My favourite analogy is with handedness. For the longest time, left-handed people were beat until they'd use their proper hand dammit, and they were seen as lazy/stupid/willful for it. (even, evil/amoral, depending on your time-frame).
Something approximating 1/10 of people have a dominant left hand; and some larger fraction could have either dominant hand depending on cultural convention. And it took till- what, the 70s? for norms to change so it wasn't awful for people to keep their left-handedness.
Totally the same with differences between men and women; traditional (USian, at least) 50s-era norms have women and men separated by this wide gap, but in reality there is huge overlap and while there is a difference, it's much narrower than culture says it is.
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Date: Friday, 17 March 2006 04:24 am (UTC)Something approximating 1/10 of people have a dominant left hand; and some larger fraction could have either dominant hand depending on cultural convention. And it took till- what, the 70s? for norms to change so it wasn't awful for people to keep their left-handedness.
Totally the same with differences between men and women; traditional (USian, at least) 50s-era norms have women and men separated by this wide gap, but in reality there is huge overlap and while there is a difference, it's much narrower than culture says it is.
But don't get me started about cultural norms.
No, I don't think you're out to lunch. :)