On Tue, 24 Aug 1999, phil osborn, replying to Elizabeth Childs wrote:
> Women typically start relationships by telling some dirty secret,
> to show they trust you. But that in itself tells you how they see
> their relationship to other people -
> i.e., a manipulator, allied with other manipulators.
You may wan to read "The Red Queen" (or some other related books like "Sperm Wars"), documenting the difference in the sexual strategies between men and women.
Women are "manipulative" due to the requirement for "Plan B". Women (in evolutionary times) mate with a man so he can provide resources for her and her offspring. However, being a man is a hazardous profession, women live in fear of their mate not coming back from the mastadon hunt or having him stolen by a younger woman (more able to bear his children)... Given that situation, the best strategy is "Plan B" -- have another man that you can entice into being your mate, should mate A suffer an accident or be lured away. To make "Plan B" work, you have to be *very* clever (manipulative), in that you have to make potential mate B think he has a chance without letting mate A discover this. For if mate A discovers this he may start to wonder whether those children he has been feeding are his or B's. This will cause him to (a) pick a fight with potential mate B; (b) exercise his mate B option deserting his mate A and any children; (c) kill the children of questionable parentage and begin again (thus negating female mate A's large investment in previous offspring).
If this isn't a recipe for producing "manipulative" behavior in women, then I don't know what is. So it isn't women you should be griping about -- it is the womens' *genes*.
I have a friend who is a classic example of this. She is an ultimate controller/manipulation entity (self-admitting). In looking at her background, I can't find much that would have "trained" her for this (her parents were both well educated, engineer/scientist types and very laid-back). I can only suspect that she is homozygous for the "manipulation" genes.
> Not that I'm accusing you of any of this. With the billions of women out
> there, there will always be some who buck the trend. Just not enough. Most
> of the values and goals that extropians and libertarians are working for are
> opposed primarily by women, who have the inherited money and the additional
> years of life, giving them the political majority to use the state's gun to
> force their "progressive." anti-futurist views down all our throats.
I was surprised a few years ago, when when I stood up in a meeting of the Gerontological Society of America in a session that I believe was on Health Care Economics, and announced that as the president of a biotechnology company that was working on the molecular biology of aging, we had one fundamental goal -- to *eliminate it* and that *only* this approach would solve the problem of health care economics (due to the fact that a large drain on the health care system is to individuals in the last year of their lives).
That comment drew cries and protests from the audience. The net of the feedback I got, was -- how could I consider elimintating aging? If I recall correctly, the session was part of the "sociological" division of the GSA (which has 3 divisions: biological, medical and sociological).
One has to wonder if most of the protests were from women (who I would argue, are probably in greater numbers in the sociological, than the medical, than the biological divisions [of course with no evidence to confirm this]), who view lifespan extension (and/or the elimination of aging) as a fundamental threat to one of their self-perceived "values" to the race (i.e., their ability to bear children). Women who identify themselves with child-bearing may inherently be anti-longevity because if one can live forever, there is less desire/drive to leave behind a memory (as offspring) and an inherent problem that eventually non-dying individuals will consume all of the resources and eliminate the possibility of reproduction.
So recontextualizing, the "progressive, anti-futurist" argument -- these women are simply fighting (tooth and nail) for the survival of their genetic design function -- to bear offspring.
Robert