More stuff on programming, and gender

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There's an article in this month's Scientific American Mind about the effects of self-image on performance which is fascinating. Most of it is on the web: look it up. One of the experiments was absolutely elegant. They took a group of Asian women and gave them a math-weighted intelligence test. Half were told that because they were women, they wouldn't do as well as men. The other half was told that because they were Asian, they would do better than average. Easy to imagine what happened, right? Right.

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Take a look back a couple of subjects to the conversation about good boys/bad boys, etc., and we get a perfect example of where the problem in examining human relationships occurs: each side (men and women) seem to believe that the other side has the advantage.

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To me, suggesting that men are running the game, and have been for twenty thousand years or so, simply isn't possible unless women are inferior mentally and emotionally. ISN'T POSSIBLE. To me, something else has to be going on. The men who resent women and the women who resent men are exactly the same in my book, and if you flipped their genders, they would behave exactly the same as the people they abhor. This is the same as whites who think blacks are intellectually inferior, or blacks who think whites are evil. Flip their race, and they'd be their own worst enemies.

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I've been down this road many, many times. Women who think men are in control ALWAYS ignore the fact that most of the victims of violent crime are men, and look at the carnage on a battle-field (generally all men) and say, "well, men start the wars..." Well that's great, but it begs the question of WHY.

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If it's nearly universal, then it's anchored in our biology. Which implies that aggression in males is a serious survival trait for an individual or society. Which relates to the survival of more children--which is of benefit to both men and women. Men didn't decide that women would be the ones who get pregnant--nature did. If men are these horrible dominating creatures, blame God, or Nature, not man.

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But I think the game is different from that, that men and women are the same animals with different wedding tackle, and that each side has a schetoma about it's negative effects on the other.

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Someone commented about how black people know more about their lives than whites, and therefore must be considered the experts. And that the same courtesy should be extended to women. That, in other words, men should be careful in having too much confidence in their opinions about them. I see the argument, but it isn't quite valid.

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A white person who grew up in a 50% black neighborhood, whose address book is 50% black, and 50% of their family (by marriage, let's say) is black and a big chunk of their employers, educators, students, co-workers and neighbors and ALL of their lovers had been black (looking at this from a heterosexual perspective, of course) I'd think that if they didn't know black people they were IDIOTS.

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Men and women SHOULD know each other as they know themselves. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that's exactly true. That, in other words, from my own point of view, the more a man or woman considers the opposite sex to be "different" and/or "to blame" for the problems of the world, the less they know themselves. Frankly, I think the major reason I've never had a problem having women as friends or lovers is that I don't seem much difference. Most of the people I talk to who think there's some huge difference have a pretty miserable record with the opposite sex.

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What is that truth? That the surest way to raise the standard of living (as well as health stats overall) is women's equality? I buy this completely. Then you have to consider the reverse to be true as well: the surest way to trash your standard of living is to REPRESS women. Afghanistan, for instance, had a dreadful record of women's rights--and, if I'm not mistaken, the highest infant mortality rate in the world. That's the road to extinction. You simply cannot sink half a boat. Men might well jocky for the FRONT of the boat, but to continue the analogy, when the ship is sinking, they know they have to protect "women and children first."

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Contrast this with race relations. Whites literally COULD kill every black person on the planet, and still survive just fine. As blacks could kill all the whites, or Asians could kill off everyone. Whatever urges to domination and control exist within the human psyche (women conditioning men to be more aggressive, men conditioning women to be more passive) that shit REALLY takes off if you actually don't need the other group--and fear that the other group might actually kill you and take your resources.

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In comparison, the "war" between men and women is a family argument. Yes, from time to time there is brutality, and feelings are hurt, and people even die. But in general, men and women LOVE each other as they love almost nothing else in this world. They need each other, hunger for each other. They yearn to spend their lives together. They move heaven and earth to be together. They die and kill for one another, and sacrifice fortune and fame to build lives together.

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To my knowledge, there is no case, anywhere in the world, at any point in history, of the men of a town, city, state, or nation killing all of their own women There are uncounted instances of one ethnic or racial group slaughtering and utterly exterminating another. I wouldn't doubt that men might have killed all the women--or vice versa--some little teeny village somewhere...but any imaginable human behavior has been done SOMEWHERE. The point is that slaughter of another ethnic group is just business as usual for humanity. Slaughter of all woman is SUICIDE. There is a gigantic difference, and it's easy to miss it--everyone's pain feels like Everest to them, if they lack perspective.

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Years ago, I came up with a list of requirements for racial parity. I said something to the effect that I'd consider that the playing field is level when there is parity between white and black for:

1) Life expectancy

2) Infant mortality rate

3) Inherited Wealth

4) Incarceration rates

5) Net Worth

6) Death by violence

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Look at this. When people started asking about whether, in America, blacks or women have it worse, so far as I know women have the advantage over blacks in every single one of these categories. Now, I'm not saying that my standards apply with fairness and elegance. I mention them to suggest why I PERSONALLY can't agree that women in America have it worse--I would literally have to ignore damage being done to the basic levels of Maslow's heirerarchy. Most of the things women complain about have to do with higher levels: presence in the executive board room, education (in the past), self-expression. For me to think it was worse, I would need to see something impacting women so that they DIED earlier, on average.

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Any society, anywhere in the world, that is so screwed up that it's women are dying at a faster rate than their men is a society in collapse. Period.

This is why I kinda think that in life, "men's lives are disposable, as are women's dreams."

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It's horrible. But what we're trying to do is create a world where both lives and dreams are precious for all. When you look at the different ways the mating game is played, to me, the thing to ask is: "if men and women are equally intelligent, equally moral and strong, how do their most basic human drives propagate through different reproductively weighted neurology to create the societies and customs we see?"

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Both sides tend to assume superiority, trust me. It is gloriously easy to provoke a group of either men or women into prating on about why their side is the best. In my mind, this mode of thought is precisely the same as racism, homophobia, cultural elitism, or whatever. It is the standard "we rule, you drool" crap that Octavia Butler was afraid would doom us as a species.

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We've going to get beyond it people. I hope you're around for the ride.