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Comment by enord | Hacker News Reader

I was almost intrigued, until i got to

>Women, he emphasizes, have retained the instinct to nurture because the human child is especially vulnerable compared to the young of many animal species. They have to create peaceful, nurturing conditions or the human race can’t survive.

>“There is no other fount of social morality itself,” says Kanth. He faults Eurocentric modernists for centering on male aggression and taking it to represent everybody, which is unfair.

No, nope, sorry. Take your armchair anthropology to the Rudolf Steiner Appreciation Society, but spare _me_. Maybe the piece picks up again after this, but I could not read on.

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I'm sorry his viewpoint opposes your worldview, but there are both physical and psychological differences between men and women across the world(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology). Those differences don't stem from nothing: The act of giving birth and nurturing a child for years means it's biologically very expensive for women to breed. This leads to a sexual strategy that requires the mother to be much more selective than men. You see it in the gender norms across the world, where men tend to be more aggressive, assertive, and womanizing while women tend to be less competitive, more nurturing, and more selective towards their mates. You can recognize the general differences between the sexes and still fight for equality.

Thank you for your charitable interpretation of my knowledge about the difference between men and women, you must be fun at parties.

Since you have already committed to disagreeing with me i'll make the deductive leap that the article is comensurable with your worldview and assume that you personally believe that morality can only come from the nurturing mother (as stated in my quotation). From this i'll take the liberty to conclude that your opinion on the matter is... freudean at best, and disregard it completely. What a fruitful discussion we're having.

I'm sorry, but look at your last post:

> No, nope, sorry... spare _me_... I could not read on.

You dismiss his entire argument simply because he has a different viewpoint. That's too dismissive, in my opinion. People are very good at seeing things as black-or-white and creating an us-vs-them mentality. From this post and the post before it, it seems like you have that binary mentality against people with different views on gender and sexuality. It's fine that your opinions differ from mine and the author's, but please don't dismiss and belittle us because of that. _Argue_ with us, use your logic, and teach us otherwise. There are many people who will have deaf ears, but if you open yourself up, you may teach some people stuff & you may gain a different perspective on things yourself.

I dismiss it because its not well founded and socially regressive. "Eurocentric modernity" is basically the only context in history where women are even considered as first order citizens and not just as caregivers and housekeepers etc. This is because the female monopoly on birth has been expressly ignored (at least to some extent) while fleshing out the details of social morality and responsibility. This has been deliberate and difficult (see: feminism) precisely because the temptation to refer to "the natural order of things" is so great.

I consider myself open to other world-views (you may not, that's fine), but a criticism of my world view (me being a modern european and all) that starts the conversation in 18th century terms (from a european modernist perspective) is a non-starter. There is to much ground to cover between then and now, and if that ground is covered in the book, then that's certainly not reflected in the article.

I made it a little further, but bailed on the Myth of the Noble Savage part.

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