Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@osu.edu> wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid"> At 9:47 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote: >I did not contrast American views with anyone else's Aren't such historical and cross-cultural contrasts particularly relevant in understanding the "psycho-sexual" as explananda? Oh, I see, first I am at fault because I tried to expalin American particularism -- which I did not, that was just your assumption -- and now I am fault because I didn't? > Given historical and cross-cultural differences, one might look to causes other than "psycho-sexual impulses" in explaining wide-ranging views about abortion.Lynching, too, is a historically specific phenomenon: Apparantly you are trying to pin on my the view that all human nature and all human behavior is the same everywhere and is caused solely by psychosexual factors. Sorry, no sale.  <HTTP: e_lynch.html peopleevents till amex wgbh www.pbs.org>> Given these facts, it obfuscates the cause and reality of lynching to use the "psycho-sexual" impulses as explanans. This is pernicious rubbish. Evidently you think that if class has any explantory relevance, it must explain everything else, and nothing else can be causally efficacious. What is the point of studying marxism for all these years if that is what you get out of it? At 9:47 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote: > > Is gender identification in itself a cause of sexual anxieties? > >What do you mean, itself? Apart from any context? There is no such >thing. But it is explantorily relevant to such anxieties in many >contexts. > It can be, but how exactly? That's what needs to be explained. Sure, and that is why thsi is my last contribution to the pointlesss discussion. There's a war to fight, one obviously driven in part by psychosexual anxieties, although economic and strategic factors cannot be minimized, and the internet discussion list is not the place for detailed scholarly discussion of particular cases of the sowrt thatw ould be useful. I decline your challenge to start a third career as a psychohistorian.  Are you seriously >suggesting that people didn't notice gender, that it wasn't >important to them, for millenia until class society arrived? > You are conflating sex with gender. No I am not. People have sexes, they see genders. Gender is hwo sex is perceived. As you damn well know. At 9:47 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote: >I really don't see what child abandonment (which Boswell does NOT >particularly tie to infant health) had to do with anything. > I'm simply saying that gender assignment wasn't the topmost concern of parents upon the birth of a child in premodern societies; its ability to survive, and parents' and other kins' ability to support it, were. Obsession with gendering children as soon as possible is a late modern phenomenon. But you didn't get that from Boswell. > You've yet to present an example of such "psycho-sexual" explanations that work better than other explanations. Frankly, any psychosexual explanation will work better than mechanical materialism, which proceeds immediately from imputed class interests to behavior with the interruption of thought or feeling. At least psychosexual explanations have the advantage of proceeding by knwon causes of behavior, namely mental states. At 9:47 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote: >true and informative explanations > Is that the sort of explanation of the "psycho-sexual" that we are seeking here -- the kind that matters to some degree in a court of law? Or do you think that "psycho-sexual" explanations can be useful social theories as well? -- No one cares about explanations of behavior in a court of law, the question is, did you do it or not? Mental states mater to the extend that there isa  question about what you knew about the likely consequences of what you did, and in discrimination cases, whether there was a forbidden motive for w hat you allegedly did. But courts are not interested in explaining behavior, only in regulating it. Yes I think psychossocial theories can be useful social theories. I'm done with this, so you get the last word. it is inconceibale to me that you would not talke it. jks </BLOCKQUOTE> <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? <a href="http://rd.yahoo.com/platinum/evt=8162/*http://platinum.yahoo.com/splash.html">Yahoo! Platinum</a> - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, <a href="http://rd.yahoo.com/platinum/evt=8162/*http://platinum.yahoo.com/splash.html">live on your desktop</a>!