martyarf

Woooshhhhhh

Y'all think its real important to make sure that nothing is ever sexist ever, and that if it is, people don't talk about it because my video games

FYI if you're trying to prove that sexism doesn't exist in games maybe don't make a section called FEMALE LOGIC and then insinuate that women are irrational. Just a lil' pro-tip from someone that thinks you are an idiot and should go away forever into a pit full of piss.

My god, can you guys get any more pathetic?

I've read Pinker. I've read Morris, I've read Baren-Cohen, I have read most of the prominent evolutionary-psychologists. Their science, when they make bold claims about gender roles, does not stand up to scrutiny. You have ignored the evidence I've presented showing the completely fluid ways in which roles have been defined across various cultures - remember that many Native American cultures had three, or even four, discrete genders. This is the essence of what it means to say gender is a social construct.

Let us be clear: you are favoring one very new scientific field (which is based on very little scientific evidence and instead post-hoc rationalisations) over centuries of anthropological work. The concept of male hunter and female gatherer as biologically defined is a myth. We know this because we look at contemporary hunter-gatherer societies and cross-culturally at the fossil evidence, and we see that it is impossible to make sweeping generalisations about the role of men or women being predetermined.

http://discovermagazine.com/1998/apr/newwomenoftheice1430#.Ui-bYcbEqeZ

Recent anthropological research has revealed just how much Soffer’s colleagues overlooked. By observing women in the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies and by combing historical accounts of tribal groups more thoroughly, anthropologists have come to realize how critical the female half of the population has always been to survival. Women and children have set snares, laid spring traps, sighted game and participated in animal drives and surrounds—forms of hunting that endangered neither young mothers nor their offspring. They dug starchy roots and collected other plant carbohydrates essential to survival. They even hunted, on occasion, with the projectile points traditionally deemed men’s weapons. I found references to Inuit women carrying bows and arrows, especially the blunt arrows that were used for hunting birds, says Linda Owen, an archeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

You seem keen to paint the history of humanity with a gigantic brush, not paying any credence to the idea that humanity developed simultaneously in remote geographic pockets along divergent and convergent paths, with the structures of the societies (their economics, their heirarchies, their roles) being completely different and unpredictable from one to the next.

I think you would be interested to see how the perception of fields change over time. I am a teacher now - a field that we in the West see as a feminine occupation (for all the stereotypes you mentioned - "nurturing, caring" and so on). This is played out in the numbers - the majority of teachers are women.

But if we go back in time just one century we discover that the complete opposite was the case! Where were the women teachers in Dickens? They didn't exist, because teaching was a masculine occupation - one to do with knowledge, facts and power. A similar switch is happening with medicine in front of our eyes - a historically male occupation, and now most med school graduates are women.

The absurdity of our gender roles is shoved in our face daily, as women are relied upon to do the majority of the world's cooking and yet make up a sliver of the percentage of professional, recognised chefs. We in America have a preconception of women as being less mathematical, and yet test scores have shown for decades that they perform far better than boys. The examples go on and on. To search for a biological explanation in all of this is to miss the wood for the trees.

Did you read my post? Because if you had, you'd know I understand exactly what the claims of biological determinist evolutionary psychologists are - and I refute them almost wholesale. They are bad science, I cannot stress this enough. That experiment, for example, is fatally flawed in many ways.

The book I recommended specifically addresses Baren-Cohen's work. I highly suggest you read it.

Cordelia Fine: Well one of the most influential ideas -- and it certainly has both popular influence and also within the scientific literature -- is the idea of Simon Baron-Cohen's, who sort of gives a new name to the idea that men are thinkers and women are feelers by saying that foetal testosterone, if you have sort of higher, more typically higher male levels in utero, will wire you a male brain, that's a systemising brain so it's geared to understand the world, to build and understand systems -- so that would be engineering systems, to legal systems, to business systems and so on. You know basically if you want to take any male-dominated occupation and then describe that as being a system, so that would be the implications of having a male brain.

Or when you have the lower, more typically female levels of foetal testosterone, you were skilled in and interested in understanding the thoughts and feelings of others and responding sympathetically to them. And it's easy to see from this idea of a sort of female empathising brain and the male systemising brain that it has very clear implications for occupational segregation and the status quo generally. It says there's something natural about the current division of labour in society.

Natasha Mitchell: Now Simon Baron-Cohen, you've taken him on fair and square in your book, in fact he's responded to your book this week. He's a leading autism researcher and his book The Essential Difference was very popular and it really did establish us on a continuum, didn't it, of either being systemisers or empathisers. Now you've dug in to the science behind his conclusions and what did you find?

Cordelia Fine: The first thing to say is that Simon Baron-Cohen's hypothesis is a form of the brain organisation hypothesis. It's looking specifically at the cognitive and social traits that supposedly arise from having a male or female brain. But what I would say about Simon Baron-Cohen's research -- and he has done absolutely seminal work in autism -- but what I find is an issue in his research when I take a close look at the methodology of many of his studies is that there is a lack of carefulness with regard to how his experiments are designed and conducted and interpreted that is not appropriate for the field -- sorry, not to say that we need to argue for any special consideration because you're dealing with sex differences research, but just very basic things like, for example, it's well known, first of all that people's self-perception can be influenced by gender stereotypes. And secondly it's also well known that people's ratings of how empathic they are in terms of understanding people's thoughts and feelings have little or no relationship to how good they actually are at these things. And so knowing these two facts, there's something problematic about diagnosing brain type using self-report questionnaires which ask questions like: I'm very good at understanding what other people are feeling. That's not terribly good science.

Natasha Mitchell: Let's look into another one of his studies that you've investigated Cordelia, and that was a study he did with a graduate student at the time with newborns. Why was that of interest to you?

Cordelia Fine: It was an idea of trying to look at sex differences free of any effects of socialisation. And so the idea was to look at newborns who are a day and a half old on average, so it's a reasonable assumption that not a great deal of socialisation has taken place by this point. And what they did was to show two different stimuli -- one was a mobile and one was the face of a person, and the contrast that's assumed that's between sort of mechanical motion and biological motion. So it's interest in objects versus interest in people, and they found a small but significant difference in boys' and girls' interests so there was a sort of preference for the mobile in boys than was observed in girls.

Natasha Mitchell: So this was measured by the length of the gaze?

Cordelia Fine: That's right, so how long, what percentage of the looking time they looked at the two different types of stimuli. Now this study's sort of ubiquitously reported in every popular book, and it's claimed as evidence that boys are hard wired to be interested in objects and girls are hard wired to be interested in people. The major flaw was that the person whose face was being shown to the newborns was actually the first author, she was the experimenter and not very many measures were taken to ensure that the experimenter didn't know the sex of the babies.

Natasha Mitchell: Why is that an issue?

Cordelia Fine: Well it's well known from social psychology we are influenced by gender stereotypes, it can influence our behaviour. So the student was looking at the babies and she was also holding the mobile. Now I'm not for a moment suggesting she was consciously behaving in any particular way depending on an awareness, unconscious or otherwise, of the baby's sex; it's just a very basic thing to do in psychological research is to eliminate the possibility that these kinds of effects can occur, that she looks for the wider gaze of the girls, or she moves the mobile a bit more for the boys -- completely unconscious but these things do happen, and that's why in the normal experimental method that this would happen for the possibility of this occurring would have been eliminated through the experimental design.

Natasha Mitchell: Now this sounds like nitpicking perhaps for some, this is the degree of detail that you interrogate these studies with.

Rebecca Jordan-Young: Natasha, if I may pop into that, it's important to recognise just how much literature there is about the depth and strength of the gender stereotyping and perception, and unfortunately in Simon Baron-Cohen's work as well as a lot of other work out there, all of the vast literature on effects of gender and perception for example, it's just really not taken seriously when it comes to designing and interpreting the studies.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/battlelines-science-sex-brains-and-gender/2964048#transcript

Yeah, terrible games like Gone Home, widely panned by the critics and public alike,

Yeah I feel you, when I wanted to choose a great male protagonist for my avatar I thought "Drake or Pac Man?" And they said Sophie had to make a tough choice.