... most women, researchers suspect, don't realize how much they are influenced by social expectations. The Stanford social psychologist John Jost suggests that 'women in general are relatively unaware of their status as an oppressed group,' and consequently, 'hold many beliefs that are consonant with their own oppression.' He also suggests that what he calls 'gender socialization practices' are 'so thorough in their justification of inequality' that girls and women end up believing that the existing system of inequality and discrimination is appropriate and right. In other words, 'members of oppressed groups internalize aspects of their oppression, coming to believe in the legitimacy of their own inferiority.'
How to fight this? As a general matter, you fight things with similar things:
Fight memes with other memes.
Fight scientific findings with other scientific findings.
Fight just-so stories with other just-so stories.
I am going to try my hand at fighting the story of why women are oppressed with a similar story that reaches the opposite conclusion. (I will not enumerate the standard story since it needs no additional reinforcement.)
Note: this describes an imaginary situation, but one that could just as easily be supported by "biological differences" as the current situation. This is a though experiment and not a statement about how things are or should be, and some of the biological differences cited below might be suspect (as are many cited in favor of the status quo).
1) Children take their mother's name because they came out of the mother. Throughout human history it has been easier to determine a child's mother than her father. Men take their wives' names when getting married because they are joining up with their wives' life-creating potential.
2) Women have a higher position in society because they are more essential for continuing the population.
3) Men are kept out of positions of power because they tend to be irresponsible, reckless, and prone to violence. Almost all presidents and governmental leaders are women.
4) Women are the heads of households because they tend to be better at keeping on top of the many responsibilities of running a family, they are better investors, and they make decisions that benefit all the family members.
5) Women have higher educational attainment because they tend to be more focused and better students.
6) Men do not always do well in higher education, because they tend to become focused on small, narrow, abstract problems, which makes it hard for them to contribute to the predominant type of inquiry, which is holistic, human-centered, and multi-disciplinary.
7) Instead of asking, "How does this affect our society?" or "How can we make things good for all people involved?", men are prone to researching abstruse and pointless questions about imaginary constructs like "rational agents." They keep asking for new departments to be formed to address one subject alone (called "mono-disciplinary" departments).
8) Men's innate tendency to care about status and power causes them problems in the non-hierarchical, warm, happy-family society where vying for power is frowned upon. Men's displays of power-hunger at work are often seen as inappropriate, and men try to learn to contain these seemingly natural tendencies.
9) There are books trying to teach men to act more like women.
"Learn to care about the general welfare (like a woman)"
"Men have monthly cycles too!"
"Learning to cry: the therapeutic benefits of crying and sharing one's troubles."
"Mean boys don't get the corner office."
10) Women are thought to be innately superior due to their average greater physical attractiveness, responsibility, and skills for care-taking of both people and society. Other advantages include a greater connection with lunar rhythms and intuition.
11) Occasionally men will protest that women are not more nurturing than men; it's just that society has been set up that way, and that in fact men have also evolved to take care of children.
12) There are large-scale movements trying to win men more responsibility for childcare. Men feel cut out of something important in life--raising their children--because of societal patterns that magnify women's initial advantage in childcare (due childbirth hormones and being able to breastfeed) into near-complete control of child-raising.
13) New books and movements encourage men to ask for solo time taking care of their children, so they can develop competence at childcare and so that their children will see them as parents just as much as they see their mothers as parents.
14) It's thought that little boys are not given enough opportunity to explore nurturing behaviors. Thus, forward-thinking mothers provide their boys with dolls and opportunities to care for things, in hopes that they will grow into the type of nurturing, loving people that society wants them to be.
15) In the workplace, men have taken to wearing clothes traditionally worn by women, in an attempt to seem more like women and to gain some of of the cache of women. Thus, men are increasingly wearing skirts and dresses, which they often find to be more comfortable than standard men's wear.
16) Most college campuses have a Men's Center, where men can talk about their concerns as a semi-oppressed minority on campus.
17) Men read The Second Sex by Simon de Beauvoir, about how men have been seen as the "Other." They realize that they have always seen women as the default.
18) Human development, and the way that all fetuses start as female, is cited as biological justification for women to be seen as the default gender.
19) Breast-envy is seen as a major factor in men's desires including the desire for children (so they can engender breasts themselves, if they give birth to any girls). Women are thought to experience mastectomy-anxiety. Men are also thought to experience womb-envy.
20) In popular culture, theories about the benefits of female sex hormones abound. It is thought that estrogen and progesterone contribute to women's advantageous behavioral profile; and testosterone contributes to men's maladaptive behaviors; but it has been hard to establish these theories scientifically.
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Source: art-of-pickup.blogspot.com
