Many argue that it’s sexist to say, for instance, that women are more parental than men, or that women are… — Steve Stewart Williams
Many argue that it’s sexist to say, for instance, that women are more parental than men, or that women are more interested in working with people and less interested in working with things. But the accusation can be turned on its head. The idea that such claims are sexist only makes sense if we tacitly assume that the female-typical tendencies are inferior. Why else would it be disparaging to women to say that more women than men exhibit these tendencies? But if women really are more parental than men, or if they really are more interested in working with people, then we’re taking a negative view of traits that are more characteristic of women than men. That’s sexist!
p. 24Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
In some frog species, females fake their own deaths to escape unwanted male attention; males, on the other hand, never fake theirs to escape female attention.
p. 139
We often view sexual victimization and partner abuse as women’s problems, rather than more-women-than-men problems. In doing so, however, we once again treat a statistical sex difference as a Mars-and-Venus difference. Ironically, the tendency to polarize sex differences in this domain is particularly common among gender-role progressives, who usually downplay female-male differences.
p. 249
I once spotted an article in The Daily Mail with the rather striking headline: “How did I raise such a girly girl? Feminist mother cringes at her three-year-old daughter’s love of princesses, frills and pink – and wishes she was into toy cars instead.” I remember thinking how strange it is that people who wish their daughters were less girly, and more like boys, are viewed as pro-female, rather than anti.
p. 253
