From: matt@smoke.brl.mil (Matthew Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: misc.legal
Subject: Re: Males Doing it to Themselves
Summary: Nonpatriarchal society is like the moa bird: there ain't no moa.
Keywords: feminist wish-fantasies; mesomorphic thugs
Date: 29 Jul 92 16:16:55 GMT
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.

In article <1992Jul24.182426.2921@gateway.ssf-sys.DHL.COM> 
mbisted@ssf-sys.dhl.com (Morris Bisted) writes:

>In article <18983@smoke.brl.mil> matt@smoke.brl.mil (Matthew Rosenblatt) 
>writes:

>>Anyone who has ever looked around at boys and girls, men and women, in
>>the real world, knows that boys and men are more aggressive and more
>>violent than girls and women.  This is true in every society on earth.
>>system on feminist wish-fantasies.  Any legal system that wound up fining 
>>and jailing equal numbers of men and woman would have to be unjust.
>>[Matt Rosenblatt]

>I have read of non-western societies where women take on traditional male 
>roles and are the aggressor and resolvers of violent conflict.
>[Morris Bisted]

I'm not surprised that Mr. Bisted has read of such societies.  Consider:

    "In 1935, when [world-famous anthropologist] Margaret Mead published 
  her book, _Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies_, . . .
  Miss Mead exaggerated the degree to which one of the societies she 
  studied (the Tchambuli) associated what we would call masculine 
  with women and the feminine with men.
    "Few social scientists bought this view.  For example, Jessie
  Bernard, who would have very much like to be able to accept Miss
  Mead's conclusions, pointed out that, if the reader ignored the
  adjectives, the Tchambuli did not seem very different from other
  societies.  'Effete' headhunters and 'comradely' women feeding
  their children are still male headhunters and women feeding their
  children, and it is only the adjectives provided by Margaret Mead
  that even begin to suggest otherwise.
    "In response to such criticism, Miss Mead wrote a famous letter
  to _The American Anthropologist_ in which she pointed out that

      Nowhere do I suggest that I have found any material
      which disproves the existence of sex differences. . . .
      This study was not concerned with whether there are
      or are not actual and universal differences between
      the sexes, either quantitative or qualitative.  [Margaret Mead]

  "Over the course of fifty years Miss Mead repeated her denial
   a hundred times, in response to one or another claim that she
   had found a society that reverse sex roles; in a review of my
   _The Inevitability of Patriarchy_, she wrote:

      It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out, that all
      the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women
      are nonsense.  We have no reason to believe that they
      ever existed.  . . . Men have always been the leaders
      in public affairs and the final authorities at home.
      [Margaret Mead]
      . . .
     "Now, one would think that all this would be sufficient to
   preclude even the most ardent environmentalist's invoking
   Margaret Mead's study as evidence of sex-role reversibility.
   And yet, a couple of years ago I went to Barnes and Noble
   and located 38 introductory sociology books published in 
   the few preceding years.  Of these 38, 36 began their sex-
   roles chapters with a discussion of Miss Mead's work on the
   Tchambuli and how it demonstrates the environmental nature
   of male and female behavior.
     "It is not clear now many of these 36 knowingly misrepre-
   sented the facts and how many were incompetent as much as
   dishonest (uninformed cribbing from other textbooks is near-
   standard procedure in introductory textbook writing).  But 
   it is clear why the textbooks misrepresent the evidence.
   They, like the discipline whose work they represent, have
   an ideological commitment to denying that masculine and
   feminine behaviors and emotions are rooted in male and female
   physiologies and that all social systems conform to the
   limits imposed by this reality.
     "My point here is merely that no case can be made for
   Miss Mead's having even *claimed* to have demonstrated
   that the Tchambuli refute that explanation.  Yet 36 of 38
   introductory sociology textbooks state it as truth."
        -- Steven Goldberg, "Feminism Against Science", in
           _National Review_ magazine, November 18, 1991, p. 30.
   
I don't doubt that Mr. Bisted has read of "non-western societies where
women take on traditional male roles and are the aggressor and resolvers 
of violent conflict."  If he studied sociology, there is an awfully good
chance -- maybe as much as 36 out of 38 -- that he read about them in
one of the textbooks that Professor Goldberg describes.

>I am neither feminist nor do I subscribe to wish fantasies and I think
>it a very sweeping statement when you purport to examine the "real world"
>and come to a conclusion for "every society on earth".  There are very
>probably trends, but all societies is overreaching.  [Morris Bisted]

"All societies" may indeed be overreaching, and all it takes to
invalidate such a claim is *one* counterexample.  Professor Goldberg
has made a career out of investigating purported counterexamples:

 "I have checked well over a hundred claims -- never made by
  the ethnographer who actually studied the society in question
  -- that a specific ethnography describes a nonpatriarchal
  society; it has never taken over ninety seconds with the
  invoked ethnography to demonstrate the ludicrousness of
  the claim.  I have never found anyone willing to back up
  such a claim once it became clear that I had checked the
  ethnography that had been invoked."
          -- Steven Goldberg, "Feminism Against Science", in
           _National Review_ magazine, November 18, 1991, p. 33.

>My cursory research on this topic leads me to conclude that there are
>experts who support both sides of the "heredity"/ "environment" issues of
>causation.  Thus, you make a very large leap of faith when you make this
>conclusion, as people who devote their life to research on these issues 
>have disparate opinions.   [Morris Bisted]

I do not deny that environment affects how men and women behave.  I
agree that it is possible for a violent, aggressive man to subdue his
evil inclination and never harm anyone again.  

>Further, mens greater aggressiveness, even if innate is just one of many
>factors that embody the commission of violence.  I seldom see random acts
>of violence committed by men or women which one can attribute to a man's
>innate aggressiveness.  What I do see, is initial non-violent conflict 
>which escalates to a violent resolution.  All men don't escalate conflict
>to violent resolutions, some use the legal system to resolve it, etc.  I 
>think if a causal link were to be found, it would not be here.  In my mind,
>even if I accept your assertion above as true, it carries little weight
>in the ensuing discussion.  [Morris Bisted]

If Mr. Bisted or anyone else read my posting as meaning something along
the lines, "We can't help being violent and aggressive because we're
born that way," that's not the message I intended to get across.  All
I stated is that proportionately more men commit violent crimes because
proportionately more men are born with aggressive impulses.  Men's
greater innate aggressive impulse gives them a harder task than women
have when it comes to controlling that impulse and staying out of jail.
The fact that it is harder for men to control their violent impulse
than it is for women in no way excuses those men who fail to do so.

It's too bad that so many men have such a difficult task, but I'm not
the one who made them be born boys instead of girls, so I should not
have to suffer the dangerous consequences of a policy that would
imprison no more men than women.

>By using the innate argument you eliminate any volitional argument.  
>[Morris Bisted]

I surely do not mean to do so.  I believe very strongly in free will, 
and in holding people responsible for their own actions.

>>I admit it:  The ones I want behind bars for a long time are the ones
>>I'm afraid will hurt me or my family.  They're the ones who have been
>>convicted of violent crimes against strangers.  [Matt Rosenblatt]

>Those acts that are so counter to the progression of humanity/
>society that they eliminate or injure the participants should be sanctioned
>by removal from the society at some level.  Jails should be for punishment,
>primarily, and retraining and relearning of societal skills secondarily.  
>The safety of society, to me, trumps the revitalization and reinitialization 
>into society of the offender, and thus incarceration is reasonable for 
>violent acts regardless of motive and regardless of sex of the offender. 
>[Morris Bisted]

I agree completely with this . . .

>There may be a high correlation between sex and incarceration, but that
>would result from a particular set of men *choosing* to act more violently 
>and thus meeting the criteria for incarceration.  [Morris Bisted]

. . . and with this, too.

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
                                        (matt@amsaa.brl.mil)

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