Exonerated of Sexism ?

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A forward from another list.

Charles Brown

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Subject: 	Lower Classes Exonerated from Sexism

  "Many cultures bias their legacies, parental care, sustenance and
favoritism toward sons at the expense of daughters. Until recently this
was seen as just another example of irrational sexism or the cruel fact
that sons have more economic value than daughters. But by explicitly
using the logic of Trivers/Willard, anthropologists have now begun to
notice that male favoritism is far from universal and that female
favoritism occurs exactly where you would most expect it.
   " Contrary to popular belief a preference for boys over girls is not
universal. Indeed, there is a close relationship between social status
and the degree to which sons are preferred...in feudal times lords
favored sons, but peasants were more likely to leave possessions to
daughters. While the feudal superiors killed or neglected daughters or
banished them to convents, peasants left them more possessions. Sexism
was more a feature of elites than of the unchronicled masses.
   " As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of the University of California at Davis has
concluded, wherever you look in the historical record, the elites
favored sons more than other classes: farmers   in 18th century Germany,
castes in 19th century India, genealogies in medieval Portugal, wills in
modern Canada and pastoralists in modern Africa. This favoritism took
the form of inheritance of land and wealth, but it also took the form of
simple care. In India even today girls are often given less milk and
less medical attention than boys.
   "Lower down the social scale, daughters are preferred today. A poor
son is often forced to remain single, but a poor daughter can marry a
rich man...
   " Of course, this assumes that societies are stratified. As Mildred
Dickemann of California State University has postulated the channeling
of resources to sons represents the best investment rich people can make
when society is class ridden. The clearest pattern comes from
Dickemann's own studies of traditional Indian marriage practices. She
found that extreme habits of female infanticide coincided with
relatively high social rank...high caste Indians killed daughters more
than low caste ones. One clan of wealthy sikhs used to kill all
daughters and live off their wives' dowries.
  "In some societies, the boy preferring habit has spread from elites to
society at large.In China a one child policy may have led to the death
of 17% of girls. In one Indian hospital 96% of women who were told they
were carrying daughters aborted them while nearly 100% of women carrying
sons carried them to term.
   " Choosing the gender of your baby is an individual decision of no
consequence to anybody else. Why, then, is the idea inherently
unpopular? It is a tragedy of the commons -- a collective harm that
results from the rational pursuit of self-interest by individuals. One
person choosing to have only sons does nobody else any harm, but if
everybody does it, everybody suffers. The dire predictions range from a
male-dominated society in which rape, lawlessness, and a general
frontier mentality would hold sway to further increases in male
domination of positions of power and influence.At the very least, sexual
frustration would be the lot of many men.
   " Laws are passed to enforce the collective interest at the expense
of the individual, just as crossing over was invented to foil outlaw
genes. If gender selection was cheap, a 50-50 sex ratio would be imposed
by parliaments of people as surely as equitable meiosis was imposed by
parliaments of genes"

_The Red Queen. Sex and The Evolution of Human Nature_ by Matt Ridley p
125ff