I'd much rather prefer to lurk Hacker News but these comment chains have just been so exasperating.
I'd like to know how many people actually believe that science is engaged in a widespread effort to dissimulate the truth of sex differences? Everyone knows that there is a sexual dimorphism in humans. It's not that pronounced compared to other species. Our dimorphism is not anomalous amongst great apes, nor is it indicative of much: Our closest relatives are Chimpanzees and Bonobos where the former form hierarchical male dominated communities while the latter form egalitarian communities.
Let me ask some questions just as an efficient way of throwing up historical and social context. These questions are rhetorical and aren't even the best questions to ask. I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking up the best questions. I think a few examples are enough to convey the general line of inquiry I'd like to show is possible.
Do the differences between humans caused by sexual variation account for the structure of our society? If yes, when did this become the case? Was it the case in 1800 United States of America when married women could not own property? Was that caused by some sort of sex-linked genetic variation?
Was it the case in the 1940's when lobotomies were in vogue, and most of the operations performed were on women? Do women have some sort of sex-linked genetic flaw that leads to brains that need to be lobotomized?
Is the nuclear family a primordial family unit optimized for the innate sex-linked variations between humans that form viable reproductive pairings, or is it optimized for the division of labor and capital of bourgeois society?
When exactly were the unimpeachable doctrines of male supremacy promulgated by law, church, and capitalism purged from our consciousnesses, our institutions, our social networks, our education centers, our philosophy, our _science_ so that society immediately restructured along more _objective_ lines where all individuals realize their full potential and enter into the social relationships most suitable to their essential nature?
Because that is the subtext that speckles this page. That male supremacy was banished from human reason and what remains is a hegemony based on some _rational_ _objectively verifiable_ sex-linked variation that is unimpeachable by human means. The power structures in which this truth is intelligible, that verifies and reproduces this truth is left implicit, because it is normalized in so many social groups, HN intersecting with a great many of them. I don't think I am capable of deconstructing this logic, but I will just throw out my conjecture:
This is the neoliberal paradigm squaring its beliefs in the free market, meritocracy, minimal governance, the free flow and concentration of capital, dissimulation of relations of power, the privatization of ever more institutions, the application of market rationality to all spheres of human activity, an epistemology based on private institutions and capitals competing in a market of ideas, and the refusal to regard as legitimate any theory that posits power structures and modes of truth that do not follow analytically from these doctrines, with systemic inequality. The cause _must be_ the sublimation of truth from the market of _free_ individuals pursuing their rational self-interest, where the market and the pursuits it comprises _define_ truth.
As a last note, I don't think I am familiar with much feminist theory that tries to dissimulate sexual differences. In fact, many feminists would probably agree that the most significant and easily verifiable sex-linked variation between people accounts for a great deal of interpersonal inequality between men and women: Men are bigger and stronger and thus have an easier time getting what they want through personal violence. But this is in fact a minor point. There have been a great many societies on this Earth, in spite of their systematic obliteration and assimilation throughout the years, ever accelerating to meet the hunger of capitalist societies for new places and peoples to put on the market. They have had varying levels of equity between people-- there are even non-binary systems of gender, and their existence ought to pique and interest to critically examine the cultural institutions that separate and regulate the biopolitical realities of people in bourgeois society.
Feminist theory, by and large, especially the theories of leftist feminists (none of that bourgeois, liberal crap) emphasize systemic inequality, not interpersonal variation. They certainly don't need to resort to such minutiae when so much effective theory and action has been executed against institutionally imposed male supremacy. It seems that it is a tenacious enemy though. Once it can no longer reproduce itself along certain power structures (e.g. church) it will find ways through more contemporarily legitimate power structures (e.g. neoliberal rationality).
Suppose greater male variance is true, how should feminists respond? Well, if they think more high IQ females would be good, there are things like embryo selection and iterated embryo selection that would vastly overwhelm greater variance.
If you combined iterated embryo selection with sex selection against males, you could vastly increase the number of genius women.
So even if you grant greater variance, this is all very impeachable by technological means, and technological means are just extensions of human means. Reality is allowed to differ from ideology and almost always does. However, ideology with technology can change reality. Those ideologues that refuse to interface with technology lose much of their power to shape reality in the manner their ideologies prescribe. Combine that with the fact that biology is becoming increasingly mutable and you have neat science fiction idea: ideologies competing to redesign humans in their image.
You don't have to reach into science fiction to see this. The concept of biopower outlines how modern ideologies mold human life to their structures.
Feminism has always been allied with radical and revolutionary biopolitics. It does not need eugenics and futuristic bioengineering to be so. Furthermore, the idea that feminists give a shit about sex-linked variation is nonsensical and I really hope I did not give that impression in my parent comment. It's quite the opposite. The whole point I was trying to make was that feminists don't care about this level of difference, that their ideology is engaged at the structural level of society and that this engagement is completely unintelligible without deeper criticism.
I think it is a terrible summary, but I'll assume it's because of a failure to communicate on my part.
(3) does not follow from (2) and (1) together. What does follow is a need to analyse the argument further. I didn't make this analysis, I only sketched it in broad outlines. Let me put out my thoughts in a different way:
A) There is no causal link established between measured sex-linked variation in humans and social organization in humans, beyond the obvious one that the distribution of physical size and strength is strongly bimodal and this can be observed as an underlying basis for many social relationships.
B) And yet, the argument is made. The argument is made and it is presumed to be rational, objective, air-tight, and deductive. In fact, it is an abductive argument: It claims that sex-linked variation is the most likely and simplest basis for the observed social organization that leads to the stratification of society based on binary genders in bourgeois society.
I am specifying bourgeois society and assuming we are talking about modern capitalist societies, because that's the one I live in and the one I have most to gain in analyzing, and also the one whose ideology and real power dominates the planet as a whole.
C) I can accrue a great deal of data that demonstrates corroborated observations that the dynamics of gender in bourgeois society are actively maintained through institutional and systemic structure. This data ranges from the scientific, collected in aggregate, to the personal experiences of a diverse group of individuals.
A huge amount of human effort and ideology goes into gender as a social structure. This expenditure of labor and thought is prescriptive in nature, not descriptive. The argument being made neither explains their existence nor their dynamics because it solely describes variation at a very basic level between human beings. If human beings just naturally organized themselves along the gender lines we see, there would be no need for institutions, social mores, and propaganda to maintain those lines. What we see historically though, is that these lines were drawn by human hands, then dug out, then built upon with concrete, and then stringed up with barbed wire. The argument does not take this historical and sociological context into account and does not even try to exempt our present societies from that context.
D) This situation is incongruous. The argument is not only given more strength than it merits, its conclusions are essentially determined within the philosophical framework it is formulated in, and further it does not account for social and personal observations about gender dynamics. A criticism of the underlying ideology that produces and reproduces this argument is required. I conjecture that the underlying ideology is neoliberal rationality and sketched what that means.
I think danharaj's point was that the effects of sex-linked variance -- regardless of how big they are -- have not been shown to be meaningful compared to the other factors that affect human society. However, it gives the illusion of scientific rigor to use observable sex-linked variances to explain our social condition; in reality there are many possible alternative explanations that are never addressed, and many confounding variables that aren't controlled.
I'd like to know how many people actually believe that science is engaged in a widespread effort to dissimulate the truth of sex differences? Everyone knows that there is a sexual dimorphism in humans. It's not that pronounced compared to other species. Our dimorphism is not anomalous amongst great apes, nor is it indicative of much: Our closest relatives are Chimpanzees and Bonobos where the former form hierarchical male dominated communities while the latter form egalitarian communities.
Let me ask some questions just as an efficient way of throwing up historical and social context. These questions are rhetorical and aren't even the best questions to ask. I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking up the best questions. I think a few examples are enough to convey the general line of inquiry I'd like to show is possible.
Do the differences between humans caused by sexual variation account for the structure of our society? If yes, when did this become the case? Was it the case in 1800 United States of America when married women could not own property? Was that caused by some sort of sex-linked genetic variation?
Was it the case in the 1940's when lobotomies were in vogue, and most of the operations performed were on women? Do women have some sort of sex-linked genetic flaw that leads to brains that need to be lobotomized?
Is the nuclear family a primordial family unit optimized for the innate sex-linked variations between humans that form viable reproductive pairings, or is it optimized for the division of labor and capital of bourgeois society?
When exactly were the unimpeachable doctrines of male supremacy promulgated by law, church, and capitalism purged from our consciousnesses, our institutions, our social networks, our education centers, our philosophy, our _science_ so that society immediately restructured along more _objective_ lines where all individuals realize their full potential and enter into the social relationships most suitable to their essential nature?
Because that is the subtext that speckles this page. That male supremacy was banished from human reason and what remains is a hegemony based on some _rational_ _objectively verifiable_ sex-linked variation that is unimpeachable by human means. The power structures in which this truth is intelligible, that verifies and reproduces this truth is left implicit, because it is normalized in so many social groups, HN intersecting with a great many of them. I don't think I am capable of deconstructing this logic, but I will just throw out my conjecture:
This is the neoliberal paradigm squaring its beliefs in the free market, meritocracy, minimal governance, the free flow and concentration of capital, dissimulation of relations of power, the privatization of ever more institutions, the application of market rationality to all spheres of human activity, an epistemology based on private institutions and capitals competing in a market of ideas, and the refusal to regard as legitimate any theory that posits power structures and modes of truth that do not follow analytically from these doctrines, with systemic inequality. The cause _must be_ the sublimation of truth from the market of _free_ individuals pursuing their rational self-interest, where the market and the pursuits it comprises _define_ truth.
As a last note, I don't think I am familiar with much feminist theory that tries to dissimulate sexual differences. In fact, many feminists would probably agree that the most significant and easily verifiable sex-linked variation between people accounts for a great deal of interpersonal inequality between men and women: Men are bigger and stronger and thus have an easier time getting what they want through personal violence. But this is in fact a minor point. There have been a great many societies on this Earth, in spite of their systematic obliteration and assimilation throughout the years, ever accelerating to meet the hunger of capitalist societies for new places and peoples to put on the market. They have had varying levels of equity between people-- there are even non-binary systems of gender, and their existence ought to pique and interest to critically examine the cultural institutions that separate and regulate the biopolitical realities of people in bourgeois society.
Feminist theory, by and large, especially the theories of leftist feminists (none of that bourgeois, liberal crap) emphasize systemic inequality, not interpersonal variation. They certainly don't need to resort to such minutiae when so much effective theory and action has been executed against institutionally imposed male supremacy. It seems that it is a tenacious enemy though. Once it can no longer reproduce itself along certain power structures (e.g. church) it will find ways through more contemporarily legitimate power structures (e.g. neoliberal rationality).