the thing is, the term “innate” implies a lot and leaves out a lot. my position is that with enough social inputs males and females could be equalized in outcome as well as opportunity. granted, we aren’t at equality of opportunity yet either. i simply don’t think the social inputs are worth it, in fact, i think the Left’s recent tendency to reshape society in a very aggressive way via government fiat and program has been counterproductive to the project of individual liberty and potentiality.

if the set of extent societies approaches infinite at some point a large number of matriarchal societies even without inputs, and a far larger number of non-sex-triarchal societies would emerge. as it is, i don’t think the set of human societies is large enough to explore all the improbable potentialities out there. the die is loaded, so to speak.

as for deconstruction and what not, well, i think our lingo is going in orthogonal directions

oh, btw, short men are sexy, only anti-short cultures hold their potential down

The point I would be making about the non-inherency of patriarchy (which is not probably an exact way of the goal) would entail so much willing deconstruction that it would only be useful if all sides in the conversation were committed to seeing the plausability of an alernate point of view, and working to bring such evidence as would strenthen the point. After that, a committment to being reality-based would neccesitate testing the plausability of any evidence that was found.

I feel that if you personally wanted to disprove that partiarchy is innate, you’d bring a lot of evidence for it. Thats not to blow smoke up your ass. On the face of it I just do not want to sit back and “let” it be true that patriarchy is a default condition, even as I’m not willing to simply delude myself into a more pleasant reality.

look, i don’t want to get into an “argument.” that’s dumb, there is a wide literature on various personality differences on average between males and females. there is a wide literature on the relationship between hormonal levels and various personalities. there is a wide literature on the developmental genetic reasons for the differential expressions of these hormones.

the simple explanation is testosterone: women who have higher basal testosterone levels tend to be more aggressive and domineering. men who boost their testosterone tend to be more domineering. sometimes connecting the dots doesn’t work in that correlations of correlations, but i’m pretty sure this one will work. men are simply geared toward dominance and risk taking behavior because of higher testosterone levels, and there is probably a genetic rational via the trivers-willard effect, males are the gender with higher potential reproductive outpout (skew).

as for history, there has never been a matriarchy (matrilineal cultures don’t count, and iroquois females having veto power over male decisions doesn’t count). the employ of female warriors by the king of benin doesn’t count. shrug

now wave hands and tell me how every society that we know of somehow magically stumbled on the same stable-state of shitting on women.* (i suppose you could posit a marxist explanation)

anyway, i’m not making a deterministic argument, i’m making a probabilistic one. most males are not born with personalities that allow them be leaders, and most do not live in societies that allow them to be leaders. same for women. a particular socioeconomic background helps, for example, but not being a pussy really helps too. if you have two normal distributions and you shift the mean a bit, then the number on the tales will differ a GREAT deal.

consider, assume a mean of 100, and a standard deviation of 15. .135% of the probability distribution is more than 3 standard deviations above mean (>145). assume a mean of 105, and .38% of the population is above the 130. you nearly triple the value at the high end of the tail by a small shift in the mean.

if you assume that being at the extreme end of the tail of distribution gives you a leg up or is a necessary precondition, than small mean differences in populations can make a big difference. this doesn’t take into account things like gene-environment correlation and gene-environment interaction.

i’m not trying to be a bluffing asshole here…but i am tired of the same-old-same-old platitudes about social and historical factors that totally ignore some populationally powerful biases. sure, behavorial genetics or evolutionary psychology aren’t physics, and there is a lot of gray area in there…but, i think it stands up well next to sociology, which is what its detractors appeal to (sociology, at least the type that attempts to be a science, even uses many of the same statistical techniques as behavior genetics).

in my “fantasy” world where i am a single alpha male all women would be potentional cameron diaz’s like something about mary (plus, a little more promiscuous too). i don’t see that happening.

• there are differences of degree, i would argue that mass scale societies that emerged after the neolithic revolution were bad for the tenuous gender equality that probably existed before. in the nurture assumption judith rich harris points out that male cliques tend to be more stable than female cliques…and i think this is the reason why male social mobilization scales so much better than “sisterhood.”