When I read Robin Hanson’s post “Is Overcoming Bias Male?”, I got the impression of someone writing about strange alien creatures, wondering how they work and why more of them weren’t reading his blog. I was initially disturbed that Hanson’s aliens seemed so unsympathetic, so much the Other… until I had a second realization: rather a lot of women talk about men as if we were unsympathetic aliens. And if you went back a century or two, most men would talk about women as alien creatures. In modern 21st-century First World culture, there is a special and unusual cultural taboo against men speaking of women as a stereotyped class… but not the converse taboo for women. Robin Hanson is honest, and not too scared of our civilization’s special taboos, and so when he writes about women, it’s not surprising that his writing sounds so… normal. Is Hanson supposed to pretend that he understands?
Posted June 30, 2008 at 11:08am
