Thanks for the thoughtful reply, RoS.
I agree that there is some merit in your point about the "stop sign"; in fact, before I had any real understanding of feminism myself (not that I consider myself to have a massive amount now), that was my general response to this sort of thing too. I thought the stance I'm taking now was rather whiney, self-centred and, as you think, obstructive with regards to dialogue and argument. But I've come to see that engaging with feminism rather than seizing this opportunity to dismiss it actually makes a lot more sense.
I do, of course, agree that there are very many negative stereotypes around about men, and they're as unhelpful and undesireable as the ones about women. And obviously, there are positive stereotypes about women as well as about men (more about this below). But as you go on to say, the situation is far from balanced: men are, by and large, the ones with the power. Do you disagree that this situation, which has been the case forever, means that there's an imbalance in the effects that stereotyping, exclusion etc. directed towards women as opposed to men can have? (By the way, perhaps this is different political perspectives talking, but I don't understand your point about redistribution of wealth. Is it okay for certain groups to have less political power as long as they reap the benefits of others paying taxes? I can see that argument working where the group in question is children, and perhaps the severely mentally disabled (maybe that's controversial?), but otherwise I see no justification for it whatsoever.)
I didn't actually mean to assert that I could understand men's experiences better than they can understand women's -- I was simply working with people's assertions that, in fact, the reversed situation wouldn't bother them -- but it happens that some schools of thought do believe that to be the case: that women do actually have a better handle on how men see the world than vice versa. That's because the male stance is the dominant or default one, and therefore culture tends to be filtered through the male lens before it gets to women; the same doesn't happen in reverse. I've seen it illustrated with a Venn diagram: women's and men's experiences largely overlapping, but with some area of non-overlap on both sides; but while culture provides women with a lot of insight into the non-overlapping part of the men's section, it provides men with very little about the non-overlapping part of the women's section. I'm not sure to what extent I personally buy into this, but it strikes me that the example we're looking at here could be a rather typical instance of it: it seems quite unlikely to me that a woman, knowing she was writing to a mixed audience, would throw in a line like "men will always be alluring" without adding some concession to different viewpoints. Perhaps I'm wrong about that.
Your "women are on hair-trigger alert" argument is certainly one that I've heard before, extremely often, and I'm afraid I don't buy it, for the simple reason that if we were on hair-trigger alert, many of us would never get through a day with all its quagmire of gender-related crap without going insane. There really is that much of it.
I'd also like to add one more thing about the positive stereotypes mentioned above. Being neither American nor a TV-watcher, I can't speak for American TV, but I can speak for many other aspects of culture, and it seems to me that what people see as "positive" stereotypes can be just as harmful as the negative ones. Women are more emotional, more touchy-feely, more in tune with nature, better with kids, more verbally adept, more empathetic, more arty, and so on and so on and so on. All those are, on the face of it, positive attitudes towards women, but they also all buy into views of women that contribute towards keeping the balance of power and so on skewed towards men. For this reason, I think we should beware of simply making lists of male and female stereotypes and declaring that, just because the positive and negative numbers balance out, there's no problem in society with marginalising women.
Why does it matter that politicians are men if they enact policies they chose to appeal to voters of both genders?
Reaction to: Yudkowsky and Frank on Religious Experience, Yudkowksy and Frank On Religious Experience Pt 2, A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies
Frank's point got rather lost in all this. It seems to be quite simple: there's a warm fuzziness to life that science just doesn't seem to get, and some religious artwork touches on and stimulates this warm fuzziness, and hence is of value.1 Moreover, understanding this point seems rather important to being able to spread an ideology.
The main problem is viewing this warm fuzziness as a "mystery." This warm fuzziness, as an experience, is a reality. It's part of that set of things that doesn't go away no matter what you say or think about them. Women (or men) will still be alluring, food will still be delicious, and Michaelangelo's David will still be beautiful, no matter how well you describe these phenomenon. The view that shattering mysteries reduces their value is very much a result of religion trying to protect itself. EY is probably correct that science will one day destroy this mystery as it has so many others, but because it is an "experience we can't clearly describe" rather than an actual "mystery," the experience will remain. The argument is with the description, not the experience; the experience is real, and experiences of its nature are totally desirable.
The second, sub-point: Frank thinks that certain religious stories and artwork may be of artistic value. The selection of the story of Job is unfortunate, but both speakers value it for the same reason: its truth. One sees it as true (and inspiring) and likes it, the other sees it as false (and insidious) and hates it. I think both agree that if you put it on the shelf next to Tolkien, and rational atheists still buy it and enjoy it, hey, good for Job. And if not, well, throw it out with the rest of the trash.
Frank also has a point about rationality not being the only way to view the world. I think he's once again right, he's just really, tragically bad at expressing his point without borrowing heavily from religion. His point seems to be that rationality isn't the only way to *experience* the world, which is absolutely, 100% right. You don't experience the world through rationality. You experience it through your senses and the qualia of consciousness. Rationality is how you figure out what's going on, or what's going to be going on, or what causes one thing to happen and not another. Appreciating art, or food, or sex, or life is not generally done by applying rationality. Rationality is extremely useful for figuring out how to get these things we like, or even figure out what things we should like, but it doesn't factor into the qualitative experience of those things in most cases. For many people it probably doesn't factor into the enjoyment of anything. If you don't embrace and explain this distinction, you come out looking like Spock.
This seems to be a key point atheists fail to communicate, because it is logically irrelevant to the truth of their propositions. A lot of people avoid decisions that they believe will destroy everything that makes them happy, and I'm not sure we can blame them. It's important to explain that you can still have all kinds of warm fuzziness, and, even better, you can be really confident it's well-founded and avoid abysmal epistemology, too! Instead, the atheist tries to defeat some weird, religiously-motivated expression of warm fuzziness, and that becomes the debate, and people like their fuzzies.
We experience warm fuzziness directly,2 through however our brains work. No amount of science is likely to change that, no matter how well it understands the phenomenon. This is a good thing for science, and it's a good thing for warmth and fuzziness.
1- I have admittedly not read his book. It's quite possible he's advocating we actually go through religion and make it fit our current sensibilities, then take it as uber-fiction. If that's the case, I have serious problems with it. If that's not the case, and he just thinks that some of it contains truth/beauty/is salvagable as literature, then I have serious problems with the argumentum-ad-hitlerum employed against him, as it seems to burn a straw man.
2 - I'm not saying there's warm fuzziness in the territory and we put it in our map. There's something in the territory that, when we map it out, the mapping causes us to directly experience a feeling of warm fuzziness.