James F Welles*
USA
*Corresponding author:James F Welles, PhD, East Marion, New York, 11939, USA
Submission: April 25, 2019;Published: May 14, 2019
ISSN: 2578-0247 Volume2 Issue4
Unfortunately, the cognitive basis for much social stupidity is not discrimination based on ability but the human tendency to generalize behavior of differentiated members of a group into the form of a representative stereotype. This streamlines social decisions, as individual variation can be ignored, and reactions keyed to specific characteristics deemed definitive for behavioral inter-action. However, the loss to stereotyping is obvious: individuals are raised up or put down not due to their individual abilities but because they are lumped into a linguistic category. Women, for ex-ample, have been universally and eternally victimized by stereotyping [1] to the degree that 400 years ago expert on females, Cardinal de Richelieu concluded “Intellect in a woman is unbecoming” [2].
It is alleged that the female psyche has somehow been permanently shaped by the oft noted ability of women to bear children. It may well be that there is something to this for mothers (who do usually tend to be female) who spend more than 24 hours a day in the presence of children. Anyone subjected to such a situation might have to sacrifice something to emotional stability, and it may be a bit of logic and sanity. Recent research indicates there are real differences between male and female brains [3], so there may well be a special brand of feminine stupidity1 . However, before we venture too far into the unchartered domain of comparative idiocy,
let us indulge in a bit of intellectual diplomacy and allow that the two sexes are, in their own aggravating ways, equally stupid or at least ap-pear to be so to the advocates of the presumably equal other.
Be that as it may, women make better police people, doctors, drivers, gamblers, spies, world leaders, beer tasters, hedge fund managers and just about everything else–e.g., mothers than men [4]. In fact, it is difficult to find something –other than 400lb bench presses in which men excel. The inferiority of women in matters of physical strength when human culture was beginning apparently led males to slight them in all other respects up to now. Along with using race as a basis for stereotyping, sexism can be denounced as the stupidest idea in history, being more a psychocultural indulgence than a scientific rationale.
© 2019 James F Welles. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and build upon your work non-commercially.