Every sane adult has been able to notice that there exist profound biological differences between men and women that go well beyond the "obvious shape of some organs" and affect pretty much everything, including very fine correlations describing the behavioral patterns. The feminist movement is partly based on the denial of these basic facts. Why are they doing these things?
They often say that they are fighting to improve the conditions for women. However, as the paper below states, only a minority of women in modern societies count themselves as feminists. Certain folks think that this is paradoxical – it's been named the feminist paradox. Why do most women think that feminists suck if feminists claim to fight for women's conditions?
A Swedish-Belgian paper in Frontiers of Psychology gives a rather clear potential answer (thanks to Doug K. for the URL):
Feminist activist women are masculinized in terms of digit-ratio and social dominance: a possible explanation for the feminist paradox (by Guy Madison, Babe Ulrika, John, and Michael)The answer is that the feminists mean something else by the word "women" because the members of the feminist movement have significant differences from the true, typical, feminine women. In some sense, the paper is a somewhat more rigorous description of the well-known observation that feminists are ugly yelling men-like bitches.
Some of the methods of psychology are not terribly quantitative or rigorous from a hard scientist's viewpoint, of course, so you shouldn't expect particle physics here. The authoritarian character of the feminist activists was measured using the "directiveness scale" – i.e. calculated from answers to a collection of questions such as "Do you like to boss people around?". The answers "Yes" were significantly more represented among the feminist activists in comparison with the women in the strict sense. It can't be surprising. You could even claim that many if not all activists, and not just the feminist ones, are likely to tend to boss people around.
But there was another measurement in the paper that looks more science-like or rooted in biology. It's about the digit ratio. Look at the length of your #2 index finger \(L_2\) and the #4 ring finger \(L_4\) and compute the ratio \(L_2/L_4\) (it will probably be similar for both hands).
What will you get? There exists an increasing number of papers that this ratio is correlated not just with the sex but with many other biological and behavioral characteristics of the humans. Many graphs I saw on the Internet indicated that the differences are so small that they are hardly measurable. But the paper claims a significant 4-sigma deviation of the feminists' ratio from the female one. Look at the money graph:
Males are the blue dashed curve in the middle with the ratio equal to \(0.97\pm 0.04\) or something like that. But while the mean value for normal women is higher, \(0.99\) or so, the mean value of the feminist activists is lower, \(0.95\) or so. These are half-a-sigma deviations but this half-a-sigma becomes visible with a sufficiently large sample that they claim to have measured (although, of course, I would stress that psychologists are more likely to make errors in basic statistics than hard scientists).
Because the feminist curve is actually located on the opposite side of the men's curve than the women's curve, the difference between the women and the feminists is larger than the difference between men and any other group, comparable to 1 sigma. That's analogous to the difference of 15 points between the Ashkenazi Jews' IQ and the IQ of the general population.
I think that my digit ratio is above one, perhaps \(1.02\), so it's on the opposite extreme side than the feminists' mean value. This high value should lower the risk of a certain serious disease. If the curves above were right, \(1.02\) is plausible, perhaps 95% percentile, among males, but the probability that a feminist would have this high value is virtually zero.
It's likely that the lower digit ratio you get, the more authoritarian you are; yes, I am submissive by these counts. This rule-of-thumb doesn't have to be totally universal but the correlation may be strong.
But back to the article we are discussing. If that's true, that's quite a biological difference that looks almost comparable to the difference between the two sexes. In this sense, when people like to introduce "many new sexes" aside from the "two major ones", it would make sense to define yet another sex, a "feminist", which differs both from men and women. Needless to say, these feminists are not fighting to improve women's conditions; they are only fighting to improve their own conditions (sometimes in the sense of the feminists' collective conditions, always in the individual sense) which is something very, very different. And that's one obvious reason why most women don't think that the feminists are improving the world.
0 Comments