1 - At 12:58 PM on August 24 2010, Marian wrote

What a stunning article! Re the proportions of roles for women/men I immediately thought of evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Gottschall’s findings, from his comprehensive and cross-cultural statistics-based investigation into feminist critics’ claims that female characters are underrepresented and depicted negatively in folk- and fairy-tales. He found under-representation (3:1) of prominent female folk-tale characters, that the percentage of active male protagonists significantly exceeds that of active female protagonists, and that there are almost always more references to female than male ‘beauty’. He concludes that this is due both to nature & nurture: "…while the folktale patterns are inconsistent with the constructivist notion that individuals are mere products of their sociocultural contexts, they also provide no support for the orientation that is social constructivism’s equally incomplete antithesis: biological determinism...the often-considerable variability across subsamples testifies to human behavior…[which] will bend significantly…within the constraints of evolved human nature." Many many congratulations for the way you've all negotiated your way through difficult processes that—I think—are often just a contemporary manifestation of the global heritage that Gotschall analyses. (& I CAN'T WAIT to see the movie!)