[Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sat, 08 Oct 2005 20:27:41 EDT, Arthur writes:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Laura Creighton [mailto:lac at strakt.com]
>> Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2005 7:01 PM
>> To: Chuck Allison
>> Cc: Arthur; 'Kirby Urner'; 'Laura Creighton'; edu-sig at python.org;
>> rev_anna_r at yahoo.com
>> Subject: Re: Re[2]: [Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL
>> 
>> 
>> Why females shy away from math and science is no big mystery.  It is
>> deemed 'not useful' by them. 
>
>Not getting it.  Beauty is beauty, and is never useful.  Why is there a
>rejection in the women's culture of this particular form of useless beauty?

There is particular rejection of _all_ useless beauty.  Other beauty
is marketted as 'saving time', or 'will catch you a proper man' or
'will save you from embarassment'.  Caring about beauty, on its own,
is considered _irresponsible_ for women.  You have to hide it.  
I'm a mutant because I basically do not give a damn if Algebraic
Topology is useful, and whehter my life is wasted.  I am damn selfish
enough to do it because I love the feelings I get in myself for doing so.
This is very unfeminine.

My most recent idea:

boys are taught to earn the respect of their peers.
girls are taught to be respectable by their peers.

Thus respect -- for men -- is a small starting sum that can only
increase.  For women, there is no way to increase it, but only to
decrease it through error -- unless you cross the sex barrier and
start doing things that earn you respect.  Therefore, at some point,
it is inevitable that people who have not striven to increase
their respect have 'problems with self esteem'.  They aren't
producers, but consumers of respect.  The nice thing is that
we could change this.

This thinking is only 3 hours old, thus could stand a lot
of modification.  Thank you wulfmann again.

Laura

>
>But there are 2 important things to reject, I believe:
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>That women are somehow less capable in this area.
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>That something has been or is being done to them -  by someone or somethi
>ng
>that isn't them  - to exclude them. 
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>Then a conversation can be had, at least.
>
>I think we got the gender neutral word problems in all the textbooks.
>Unless there's one non-neutral one in a textbook used in some Alabama
>counties that is still causing all the problems.
>
>Art
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