army1987 comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong

58 [deleted] 25 November 2012 11:33PM

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Comment author: Bugmaster 30 November 2012 07:25:17PM 3 points [-]

Agreed; I'm not a terribly good Feminist's Advocate. That said, I believe they'd disagree with this statement:

Most real-world situations are more similar to this than to the model they use to make their argument.

I've seen feminists argue that situations where women unequivocally hold power over men are much more rare than men think. Some of the reasons given for this proposition are that:

a). Women are socially conditioned to defer to men, and do so subconsciously all the time, even when these women are nominally in charge, and
b). Men are used to their privilege and see it as the normal state of affairs; and therefore, men tend to severely underestimate its magnitude, and thus overestimate the amount of power any given woman might hold.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 December 2012 11:50:40AM *  7 points [-]

I've seen feminists argue that ... Women are socially conditioned to defer to men ... Men are used to their privilege ...

I might agree, provided they're talking about group averages rather than about all women and all men -- this guy doesn't sound “used to his privilege” to me.

And if they're talking about group averages, I can't see their relevance to interactions between individuals. Suppose that blue-eyed people are taller in average than brown-eyed people, and everyone knows this. Suppose there are two people in a room, one with blue eyes and one with brown eyes. They need to take something off a shelf, and the taller one was the easier it would be to do that. It would be preposterous to say “the blue-eyed person should do that, and if she lets the brown-eyed person do that she's an asshole, as she could much more easily do that herself, given that brown-eyed people are shorter”, if the blue-eyed person happens to be 1.51 m (5') and the brown-eyed person happens to be 1.87 m (6'2'').