I agree with Custy when she says ?there are many many examples throught a childs life where you say - look, this is what you see or hear - but it isn't what you do necessarily.? If we bring our kids up to know their own minds also, to have confidence in themselves and their choices, it won?t stop them fucking up sometimes, but it will make the recovery much easier.
Hiya Iorek, the feminist fears are encapsulated within two words - 'biological determinism'
The scientific evidence that men and women have distinct yet also complementary sexualities is no longer conjecture or hypothesis - it's theory. It's as much fact as you can get. The flavour of those differences is still being fiercely debated within science - a debate which I feel feminists should be in on, but they are too busy denying psychosexual difference to do anything else.
There historical fear was that 'biology was destiny' - it's not. Women were proscribed roles in times past and treated like caged animals. That this is also a fact is also indisputable. But that sexism was culturally constructed not biologically constructed. As the biological sciences have progressed in the last 30 years its become very clear just how equally vital and powerful women are, and the force they affect upon nature itself. 100 years many biologists thought that a whole ?man? could be observed fully formed in the head of a sperm and than women were just receptacles or incubators. These misogynous ideas have permeated through human history. Aristotle counted fewer teeth in the female mouth and added this to the lexicon of female inferiority to men. He excluded women from serious consideration as moral entities. Its from him we get the idea that women are passive and men vital. It?s from Hippocrates that we get the idea of the wandering women and hysteria that Freud did so much to revive. He also claimed menstrual blood was ?poisonous? because, according to him, women lacked the male capacity to excrete unclean substances through sweating. Galen though menstrual blood was a residue of blood in food that the inferior female digestive tract could not digest. Those were just the ancient Greeks.
These ideas have held fast for thousands of years, because women were not allowed into the sciences. Well we have flooded the sciences in the last century and have eradicated these biases as a result. Are these triumphs celebrated within feminism? No. We are called ?anti-feminists? because we go where the evidence takes us not where any ideology does. If we had followed the ideology, there would have been no breakthrough in the sciences and we would still be saying women were at a disadvantage within the objective sciences. We aren?t.
It is now known beyond a shadow of a doubt ? and in the faces of those who believe ?god? created ?man? in his image ? that the default template for all mammals is female. The transformation to male comes in the first few weeks and is trigged by hormones that are themselves triggered by the Y chromosome from the father ? or are not, depending on how that particular chromosome is coded. If the androgens are not triggered the embryo continues uninterrupted as female.
Fuck me, I think this is an amazing scientific discovery! One that you?d think all feminists would be shouting from the rooftops.