Your hypothesis is very interesting, and as a biologist I do find it mechanistically plausible. I used to be a blank-slater myself, I confess, and it took me a long time to give it up because I had a significant emotional investment in it. I suppose I was afraid that by accepting the existence of meaningful, biologically-based psychological differences between men and women, I would impugn myself as an emotional thinker with fundamentally inferior capacity for reason, and as doomed to be best-suited for child-rearing amongst all possible pursuits - a thing of which I wanted no part. That is, it would mean that anything anyone I considered sexist had ever said about/against women would be true.
You've put words to something which I believe is a common feeling. There is something in the gut of well-adjusted people which rejects full-on "therapeutic constructivism" as unrealistic and unhelpful. Check out Warriors and Worriers by Joyce Benenson.
I appreciate your time spent reading and responding. In the future I intend to elaborate on this concept with reference to works about men in relationships I've since read by Bell Hooks and Avrum Weiss, among others I have yet to get to. It's a subtle way of being wrong and I have nothing against the people who cling to it but I also consider it counterproductive and doomed to discourage its adhérents.
Your hypothesis is very interesting, and as a biologist I do find it mechanistically plausible. I used to be a blank-slater myself, I confess, and it took me a long time to give it up because I had a significant emotional investment in it. I suppose I was afraid that by accepting the existence of meaningful, biologically-based psychological differences between men and women, I would impugn myself as an emotional thinker with fundamentally inferior capacity for reason, and as doomed to be best-suited for child-rearing amongst all possible pursuits - a thing of which I wanted no part. That is, it would mean that anything anyone I considered sexist had ever said about/against women would be true.
You've put words to something which I believe is a common feeling. There is something in the gut of well-adjusted people which rejects full-on "therapeutic constructivism" as unrealistic and unhelpful. Check out Warriors and Worriers by Joyce Benenson.
I appreciate your time spent reading and responding. In the future I intend to elaborate on this concept with reference to works about men in relationships I've since read by Bell Hooks and Avrum Weiss, among others I have yet to get to. It's a subtle way of being wrong and I have nothing against the people who cling to it but I also consider it counterproductive and doomed to discourage its adhérents.