Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!aero!holstege@polya.stanford.edu From: holstege@polya.stanford.edu (Mary Holstege) Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: sex/gender Message-ID: <10865@polya.Stanford.EDU> Date: 25 Jul 89 16:20:57 GMT References: <8907071844.AA10158@cattell.psych.upenn.edu> <10546@polya.Stanford.EDU> <12869@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <10781@polya.Stanford.EDU> <3118@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU> Sender: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Reply-To: elroy!ames!polya.stanford.edu!holstege (Mary Holstege) Organization: Stanford University Lines: 96 Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org Status: R I think it is about time to call a halt to this. We can debate interpretation back and forth until doomsday, and to do a really good job of it I would have to go back and reread some of those studies and spend a lot of time and frankly, I have other things to do. I also think we are rapidly leaving the domain of interest of most people here. So let me try to drag the conversation back to more general issues, rather than contesting each study one by one. My general points are these: (1) The evidence for most -- strike that -- for the overwhelming majority of putative sex-based differences is not only not compelling, as its proponents would have us believe, it is not even very good. (2) What evidence there is is widely accepted uncritically (and I mean here not by scientists primarily but by policy makers at one level and another) and overinterpreted (read: misinterpreted) primarily because it justifies extant inequalities. A study is done on animals. A behaviour or set of behaviours is given a label "aggression" or "rape" or "altruism". Certain biological variables are correlated to the behaviour. Then whammo! the term is misappropriated into the human context and all sorts of pronouncements are made about what is "natural" for humans. Either a human study is never done, or the human study measures quite different things, which, though the magic of language, get called the same thing and therefore presto! they are the same thing. Animal studies are never done blind and human studies rarely are. Controls (in human studies) are often missing or clearly inadequate. Alternative (non-biological determinist) explanations are given short shrift. "Natural" is taken widely to mean "immutable" and a small difference between genders is expanded to apply to all men and all women (or the overwhelming majority of men and the overwhelming majority of women). For example, it is true that if you pump female rats full of testosterone they will exhibit certain behaviours. Not terribly surprisingly, these behaviours are directly related to sexual behaviour in rats: mounting and biting. Are we justified in calling this "aggression"? Well, I don't know. Is it the only "cause" of aggression in rats? Whan a mother rat attacks an invading predator, is that "aggression"? Maybe it too is hormonally mediated, and do we know whether it is testosterone? Have the controls been done? Clearly testosterone does not effect human brains as it does rat brains: I don't notice many men who go around biting people's necks and leaping on women's backs. Have human hormone levels been correlated to human aggression? Well, there are pathological cases (overdoses of anabolic steroids). An actual measurement of testosterone in human males shows that the levels *fall* during violent episodes and only rise after the fact. Castration (either chemical or actual) of prisoners has only reduced recidivism on sexual offenders, not on violent offenders. Consider a difference species. Cats. Sometimes when you stroke a female cat, she responds with a characteristic behaviour: she whips her head around, somewhat spasmodically, teeth bared. She may bite at you, and if you persist she will strike with her claws. It generally happens after they have been petted for some time, and the cat will often immediately invite further petting. Is it "aggression"? Cats in heat respond this way much more frequently. I have seen it in neutered males on occasion, but not in toms. It is quite likely (although I do not know) that this is a behaviour mediated (triggered, for the biological determinists amoung you) by hormones. Female cats show this same behaviour at the conclusion of mating. (Toms have torn ears from other toms, but that fine network of scars on the nose is the fault of females.) Is it "aggression"? If I pump a cat full of the appropriate hormone and I see the (sex-act-related) behaviour more often, have I proven that female cats are more aggressive than males? Well of course not. `Everyone knows' that tomcats are always fighting each other. The point is that for someone who believes that males are more aggressive than females, any time a male is "aggressive" or a male hormone precedes female "aggression" the proposition is verified, but precursors of female "aggression" are ignored. When the momcat jumped for my throat when I picked up her kitten, that was not "aggression" that was "maternal nurturance instinct". Suppose I accept that statement that, on average, males are 20% more aggresive than females. Why does this mean that "women cannot compete on male terms"? *That* statement says that *no* woman can compete with *any* man on male terms. Rubbish. And how are we to know that the proper variable isn't simply body size, or physical strength? Why cast it first and only as a *sex* difference? And what, if anything, does violent sex-act-related behaviours in rats and cats have to do with violence amoung humans? Or with warfare? Or threatening letters? Or success in business? Or pay? Yet all these human characteristics are taken to fall under the same rubric "aggression" that labelled the rat behaviours. Are we justified in playing this semantic game? I say no. I say further that it is both morally indefensible and scientifically dubious to use common human terms such as "rape" and "aggression" to label very specific behaviours in non-human animals. It is worse to draw from those studies any conclusion about the human behaviours just because one has misused a human term. -- Mary Holstege@polya.stanford.edu ARPA: holstege%polya@score.stanford.edu BITNET: holstege%polya@STANFORD.BITNET UUCP: {arpa gateways, decwrl, sun, hplabs, rutgers}!polya.stanford.edu!holstege