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Emily Alspector's picture

lets move on.

Hey everyone, sorry for the late post!

I thought last week's discussion, though interesting, was heavily focused on something which we as a class can do very little about. The idea that scientific exploration happens to account for gender in a binary fashion rather than a spectrum is perhaps the one stable part of science. There is so much we don't know and are presuming when we do experiments, that having the "Mark one box" really just makes it easier. At this point, if society were to see things as professor Grobstein suggested, every previous study would have to be negated and redone for the sake of a spectrum. To me, this seems illogical and quite unnecessary. As Liz mentioned, the odds of someone actually being able to accurately rate their femininity and masculinity on a scale seems highly unlikely. Self-report is not the answer in this case. Maybe testing hormone levels, etc could be a starting point for this sort of methodology, but it seems to me that this has already been considered.

Moving on to a different topic, I think this is obviously worthwhile to study. What is unfortunate is the stereotype susceptibility that so often reinforces stereotypes. It's interesting to think that maybe these differences in the brain are purely socially-induced. Because women were for so long thought of as the subordinate sex, learning about these inferiorities are perhaps the only reason for them. It would be interesting to see if women's brains are slowly becoming more like the structure of men's over the centuries (and where brains of homosexuals fit in to the scheme of it all).

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