A definite great read..

-Bill-Bartmann

In addition, I would like to see the New Feminism get real about the fact that culture — any culture — is only part of the explanation for why humans behave as they do. The other part — the third rail, apparently, judging from the reception to this idea by traditional feminists — is biology. While there’s no perfect algorithm for the proportion nature or nurture plays in behavior, or which takes precedence in which instances, current science based on extensive study of twins raised separately suggests something like a 50-50 contribution overall. Bottom line: the answer to why one in three women is brutalized, and what we should do to stop it, cannot be gotten to by examining nurture alone. We need to consider nature as well.

Concerns that a biological basis for violence against women will “let men off the hook” for their actions are unfounded.

For example, people today rise above tribalism and suspicion of “the other” expressed as racism — instincts that were selected for in our evolutionary history because they protected small bands of early humans from contamination or conquest by unrelated and possibly hostile groups. Even though many societies inculcate their members to accept everyone, the instinct to notice and react to “difference” remains and will reassert itself (particularly when externally exploited) without constant societal vigilance. This is true even though individual susceptibility to racism varies. Numerous experiments bear this out, where kids are split into groups by eye or hair color, then placed in competition for some resource, resulting in angry feuding and denunciations of the “other” group. Some societies make a conscious choice to counteract nature — humans’ instinctual tribalism — through nurture — actively affirming acceptance of every color, language, style of dress, etc., and carefully monitoring and proscribing attempts at divisiveness.

In the same way, should science confirm in humans (as is observed in many other mammals) that males are predisposed to possess and control females in an attempt to regulate paternity, so that his and only his genetic line benefits from his care and resources (the explanation for everything from jealousy to cruelty toward step-children), and that this powerful sex drive is sometimes expressed in verbal/physical violence towards women, we still get to decide, as some societies already have, that it’s NOT OK and should be curtailed. The difference is that instead of settling for one-dimensional prohibitions and blame-based punishments, most of which presume men who attempt to exert control over women are ignorant or just bad, our understanding would be holistic and more likely lead to solutions not yet entertained.

*****A

I would say some of the double standard has been here and fully entrenched for a long time – arranged marriages/dowries.

Al Qu’ran : Surah An-Nissa (11) ~

“Allah commands you concerning your children, the share of male is equal to the share of two females…………”

(34)~
“Men are incharge over women, because Allah has made one of them excel over another, and because men have expended their wealth over them, so the virtuous women are submissive, they keep watch in the absence of husband as Allah commanded to watch. And as to those women whose disobedience you fear, then admonish them and sleep apart from them, and beat them (lightly), then if they come under your command, then seek not any way of excess against them. Undoubtedly, Allah is Exalted, Great. “