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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: women as world leaders
Message-ID: <885@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 24-Jul-83 03:27:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.885
Posted: Sun Jul 24 03:27:52 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 25-Jul-83 22:34:24 EDT
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Of course, it could be argued that women, at least, have only a certain
time of the month when they are subject to "raging hormonal influences",
while men are constantly having their brains bombarded with testosterone...

Simply because a court case was resolved with pre-menstrual stress as a
mitigating circumstance does not mean that it's an established fact that
women regularly go crazy at certain times in their menstrual cycle.  The
law makes many foolish judgements.  Even if this one woman did experience
stress at that time, this does not mean 1) that it's common to all women or
2) that it's specifically due to hormonal influences.  The body does different
things during different stages of the estrus cycle (is there not a tendency
to retention of water at some points?) which may produce uncomfortable
SOMATIC effects in some women; to make an analogy, would you be less under
control of your reactions if you had a headache?

Frankly, it would take a LOT of evidence to convince me that women and men
had thought patterns that differed radically for BIOLOGICAL reasons.  There
may be forms of behavior that differ - I could see infant care as one
possibility, but I can't see the survival value of women caring ONLY about
their infant or men NOT caring much about their offspring - but the case
that women are less likely to be assertive, or agressive, or capable of
logical thought, or capable of understanding category theory or elementary
particle physics or music composition or whatever simply because they don't
have a Y chromosome wiring their brains up right or causing the endocrine
system to pump the right kind of polypeptides into their bloodstream does not
have any good evidence for it that I know about.  The (in)famous differences
cited in things like visual ability may exist, but this still doesn't mean
"men make better mathematicians than women".  There aren't that many Gausses
OR Noethers born, period.  Furthermore, all such cases I've heard about have
been hotly debated on scientific grounds.

I shall have to go back and reread "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay
Gould soon.  He pointed out that claims of "science says you can't do these
things as well as we can" have been used by the powerful to keep the powerless
in their place for as long as such claims have been made.

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