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• I Like Cake commented on Swedish children demand end to gender stereotypes in Toys R Us catalog
  In short, we're talking about eliminating a necessary, but not sufficient condition....
• Dan Mac commented on Swedish children demand end to gender stereotypes in Toys R Us catalog
  A lynchpin of the discussion of the nature/nurture debate was the now discredited work of Dr. John Money, who convinced a Canadian family to raise their infant son as a girl(Look up the John/Joan case). David Reimer had a botched circumcision,and a twin brother, providing Dr. Money the perfect opportunity to test his theory that gender was simply a societal construct. Dr. Money dutifully reported his absolute success in the transformation of young David into a girl, thus providing a quantifiable example that gender was all a construct. Many theoretical papers burst forth, citing his work. But, he lied,...
• Pipenta commented on Swedish children demand end to gender stereotypes in Toys R Us catalog
  The folks who are adamant about how this gender stereotyping is good and grand and fine, don't surprise me. Saw it when I was a parent, in my fellow parents. Saw it in the way they raised their kids. Certainly saw it when I had a business in which many parents threw parties for kids. They couldn't even see the non-stop SQUEEZE they were doing. Any chance they could tease out the difference between nature and nurture, not hardly. Saw kids in my shop trying to be who they really were and saw the pressure, the teasing, the disaproval. When...
• I Like Cake commented on Swedish children demand end to gender stereotypes in Toys R Us catalog
  Dan Mac, the fact that you can make a boy 'live like a girl' isn't even relevant (and obviously it's unethical to manipulate a human life that way). The argument against gender essentialism is an existential argument: it's about questioning what men and women ought to do, not what the statistical distribution of perceived behaviors are. I'd be willing to go so far as to say that any statistical study of gender and behavior suffers from serious methodological problems if used inferentially, and although it's an extreme statement, I'm pretty convinced I can back that up....
• I Like Cake commented on Swedish children demand end to gender stereotypes in Toys R Us catalog
  Anonymous, are you trying to critique my obvious and extreme sarcasm as if I were being serious? I even mentioned I was being sarcastic! But yes, that is the problem with the argument when people are serious about it. A good example is cheating among men, which evolutionary psychologists suggest is rampant and also has an evolutionary purpose (although to suggest the latter is the ad hoc fallacy, without which we really wouldn't have evolutionary psychology at all, I suppose). The idea is that cheating is 'normal' simply because enough people do it, but that's never been how we define...