From: Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Thu Nov 26 1998 - 00:41:37 MST
Since I - and, hopefully, uploads - would consider cognitive
styles primary features of an [in]dividual, and look at gender
as a secondary and somewhat outdated characteristic, I'd try
to look at the gender/assertiveness statistics from another side.
So we have a number of "assertives" in the society that play
dominant roles in some social tasks, related to leadership, and
a number of "non-assertives" playing a (necessary!!!) subservient
role in these tasks, and maybe leading in some others, such as
preservation of traditions, nurturing, emotional stabilization.
Assertives also exhibit some old-fashioned manifestations of
masculinity, and non-assertives - femininity (all these no longer
needed distinctions in body size, hair, milk glands and [emulations
of] sexual appendages). These old-fashioned features and
appendages are distributed unequally between assertives and
non-assertives. We could fix that by distributing body sizes
and appendages more equally (I am sure any intelligent being would
rather change physical features than its core cognitive
characteristics). Or we could change the situation by
liquidating variety of all features, making sure that nobody
has an equal start in the social physical/emotional/cognitive
ecology, not leading in being more emotionally sensitive, curious,
adventurous, impulsive, or whatever.
I hope it sounds ridiculous enough already.
Isn't it time we stop classifying ourselves by gender?
I would actually expect that billions of highly intelligent
beings with high degrees of morphic freedom would often play
with all their features and tune them freely in any direction,
depending on need and interest, so the diversity of features
will grow dramatically. If we want to prepare to this situation
now, the last thing we want to do is to attempt removing any
personal distinctions.
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Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
<sasha1@netcom.com> <sasha@media.mit.edu>
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