You're not really making an argument. You're saying "I'm uncomfortable with your counterargument." The speech was entitled "Is there anything good about men?" Perhaps you forget, but I don't - "Men Are Not Cost Effective" "Are Men Necessary?" "The Female brain" The implication has been, since the dawn of women's lib, that women aren't just equal to men, they are superior in many ways... and that it is only through (a) the concerted efforts of a misogynist patriarchy or (b) the natural malevolence and antagonism towards women by men that society remains a male-dominated enterprise. In other words, men are over-represented in positions of power because we're either conspiring or evil. I am not a member of the men's rights movement. I fully support equality for women in all things. I always have. I have always gone out of my way to reverse the tide that women face in a man's world, and I have always been reminded that I'm part of the problem, not the solution, and that there are some things I just won't understand because I have a penis. Yet every son has a mother and every daughter has a father and I guarantee you, nobody set out to make things harder for their loved ones. Yet we've evolved a social environment where even questioning the reasons behind the imbalance is taboo. We've gotten to the point where someone can mention that childbirth was made safer by integration into society and someone else feels perfectly justified getting uncomfortable that the suggestion was even made. It PISSES ME OFF that we can't even talk about anthropological differences without somebody getting hot under the collar. It PISSES ME OFF that the default position is "men are evil, accept it and shut up" is the only position you can take without getting screamed at. It PISSES ME OFF that you feel comfortable saying "I honestly don't know the full story here..." but your argument is invalid. THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT is that modern times are DIFFERENT. It's not a circular argument. Either (A) men are evil or (B) there's something else at play and I, for one, am sick of being the fucking bad guy.(Why are women more verbal than men? Why do women remember details of fights that men can’t remember at all? Why do women tend to form deeper bonds with their female friends than men do with their male counterparts? These and other questions have stumped both sexes throughout the ages. )
As much as he's easy to mock for being impenetrable, Derrida has a good theory for why what you're seeing happens. Because when you're comparing opposites it's hard to do it from a neutral position; you're not really asking how men and women are different, you're asking how women are different from men or how men are different from women. Because you start with one as your model, you see the other as lacking whatever traits aren't shared, and so being deficient. In light of which, while it may or may not be true, "there are no essential differences" is the only position that isn't perilous.
Calm down. I'm not getting hot under the collar. I'm not saying I'm uncomfortable with the argument, or that it's inappropriate, or accusing you of being a bad person in any aspect. I'm just saying that I don't buy the author's argument. I think it's searching for one explanation to a phenomenon that I consider highly complex and hard to ascribe to any one factor without mountains more evidence than what the article presented. If a professor of social psychology is making observations of how things are, that's fine. If they want to get mechanistic and say X is the reason why things are that way, I'm going to put on my skeptic hat and ask: is that reasoning sound? And my conclusion is that I don't think it's sound to use the historical prevalence of men in technical innovation as an argument for their innate tendency towards the edges of intelligence / creativity when all the while women were actively discouraged from doing those very things. And my most basic counterexample is that the trends of women involvement across different fields don't correlate with the attributes described by the author. He could have made a non-PC appeal towards differences in abstract vs. concrete thinking ability and I would have taken it more seriously. But he argued from the perspective of motivation, sociability, and sexual reward and I gave the counterexample of CS vs. biology. Past that, I largely agree with his argument that cultures put men to use at both of the extremes of the world and that men have a greater need to prove themselves to improve their chances of reproduction.
Fair enough. At the same time, recognize that _refugee_ hasn't talked to me in three days because I dared to support the notion that maybe men and women are different in ways other than "men are evil, women aren't." And I've had this argument, over and over again, where some attempt is made to divine a reason for inequality other than "men are evil" and the consensus opinion remains "it is taboo to discuss the idea that men aren't evil." Which is what you're doing - you're arguing that it's inappropriate to explore the prevalence of men in history to explain the prevalence of men in history. You're arguing, in effect, that you'd humor the argument if only he'd made a completely different argument. This is the argument that was made. This is the argument being discussed. Instead of the default "women are better and different" or "men are worse and different" the discussion is "how are men different?" and a hypothesis was put forth. Reject that hypothesis if you want, but don't rejected on the basis that it isn't the hypothesis you wish to discuss.
Well, for a bit of context, coffeesp00ns told me off the other day for my use of language and I got dumped last month for being too politically apathetic. I'm not really in a position to judge others morals and, even if I were, I'm trying my best these days to try and be non-judgemental towards other people and actually understand all the compassion and mindfulness preachings that the hippies I lived around in Berkeley used to always talk about. I think my dispute in this case is that, yeah, each gender's innate abilities is a touchy subject, so I don't like seeing what I see as poorly reasoned argument being put forth as fact. Like I said though, author is definitely not MRA-y about what he says, so I'm only poking at one component of his essay / speech.