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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35349 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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The triumph of the blank slate

an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it ‘reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.’

On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that ‘maternal instinct is a myth that men created’. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that ‘The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.’

Just recently, Scientific American stated that ‘Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the “two-sex model” served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.’

Yet what is strange is that such ideas are triumphant, even as the scientific evidence against them mounts up, with the expanding understanding of genetics and the role of inheritance. The tabula rasa should by all rights be dead, indeed it should have been killed twenty years ago with the publication of one of the most important books of the century so far, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.

Rather than blank slate-led ideas falling to mockery and obscurity, the opposite has happened — they’ve proliferated and spread. Pinker was obviously right, yet seems to have lost.

i recently was in a seminar discussing fixed versus growth mindsets, and it was argued that believing in any innate/genetic component of intelligence was connected to a 'fixed' mindset. we were discouraged from using the idea of 'talent' as it implied that some people were just naturally better at some things than others. it seems like a core part of the 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' mantra that is finding its way everywhere - the idea of innate difference is anathema to the principle behind caring about equity versus equality.

‘reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls

My 5' 4" female self looks around at all the guys around me, who are between 3-6" taller than me at a pinch.

Gosh, wherever did they get that idea from? 🙄

EDIT: I work in a childcare service, so yeah, right now the kids both boys and girls are roughly around the same size, and it's perfectly possible to have girls who are bigger than boys. These kids are 2-5 years old, though; around 12 or so when puberty hits, that won't remain the same. So yeah, a kindergarten race can have boys and girls running together, but after that no way.

My 5' 4" female self looks around at all the guys around me, who are between 3-6" taller than me at a pinch.

Have you tried just being taller? Grow more smh

Hey, in First Class, I was bigger than at least two of my male classmates! Most of them were bigger than me, but I think I sort of unintentionally bullied one of them into lending me his comics (the benefits? of lack of social awareness/autism spectrum, where I had no idea I was coming across as menacing when I said 'you will lend me those') 😁

And then between ages 12-15 I stopped growing so much, and my height was fixed at what it is now.

Growing quick young is always a doozy. I have some pictures of myself around eight years old playing youth soccer, and in the team pictures I'm standing in the back with the adult coaches because I had some ridiculous early growth spurts. It's funny to look back on how much I out-huged my peers my entire life.

But because I'm a hard-working man and not a quitter, I kept going after 5'4".

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