Response Post March 1

Both Fausto-Sterling and Susan Douglas confirm what I think is one of the most dangerous tendencies of Western society. The advent of the scientific method formulated western thought to divide everything into factual or nonsensical, empirical or irrational. This spilled into our opinions of things more generally; we are quick to label people and beautiful or ugly, or we categorize them by race, sex, orientation, etc. It’s as though we are constantly collecting data and making conclusions about groups every second of every day. It is the way our brains have been wired and, even though it has done great things for our society, it is dangerous to always think with such certainty. The most dangerous thing about the studies that Fausto-Sterling investigates, for example, is not that these sexist ideas were published, it is that these ideas were published as fact as shown by science. It is very difficult for western society, which is only beginning to realize its ethnocentrism, to understand that even we have a bias. Even science has bias. Even the most advanced data collecting techniques and experimental processes are not perfect and should be questioned.

As Douglas shows, this mentality even permeates our ideas of beauty. Exemplified most by the website HotOrNot.com, we struggle constantly to reach an ideal of beauty that no one seems to realize is completely constructed. And it is websites like “hot or not” that perpetuate these standards of attraction and give us the idea that there is some empirical definition of beauty. Much like there is danger in some studies being construed as “fact,” there is serious danger in these ideas of beauty being described as feminist. That is the major point of Embedded Feminism that Douglas tries to prove from a lot of different angles and I think she is successful in this chapter.