I just ran into another example of something that bothers me a bit.
For various reasons, feminists tend to be hostile toward evolutionary psychology and sociology.
As far as I can tell, the main beef is that not all of the problems in human societies are solely artificial. Well, actually, some of the less nuance oriented folks seem to take statements of biological and evolutionary trends as normative absolutes. "Boys, in general, behave in manners x, y, and z," becomes "All boys behave in manners x, y, and z, and any examples otherwise are aberrations likely due to abuse" in their ears. Admittedly, anti-feminists are fairly guilty of turning the first into the second, but come on people, you don't want to let the bad guys set the rules of the conversation do you?
Let me make a few clear statements of belief.
0. Biology is not destiny. Nor is social conditioning.
1. There are differences in human behavior that are grounded in gender and only reinforced by social systems. These are, like damned near anything dealing with living organisms, expressed not as two distinct expressions, but as tendencies and trends, statistical clusterings. You'll tend to get gender based behavior clusters with outliers from each cluster spanning the whole range of behaviors. I suspect this will hold up even in the absence of or when corrected for social conditioning. Humans can and do overcome their biology.
2. Social conditioning can absolutely change behavior trends in a group. If it is more than a mild thing, it can also seriously harm people whose biologically based behaviors fall outside of the social norm. Humans can and do overcome their social conditioning.
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