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I mostly agree with the idea that women in modern society are given general priority/encouraged to spend time with their children vs their male partners. What I
by mklim 11y ago
I mostly agree with the idea that women in modern society are given general priority/encouraged to spend time with their children vs their male partners. What I disagree with is that this fact of modern society is biologically inherent to the ability to give birth itself. (Maybe related to biology in other ways, I could see an argument for hormone-based brain differences, but that wasn't what I was nitpicking in your first post.)
The multiplicity of options that women currently have (stay at home mom without shame and/or a career), is a result of how our society reacts to the biological fact of childbirth (among other things), not an innate result inherent to the fact itself. You suggest this yourself by saying "unless women are being enslaved or raped (not the norm in the first world), they control who gets to procreate." In other societies, the ability to give birth could result in widely different outcomes for women.
Additional edit: Even accepting your premise that women have more "bargaining power" than men in interpersonal relationships, that would again be a function of society's reaction to biology rather than biology itself. It's true that bearing a child to term takes several orders of magnitude more time and resources than the act of impregnating someone. But the idea that "limited resources have a price" and so the people who can become pregnant have leverage against the ones who don't isn't biological. Limited resources could just as well be seized and then redistributed by the government to the general population for free. The fact of childbirth is biological, but the reaction is societal.
- facepalm 11y agoI don't understand what you mean by "biologically inherent" - I never claimed that biology forces us to react in such and such a way to mothers. The only thing you need to assume to understand the modern situation of men vs women is that women can give birth and men can't. That is a purely functional thing, no "biological programming" necessary. I am not making any claims about biological programming. Are you saying plausibly women could be seized by the government and distributed to men to create children? I think this actually happens in some societies/cults, or it even was the norm in the past (and in the third world, where arranged marriages are the norm). But we are talking about western society here. Still, it might not be that easy to distribute wombs - women can perhaps secretly abort pregnancies or use contraceptives, or make themselves infertile. Again, if you have witnessed your wife giving birth, I think the idea to take the children away from her becomes quite absurd. There is a reason it is usually not randomly determined who gets to stay home to look after the offspring. (Historically presumably other factors, too, such as pregnant women and women after birth not being able to do hard manual work which was necessary for survival - so the division of work was a no-brainer).