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From: travis@douglass.cs.columbia.edu (Travis Lee Winfrey)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: sex/gender
Message-ID: <6419@columbia.edu>
Date: 28 Jul 89 18:17:17 GMT
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In article <10865@polya.Stanford.EDU> elroy!ames!polya.stanford.edu!holstege (Mary Holstege) writes:
>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.

People interested in this discussion might want to read the following
books:

  Violence Against Women: A Critique of the Sociobiology of Rape
  Suzanne R. Sunday and Ethel Tobach, editors
  Gordian Press: NY, 1985

This covers in detail many of the arguments Mary Holstege and others
have already discussed.  Particular attention is given to the logical
difficulty of moving from studies on animals to conclusions about
humans -- and a common propensity to make exactly these types of
invalid conclusions, particularly when they support the status quo.
The particular conflict that spurred the book was a paper from a
certain biologist discussing rape as an evolutionary strategy.

There is also Stephen Jay Gould's book on the Mismeasure of Man, which
discusses science's long, erroneous, history of drawing conclusions
about the abilities of entire races, as opposed to the two genders.  I
haven't read it yet, but the mental mechanism is clearly the same.

t


Arpa:	travis@cs.columbia.edu	Usenet: rutgers!columbia!travis