Friday, August 13, 2004

It's not "gender bias"

Point taken. I also should have added that the Maroon now has at least one female columnist who focuses on politics.

But I wasn't trying to imply that there's "gender bias" at either publication--if the "Viewpoints" section of the Maroon had been biased at that time, it would have been my own fault, and I don't believe it was. I was just pointing out that the drive to make one's political opinions known in op-ed or article form seems more pronounced in men than in women. I picked TNR to discuss because, at the time I was writing the post, TNR Online has an article up that was the epitome of a "girl article" in a political publication. Now check out NRO: this and this are what women are writing at that publication, leaving serious matters such as "War" and "Election 2004" to the boys.

I just don't fully understand why often women, more than men, are inhibited when it comes to expressing loud, sometimes obnoxious, political opinions.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

PG of HSM:

Someone at another blog was noting that women are less likely to engage in pointless, my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours debate of the type popularized by Usenet. It is because of debates like that that we have the observation that the longer a debate thread goes, the more likely (to the point of certainty) that someone will make a Hitler/Stalin reference.

Maybe Woman, as a species, is more likely to wonder what will be gained from "expressing loud, sometimes obnoxious, political opinions." God knows why, but the women who choose to go that route (at least when they express opinions divergent from mine!) end up sounding even more insane than the average man to many people. Compare the ire directed at Ann Coulter to that sent in Sean Hannity's or even demented Michael Savage's directions.

For myself, I don't follow my blog's little sidebar maxim nearly as much as I ought. But it is a guiding principle, both in blogging and real world discussion, nonetheless.

Anonymous said...

Comment: “Women are not less rational; they're just less educated in the subjects which, properly understood, lead to libertarianism, such as philosophy and economics. I don't know about economics (or political theory), but in philosophy it's certainly true that there are relatively very few female philosophers; I'd need to be convinced, therefore, that the percentage of female philosophers who are libertarians is much less than the percentage of male philosophers who are libertarians.”

My comment on above comment: Though eloquently, you have rationalized away, and thus offended, the female gender's intrinsic other values, about which you prove to be ill-informed, which is understandable in a world which holds the falsification of priviliged, gender-biased, male dominated thinking, for objective, or natural, or - God forbid - even truth. A clear misconception that may also be caused by a wanton lack of self-education, which would be gender-bias in its purest form.