Re: The Woman Racket: new book, science explaining discrimination against/ derogation of men.

On 20 Feb, 02:34, Sean_MacCl...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 19, 3:53 pm, sp...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:





Just published is a new book, The Woman Racket: The new science
explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society, by
Steve Moxon (Imprint Academic).
Details & extracts are available athttp://www.imprint-academic.com/moxon
. It's received enthusiastic praise from the evolutionary
psychologist, Bruce Charlton.
The book is the first scientific explanation of why and how men are
routinely and systematcally discriminated against and derogated.

Here are the chapter headings & sub-headings:
Foreword
Progressing Backwards: The political and social foreground
Why There Are Males: Men are humanity's essential genetic design and
test lab
The Real 'Power': Intra-sex dominance and female privilege
Separate Worlds: The self-segregation of the sexes, and how they
compete and affiliate differently
Difference Incarnate: Sex-typical variation - men's focus and women's
connectedness
Sex in care: Men's poor health stems from the 'status syndrome'
Historical Blindsight: Uncovering social justice in the past: woman's
perennial privilege
The True Sufferers for Suffrage: Votes not for men
Sex at Work: Why women are not in love with work, yet the pay gap is
so small
Home Lies: Violence between partners is not mostly by men
Rape: Fact, Fantasy and Fabrication. The crime that's 'worse' than
murder
Who's Exploiting Who: Prostitution defrocked
Proscribing Male Thought: Erotica as 'pornography'
Excluding the Family: The state as the real absent father
Coda: Seeing the Game
Bibliography
Index

Starting from the new insights about the function of the male as the
'genetic filter' for the whole lineage (which itself is related to the
fact that the female is the 'limiting factor' in reproduction) I build
up out of biology into EP and related disciplines an outline of the
main bases of sex difference on several levels of analysis.
In line with the address to the APA by Prof Roy Baumeister last year,
he titled 'Is There Anything Good About Men?', it is clear that the
core of sex difference is motivational; and this comes from the
distinctive intra-sexual competitivity of men, which is a result of
the male role of 'genetic filter' for the whole lineage.

Mine is the first book to outline these insights, and I also marshall
a lot of very recent and startling research work that together shows
that human sex difference is far more profound than had been thought.
For example, we now know that the basis of 'in-group'/'out-group'
social psychology is very different for men and women. Experiments
show that males and females do not compete cross-sexually but instead
display to each other. We now know even the precise genetic basis of a
default sexual behaviour that is overridden by dominance-submission
behaviour only when the other individual encountered is of the same
sex. As we can now see across the animal kingdom, with humans as no
exception, there is no cross-sex biological dominance-submission
interaction of any kind. There is only the non-engagement of
deference.
Work on 'cheater detection' mechanisms have revealed them to be the
tools with which the male hierarchy is 'policed', and this explains
the natural prejudice towards males generically -- though with special
treatment of the minority of high status men, of course. We already
knew about the profound self-segregation of the sexes in early
childhood, but piecing together what goes on through adolescence is
illuminating, and major epidemiology research has revealed the
complete separation of male and female social worlds in how male
status impacts on health. Evidence converges to show that essentially
men and women live in a separate male hierarchy and female social
network, that are always psychologically salient for all the amorphous
social superstructure we all live within.

The upshot is that our contemporary understanding of the basis of
'power' in society is fundamentally mistaken. It is in no sense inter-
sexual. In particular, the identification of disadvantaged sub-groups
is not merely false but upside-down. In fact, women invariably are
privileged, and the majority of (necessarily lower status) men always
form the principle sub-group of disadvantage in any society. Indeed,
ideological attempts to supposedly rectify 'power' imbalance between
the sexes actually serve to reinforce elites. We end up with ultra
conservatism -- just as we should expect whenever there is a more
fervent working of our evolved social psychology, which is all that we
can ever do whenever we strive for a supposedly new sociality.

The book is structured so that after a scene-setting chapter outlining
the philosophical and political foreground -- which is itself the
product of our evolved social psychology -- the first half is given
over to presenting the science. Two central pivot chapters deal with
the history of men-women affairs, showing that they have been
radically misrepresented -- the franchise most notably so. The
remainder of the book 'applies', as it were, the science, to look at
how completely upside-down is our (mis) understanding of the topics of
work, domestic violence, rape, prostitution, pornography and the
family.

Steve Moxon (author of The Woman Racket, out from today, published by
Imprint Academic. Details & extracts:http://www.imprint-academic.com/moxon
)

Um...

Is that gonna be good?...

(You know I'm against reading...)

Wow. I hope so. Sounds good.

It is good. A recommended read. In fact, the best read of the year so
far IMO.

That said, Steve Moxon states up front that it is a polemic. And he is
right. In my view the essential theories behind the book are strong
enough for it to have been more balanced. Its important to read the
book adding 'some' or 'most' to qualify his over-enthusiastic
'absolute' statements.

He is right, above, when he says this is the first book to describe
man's 'genetic filter' role. The only evidence he cites for this is
from a 1991 paper by Wirt Atmar, a computer scientist. This will leave
most reasonable people thinking this assertion is pretty thin and will
give his critics the opportunity to rubbish his whole thesis. We all
know that feminists aren't strong on balanced reasoning, after all.
That's not to say the genetic filter idea is wrong - just that it
needs either a lot more justification to push it into first billing or
it would be better presented as a possibility rather than a certainty.
Unnecessarily, he's setting the rest of his book up by highlighting
genetic filtering so heavily.

Statements like "there is no cross-sex biological dominance-submission
interaction of any kind" also sets him up for criticism. He can't be
unaware of the popularity of BDSM, for example, so why not compose a
statement to say what he has justified (human dominance behaviour is
overwhelmingly intra-men and there is no evidence of it being
demonstrated consistently by men, as a group, towards women, as a
group) rather than to over-blow the case? Probably because he's a
journalist and not a scientist at heart, and can't resist
sensationalising.

He also avoids the whole question of homosexual behaviour, which is a
significant omission in a discussion about sex specific behaviours.

All that said, it is a very thought provoking and readable book. It
proposes a very promising and stimulating set of ideas that need to be
promulgated and investigated. I thoroughly recommend it. May there be
many more like it.

--
Rob
There's no gender equality without paternal certainty and full 50/50
child custody.
.

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