Why Men seems to be superior than Women
I lifted this straight from my book commentary writing assignment. Will prune it for easier reading when I have the time.
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On page 119, a drawn premise was that "culture is superior than nature". To leave this statement just as that without any qualifications would imply a holistic & absolute superiority, which is a questionable stance to adopt. Thus I believe a more reasonable statement would be that "in certain aspects, culture is superior than nature". Example of this case would be the desirable presence of a conscious free will and an active control on the cultural agent's part over himself and his environment, compared to the seemingly mindless automatic behavior of natural agents. Example to the contrary would be the self-sustaining and self-regulated ecosystem of natural agents as a whole as compared to the unbalancing actions of unethical elements of cultural agents.
Correspondingly, to say "men are superior than women" also requires having its situational qualifiers. I would agree to the passage's assertion that [in terms of capacity for self-control] *, a woman "spends more of her life engaged in natural processes than is true for men and male physiology", thus having less control over her physiological (alluding to hormonal, and then emotional) states. I am being cautious in my qualifier by stressing further that it is her capacity that is lacking, not her actual exerted self-control. Men, having less physiological issues to worry about, have more opportunities for higher level endeavors. Whether they actually make full use of this extra capacity is a different matter.
Why then it oftentimes seem (or societies lead us to believe) that men are overall superior to women? I would posit that men's superiority are often in areas of immediate concern or in simple low-cognitive-level matters, such as physical strength or courage. Women's advantages, on the other hand, are on subtler issues such as empathy and holistic thinking styles. This is further accentuated by our tendency to commit availability heuristic thinking, drawing upon our first few thoughts to make deductive judgments, rather than a lengthy, strained, and careful considerations of all possible ideas.
*My own qualifier added
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On page 119, a drawn premise was that "culture is superior than nature". To leave this statement just as that without any qualifications would imply a holistic & absolute superiority, which is a questionable stance to adopt. Thus I believe a more reasonable statement would be that "in certain aspects, culture is superior than nature". Example of this case would be the desirable presence of a conscious free will and an active control on the cultural agent's part over himself and his environment, compared to the seemingly mindless automatic behavior of natural agents. Example to the contrary would be the self-sustaining and self-regulated ecosystem of natural agents as a whole as compared to the unbalancing actions of unethical elements of cultural agents.
Correspondingly, to say "men are superior than women" also requires having its situational qualifiers. I would agree to the passage's assertion that [in terms of capacity for self-control] *, a woman "spends more of her life engaged in natural processes than is true for men and male physiology", thus having less control over her physiological (alluding to hormonal, and then emotional) states. I am being cautious in my qualifier by stressing further that it is her capacity that is lacking, not her actual exerted self-control. Men, having less physiological issues to worry about, have more opportunities for higher level endeavors. Whether they actually make full use of this extra capacity is a different matter.
Why then it oftentimes seem (or societies lead us to believe) that men are overall superior to women? I would posit that men's superiority are often in areas of immediate concern or in simple low-cognitive-level matters, such as physical strength or courage. Women's advantages, on the other hand, are on subtler issues such as empathy and holistic thinking styles. This is further accentuated by our tendency to commit availability heuristic thinking, drawing upon our first few thoughts to make deductive judgments, rather than a lengthy, strained, and careful considerations of all possible ideas.
*My own qualifier added
posted by haya_shiloh at 10/14/2006 05:37:00 PM
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