
Boeing Aerospace, for putting Freud and the person who cited him in their
place.  If his response was meant as a joke, it wasn't very funny; that
line has been repeated SO many times it's become part of our cultural white
noise.  And thank you, those who have pointed out that asking what "women"
would do depends more on who the woman is than on her being a woman.)

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,mcnc,we13,brl-bmd,allegra}!rlgvax!guy