I just read a paper on 'gender-fluid geek girls' which claimed men in tech make less eye contact with attractive, feminine women & this is sexism. ' No data on this but even if true, could shyness/awkwardness be a thing?https://twitter.com/mjaeckel/status/981190080814551040 …
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...we are observing these differences on average. The problem is when we moralise these differences and read them as a flaw of one sex and making one sex inferior to the other either naturally or due to socialisation.
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I have always wanted to go back into late medieval Christian perceptions of male & female failings & show how they correlate to gender politics today but with a very different interpretation & bias and then show how it all is consistent with evolutionary psychology.
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eg, Analysis of the Sin of Eve in medieval culture focuses a lot on weakness of women in being moved to sympathy with plausible strangers & weakness of men in being moved to sympathy with women. Horribly moralised into women lacking moral integrity & men needing to take charge
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We see echoes of this in members of the alt-right who tell us that women are going to bring about the destruction of western civilisation because of sympathy with refugees & today's men are all cucks who go along with this & the solution is a literal, legal patriarchy.
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We see a complete renuancing of this within feminism which holds that women's greater empathy (yes, I know that's complicated) &social skills & provision of 'emotional labor' is how everyone should be & men fail. (They leave out the bit where men tend to prioritise women's wants)
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We see a weird version of this in Lacanian psychoanalysis where women work on social connections and men are linear and goal-orientated, women emote & men systemise, women are open & men closed, women feel & men reason. (semiotic & symbolic)
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I'd really like to take all this stuff and remove the contradictory ideological moralising & pull out gender observations which have been being made consistently in various forms for hundreds & even thousands of years & show what evolutionary psychology has to say about them.
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This is not moral, no matter how much opponents say it is because it reinforces stereotypes. We're not going to lose stereotypes because they relate to an objective reality which humans won't stop noticing. We will just moralise about them in radically different ways forever.
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Unless we actually work on understanding human psychology & nature from a biological & evolutionary point of view. This is actually the best countermeasure to the negative aspect of stereotypes which is moralistic generalisation. The facts don't allow for generalisations.
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End of conversation
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