"Tough Guise"

So we watched this video in Adolescent Psychology today: 'Tough Guise'. What a load of crap. I happen to be quite interested in psychology, and have enjoyed this course more than others of mine, but I find it remarkable that the prof pulls out her feminist-flag only right after we do her course evaluation.

The video:

If you've taken any university-level psych course, you'll have heard of the nature/nurture debate. Unfortunately, back when I took psych 1000, I wasn't at the same level of intellectual understanding nor had the same interest in the subject that I have now - not enough to really care about the lectures on this topic at the time. The nature/nurture debate is simply this: are we the way we are, as individuals and collectively, because of society and our upbringing, or because of evolution/genes? There isn't a consensus.

I'm a believer in Evolutionary Psychology, and an anti-feminist. I also believe in one of the forms of equality. Unfortunately, there have been some evolutionary psychologists who have said some pretty chauvinistic things, and as a result, feminists are at war with evolutionary psychology.

But evolutionary psychology just makes sense: men and women are quite physically different - and it's easy to see that men are taller/stronger than women because for 100's of thousands of years, cave-men hunted and performed tasks that required strength, while women worked in closer proximity to the home, and established more social tenancies with children and other women. Studies even show that newborn baby girls respond with much more brain activity to pictures of faces than infant, newborn baby boys. Young girls play with toys with faces - young boys, if given barbies, hit each other with them, or use them as digging tools. Heck, even apparently male vs female EYES are different. Apparently men are better at far distances, and women have better wide-angle vision, and are better at finding things in close proximity. Oh, and men are better spacially - we can better find our way through mazes, and draw maps better than women.

So feminist/nurturists, including my psych prof, argue that men perform better in mazes because we spend more of our childhood playing sports, outdoors, and playing spatially-aware video games. Bullshit, I say. I asked my prof in front of the class if they had been able to isolate the confounding variables enough to eliminate the difference in test subjects between boys and girls - they'd need to find girls who were into sports and video games (which shouldn't be that hard these days) just as much as the boys in the study, and find out who is better, all significant variables accounted for. She couldn't give me an answer, other than the fact that the boys in the study done had played more sports/video games.

I'm not trying to argue that men are 'better' than women - far from it. I'm jusst convinced that we ought to recognize that men and women are biologically different, and that this MUST have an effect on our psychology. Hell, even male birds and female girds act differently - and they don't have the possibility of being socially influenced - as far as I know, birds don't have the pre-frontal cortex to learn socially, like we do.

What's more disturbing is that feminists want to eliminate/transform masculinity. I can't help but relate it to my indigenous studies class: a dominant white culture totally destroyed aboriginal culture/language because they saw it as 'barbaric' - even until the early 1990's, aboriginal children were sent to Residential Schools where they were raped, made to perform sexual acts on priests, forbid to speak their language, and killed, and as a result aboriginal people have suffered more than most can imagine, and have had their culture/identities erased. I can't help but see that men might suffer the same fate - men, and masculinity, are portrayed in almost nothing but a negative light in media - either we're stupid or violent assholes. Think: Homer Simpson or Donald Trump.

Enough said.