Dustin M. Wax » reductionism http://dwax.org writer, educator, anthropologist, and freelance thinker Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:27:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 The Tyranny of Tiny Differences http://dwax.org/2006/01/05/the_tyranny_of_tiny_differences/ http://dwax.org/2006/01/05/the_tyranny_of_tiny_differences/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 The Y Files: Hyping sex differences Cathy Young of the Y Files has a fantastic post on the way that tiny sex differences discovered in research get inflated, by the media and often by the researchers themselves, into essentializing characterizations of men and women. "[T]he truth," she writes, "is that on the popular level -- and also among the anti-PC set -- talk about sex differences often tends to lapse into unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping." These generalizations and stereotypes often tell us more about the political goals of the people describing the research than the research tells us about men and [Continue reading]]]> The Y Files: Hyping sex differences
Cathy Young of the Y Files has a fantastic post on the way that tiny sex differences discovered in research get inflated, by the media and often by the researchers themselves, into essentializing characterizations of men and women. “[T]he truth,” she writes, “is that on the popular level — and also among the anti-PC set — talk about sex differences often tends to lapse into unwarranted generalizations and rather egregious stereotyping.” These generalizations and stereotypes often tell us more about the political goals of the people describing the research than the research tells us about men and women.

]]> http://dwax.org/2006/01/05/the_tyranny_of_tiny_differences/feed/ 0 Cuteness and Culture http://dwax.org/2006/01/02/cuteness_and_culture/ http://dwax.org/2006/01/02/cuteness_and_culture/#comments Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 The Cute Factor, Natalie Angier Angier struggles to find some deeper biological meaning in our responsiveness to "the cute", ostensibly evolved as a means of assuring adult human responsiveness to defenseless and oh-so-cute human babies.
Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with [Continue reading]]]> The Cute Factor, Natalie Angier
Angier struggles to find some deeper biological meaning in our responsiveness to “the cute”, ostensibly evolved as a means of assuring adult human responsiveness to defenseless and oh-so-cute human babies.

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

Though I am willing to concede the possibility of a “hard-wired” responsiveness to cuteness, the idea begs the question of why this responsiveness waxes and wanes over time and from culture to culture. Why do some people even in our currently cute-obsessed culture see cuteness as a thing to be destroyed (e.g. kids who kill puppies), and why is cute so fashionable at the moment (as documented by Angier) but wasn’t before the 1960′s (again, acc. to Angier)? How do cultures like the one described by Nancy Scheper-Hughes become able to disregard the influence of cuteness and the parental attentiveness it supposedly engenders?

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