Are you afraid @GoodPersonEffed will grade your post?
It would not surprize me if she sent us a word document with our posts back with comments on the side.
Are you afraid @GoodPersonEffed will grade your post?
It would not surprize me if she sent us a word document with our posts back with comments on the side.
GoodPersonEffed
Brevity is my middle name, but my name was TL
- Jan 11, 2020
- 6,727
I don't see how body=female - mind=male fits in this line of thinking, so don't stress about it!
Hunter-gatherers did not leave evidence that they had what we associate with the mind, such as a writing system and schools. They had shorter life-spans, and their efforts were focused on survival: eating and shelter. Men hunted, I would think, not just because of their musculature, but because they could be gone for long periods and women would need to be close to the children in a safer environment, therefore gathering fell primarily to women. Of course there were social structures. Also, anything resembling the Cartesian duality of mind/body was still milennia away from developing, was it not? Anyone who has knowledge about this, feel free to correct me. Also, it's my understanding that humans' brains evolved along with the development of tools, so I wonder how much such societies were able to ponder the mind, intelligence, and rationality. Men had to find some reason to be dominant, I wonder what those reasons were. Was it because they didn't allow women to know where prey animals hid, how to hunt, or how to make tools?
In modern humans, women are equally as intelligent as men. When women are allowed to receive education and intelligent instruction, they are no less intellectually or rationally capable than men. When men decide that women cannot access education or information, then women may appear less intelligent than men, but it is false. Furthermore, the history of Stoicism reveals that women and slaves were also students of this school of philosophy, and were not considered to be intellectually inferior and therefore unable to grasp it, use it, or debate it. This leads me to think that the mind, rationality, and intelligence are determined by who has the power to allow them to develop.
In the States, areas of poverty have a higher percentage of racial "minorities," and have historically received lower quality education, further reinforcing challenges in receiving better opportunities for higher education and white collar work. They also have been historically treated as less intelligent and less capable. As an example, I read an either autobiographical or semi-autobigraphical book, I can't recall which it was, by a Black American woman, in which she was at the top of her class in an exclusively Black public school. When she transferred to an almost exclusively white school, she would answer correctly the same questions she had previously encountered, and teachers would tell her she was wrong, and in tests she went from making As to Cs, not because she was wrong, but because her teachers decided she was not capable of giving the accurate answers that white children gave. She became discouraged and lost much of her previously high self-worth. Sorry I can't give a resource, I read it awhile back and didn't retain the title or author.
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Brick In The Wall
2M Or Not 2B.
- Oct 30, 2019
- 25,158
I don't really think too much about gender roles in a forum. We're not here to hook up so it never really crossed my mind. I guess it has some influence atleast on the writing style.
GoodPersonEffed
Brevity is my middle name, but my name was TL
- Jan 11, 2020
- 6,727
I can think of a few examples of forum arguments about folks who didn't include themselves in the "we" you mentioned.
Brick In The Wall
2M Or Not 2B.
- Oct 30, 2019
- 25,158
I'm not disputing this. I guess I'm just getting older. Back in the old days of the internet you just assumed everyone was a man.I can think of a few examples of forum arguments about folks who didn't include themselves in the "we" you mentioned.
Lol yes. Every cute elf girl in any mmo is obviously a 15 stone male dock worker from Newcastle.
@GoodPersonEffed
Very good observations about hunter-gatherers cognitive development.
I still think there is might be a connection between women as primary caregivers and their subordintion to men.
What if we look at it from another perspective?
Caregivers are nurturing and empathic. The more they care you had for your offspring, the higher the chances the offspring will survive.
Non-caregivers cultivate other attributes.
@GoodPersonEffed
Regarding what you wrote about poor areas in the US.
Maybe the category "woman" today is subordinate to other social categories: E.g. black, muslim, asian, uneducated, educated, rich.
Or, if not subordinate, at least heavily influenced. Not all women do female attributes the same way. It varies depending on where they live, their ethinicity, their wealth.
Oh no! I am busted. (You got me down to a tee, except I come from Liverpool)
Very good observations about hunter-gatherers cognitive development.
I still think there is might be a connection between women as primary caregivers and their subordintion to men.
What if we look at it from another perspective?
Caregivers are nurturing and empathic. The more they care you had for your offspring, the higher the chances the offspring will survive.
Non-caregivers cultivate other attributes.
@GoodPersonEffed
Regarding what you wrote about poor areas in the US.
Maybe the category "woman" today is subordinate to other social categories: E.g. black, muslim, asian, uneducated, educated, rich.
Or, if not subordinate, at least heavily influenced. Not all women do female attributes the same way. It varies depending on where they live, their ethinicity, their wealth.
Oh no! I am busted. (You got me down to a tee, except I come from Liverpool)
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GoodPersonEffed
Brevity is my middle name, but my name was TL
- Jan 11, 2020
- 6,727
Good point. Any woman who's stayed home to care for children will tell you that it's difficult to cultivate personal interests when children take up so much attention. Women have traditionally had to care for everything to do with the home as well as the children. Men work outside of the home, hunters hunted outside of the home, and then they come home and are also cared for and nurtured.
With regard to what you added to your comment that I did not quote here...
I could be wrong, but it seems that Arab and rural African cultures could give clues to how more ancient cultures functioned. And I admit I could have been off to even include it, I went off on a tangent, as I was grouping together all sorts of dominance rather than focusing on male vs. female.
Also, your thoughts about "subordinate" or sub-alterns...an interesting book if you want to follow up about dominance, specifically a theory of how white cultures became dominant when they seem to have less physical reason to have become so, is Guns, Germs and Steel. I found the author's writing style very difficult (many have this complaint) and gave up on it, but I watched the documentary, and it was fascinating. Unfortunately, I retained very little, but I highly recommend it if you're interested. It was, imo, quite an elegant theory.
I am going to do something out of character and channel my inner Baskol and LIKE your post before I read it, @Underscore
Just because I find it cool that you dug up your undergrad dissertation.
My hat's off to you!
Just because I find it cool that you dug up your undergrad dissertation.
My hat's off to you!
Thanks, but I didn't. It's lost. I just blathered from memory. The original has a contour survey and finds database and a statistical analysis comparing monument shape with location and grave goods. All I have is an ancient floppy disc that probably won't work and nothing to read it on lol. Oh well.
I also lost a printer and my tent in the move. Not to mention all my plants, half my gardening tools and and some furniture. I gained four yard brushes though somehow.
Apathy79
Arcanist
- Oct 13, 2019
- 482
I couldn't tell you the gender of most posters here that haven't revealed it. I've already assumed the wrong one enough times that I have zero confidence guessing in most cases. I imagine anyone who says they're the opposite gender to reality would get away with it forever, and people would project gender assumptions on them that fit the gender they say they are.
GoodPersonEffed
Brevity is my middle name, but my name was TL
- Jan 11, 2020
- 6,727
Rather than quote specific sections of text from @Underscore's comment #71, I'm going to continue the conversation.
Here's a loose summary of what my comment follows:
@Epsilon0 brought up biological imperatives, there was discussion of hunter-gatherer societies, I questioned cognition, and @Underscore looked at social examples in such societies that indicated cognition and delineation between genders.
I recalled things I had read about chimpanzee social practices and did some googling. I found this article, see spoiler, that speaks to both biological and social constructs. It appears that chimpanzees act one way in the wild, and another in zoos, so that gender from a social perspective is impacted by environment. The article also addresses cognition of the self and of genders evidenced by chimpanzees.
psmag.com
In considering @Underscore's comment, I also recalled things I've read over the past few months about social rituals, which relates to my previous comments about tribal cultures, as well as to @Epsilon0's ponderings.
I don't have any resources for this, I'm writing from memory. Many tribal cultures had/have male bonding rituals in which they go through physically and mentally extreme challenges, such as a young male becoming a man in the group by surviving such challenges. The rituals are kept secret from the female and young members of the tribe. Such rituals can be seen in contemporary culture in fraternities and secret societies.
Going back to the hunter-gatherer scenario, and the idea of women being seen as less intelligent than men, it makes sense to me that a male could say, as some men say today in Arab cultures for instance: "You stupid woman, what do you know of the world? You are here all day cooking and looking after children." Coming of age rituals would further reinforce the denial of knowledge to women.
Finally, the article I linked shows that the environment changes gendered behaviors. During WWII, women got a taste of freedom by working outside of the home to keep industries going while men were conscripted into service, or socially encouraged/shamed into service. Women resisted giving up jobs when men returned, heralding the birth of feminism. The article suggests a biological imperative for women to be choosy in selection as they are the ones who carry and nurture offspring. In the contemporary Western climate, with a combination of capitalism, industrialism, technology, and increasing equality for women, men are less able to compete for women based on brute strength and privileged knowledge, and from that perspective, it's understandable that some may feel resentment when up until only recently it was their socially sanctioned right and privilege to dominate females and to attract females based on dominance and social power. Women were supports for male social power, and carrying the offspring of powerful males ensured the selection of those traits. But even non-alpha males were more powerful than the most powerful women -- an example of this is in Buddhism, a brief aside.
Gautama had to be convinced by his monks to allow nuns into the sangha. He was concerned about the social impact of lettign them in, and about giving them equality. So he compromised. He agreed they were equally spiritual and capable of the practices, but in order to not incite the masses, he decreed that the lowest monk would have higher status than the highest nun. Even in contemporary sanghas, the highest status monks eat first, down to male novitiates, then the highest nuns, etc. Gautama was a high-status male who could have had a major impact on society had he chosen to allow female equality. And he claimed that the dharma, the Truth, is that the universe has the same order as society, keeping women in a subjugated position of what he admitted was more suffering.
To circle back to the original topic, I think that this all has bearing on Epsilon0's first comment after the OP, and is in keeping with the subsequent flow of the conversation, even touching on others' comments, such as the frustration @Mr2005 experiences.
Edit: One more thing about male dominance potentially being a biological construct...you can research for yourself, but there are very few species with matriarchal social orders, such as hyenas and a bird in Mexico. I wonder if natural selection kept a few female-dominant species in case male dominance ends up resulting in bad outcomes, much like vestigial traits never totally disappear. There are even rare exceptions to procreation, such as male seahorses being pregnant instead of females.
Here's a loose summary of what my comment follows:
@Epsilon0 brought up biological imperatives, there was discussion of hunter-gatherer societies, I questioned cognition, and @Underscore looked at social examples in such societies that indicated cognition and delineation between genders.
I recalled things I had read about chimpanzee social practices and did some googling. I found this article, see spoiler, that speaks to both biological and social constructs. It appears that chimpanzees act one way in the wild, and another in zoos, so that gender from a social perspective is impacted by environment. The article also addresses cognition of the self and of genders evidenced by chimpanzees.
Is Gender Unique to Humans?
Evidence from our closest evolutionary relatives suggests that we might not be the only animals with a sense of gender identity.
psmag.com
In considering @Underscore's comment, I also recalled things I've read over the past few months about social rituals, which relates to my previous comments about tribal cultures, as well as to @Epsilon0's ponderings.
I don't have any resources for this, I'm writing from memory. Many tribal cultures had/have male bonding rituals in which they go through physically and mentally extreme challenges, such as a young male becoming a man in the group by surviving such challenges. The rituals are kept secret from the female and young members of the tribe. Such rituals can be seen in contemporary culture in fraternities and secret societies.
Going back to the hunter-gatherer scenario, and the idea of women being seen as less intelligent than men, it makes sense to me that a male could say, as some men say today in Arab cultures for instance: "You stupid woman, what do you know of the world? You are here all day cooking and looking after children." Coming of age rituals would further reinforce the denial of knowledge to women.
Finally, the article I linked shows that the environment changes gendered behaviors. During WWII, women got a taste of freedom by working outside of the home to keep industries going while men were conscripted into service, or socially encouraged/shamed into service. Women resisted giving up jobs when men returned, heralding the birth of feminism. The article suggests a biological imperative for women to be choosy in selection as they are the ones who carry and nurture offspring. In the contemporary Western climate, with a combination of capitalism, industrialism, technology, and increasing equality for women, men are less able to compete for women based on brute strength and privileged knowledge, and from that perspective, it's understandable that some may feel resentment when up until only recently it was their socially sanctioned right and privilege to dominate females and to attract females based on dominance and social power. Women were supports for male social power, and carrying the offspring of powerful males ensured the selection of those traits. But even non-alpha males were more powerful than the most powerful women -- an example of this is in Buddhism, a brief aside.
Gautama had to be convinced by his monks to allow nuns into the sangha. He was concerned about the social impact of lettign them in, and about giving them equality. So he compromised. He agreed they were equally spiritual and capable of the practices, but in order to not incite the masses, he decreed that the lowest monk would have higher status than the highest nun. Even in contemporary sanghas, the highest status monks eat first, down to male novitiates, then the highest nuns, etc. Gautama was a high-status male who could have had a major impact on society had he chosen to allow female equality. And he claimed that the dharma, the Truth, is that the universe has the same order as society, keeping women in a subjugated position of what he admitted was more suffering.
To circle back to the original topic, I think that this all has bearing on Epsilon0's first comment after the OP, and is in keeping with the subsequent flow of the conversation, even touching on others' comments, such as the frustration @Mr2005 experiences.
Edit: One more thing about male dominance potentially being a biological construct...you can research for yourself, but there are very few species with matriarchal social orders, such as hyenas and a bird in Mexico. I wonder if natural selection kept a few female-dominant species in case male dominance ends up resulting in bad outcomes, much like vestigial traits never totally disappear. There are even rare exceptions to procreation, such as male seahorses being pregnant instead of females.
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How exciting!
And what an intellectual feast to read abour gender from an archaelogy/anthropology point of view (gracefully provided by @Underscore) and a biology perspective (thanks to the great research done by @GoodPersonEffed).
There seems to be somewhat of a consensus among us: Males (human and non-human) are aggressive, domineering, and status-seeking, while females are generally less political and less violent because they have other priorities, like caring for their offsprings.
It seems the case, as far as humans are concerned, is pretty much settled considering the scope of this post.
Regarding non-humans, there seems to be some evidence of the existence of gender roles, though more research is needed to prove that that behavioral differences between males and females are socially determined.
And what an intellectual feast to read abour gender from an archaelogy/anthropology point of view (gracefully provided by @Underscore) and a biology perspective (thanks to the great research done by @GoodPersonEffed).
There seems to be somewhat of a consensus among us: Males (human and non-human) are aggressive, domineering, and status-seeking, while females are generally less political and less violent because they have other priorities, like caring for their offsprings.
It seems the case, as far as humans are concerned, is pretty much settled considering the scope of this post.
Regarding non-humans, there seems to be some evidence of the existence of gender roles, though more research is needed to prove that that behavioral differences between males and females are socially determined.
Personally I think the whole matriarchal thing is fascinating.
www.mydomaine.com
Why are some societies matriarchal?
A Look at 5 Matriarchal Societies Throughout History
Here's an inspiring look at matriarchal societies through the ages
PoisonedJuliet
You saucy boy!
- Feb 12, 2020
- 1,191
PoisonedJuliet
You saucy boy!
- Feb 12, 2020
- 1,191
Erdapfel
I am a german potato
- Feb 19, 2020
- 48
I believe, that there is also a lust for dominance in females. Dominance is not a trait wich is exclusively reserved to males. I believe that every conscious being loves to be in control. As long as it takes place in a playful manner, I also don't see any moral obligation in it.
Of course, these excessive discriminations against a certain gender is a violation of any moral threshold. I do not think that these destructive properties can be assigned to a certain gender, but rather that they come from people who are mentally ill and at the same time are in positions of power. I believe that all genders are being discriminated in some way and that this is primarily the result of tyranny, black pedagogy and religious fanaticism.
(Where you able to guess my gender based on my text?)
Of course, these excessive discriminations against a certain gender is a violation of any moral threshold. I do not think that these destructive properties can be assigned to a certain gender, but rather that they come from people who are mentally ill and at the same time are in positions of power. I believe that all genders are being discriminated in some way and that this is primarily the result of tyranny, black pedagogy and religious fanaticism.
(Where you able to guess my gender based on my text?)
We all fit somewhere under the normal curve, even if we are in the minority at either end.
I have many traits that could be considered more stereo-typically female and I'm very happy with how that works.
But seriously, I can't put a duvet in a duvet cover without swearing for half and hour and finally breaking down into tears and calling for a woman to help me.
Why? Why can't I do that? That is some serious gender sorcery right there.
I have many traits that could be considered more stereo-typically female and I'm very happy with how that works.
But seriously, I can't put a duvet in a duvet cover without swearing for half and hour and finally breaking down into tears and calling for a woman to help me.
Why? Why can't I do that? That is some serious gender sorcery right there.
That's seen as justifiable to hate them all because of what one did.
I once met a man.
He was a bachelor.
My conclusion: All men are bachelors.
"Impeccable" logic...
We all fit somewhere under the normal curve, even if we are in the minority at either end.
I have many traits that could be considered more stereo-typically female and I'm very happy with how that works.
But seriously, I can't put a duvet in a duvet cover without swearing for half and hour and finally breaking down into tears and calling for a woman to help me.
Why? Why can't I do that? That is some serious gender sorcery right there.
I have many traits that could be considered more stereo-typically female and I'm very happy with how that works.
Skincare products are a case in point.
20 years ago you would find 1000+ skincare products for women in any department store.
None for men.
Skincare was a woman's domain.
Now both low end and high end brands offer skincare for men.
Skincare products have gone from being typical female artefacts to being more gender neutral.
(although they are still gender coded as far as coloring and packaging are concerned)
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Mr2005
Don't shoot the messenger, give me the gun
- Sep 25, 2018
- 3,622
Mr2005
Don't shoot the messenger, give me the gun
- Sep 25, 2018
- 3,622
It's kind of interesting don't you think how a partners thread might be used for something other than death and that's what freaks us out. I'm still getting used to what a strange place this is after over a year. I think it's simply thinking one thing and it being another. Being sold something under false pretences. If two people met and spent the rest of their lives together I'd be more than happy for them
Sabriel
for in that sleep of death what dreams may come
- Jul 23, 2019
- 209
Sex and death existing as mutually exclusive goals in a pro-choice suicide forum full of desperately lonely people? What a concept. What I have a problem with is vulnerable people being taken advantage of in order to coerce sex out of them. Why I said, "...as a means to an end".
Hypothetically speaking, two people meet on here and spend the rest of their lives together happily ever after? Sure, go for it, more power to them because I'm not so bitter that I don't want to see anyone else happy in the world. I just don't want to exist in it.
But I digress. I can't decide whether I should change my avatar to reflect gender-neutrality or a brightly colored one to reflect more of my angry personality, lol.
Hypothetically speaking, two people meet on here and spend the rest of their lives together happily ever after? Sure, go for it, more power to them because I'm not so bitter that I don't want to see anyone else happy in the world. I just don't want to exist in it.
But I digress. I can't decide whether I should change my avatar to reflect gender-neutrality or a brightly colored one to reflect more of my angry personality, lol.
GoodPersonEffed
Brevity is my middle name, but my name was TL
- Jan 11, 2020
- 6,727
@Sabriel, it would be an interesting experiment to see if people perceive a gender from what you consider gender-neutral.
I, for one, like your avatar and the Hamlet line.
Would you say the color grey is gender neutral?
Mr2005
Don't shoot the messenger, give me the gun
- Sep 25, 2018
- 3,622
I wouldn't touch that thread with a twenty foot barge pole. Lol that was such a male response my barge pole is bigger than Epsilon's hahaha.
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