Kevin Baldeosingh
Albert Einstein once wrote, "It is the theory that decides what we can observe." He meant that interpretation of data depends on the paradigm we use. This is why feminist "theory" is absolutely useless for real research, since its fundamental paradigm�patriarchy�is a-historical, simplistic and incoherent.
Take a 2012 paper titled Modern Navigations: Indo-Trinidadian Girlhood and Gender-Differential Creolization by a leading feminist academic whom I shall not embarrass by naming. I cannot list the paper's many defects in this space, but the three basic ones are: (1) the 2012 essay is based on a 1999 questionnaire which is not included in the paper; (2) the author employs concepts like "modernity" and "creolisation" without defining them; (3) her conclusions are diametrically opposed to the statements given by her respondents.
Additionally, the survey seems based on loaded questions–ie questions phrased to fit the author's theoretical assumptions; she had no dummy variables to check either consistency or honesty; and she did not test if her respondents admired celebrities as high-status women or as role models. Her survey, she writes, "sought to understand the experience of Indian girlhood in terms of young women's reproduction and contestation of late twentieth century gender ideals and moral imperatives, and the implications for marking the boundaries of ethnic identities and regulating processes of creolization among young Indian women."
These are the key points the questionnaire yielded:
�2 65 per cent of all girls in the sample saw women on American television as "powerful, intelligent, confident, outspoken, brave role models, and women of the nineties"
�2 Almost all respondents described sexual irresponsibility as embodying prostitution, promiscuity, stripping, abortion, adultery, pre-marital sex, lesbian sex, illegitimate children, and sexual activity as a young age
�2 Immoral behaviour meant engaging "in vulgar dancing, flirting with men, wild, ho-like behaviour or skettish Carnival-like gyrating in bra and panty, laughing loud and liming with men in skimpy clothes or walking around with your breasts and half your a.. showing"
But even bad data can be fruitful if interpreted through scientific lenses. We can start with evolutionary psychology, which basically holds that the primal drives of survival and reproduction have shaped the mating predilections of human beings. But, because maximising genetic replication requires different strategies for women and men, the sexual motives of both sexes are often at variance. This means that successful reproduction between a male and a female is usually the outcome of a negotiation. This is where we apply our second paradigm: game theory, which is basically about making decisions based on a person's preferences and the strategies for optimal outcomes.
Unlike feminism, which assumes that all non-feminist women don't know what they really want, both evolutionary psychology and game theory assume that human beings are rational creatures–ie they have consistent goals and, if they apply ineffectual strategies to achieve these goals, this is a consequence of "imperfect knowledge": which is not the "false or inauthentic consciousness" of feminist theory, but merely the fundamental fact that nobody has complete information.
On this basis, the norms expressed by the teenage Indo girls do not reflect patriarchal oppression, but their perceived optimum strategy for mate choice in the context of Indo-Trinidadian culture as mutated by Western norms. Interestingly, the girls themselves describe a mirror strategy summed up as Carnivalesque behaviour.
In terms of reproduction, the Indo females' strategy is equally effective as Afro females, since the average birth-rate does not vary between the two cohorts. However, the social profiles of Indo and Afro youths suggest that the mating strategies of Indo females yields better outcomes for their children (as measured by delinquency, academic achievement, and violent death rates).
It must be noted that males' strategies are also determined by female norms because, contrary to patriarchy's premises, mating is a two-way negotiation. This can be described by mathematical formulae based on a Nash equilibrium, which would encapsulate the norms identified in the paper. (Economist Herbert Gintis has written an applicable theorem.) In this context, equilibrium would be defined by females signalling sexual competence as well as sexual fidelity. Evolutionary psychology shows that this is an optimum reproductive strategy for women; moreover, female mate choice is dominant, since more women than men reproduce and women typically have more men trying to mate with them than vice-versa. Patriarchy, however, is a construct which yields no insight into this primal mating game.
The paper's author boldly predicts that "girls in the future will increasingly choose navigations that break apart, reclaim and recast the terms within which they come of age." But is this process really new? The available evidence suggests that Indian women have never been as subservient to the "patriarchy" as this feminist essay implies: between 1872 and 1900, for example, 65 of 87 murders in the sex-skewed indentured Indian community were wife killings mostly sparked by the woman's infidelity. These homicides, ironically, marked the decline of male dominance and the beginning of Indian women's journey to the status they now hold.
Unfortunately, feminist analyses eschew the scientific approach and so never yield findings which are actually useful, or even interesting.
Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a History textbook.