Thursday, October 11, 2007

Broken Heart Risk Management

My latest is up on Mercator Net.
Feminism has never been a coherent ideology but it has broadly come to mean that men and women are identical, except that women are better. This was the starting point for a speech I gave recently at the Case Western Reserve Law School in Cleveland, as the guest of the Federalist Society. Under the heading, "Humane Alternatives to Feminism", I argued that we would be better off embracing the reality of gender differences, rather than a) denying them, b) suppressing them and c) feigning surprise when they emerge anyhow.
One of my questioners asked the fairly standard feminist question of whether these gender differences I cited weren't simply all products of cultural conditioning. I asked her what she would be willing to accept as evidence that some gender differences are not cultural artifacts, but actual differences. She didn't have an answer.
I got to thinking afterwards: answers based on evidence never seem to be convincing to someone who is already committed to radical androgyny.

Read it all here.

1 comment:

Jennifer @ Conversion Diary said...

Feminism has never been a coherent ideology but it has broadly come to mean that men and women are identical, except that women are better.

That might be the best one-sentence summary of feminism I've ever read.

I'm so glad to have discovered your blog!