An exercise in feminist sociology

[redbird]

Someone yesterday quoted, in a comment thread elsewhere on LJ, a study
that they claimed showed that day-old human girls pay more attention to
faces, and day-old human boys pay more attention to mobiles.

I haven't checked to see whether there is such a study, much less looked
at the methodology or the robustness of the results. For the purposes of
this exercise, it doesn't matter.

The exercise is to think about how such a study would be interpreted in
a culture that was, and long had been, female-dominant, in which the
long-standing default assumption was female superiority. A culture in
which many moderns believed the sexes were equal, but old habits had
women in charge of most things and the not-so-occasional reactionary
defending that imbalance as the natural order of things.

My immediate thought is that, in such a society, the conservatives would
be saying "Well, of course. We know that women hold most political power
because they pay more attention to other people and what they want,
which makes them better at negotiating and persuasion. It's not
discrimination keeping men out of top management, it's that they're so
easily distracted."

Comments

[cheshyre]

Have you read Carol Tavris' Mismeasure of Woman? The exercise (in differing interpretation) reminds me of some of the observation in there.

Of course, it also reminds me of Gloria Steinem's "If Men Could Menstruate" which I think everybody's read by now...

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

Good one.

[snippy]

It was on my journal, in a post rather than comments.

I agree with the point of your exercise.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

My response was - 'so lets surround the males with more human faces so they don't get the chance to fixate on something else'....

Not sure what this says about me or my assumptions about dominant society...

[ailbhe]

My first reaction was "Typical; women focus on what's really important, everyone knows that."

I was raised funny.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

How does the saying go? "Humans are not so much a rational species as a rationalizing one."

History seems to show that people are very clever at generating arbitrary conclusions from arbitrary data. Then again, that might just be my own rationalization...

[kiya]

History seems to show that people are very clever at generating arbitrary conclusions from arbitrary data.

May I place this in my quotes file, and if so, how would you like to be credited?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Hi, sorry to have taken a while to get back to you. Life intervened.

Anyway, the answer is "Sure, and thanks, that's flattering. If you want a real name, it's Leon Marr."

Is your quotes file open to the public? If it's on line, would you tell me where it is?

[kiya]

No worries; life is often like that.

The file is mostly a collection of stuff I keep in a text document on my desktop; I prefer to ask permission for stuff in it in the event I wind up doing something like putting it online.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

clever at generating arbitrary conclusions from arbitrary data

I'd be tempted to say "self-serving conclusions": it covers everything from the Face on Mars to the invasion of Iraq, and a bunch of other stuff into the bargain.

But yeah, it's a neat thought experiment - and it doesn't have the flaws of the Steinem article.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I think that one could take any characteristic in which humans differ from each other (whether individually or on a category-average) and imagine a culture that would value more the aspect that our culture values less. Parents of kids with ADHD are familiar with this phenomenon--much (not, in every case, all) of the trouble that kids with ADHD have comes from the expectations of our culture, especially but not exclusively in school settings.