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From: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP (William Ingogly)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Are the sexes the same?
Message-ID: <410@rti-sel.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Sep-85 15:02:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: rti-sel.410
Posted: Fri Sep 13 15:02:46 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Sep-85 17:15:47 EDT
References: <411@decwrl.UUCP>
Reply-To: wfi@rti-sel.UUCP (William Ingogly)
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, NC
Lines: 70
Summary: 

In article <411@decwrl.UUCP> jackson@curium.DEC writes:

>Can't say I agree with this. The implication is that society is
>to blame for creating artificial differences between men and
>women. I think for the most part, society has reasons for the
>customs it adopts. Usually, society adopts those customs that 
>will allow it to function the as smoothly as possible. If society
>treats men and women differently, isn't it possible that it does
>so because of actual differences that have been observed over the
>years?

I have problems with both viewpoints for the following reasons.

What exactly is society? It's a label we use to refer to a number of
things, mostly a set of agreed-upon conventions for social
interactions. 'Society' doesn't have any physical reality in and of
itself. A number of people over the years have suggested that social
customs evolve according to some internal laws the same way organisms
evolve in response to environmental changes. Although this is an
intriguing idea that has a lot of intuitive appeal, it seems to have
the same problems the superorganism approach to ecosystems did a few
years back in the field of ecology. Both the superorganism theories
and societal evolution theories are based on the assumption that the
symbol they're dealing with (i.e., 'ecosystem' or 'society') has the
same relationship to physical reality as a symbol like 'brown
squirrel' or 'resident of Indiana.' 

When we talk about the way 'society' treats one of 'its' subgroups
we're really talking about a certain kind of average behavior
exhibited by a human population and inferring reasons for that average
behavior. In addition to the observed behavior, the only other thing
we have to go on (it seems to me) are the ways people think they act,
the ways they think they SHOULD act, and the ways they think other
people act. And individual perceptions of those things will vary
considerably. So we can interview people, observe behavior, and make
statements like:

    80% of the residents of the USA believe that men should
    be paid more than women

    50% of the white residents of Illinois believe that they are
    less prejudiced toward blacks than most other whites

and so on. So there is no such thing as a 'society' that evolves and
does things a certain way because 'it' has reasons for doing so.
There's only human behavior and the statistics we can perform on human
behavior to decide how people's perceptions of right and wrong IN
GENERAL are changing. By the same reasoning, there's no 'society' to
blame for the injustices we see around us, just individuals who are
wrongheaded and/or misinformed. If most individuals believe reality is
a certain way, they'll be able to enact laws in accordance with their 
beliefs because they have the statistical advantage. Plain and simple.

Why are men and women treated differently in our society? You can come
up with a lot of different hypotheses that explain why this came
about, but fundamentally changes in human behavior occur at the same
level as changes in organisms: the individual. A term like 'species'
or 'ecosystem' or 'society' is just a convenient symbol human beings
have devised to partition a continuous reality so they can deal with
it. Biologists out there might note, for example, that the symbol
'species' is virtually meaningless when dealing with willows, haws,
and many other plant groups. We're so used to dealing with reality in
this fashion, however, that we continue to try to classify these
things into species. It's pointless trying to assign blame to society
when society is nothing but a statistical distribution. This is the
main problem I have with various economic and sociologic analyses of a
situation like the men/women pay differential: economies and societies
don't really exist. Ain't it a hoot? ;-)

                                  -- Cheers, Bill Ingogly