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Congratulations. You have managed to expertly dodge my point. >It's not OK not to learn about sexism and try to fight it now that we have a much better sense o

• pron 11y ago
  > Please elaborate. OK. If you don't know how to make it rain, it's fine to say or do whatever you want about it, but if you do, and it turns out to be possible and affordable -- and you need rain -- you should probably do something real about it. Same with sexism or racism. Since we are now familiar with many of the mechanisms by which they perpetuate themselves, and because we now understand how they shift power in society in ways that serve some at the expense of others -- assuming we believe enriching some at the expense of others is wrong -- we should do something about it, now that we understand the mechanisms. Of course, I don't demand people accept my values, so I would settle for people understanding sexism yet deciding nothing should be done for whatever reason they deem justifiable. What I do not accept is people making things up (like "it's genetic", "it's unavoidable", "its unfixable") and using their unsubstantiated gut feelings in arguments like this. > Would you please name between one and ten particular studies, journals, or "world-famous researchers" I can pursue to get a general overview without getting drowned in "literally millions of hits"? Certainly (general overviews of advanced academic fields, however, are not usually given in academic journals or papers -- at least not that I'm familiar with -- but in books). There are two caveats, though. The first is that the field(s) of gender studies or racism studies is multidisciplinary; research is done as part of history, sociology, anthropology and psychology, and while those disciplines certainly interact, each of those disciplines has its own methodologies, and you’ll find few who are expert in all of them. The second caveat is that gender and race issues are rather advanced concepts, so a text is either an overview or an introduction (to one of the disciplines) but rarely both, just as it’s very hard to find overview texts about Quantum Mechanics that do not presuppose some basic understanding of physics and its methodologies or do not require many leaps of faith on account of the reader. Having said that, let me try and address your request. While certainly not a scientific text, there is little doubt that 1949 book The Second Sex, by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir[1] laid the theoretical groundwork for much that followed, drawing people’s attention to the cultural constructs underlying sex differences in society. Another groundbreaking conceptual (though not scientific) work was done by Michel Foucault on the concept of “power”, which is now considered possibly the most important concept in all of the social studies. The wikipedia article on the topic[2] provides a nice overview. To get to actual science, we need to look to the disparate disciplines separately. My background is history, so we’ll start there. The best way to find relevant research in history is to search for "[topic] in [era [place (often implied)]]”. A lot of modern cultural constructs surrounding women (and race) are products of (or reaction agains) Victorian ideas, so a good place to start is with “women in the Victorian Era”; the Wikipedia page on the subject[3] is a nice introduction and has a nice bibliography. Historians sometimes track progression of ideas over several eras, so an interesting comparison is “women in the Middle Ages” (again, Wikipedia with bibliography[4]). Next, we have psychology of sex differences, of which Wikipedia has an overview[5]. In sociology, I’ve found this nice course material (several parts with suggested readings and online resources)[6]. In anthropology, this[7] should provide an overview (though unlikely introductory). [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(social_and_political) [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Victorian_era http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Victorian_era [4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Middle_Ages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Middle_Ages [5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology [6]: https://uncgsoc101.wordpress.com/module-8-gender-stratification/ https://uncgsoc101.wordpress.com/module-8-gender-stratificat... [7]: http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405101954.html http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405101954...