As I research how to best raise conciseness about singlism, I inevitably started to look at consciousness raising groups of radical feminists in the 1970s. Their goal was to leverage personal sharing for theory building and to further political action. One of my frustrations with my current path is that academia seems to be stuck in theory. I seek practical applications of theory or theory-informed activism. So, I am looking for historical inspiration of approaches who had similar goals. I found three chapters in three books assigned in a women’s studies course that address similar concerns from several different angles. … Continue reading »
Jun 222010
I read a couple of chapters today in a very interesting book on the Psychology of Legitimacy. Both chapters talked about ambivalent prejudice/stereotypes (unlike other scholars, the authors seemed not to distinguish between these two concepts). They mentioned a couple of inventories that I thought sounded interesting: The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory and the Ambivalence toward Men Inventory. The ASI can be taken online (just follow the link…). It is supposed to measure hostile and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is the good old sexism of negative feelings toward women. Benevolent sexism describes positive stereotypes toward women that still keep us “in … Continue reading »
I have started to read a book on developmental systems theory (I’ve summarized a little on DST already). It is a fascinating read! And the themes raised are relevant to my recent musings on evolutionary psychology, so I thought I’d muse some more… The chapter I read was a reprint of an article by Daniel Lehrman originally published in 1953 critiquing Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior (the link opens a PDF to the full article, which is excerpted in the chapter in Cycles of Contingency). I would like to touch on a couple of things in response to reading … Continue reading »
Jun 062010
As I have mentioned before, there are two issues that are most often raised when critiquing marriage: The naturalness of marriage/monogamy/coupling (this can also come in the form of a universality claim) and the benefit to children of being raised in a “stable home.” Both are brought up to argue for marriage. And there are problems with both. In this post, I want to look at the coupling as natural claim: Is coupling natural? The assumption that is underneath the claim that monogamous, life-long coupling is natural seems to be that since it is natural, we should support marriage as … Continue reading »
Jun 052010
My most exciting discovery during my first year back in school was part of my research for a paper. I had planned on incorporating meme theory into an approach to explaining how beliefs become tradition. Fortunately, my professor pointed me to an article about cultural evolution, which turned me off from memes and turned me onto co-evolution. With excitement, I read about this emerging branch of evolutionary theory (for an introduction, please see the SEP entry). I abandoned that research during the semester when it became clear that my paper idea was way too ambitious. Now that the semester is … Continue reading »
One of the two most common counter-arguments to critiques of marriage is “but monogamy/coupling is natural!” (The other is “but it’s best for the children!” which I will not address here). As a marriage critic, I found that more of a challenge than a convincing counter, so I decided to investigate. Before I share what I found on that topic I want to provide some background information. Most of the claims that monogamy is not natural come from evolutionary psychologists, so I figured looking at that is a first step. I agree with Frans de Waal who suggests that the … Continue reading »
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