Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Hillary to win: a backlash to violence



violence is it's own reward for men. that's my interpretation of a
1987 rat experiment by Swanson and Schuster where high testosterone mice were preoccupied with maintaining dominance hierarchies (fighting) and low testosterone mice cooperated in a democratic fashion to earn rewards.

while I myself admit to enjoying high energy testosterone induced levels of excitement, I sense that a shift is needed to foster real progress away from the current specter of Farfur the AK47 toting mouse.

in the emerging world order women are taking more control.
take the legal arena for example. yesterday I was introduced (in a sexual harrassment prevention seminar) to the "reasonable woman standard" of legal judgment -- that is, what the typical man thinks is not considered proper and sufficient in judging sexual matters; instead, what a typical woman would decide is how evidence is weighed. despite the recent supreme court ruling on "partial birth" abortions, women in general are going to get more of what they want, because they are better at cooperation and support.

so while the he/she ratio is still strongly biased towards male newsmakers, expect that to change as the new Clinton presidency formulates.

the competing view I have is that the best looking candidate always wins; there I thought, Edwards or Obama had it. not any more.

so reasonable women are the new standard bearers. but then what of reasonable men?
as George Bernard Shaw wrote: "The reasonable man adapt's himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man" (Man and Superman, 1903).

maybe that's why I don't play by the rules?

in light of this, to close, I must share a female perspective:
Heidi of Hollywood said "In general, I think men are great. I think they’re a lot like horses. Beautiful to look at and fun to play with sometimes, but at the moment I’m definitely glad I don’t have to take care of one."

mark my words people!