Thursday, May 19, 2011

“The purpose of demonstrating gender differences is to “prove” the validity of traditional gender roles, which serve to preserve patriarchal power dynamics. This purpose is achieved by generalizing and communicating scientific research in a way that obscures certain realities. The research itself may be sound or not, but the way it is expressed is based on several typical fallacies. The first is to confuse genetics with a blueprint for social engineering. Human beings exhibit the potential for countless genetically influenced behavioural tendencies. Any given society may decide some of these tendencies to be desirable, and others to be undesirable. If scientists discovered certain people to be genetically predisposed to commit murders, society would not hand them Get Out of Jail Free cards, but that is exactly what is expected in the case of potentially destructive patriarchal behaviours. Our society will only normalize and encourage genetically predisposed behaviours in men and women if we choose to; however, corporate media portrays the patriarchy’s active and conscious self-preservation as accordance with an objective science. Furthermore, such an evolutionary conservatism misses the very point of evolution. We evolve to adapt to circumstances as they exist now. Even if gender roles provided some useful survival mechanism in the Paleolithic, we would be foolish to preserve such roles, based as they are on conditions that are no longer present. Just the sheer violence, primarily against women, children, and queer people, that is necessary to hold the patriarchy together is enough reason to evolve into more relaxed gender distinctions.”

~ Peter Gelderloos (The Patriarchal Science of the Corporate Media. 2004)