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Big fan of Ms.Fine. :)
“My risk of an unwanted pregnancy and being denied an abortion is not a random fact about me. It’s a fundamental part of what it means to be born female, shoved into the class “woman” and hence devalued as an autonomous human being. It will remain so even when I can no longer conceive. I won’t shed my perceived lack of bodily autonomy; it will have different manifestations but it will persist because I was born into this body. To claim “not everyone who is born female can bear children therefore bearing children has nothing to do with being female” is rather like me arguing that because I was born with three nipples, any biology textbook which claims having two nipples is a feature of being human is making a random assertion rather than an obvious generalisation. And generalisations matter. To argue otherwise is not only to dismiss the history of discrimination but to perpetuate it.”
-Cordelia Fine, Manbrains and ladybrains: Squaring the circle
Extra ‘bonus’ features of not being the default normal in society. So when you see women achieve you know that, most likely, they know their shit because they’ve had to work twice as hard as a dude to get similar results.
‘When women display the necessary confidence in their skills and comfort with power, they run the risk of being regarded as “competent but cold”: the bitch, the ice queen, the iron maiden, the ballbuster, the battle axe, the dragon lady… The sheer numbers of synonyms is telling. Put bluntly, we don’t like the look of self-promotion and power on a woman. In experimental studies, women who behave in an agentic fashion experience backlash: they are rated less socially skilled, and thus less hirable for jobs that require people skills as well as competence than are men who behave in an identical fashion. And yet if women don’t show confidence, ambition, and competitiveness then evaluators may use gender stereotypes to fill in the gaps, and assume that these are important qualities she lacks. Thus, the alternative to being competent but cold is to be regarded as “nice but incompetent.” This catch-22 positions women who seek leadership roles on a “tightrope of impression management.’
— Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
The antidote to all the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus bullshit. Cordelia Fine lays the smack down on this pseudo scientific, yet very profitable, clap-trap.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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