Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Simone DeBovoire Eat Your Heart Out
In yet another stunning upset to the postmodernist theory that gender roles are "mere artifacts of an unbalanced society" and in affirmation of Simone de Bovoire's lament that "biology is destiny", it turns out that gender-related toy-choices are biologically determined, as shown in this study on monkeys.
2 comments:
I don't buy DeB's "biology is destiny". Just because women are wired to take care of children, and thus prefer dolls, does not mean that they can't, for example, become philosophers. And just because males tend to like things that move along, doesn't mean that they can't for example, become philosophers.
For the record, when I had dolls I tended to put together outfits and set up apartments, (rather than make them *do* stuff) and when I had cars I tended to be more interested in the patterns of the track than in moving the cars around it.
Of course there are things that are biologically determined, but I would say that as a cognisant species (supposedly, anyway) it *isn't* destiny.
Amanda
Yes, but you see, Amanda, that was two-thirds of Simone's lament: women *can* become all these things, yet *other women* tend to profoundly discourage outside their understanding of feminine. Your critique takes SdB to task for a statement she hasn't actually made.
That value changes with time, geography, and ideology... yet women and men remain different from the chemistry on out, and inevitably trying to shoehorn one sex into the mold of another tends to utterly shaft one or the other sex.
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