Heather sent me a link to this post, which is an excellent example of how gender roles are taught to kids and then reinscribed as “natural.”
This is exactly why I have so little use for pseudo-scientific just-so stories about how we are how we are because that’s how we evolved, as if we aren’t indoctrinated every step of the way to be just this way. You would think that scientists would be smart enough to see the inherent problem with looking at things as they are now, assuming our ancestors were the same way, and then using the behavior that we’ve projected back onto our ancestors to explain why we have that behavior now. It’s just the scientific equivalent of sitting in a three-way mirror and mistaking the endless stream of you doing all the things you do for you and your ancestors sharing behaviors.
That being said, it seems like the teacher whose qualifications are that he’s somehow involved in school athletics is a pretty ubiquitous figure. We had an athletic director who taught us psychology and sociology. He also told us that all of the football players dried their asses and genitals first and then their faces. In retrospect, if everything’s clean, I’m not sure why that was supposed to be so gross.
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Tiny Cat Pants 