Thursday, August 7, 2008

Of men and women, and preference thereof

Today our college kicked off talent-night, an event to showcase talent for incoming batch and to have fun booing them for senior batch. In a horrendously noisy environment where air is reverberating with tempo shouts of performing students and booing noises of audiences, only one thing typically works in calming audience. Bring on ladies. In college where men-women ratio is disproportionately against fairer sex, only beauties on stage can make people pause and listen. I can admit that women may get more than fair representation in any such performance because typically women tend to be good at dance stuff or because any duet song requires performance of both genders. But what ends up having is something akin to mujra where audience whistle and ladies on stage dance to popular item numbers. To my mind this very sexist and I find this disconcerting. But what perplexes me more is that women in audience too enjoy that and women at stage are willing to go to any extent in displaying their seduction. Perhaps my sense of gender fairness is stronger than what even women prefer, or may be it's wrongly applied here and I have conceptual misunderstanding.

On a related note, I find signals that women convey when they expect men to treat them like human beings and not just sex-objects very mixed up. I am sure I am generalizing it a lot but somehow I feel that their civilized sophistication (which warrants non-sexual treatment) is at odds with their biological wiring (which warrants wooing partner with baser of instincts). I remember reading somewhere that our society is progressing faster than what our biology can cope with.

Breaking the Bias – Lessons from Bayesian Statistical Perspective

Equitable and fair institutions are the foundation of modern democracies. Bias, as referring to “inclination or prejudice against one perso...