Grit Vandermassen und die Unstimmigkeiten feministischer Theorie im Gegensatz zu evolutionärer Psychologie

Leser Leszek zitiert einen interessanten Text von Grit Vandermassen:

“While having considered myself a feminist since my coming of age, it is only since a few years that I would use the description ‘Darwinian feminist’. Before that time it just seemed self-evident that as a feminist, one did not trust what scientists had to say about the sexes. Science was, after all, a white, male enterprise. Did its history not testify enough to its inherent sexism, with Aristotle trying to prove female inferiority and Francis Bacon talking about ‘enslaving Nature’? The scientific method itself was an androcentric approach to the world, used to dominate both women and nature, that much was clear to me, as it was to my fellow feminist (female and male) friends. We gathered in discussion groups, female-only as well as mixed (there was a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of both kinds of groups). Together we explored the ways in which masculinity and femininity were socially constructed, because we felt sure that everyone is born bisexual. Society, we knew, guided newborns into heterosexual pathways, in order to keep control of things. We considered strict heterosexuality and monogamy bourgeois, although many of us experienced how difficult it could be to break free from those conventions.

Yet that only testified to the deep ways in which we had all been indoctrinated by society. We found ourselves confronted with a few problems, however. Some of us obviously liked to behave in sex-typical ways. Now we girls could understand about some males wanting to act macho-after all, they got something out of it: dominance. What were we to do, however, with our desire to look feminine and behave in a feminine way? Was it permitted to shave one’s legs or did that mean that one had given in to the demands of patriarchy? How were we to react when one of us said that she liked to sexually arouse herself and her boyfriend by playing hard to get, that most stereotypical of female tricks? Were we to condemn feminine behavior as a weakness, as a sign that one did not have the emotional strength to resist indoctrination? I felt that way. I felt guilty when trying to look pretty, because that implied I was weak. I felt bad when I didn’t, because then I just felt unattractive. We read and talked a lot, but we did not consult any dissenting literature. Why should we? We knew that we were right and that all the others were just defending their vested interests or were not enlightened enough to see the truth.

That is now all more than ten years ago, and in the meantime I have learned that it does not suffice for things to be true to just want them to be true. Reading scientific literature made me realize that my anti scientific stance of the past was mainly based on prejudice and ignorance. Through reading evolutionary biological and evolutionary psychological works it drawed on me thatI had been misinformed by feminist writings on the subject. Moreover, I felt that evolutionary psychology could contribute to a better understandingof all the topics our gender groups. Evolutionary psychology, after all, only tries to describe how the evolved architecture of our minds reacts in a highly context-sensitive way to the environment it finds itself in. By changing the environment one can change the behavioral outcome, as the huge differences between cultures show us.

That does not mean that men and women will ever become the same; there will always be statistical, mean-group psychosexual differences between them, just as there will always be differences between people. There ist nothing wrong with that, it would seem, as long as people get equal chances to realize their potentialities. Since evolution is about variation and since evolutionary psychology is about statistics, moreover, no single man or woman, should feel obliged to behave in a sex-typical way. Nor should they feel guilty if they want to do so – that is, of course, as long as they are considerate of the needs of other people.” (Griet Vandermassen – Who’s Afraid of Charles Darwin?: Debating Feminism and Evolutionary Theory, S. 1-2)

Ich finde das Buch insgesamt durchaus empfehlenswert. Hier zeigt sie schön einige der Unstimmigkeiten, die man machen muss, um sich mit einem Gender Feminismus zu arrangieren. Viele der inneren Konflikte erledigen sich, wenn man zu einer stimmigeren Betrachtung wechselt