4P
FRIDAY,APRIL11,2003
NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAIEYKANSAN - 5A
4A = THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
OPINION
FRIDAY,APRIL11,2003
TALKTOUS
Kristi Henderson
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I just tried to vote online at work, and I was denied. So what's the point of online voting?
it's pretty amusing that KUnited claims it's not the Greek coalition, yet they're offering a free pizza party for whichever fraternity and sorority have the most members go vote. Coincidence? I think not.
I'd like to thank whoever's idea it was to start online Senate elections the same time we start online enrollment, because now the computer lab is full of people voting and I can't enroll.
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I know this makes me really immature, but I will always laugh when I see the word "vagina" displayed in giant block letters on a billboard or the back of a bus.
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Someone just told me voting was fun and everyone needs to vote because it's fun.
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How wonderful, KUnited has rented parly buses to shuttle the little frat and sorority boys and girls back and forth to the polls. So if elected, is that what you're going to do with the tuition increase? If that's having a say before you pay, then I say no.
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Daylight Savings Time bites my ass
I'm sick of KUnited people accosting me on campus. It'll be nice when I can walk through campus in peace.
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I have the answer: Triscuits and tuna can solve all the world's problems. Just ask fat people and lesbians.
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No one does the mullet quite like MacGyver did.
Online voting is the worst idea since the hydrogen blimp, eh?
My roommate and I are going to be holding informational meetings for guys to teach them how not to be jerks.
So if in the phone book, you're looking up El Hodiri, you look up "El" or "Hodiri" first?
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Does anyone find it strange that at 5:25 in the morning, my roommate's singing "Rock Your Body" by Justin Timberlake and doing his "sexy dance"? Yeah, he's a guy.
Yeah, I said I voted, but I didn't.
训
ATKINSON'S VIEW
Donovan Atkinson for The University Daily Kansan
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Feminism relies on exaggerated info, fails to depict accurate gender relations
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111 Staufer-Flint
GUEST COMMENTARY
It has been suggested that feminism, the "F" word, has been given a dirty name in the media. As a result few American women are willing to call themselves feminists even if they wholeheartedly embrace feminist ideals and identify with feminist concerns.
Feminism has enjoyed a fabulous reception in the media from Oprah Winfrey to Katie Couric to Lifetime Television Network and The New York Times.
The media have been so eager to promote feminism that they have accepted bogus statistics that have no credible studies to support them, such as the claim that battery against wives increases on Super Bowl Sunday. Instead of bothering to see if this statistic was merely a gross exaggeration or, as it turned out, was cut from whole cloth, journalists disseminated the false statistic across the nation before journalist Ken Ringle of The Washington Post exposed it for what it really was — a sheer falsehood.
Feminist statistics on anorexia have about as much credibility as the battery claim. Joan Brumberg, former director of women's studies at Cornell University and author of Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, attributes 150,000 deaths a year to anorexia. Gloria Steinem also uses this figure in her book Revolution from Within. Steinem credits this statistic to feminist author Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth.
Arrah Nielsen
omnion@hansan.com
According to its president, Diane
Consider for a moment that roughly two million people die in this country each year. That amount of deaths from anorexia is pretty extraordinary when only 40,000 people die from automobile accidents (including pedestrians).
Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? , actually bothered to call up the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association only to find out that the 150,000 statistic referred to 150,000 sufferers.
Mickley, the association had been misquoted. The National Center for Health Statistics reported fewer than 100 deaths per year due to anorexia. Certainly these deaths are regrettable and medical professionals as well as the friends and family of sufferers should strive to prevent them, but 100 deaths hardly constitutes as national health crises.
Despite this, in The Beauty Myth, Wolf refers to anorexia as "a Holocaust" and suggests that women "must claim anorexia as political damage done to us by a social order that considers our destruction insignificant because of what we are — less." Anorexia is a disease (and a rare one at that) that has nothing to do with the patriarchy. But who needs objective reality when you have feminist ideology?
Feminist ideology ranges from enlightening to divisive to just plain silly.
Consider for example the anti-syntactical evasion of man in alternative spellings of woman such as "womyn" or "wimmin." Or the replacement of the obviously sexist word word "seminar" with the more female-friendly "ovular."
Arguing that gender-neutral language will improve the status of women in society is roughly akin to arguing that inner city African-American children would have a better lot in life if there were black Keebler elves.
Domestic abuse and anorexia are serious issues, but statistically challenged feminists have harmed the very causes they seek to promote. What we need is accurate figures, not hysteria.
Feminism has warped from a noble justice-seeking cause into a paranoid philosophy of victimology.
PERSPECTIVE
It is our duty to appreciate the freedoms we enjoy and seek to advance them to our brothers and sisters elsewhere.
Most women have deduced (correctly) that modern feminism does not speak to them and has few solutions to offer them.
The depiction of American women as being polarized in a gender war against patriarchal forces is not only inaccurate but deeply ridiculous. American women are among the freest, most privileged agents in history.
Neilsen is a Wichita junior in biological anthropology.
Sociology does not cause gender differences sex roles stem from biological, historical factors
Men and women are not the same. It is a frequently argued position in modern academia that men and women are all identical at birth, and it is only through the negative influences of a patriarchal society that women and men are different during their lives.
COMMENTARY
But Hasbro Toys discovered something many liberal feminists arguing against innate differences would find outrageous: women and men are different.
Matthew Dunavan
opinton@kansan.com
In a controversial test, Hasbro allowed young children to interact with a playhouse it considered marketing to both boys and girls, but not all of the children interacted with the toy in the same way. The girls dressed the dolls, and cared for them as they would small infants. The young boys? They catapulted the toy furniture from the roof of the playhouse. The frenetic physical activity of the young boys in the Hasbro toy test is a natural part of what most young men are constructed to do: engage in physical life or death competition against Mother Nature.
Gender is not socially constructed. Our different brains were formed by the same evolutionary forces that shaped
In the Ancestral Environment (AE) where our minds originated, men and women had differing roles in simple proto-human societies. In this environment, men and women acquired different psychological characteristics as a direct result of the most important biological difference between men and women: women can have babies. Women would have been settled at a "home" because of their reduced ability to move great distances while pregnant
our different bodies, and it does not imply any superiority or inferiority to a half of the species to hold this position. By applying evolutionary concepts to our minds, we can explain differences between men and women with little effort, and the field of evolutionary psychology does this regularly.
or caring for children, and men would have been the hunters of protein-rich animal flesh.
It would be beneficial for the species to have those who cared for children (the women who were more grounded to a given location) develop tendencies to desire to care for those children. Those who did not had their genetic legacy go extinct.
That women are more apt to take on roles of caring and nurturing in modern life reflects not a patriarchal effort to force women into these career options but rather that women are uniquely suited to careers that rely upon compassion for the weak, as a legacy of the necessity of their caretaker responsibility in the AE.
It also explains how women came to have greater communicative abilities than men. Women would have spent a much greater period of time socializing with each other in cooperative environments, where verbal skills would have
The AE clearly explains why men have greater spatial reasoning ability than women. Men would have needed it to find their way across the Savannah to the animal herds and to find their way home again after killing a wildebeest.
been important, while the men were out competing against the world for a haunch of giraffe to bring home.
There are only a few great exceptions to the general rule of male/female gender roles. Girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia are subjected to high doses of androgens (male hormones) in the womb. These girls grow up to be more aggressive than other girls and tend to play with toys traditionally associated with boys. Is it logical to assume that girls exposed to androgens are all socialized differently? No. Their gender is created by their biological development.
Does this mean that no part of gender role is shaped by culture? No. Culture surely plays a part in who we are, but it can never reverse the hardwiring with which all humans, male and female, are born. No matter how much we attempt to alter human nature, it can never succeed. Countless communes, totalitarian regimes and social programs have shown us the error of that line of thinking. Mother Nature made us into who we are and only Mother Nature can change us into something else.
Dunavan is a Topeka senior in political science and philosophy.