welsch@houxu.UUCP (Larry Welsch) (04/11/84)
Shava Nerad's responded to me with: I don't know about the rest of the people on the net, but I do not consider being pleasant to people in the best way I know how to be "phony." I don't consider being pleasant to be phony, if you feel good about other people. However, I think if a woman is pleasant to a man because she is: "... consciously manipulating this man by being a woman and acting in a manner with which men are taught to be very pleased when treated to such attention." to quote Shava Nerad's earlier article, then I consider her a phony, and it is likely she will be found out as one. I find the next part of Shava's article to be schizo. First she does not consider "true emotions" to be "usually appropriate to a business context." Next, she is saddened that she cannot express herself by "hugging people who I know would care about the good news, whether or not they are people with which I would feel free to act that way out of the office." To resolve this conflict she asks the following questions. Is it possible to treat each individual without regard to that person's sex without treating each person as a sexless individual? and Since neither men's nor women's culture is right for all people, can we excise the harmful parts of each, and preserve them; or are we going to have to impose a synthetic androgynous culture which denies cultural differences between men and women? While Shava may say I don't understand the questions, I find that the answers to the questions are quite simple. To answer the first question, one must first see the paradox. The solution to the apparent paradox is to introduce a theory of types and to realize that there are two different types of treatment, the first I will call quality, and the second I will call procedure. Now to rephrase with our types and to be specific let's add a context of medicine. "Is it possible for medical doctors to provide the same high quality of medical treatment regardless of sex while altering their treatment procedures to account for an individual's sex. Now the answer is clearly yes, good doctors do it all the time. Without a theory of types, however, the answer is no. To consider the second question. It is a bit like the price is right, which do you want, curtain A or curtain B. For me again the answer is simple, those aren't my only two choices, I want what is behind curtain C. I am not interested in excising cultures or being part of an androgynous culture. No, I opt for something different, treating each person as an individual, with all that comes from being a human being. If a question is unanswerable, it is the wrong question. Larry Welsch houxu!welsch