Sorry for the delayed response.
Satyr, why do you say that physical dominance and mental dominance are necessarily joined? Wouldn’t that entail that humans are the strongest animal, or that whales are the smartest? Or that football players are the smartest people or that Stephen Hawking is among the strongest? I don’t see any reason to suspect that if men dominate physcially they must dominate mentally as well.
How and why did they become the dominant sex? Through physical force. In early society, order was enforced by brute strength. Only the strongest member of a tribe or group could maintain power (it functions the same way in many pack animals today; when the leader’s strength lags, they lose control and they are challenged). As society budded under the control of the strongest, strength was valued primarily for long enough to cement a system where women, who did not evolve to hunt, were considered non-considerations. Leadership was initially defined as strength, and by the time strength was not the foremost consideration, leadership had already come to entail male-ness.
Kris, I read the article. I don’t see where you’re coming from. The conclusions in the article are pretty solid: People choose their mates based on observable similarities (attitudes and values) and marital satisfaction is largely dependent on deeper similarities (personality characteristics). If you could point to the specific parts you find to support your case, it would be helpful.
The criticism that the study is only of newlyweds is misleading. “At the time of the assessment, the couples had been married an average of 153.9 days (range = 25-452) – that is, approximately 5 months. They indicated that they had known each other an average of 4.7 years (range = <1 year-30 years) and had been dating approximately 3.5 years earlier (range = <1 year-15 years).” New marriages do not necessarily indicate new relationships. Though they didn’t follow the couple, they did get a diverse group in terms of relationship length.
Besides, this is the best study that exists as far as I can tell. If you have another study whose methodology you prefer that indicates something different, please share it. But it seems that this minor shortcoming for the study in question doesn’t support your position, it just (ever so slightly) calls into question this study. I also presented two other sources to support my position, so it seems that the findings are corroborated and that my position, that opposites do not in fact attract, is accepted as scientifically tenable.
The more recent discussion of whether you should offer to help people is an interesting one. I can appreciate the view that it is an act of kindness to offer to help someone, and that alone should not insult anyone. But the presuppositions behind it can be highly insulting. Kris, you refer to a number of examples where it would be acceptable to help someone, e.g. the deaf person and the person in a wheelchair. Obviously, helping these people is the humane thing to do, and I am not in the least condemning your compassion (quite the opposite).
But these people are unquestionably disabled. To hold that these examples indicate that it is acceptable to offer assistance to a man shopping or a woman changing a tire, is to hold that being a man is a disability when one is shopping and being a woman is a disability when one is changing a tire. People have every right to be insulted when they believe they are being assumed to be disabled when they are not, and I think the presupposition behind the offer is insulting to any automotively inclined woman or shopoholic man.
So while it is acceptable, even respectable, to offer assistance to the disabled, if your conception of who should be considered disabled comes from bigotry or bias, you shouldn’t be surprised or indigant that someone takes it as an insult.