With or without the slanted adjectives (you should be glad us men are "emotionally flat". Can you imagine how many fights we'd get into if we were emotionally excitable?).

You are talking about two different concepts here: (1) the relative balance of authority/responsibility and respect accorded the two genders in the family and the society and (2) the personal psychological characteristics of the people in those societies. There is no a priori reason to believe that the two are connected at all. I also seriously doubt that any current day research could shed much light on the question.

Most of the research that I'm aware of that observed the egalitarian nature of primitive societies was conducted long ago on truly primitive societies. Societies that no longer exist. The Bushmen of the Kalahari, the nomads of Central Asia and Siberia have all long since been infected by modern society and anthropologists have noted a decrease in equality as a result. However, those early studies (1800s - early 1900s) were anthropological studies, not psychological studies so nobody was trying to find out if women were emotional and men were rational (I prefer my slanted adjectives ... naturally). Unfortunately, the last untouched societies are some of the Indian societies of the Amazon basin and people aren't being let into those areas to study them. So I'm not sure how willing I am to believe that they actually were able to study egalitarian/primative societies.

And while I'm on the subject of egalitarian societies...

They were egalitarian because both men and women were equally important to the survival equation (and please don't confuse this with eking out an existence. Even though life and death survival was at issue, except for bad times, they mostly worked less, spent more time with their kids, and enjoyed life more than we do). As a result, both sexes were accorded the respect and authority as was their due as equal pillars in the support of the family and the group. This does not mean that there weren't gender roles, that bugaboo of the feministas. Men hunted; women gathered. It isn't until you get to modern society that gender roles are being used to enforce inequality between the sexes.

Finally, your psychological profiles of the sexes? Pfui. Kindly remember that what that represents is the number of data points within one standard deviation to the mean on a psychological test that (hopefully) measures each of those psychological characteristics. It says zero, zip, nada about the individual. People are people first and their gender is merely an attribute of their humanity.

Let's not do it at all. It's not as if they would disappear. Somebody would buy the profitable bits. They need to pay the price for their lack of vision and, besides, all those furriners who have been buying all that dollar debt that your government buddies have been pedaling need to spend it on something here.

There's a scene in one of the Star Wars where Han Solo is trying to beguile Princess Leaha and she gets really irritated. At which point, Solo says: "See, I must have gotten pretty close to the point there to get her all riled up like that."

They reelected Shrub in 2004, didn't they? A more colossal example of collective stupidity is hard to imagine. And I don't think they've gotten any smarter. When 62% of the respondents say that Shrub's performance is either poor, very poor, or the worst in American history, you shouldn't be having a neck and neck race with Shrub II. But there you have it.

So I have a bad feeling about this....

I'm sure you (and most everybody else on the planet) has seen some version of the e-mail joke about the chemistry test wherein the professor asks if Hell is endothermic or exothermic. One of the lines is that virtually all religions claim that you're going to Hell in a handbasket on a freight train headed south if you're not a member of that religion and since nobody is a member of all religions, everybody is going to Hell.

I long ago ceased to worry about the rantings of the very religious. After all, they're going to Hell.

It'd be good if somebody finally broke the code that what you look like and what you do at home typically are not good indicators of what you do professionally. On the other hand, what you do professionally usually is a good indicator of what you will continue to do professionally. In Ms. Palin's case, she managed to run a town of 9,000 $22M in the hole all by herself. Fiscal irresponsibility.... not a good thing. She demanded the resignations of most of the staff of this little town to prove their loyalty to her... sounds like Shrub/Darth/Monica Goodling. Political litmus tests have no place in a bureaucracy. Based on her past performances, she's likely to spend other people's money like water and further politicize what should be a professional bureaucracy (indeed, that politicization is what has made it so incompetent).

So leave her personal life out of it and just focus on her rather thin record at work.

I retired from the Boeing Company's Training and Support systems where my group designed and built the visual systems for our trainers (our visual databases were obviously better than yours since aside from the satellite imagery and aerial photography, they included ground photography - it really did look like the real thing). I've seen experienced F-15 jockeys come out of the sims dripping with sweat after a mission (this was simulated combat, where the sadist at the IOC wasn't turning your engines on and off but throwing more aircraft, SAMs etc at you.) They would say that it was so real it was real.