Re: Sexist propadanda [was Re: Genderless societies [was Re: kathryn's comments]]

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Fri, 17 Sep 1999 10:56:17 -0700 (PDT)

>> Here are some more extropic sites of interest:
>> http://www.panix.com/~jk/antifeminism.html
>> [Further excerpts of pretty hideous stuff]

Yep, that stuff is pretty stupid and entropic. The label "Neandthal" bothers me a bit though: Neanderthal man was Homo Sapiens, so we /are/ Neanderthals. Some of us have learned that those innate capacities and predispositions that served us well during our evolution don't work as well in modern society, and have rightly abandoned them. But one shouldn't be surprized to hear them popping up now and then from the mouths of those less capable of overcoming them. To fight these ideas, though, it is important to first understand them and why they worked so well for so long, so that you can demonstrate the conditions that are different now and why we have to adapt.

Societal norms change with technology. The technologies of agriculture, education, birth control, personal defense, and many others have completely changed the economics of interaction among men and women. Screeds like the one quoted fail to recognize this when they resort to historical arguments to justify their sexism. The screeds of some feminists fail to acknowledge the history and its impact on our minds, and while they may have noble motives, this irrationality leaves them open for attack (I'll leave alone for the moment those rare cases of explicit questionable motives like Dworkin and McKinnon).

Let's not forget the target: the goal is to be rational, not egalitarian. In most cases, egalitarianism is rational, but sometimes it's not.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC