How to Avoid the Conflict Between Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology?

diegocaleiro

I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.

Most likely the conflict arises because of many things, such as 1)Women having been ostracized for much of our society's existence 2)People failing at the is-ought problem, and committing the Naturalistic Fallacy 3)Lots of media articles saying unbelievably naïve evolutionary statements as scientific fact 4)Feminists as a group being defensive 5)Specially defensive when it comes to what is said to be natural. 6) General disregard by people, and politically engaged people (see The Blank Slate, by Steve Pinker) of the existence of a non Tabula Rasa nature. 7) Lack of patience of Evolutionary Psychologists to make peace and explain themselves for the things that journalists, not them, claimed. and others...

But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.

How to avoid this conflict? Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology? Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation?

There are obviously no incompatibilities between reality and the moral claims of feminism. So whichever facts about evolutionary psychology are found to be true with the science's development, they should be made compatible. Compatibilism is possible.

But will the scientific community pull it off?

Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8

I don't mean to claim that there should be a conflict.

But the fact is, the conflict arose. It has only bad consequences as far as I could see, such as people fighting over each other, breaking friendships, and prejudice of great intensity on both sides.

How to avoid this conflict? Should someone write a treatise on Feminist Evolutionary Psychology? Should we get Leda Cosmides to talk about women liberation?

But will the scientific community pull it off?

Related: Pinker Versus Spelke - The Science of Gender and Science

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

David Buss and Cindy Meston - Why do Women Have Sex?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0sqg3EHm8

The preferred interpretation is that focus on women is misplaced if women are not being particularly targeted by atrocities

"Ones particularly targeting women" is not an empty set, so that takes care of that, surely?

instead, the whole atrocities (preferably their source) should be tackled on directly in most cases.

Except in the real world, existing groups and their situations are exploited to get those atrocities a pass; most of these incidents (I'm tabooing "atrocities" here as the effect of repeated reference seems to be to make my words sound more emotionally-laden than is the case) happen in the first place because ofexisting attitudes on the part of the perpetrators, and majority/marginalized power imbalances etween them and the target population.

When a senior surgeon at their own clinic a wealthy area with a mostly-majority, mostly-wealthy clientele starts sterilizing people who come in for other procedures, it's a bunch of lawsuits and a media frenzy just waiting to explode -- malpractice charges are the best-case scenario. When it's a bunch of doctors in Indian Health Service hospitals on reservations all over the country doing it to Native American women, basically nobody outside those women and their families ever hears about it or takes it seriously. It may take decades to get a public acknowledgement from any of the relevant parties that it happened at all.

When it's a bunch of doctors in Indian Health Service hospitals on reservations all over the country doing it to Native American women,

Please, tell me you're making this up.

[googles for native american sterilization]

OMG OMG OMG OMG...

4DaFranker13y

Heh, now that you've spelled it out like this, I think it was mostly an interpretation problem. What I was referring to was, suppose a particular group of Mad Doctors is performing retroviral experiments in secret: 25% of them target LGBT people¹ 25% of them target low-IQ people² 25% of them target public figure individuals³ 25% of them target women. In such a case, I don't see why everyone should focus on the women-targeting and only or specifically or specially or with more effort try to get rid of the ones targeting women. Exactly 25% of the effort should be on the ones that target women, ceteris paribus. In other words, the efforts should be directed at the group and all the bad things they're doing, not freezing in place at the word women. Unfortunately, this seems to be exactly what some "Feminists" are doing wrong, and the popular media is obviously going to get a lot of stuff wrong anyway (for any cause in almost any situation - I'm still disgusted by the articles on SIAI). That's why I was saying that the fact that they also target women is only relevant if there's some particular, additional reason to care about them specifically - if the above toy group were 75% targeting women, now I'd say yeah there's good reason to worry about those in particular. Or if the women were somehow suffering a hell of a lot more, or if there was higher utility in saving the women than the other groups. Also, the footnote "reasons" are there as illustration that there may be some mundane reason why women were targeted, such as genetics or maybe 25% of those Mad experimenters just happen to be gynecologists. I really wouldn't be surprised if some Mad Gynecologists were to target women practically exclusively. What would surprise me is if it turned out that nearly all the people prone to become Mad Experimenters all for some reason decided to become gynecologists, to experiment on women. ==== 1. Possibly because they work in an "LGBT reform clinic" in Africa or the Middl