beckricci said:
Um, someone actually needed to so a study to prove this?
Here's the thing about science. Science doesn't use the conventional wisdom as its axioms. Science doesn't assume anything is true just because a majority of people believe it. The whole point of science is to determine the proveability of various assertions, and then go ahead and prove them or disprove them. If scientists based their research on shit your average Joe already believes, then we would still be operating from the assumption that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
not like this is the best example, and me big fan of sociology, but one study doesn't make it science, nor proven.
halfjack said:
not like this is the best example, and me big fan of sociology, but one study doesn't make it science, nor proven.
Sure. None of us (that I know of) have seen the study in its gory details. We don't know how well or dispassionately it was done. We can't assess its merits as a stand alone piece of scholarship.
But it's part of the discourse of science, whether it turns out to be a good part or not when history draws its judgements.
stockula is sceptical because he thinks its motivated by a liberal agenda, namely demonising SUVs and war as obsessions associated with machismo.
Many feminists wil be sceptical because they will associate this with a reactionary agenda concerned with attaching all behavioural impulses to biology so as to support an anti-feminist status quo.
Many of the rest of us will say "This is hardly fucking surprising, but I'm glad someone's curious enough about it to ask and analyse the question in a formal kind of way."
stockula said:
I think the grad student just tailored his research to confirm his intellectualized, preconceived notions.
What I mean is, I wonder if you'd find a sociologist anywhere that had neutral opinions about say, war and SUV's. Let alone positive opinions.
[Edited on Aug 03, 2005 by stockula]
Almost as hard as finding a hard right troglodyte with a terminal degree in well, anything. Honestly though, if I got to choose between doing a decades worth of intensive study or getting a six figure Scaife funded "fellowship" to write polemic totally unrelated to even my bachelors I might be tempted too, except for that signing in blood requirement.
Many feminists wil be sceptical because they will associate this with a reactionary agenda concerned with attaching all behavioural impulses to biology so as to support an anti-feminist status quo.
Possibly, but I don't think this one holds water. There is no inherent biological predetermination implied here, just gender based marketing and current preference. SUVs are popular because they are an accessible symbol of masculinity that requires no actual commitment. Ferraris on the other hand or actually say fighting the war in Iraq requires things that most cant or won't actually put up the exchange for. Plus, masculinity is biologically related, but not biologically determined. It is a social construct not an inherent artifact of sex.
beckricci said:
Um, someone actually needed to so a study to prove this?
Here's the thing about science. Science doesn't use the conventional wisdom as its axioms. Science doesn't assume anything is true just because a majority of people believe it. The whole point of science is to determine the proveability of various assertions, and then go ahead and prove them or disprove them. If scientists based their research on shit your average Joe already believes, then we would still be operating from the assumption that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
not like this is the best example, and me big fan of sociology, but one study doesn't make it science, nor proven.
Better than no studies at all and just going by what Ol Clem at the gas station thinks about the world.
Many feminists wil be sceptical because they will associate this with a reactionary agenda concerned with attaching all behavioural impulses to biology so as to support an anti-feminist status quo.
Possibly, but I don't think this one holds water. There is no inherent biological predetermination implied here,
Well, there's nothing to say what's driving the responses males make in comparison to females, that's certainly true. Us drawing inferences about the significance of these results is (in part) us reading tea-leaves.
I mean, stockula's particular reading of the tea-leaves was to read this study as part of the Culture Wars relating to cars-and-wars-as-machismo-symbols and the liberal critique thereof.
My expectation of a number of feminists' potential tea-leaf reading is as that part of the Culture Wars relating to sex and gender. (In terms of what tea leaves to be reading in the first place, I think the feminists are right on this and stockula is wrong.)
just gender based marketing and current preference.
It's not "just" anything. We simply don't know. (A deeper question is why anybody responds to "gender based marketing" in the first place.) That it happens to be about SUVs and not big wooden clubs is clearly a modern cultural accident of sorts, but why the identified stimulus-and-response is what it is at all is stuff we don't really know a lot about yet.
Plus, masculinity is biologically related, but not biologically determined. It is a social construct not an inherent artifact of sex.
But "masculinity is a social construct" is a definitional statement, rather than an analytical one. If "masculine" in one culture means wearing trousers rather than a skirt or dress, then clearly that's a cultural construct (specific to that culture), but that's a trivial observation.
Feminists and cultural constructionists generally argue that masculinity as a social construct is an analytical proposition, in that masculinity is only (always and everywhere) a cultural construct -- that there's never any connection between cultural masculinity and inherent "maleness" because all our gendered behaviour is learned along the way. Somehow males "learn" that being a man means having a hankering for a big car when perceived masculinity is challenged.
That's a funny reading of the tea-leaves, if you ask me.
Excuse me, I have to go off and get beaten up by Volkov.
i personally gotta respect the "old clem's" of the world. first off, they often know more than you uppity young punks. second of all, they have seen hundreds of real life case studies play out, instead of just reading about them. shit there was this old dude who lived across from a store i used to work at, and he was always in there, and that dude could predict the whether every frickin time, to sometimes creepy degrees. when the weather channel and the local weather and even the ship authority station. shit like "you got 7 minutes to bring those papers in, it gone rain somethin fierce." 7 minutes later, crackaboom rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrain. the point of this rant? sociology is saturated with opinion because its a study of people and people are opinionated. its inavoidable. it's what makes sociology the best science, and at the same time, not a science at all
halfjack said:
the point of this rant? sociology is saturated with opinion because its a study of people and people are opinionated. its inavoidable. it's what makes sociology the best science, and at the same time, not a science at all
Um ...
It's not so much tyat I disagree, as that I don't connect the relevance of the rant to the study under discussion.
TheFuckOffKid
NEWSWIRE
Australia
AUG 06, 2005 04:43 PM