Eliminating Gender Rolesby
Nima Sanandaji An investigation that has been conducted for the Swedish government regarding equality in pre-schools recently presented their conclusions. According to the daily paper Nya Wermlands-Tidning the conclusion of the investigation was that pre-schools ought to be used as a tool in a political experiment with the goal of eliminating "gender roles." The aim is to have boys not acting as boys and girls not acting as girls. As the editorials page of Nya Wermlands-Tidning sums up: "In twenty years historicists will look back at this investigation as one of the most flagrant examples of the influence of radical feminism over the social democrats." That government officials aim to change the behavioral pattern of basically every child in Sweden, and that they plan to do so in such a radical way, should bring about a lot of controversy. Yet it doesn’t. Swedish citizens are used to having the government plan for a gender-neutral society. The first steps have already been taken, as massive sums of taxpayer’s money are invested in research in the field of "gender feminism" and as the ideas of radical feminism are incorporated by the state in basically all facets of education, including various fields of research. Radical feminism was one of those fields that started to flourish as the fall of communism forced socialist intellectuals to seek new arguments for the big state. The influence of Marxist ideas on genus feminism are clear – the most simple explanation of their ideas is that they have copied Marx but replaced the word "capital" with "man" and the word "worker" with "woman." Genus feminism, seen as a scientific field by its followers, is basically built upon the belief that there are no significant biological differences between men and women and that all differences that exist are invisible social constructs created mainly to oppress women. In reality there are of course many differences between men and women. Although individual variation is large within both groups, it is clear that there exist significant differences in behavior and preferences between the sexes. The fact that women tend to choose occupations where they care for other people, such as in the health care, is most likely due to a programmed biological behavior where females in basically all mammals have a more nurturing nature. When different characteristics, such as intelligence, are measured it is often found that there is a wider variation between individual men compared to individual women –something that explains why men are overrepresented both among Nobel Prize winners and among criminals. In a biological sense, this makes sense: the successful males among most mammals tend to have many children whereas many males never procreate. On the other hand most healthy females who reach a certain age have offspring. Thus it is only logical to have a wider variation of different abilities among men and apply evolutionary pressure more on men than on women (at least this was logical during the conditions of human evolution, i.e. mainly before the rise of civilization).
The biological differences between men and women manifest themselves in society, with the sexes having different behavior, seeking out different career paths and having different parental roles. Again, strong individual variations exist in both groups, but on average the differences are still clear. But many gender feminists more or less deny all of this and see the idea of biological differences as part of an invisible male power structure. When women spend more time with the children, this is seen as a problem that has to be fixed by the welfare state by punishing those who do not share their state parental leave equally. When men have a greater tendency to be workaholics and more often end up in the boards of corporations, government regulations start forcing companies to put women in their boards (such has recently become the case in Norway). And when men and women seek out different professions this is a social failure that has to be corrected by the state. It is of course very difficult to alter the behavior of adults, which is why the state is turning its attention on children attending pre-schools. But brainwashing children into becoming gender-neutral seems not only as an example of the power hungry nature of the big state, but also as a dangerous experiment that could hurt these children for life.
August 5, 2006 Nima Sanandaji [send him mail] is president of the Swedish think tank Captus and the editor of Captus Journal. He is a graduate student in biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com |
One
can only hope that there will be a stop to the ideas of gender feminism
in Sweden, or at least that Swedish children are spared being part
of a bizarre government experiment.