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From: guy@rlgvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: Women's natural superiority at sympathizing
Message-ID: <1261@rlgvax.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 15-Oct-83 23:00:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: rlgvax.1261
Posted: Sat Oct 15 23:00:23 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 12-Oct-83 12:55:42 EDT
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't say much of anything
about the individual man; remember, the average human being has one testicle,
one breast, and one ovary)?

2) Given how sweeping a statement it is, what hard evidence do you have?
There are several billion people in the world, and none of us have met more
than a small fraction of them.

3) What is the definition of "mothering", or "nurturing", or "nursing" (if
you mean in the sense of providing milk to an infant, this is self-evidently
true, of course), or "caring", or "sympathizing"?  All these terms are rather
general, and the latter ones are in my opinion so general that they can't
be defined precisely enough to measure how much better women may be than men
at them.

4) Even if you had precise definitions of the above, and evidence that women
by and large were better at them, what evidence do you have that they are
"instinctually" and "naturally" better at them, and that the difference is
not just cultural?

When one is making statements that say that one very broad class of people
are better or worse at something, and such statements can fit in with a
cultural scheme that assigns people to social functions despite their
desire to perform that function or ability to perform it, one should be
very careful to base these statements strictly on very solid and
uncontroversial evidence.  If I were a woman in a family I would be very
annoyed to be given the bulk of the resposibility for child-rearing, or
given the task of being the Great Provider of Sympathy, just because I
happened not to have a Y chromosome; I would be equally annoyed to be denied
a technical job, or a position with major political power, because it was
considered that women couldn't handle such jobs.

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