On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
> When I said that
> it was just wrong to say that capitalism has been an unmitigated
> disaster for women - that many women find having a job preferable to
> being utterly dependent on men, even in conditions of exploitation -
> she dismissed this too, and cited the example of recent trips to
> Italy, where women from Eastern Europe are held in sexual slavery.
> Which is indeed horrific, but really not the whole story of women
> under capitalism.
>
> Doug
This is a good example of what cognitive psychologists call reliance on the availability heuristic: if you're trying to estimate how common some event or situation is (e.g., brutal oppression of women), you tend to overestimate the prevalence based on a few vivid examples. I'm not trying to apologize for her position, but it's understandable given human cognitive tendencies. (Another good example of the availability heuristic: people tend to massively overestimate the extent of welfare fraud in the U.S. based on a few vivid media stories about "welfare queens".)
Miles