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By thinking that crap you will raise your kids with those misconceptions and they will be true. nothing is because of gender. Everything is because of social o

• philwelch 15y ago
  Actually it's a question of considerable empirical debate, and the consensus answer to the nature or nurture question in general is "some of both". You are discussing political doctrine, not empirical science, when you make such bold claims.
  • einhverfr 15y ago
    One of the things to note is that before the industrial revolution, women literally ran some of the most important sectors of the economy. In medieval Iceland the cloth that they made was even legal tender. Talk about "making money" (literally)! I actually see modernist feminism as a response specifically to the fact that the industrial revolution largely completed an economic trend that had been going on since the late Middle Ages, which was the displacement of women economically and the taking over of these industries by men. Women, deprived of their historical economic place in Western society, had to find a new economic place, and the need for this was the catalyst for women's suffrage, the women entering the factories and schools, and the like. This lead to an extremely male-normal society, though, and it has meant that women are still suffering for that. The genders cannot be equal where one is normal and the other not. Note that Robbie Davis-Floyd documents in her (excellent) book "Birth as an American Rite of Passage" that in medical textbooks (at least in the early 90's when she was writing this one) that male figures were overrepresented among diagrams of healthy anatomy, while female figures were overrepresented among diagrams of disease. That doesn't mean that there aren't biological differences that don't come into play. But how those differences manifest is very much tied to culture. But culture is not without limits--- it is subject to functional imperatives, both biological and social in nature. Consider this: marriage, as an institution which centers around procreation and childraising, is more universally recognized in ritual practices than funerals are. There are social imperatives at work even when biological ones are not (certainly there is no biological imperative to get married). The social imperative there is in fact quite obvious when you start looking at differences between paternity and maternity considerations. Women are mothers if they have given birth. Men are fathers typically if they are recognized by society or the law as such, and this is only loosely tied to biology (even in the US today--- consider that 52% of never-married mothers never apply for child support, often out of a desire not to have further contact with the putative biological father, but in other cultures a child born out of wife-swapping or wife-loaning is always the child of the woman's husband). So a social imperative of managing paternity considerations and providing stable economic units for childraising often are decisive here.
• sliverstorm 15y ago
  nothing is because of gender. Everything is because of social organization. That's a pretty willfully blind stance to take. Have you never studied human biology? Or have you decided that you are simply above the chemicals in your bloodstream?
  • einhverfr 15y ago
    Social organization is subject to functional requirements based sometimes but not always on biology. There is a tendency to see our current social organization as dictated entirely by biology but that can't be right since, say, ancient Sparta or medieval Iceland were very different in important ways. So we can still work to create a society that works better for us.
    • sliverstorm 15y ago
      Social organization can be restructured, sure. I have no issue with that suggestion. But even functional requirements aside, the sexes have different biochemistry, and like it or not your biochemistry has an effect on your behaviors and nature. Perhaps it is small, perhaps it can be overridden, but to claim it has precisely zero impact on anyone seems like an endeavor in foolishness. Essentially I take issue with the claim that the only way the sexes differ is mechanical.
    • einhverfr 15y ago
      @sliverstorm: I am not convinced that biochemistry determines behavior differences as much as many biologists would like to think. There are cases where it does, of course, but on the whole our bodies are organic systems which learn behaviors based on external stimuli. One important source of that stimuli is culture, which also includes things like language. Physical environment provides another set of stimuli. And just because one thing seems more natural doesn't preclude other societies from doing things differently. For example Arnold van Gennep, the early Dutch anthropologist, spent a fair bit of space talking about the Todas in India which until reasonably recently practised polyandry. When you start looking at how polyandry was implemented in their culture, you can see clearly what problems they had to solve, and hence why polyandry is generally far more rare than polygyny. For example, if a woman has multiple husbands, then there is a question as to who is the socially recognized father. The Todas handled this through a series of rituals where the woman could select one of her husbands as the father of her children (regardless of having sexual relations with other of her husbands), and could re-assign that role going forward (i.e. for children born after the ritual, which she could only do while pregnant) if she so chose. Our biological systems are largely secondary to social inputs, I think. There are imperatives and some of those have biological origins. However, it's way too easy to assign too much responsibility to biology and too little to culture.
• einhverfr 15y ago
  nothing is because of gender. Everything is because of social organization. Gender, unlike biological sex, is a social construct. So quite frankly what you say isn't at odds with what I am saying. This being said, there are obvious factors in how differently situated men and women are with regard to reproduction, and because reproduction is a fundamental aspect of human life, this cascades fundamentally into other areas as well. How it cascades is dependent on social organization, as you point out. So the question I think we should be asking is how we build a society which gives more people what they really need without asking for soul-destroying tradeoffs. For my money I want to see fewer mega-corporations, and more family-run home businesses, and despite the current gender disparity, I think open source provides an opportunity here. The goal however most certainly should not be to tell women what they should want and that if they don't want to be CEO of some hot startup because the long working hours, lack of pay security, etc do not appeal to them, that there is something wrong with them. The goal should be to create an economy where people can contribute how they want and stop obsessing about why other people make the choices that they do.
• carsongross 15y ago
  "Nothing is because of gender. Everything is because of social organization." Nothing? Everything? Church starts on Friday, I guess.