Duluth-Modelled Taxonomy

Evolutionary psychologists routinely complain about the resistance with which their studies have met over the decades not only in the public mindless but within self-described academia. Few listeners complain any more about applying evolutionary principles to the ontogenesis of, say the liver or rib cage, but as far as anyone's concerned evolution stops at the neck. No-one wants to hear why we're addicted to sugar, much less why we like a particular set type of movie star. More frequently, we slip into a reflexive shadow of creationism: we're fine applying evolutionary principles to the behavior of Pavlov's dog but seem to think our own salivary reflex was handed down to us by dog in heaven, inscrutable and never open to criticism. Only inferior species carry evolutionary baggage.

On a completely unrelated note, word around town is that feminists are social constructionists and that one, ummm, doesn't quite fit with observable feminist propaganda. You don't come up with "kill all hu-mens!" or "testosterone poisons babies in the womb" or "men are inferior because they're missing half a chromosome" or "men have to be conditioned not to rape because they're instinctively programmed to do so" or any of the rest of feminists' endless tirade of abuse if you're not ready to accept a pretty hefty biological factor in behavior. Yeah, they cling to Margaret Mead's fable of the noble savage and adopt behaviorist / constructionist principles where it suits them to convince governments to give them money to re-educate men; yet even the basic principle of feminism, the conspiratorial, all-pervasive, all-controlling Patriarchy, the fundamentalist dogma of male original sin which must be expiated by toeing the ever-shifting feminist line, reveals an assumption of inborn behavior.

Now, yes of course I was being facetious when I said "unrelated" - that's called showmanship, look it up. The two observations mesh quite readily. Feminists are in favor of the harshest possible interpretation of evolutionarily-derived behavior, so long as it's not directed at women. Only that inferior subspecies, those disgusting primitive men, are subject to base instinct. Women, in feminist attitudes, are pristine angelic figures descended from on high. Women did not evolve from apes.

Reminds me of that anecdote of the Chinese official who, when asked how the state leadership plans to reconcile its increasingly self-serving capitalist schemes with its communist ideals, replied something to the tune of "we'll do whatever we like and call it communism." Feminism has been, for several decades, a top-down enterprise. It doesn't build on verifiable theoretical frameworks and empirical observations. It begins with an absolutist declaration of the moral inferiority of men and adopts whatever half-truth aids for the moment in selling this view to the ethically impaired who pay for feminist lecture tours.

You can ride that train all the way to the United Nations.