Sunday, August 3, 2014

In which Sexism Leads to Incorrect Assumptions

This is completely shocking.

The teacher for this latest round of certification classes is actually a very good instructor, but he has a habit of making broad sweeping statements about what men and women are like.  I mostly try to ignore this.  But sometimes things bother me.  As, for example, when the instructor is talking about the spread of ebola and postulates that along might come Mr. Mosquito, to drink the blood of an infected person and then spread it through bites.  I interjected that this would have to be Ms. Mosquito, since that males don't bite.  The instructor rejoined that because human males are naturally more aggressive, he'd just assumed mosquitoes were the same way.  Even leaving aside points like sweeping generalizations and socialization issues, and how are we defining aggression anyway, this is what viewing the world via primate-centric gender binaries does to us.  It makes us wrong.  We have to let go of our prejudices to more accurately describe the world around us.


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