Those Evil Men and Their Sexism

Here is a posting by Vaughan Bell at the Mind Hacks blog site. Read and weep. It is hard core evidence that men are sexist pigs to the bone, even the blind SOBs are soaked in sexism:

The study, currently in press for the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, was devised by researcher led by psychologist Johan Karremans who tested the idea by using adjustable mannequins.

The blind stood before them; they were told to touch the women, to focus their hands on the waists and hips. The breasts on both figures were the same, in case the men reached too high. The men extended their arms; they ran their hands over the region. Then they scored the attractiveness of the bodies. Karremans had a hunch, he told me, that their ratings wouldn’t match those of the sighted men he used as controls, half of them blindfolded so that they, too, would be judging by feel. It seemed likely, he said, that visual culture would play an overwhelming part in creating the outlines of lust. And though the blind had almost surely grown up hearing attractiveness described, perhaps even in terms of hourglass shapes, it was improbable, he writes in his forthcoming journal paper, that they had heard descriptions amounting to, “The more hourglass shaped, the more attractive,” which would be necessary to favor the curvier mannequin over the figure that was only somewhat less so.

But, with some statistically insignificant variation, the scores of the blind matched those of the sighted. Both groups preferred the more pronounced sweep from waist to hip.

Yep... we are a hopeless breed. Those feminists of the early 1970s tried to put us out of our misery. They did convince some psychologists that these sexist attitudes are culturally learned. They even did "sex assignment surgery" in their belief that you could raise a boy as a girl -- and vice versa -- successfully. They caused a number of suicides by persisting in this "scientific" myth. The above is interesting because it shows that a belief that males learn to admire sexy women from their culture around them is just as doomed. Look, we are hard wired. That's how nature works. You can tone it down, but you can't cut it out unless you are fanatic who ignores facts.

I'm all for civil behaviour and learning more respect for each other, but keep the fanatics away who think they can turn night to day or ignore scientific reality. Sadly the nature/nurture controversy, the eugenics movement, the sex vs gender identify controversy are all littered by the tragedies caused by fanatics who refused to acknowledge basic facts.