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It is absolutely true that boys have been neglected. But the contempt of men is a recent phenomenon. Feminism has a great deal to do with it, demonizing masculi
by lo_zamoyski 3y ago
It is absolutely true that boys have been neglected. But the contempt of men is a recent phenomenon. Feminism has a great deal to do with it, demonizing masculinity by construing all men as brutes and promoting the false doctrine that men are unnecessary, that women are self-sufficient, that the patriarchy is some kind of evil oppressive thing. All of that is false. Men and women are complementary, which is to say they differ in ways that complete the other in some way. They need each other to help realize and become who they are. This doesn't necessarily mean every man and woman will marry or can marry or must marry, only that in the great social scheme of things, men and women have their unique genius to offer and range of roles to play in service of the other and the common good, even if it is remote.
Boys have different needs than girls. Treating boys like girls will not do them any good. All children need fathers, but boys are perhaps especially sensitive in this regard as men help model for boys what masculinity means. We see how the absence of a father translates into higher rates of various pathologies and delinquency in single mother households. Father also have an authority no mother can have, an authority that helps boys, and children in general, achieve the kind of moral formation need for adulthood.
There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good, beginning with the family unit. It provides the structure and order that enables everyone to flourish. Can things go wrong? Sure. But that's true of every social order or arrangement. You don't abolish something because it can go wrong or goes wrong sometimes. This is like solving poverty by exterminating the poor, or cutting everyone's hands off to "solve" theft. A healthy masculinity, the via media between effeminacy and brutishness, is sacrificial and it is good not only for men, but all of society, including women. The common good depends on it.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago> There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. It's because men are physically stronger than women. That's it. That's all it is.
- lockhouse 3y agoI don't think it's that simple. The fact that women give birth, have periods, and have a hormonal cycle that has wide ranging impact upon their psyche and decision making processes also has probably had a major impact on most cultures trending patriarchal.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoWhat do you mean by 'impact on their psyche and decision making processes'? They are less mentally capable in some sense? I'd like you to spell it out.
- zatrouthe 3y ago[flagged]
- lockhouse 3y agoThere are biological differences between men and women, everyone saying otherwise is deluding themselves.
- shadowgovt 3y agoNo doubt. The interesting question is which are relevant to some kind of patriarchal society. (Followed extremely closely by which were relevant but are no longer relevant?)
- retrac 3y agoIf you plot human height by sex, it's roughly a normal distribution for each sex, and the women are a few inches shorter than the men. Women are, indeed, physically different from men. They are shorter. What's often forgotten is how much the two populations overlap. In other words, a man who is the height of an average woman is unremarkable. A woman who is the height of an average man is also unremarkable. If there's any innate psych or cognitive differences -- an idea I'm not fully opposed to -- it's likely a distribution like that. But probably even more overlap. Not really something that would allow you to predict something about the person. No more than knowing someone is 5'8" would allow you to guess their sex with confidence.
- celeritascelery 3y agoMaybe in a society where leadership is based on challenges of physical strength (i.e. 1v1 combat for the right to rule). But that hasn’t been true of most cultures for millennia. It goes deeper than that.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoYou are saying that women are inherently 'less wise' or 'mentally weak' or some such? What are you saying?
- roflyear 3y agoWell, read the room. It is obvious what the tone of this discussion is - and it's pretty gross!
- jay_kyburz 3y agoAgainst my better judgment, I'll comment in this thread. I think the mistake in the post above is saying that physical strength has not been an issue for a millennia. The strong have been using the threat of physical violence to take power right up to and including today. In the home, at work, and in society at large.
- lockhouse 3y agoThat’s not what’s being said here at all. As has been said in multiple comments pregnancy and everything associated with it physically and biologically is the most likely factor. It’s not bigoted to point out that women are biologically different in ways that make them unlikely to be rulers.
- Phileosopher 3y agoTo put it bluntly, men are dumber. They're wired for task-to-task thinking, and their purposes are heavily motivated by challenges. Women, by contrast, are wired for safety, which is a far more holistic approach to purpose because they consider connections men wouldn't even _consider_. The downside of being smarter, though, is more unease about things you see that may present as a risk. It keeps females away from the bottom of the performance bell curve (men rank lowest in most metrics), but also from the top (men rank highest as well). All of it is reprogrammable by operant conditioning (a large part of it often happening within marriage), but those are the biological primitives.
- ok_computer 3y agoI’m on board with tailoring upbringing to the kid’s gender and being conscious of how society sometimes treats young men in a negative way. But I second that is a weird take or point to throw in.
- lowken 3y agoThis is not true. The reason men tend to rule things is because men tend to lift each other up in life to a higher degree than women do.
- ForRealsies 3y ago[dead]
- wrp 3y agoWe need to lay to rest the idea that patriarchal societies arise just because men are physically stronger. There are known quite a number of matriarchal tribal societies where inter-tribal warfare was a significant focus of their society, so physical violence was strongly tied to social status. I"m thinking of pre-contact North America in particular.
- diogenescynic 3y agoAnd more willing to use violence.
- oh_sigh 3y agoBut the physically strongest man is rarely the leader of a culture.
- naravara 3y agoIt’s probably less the strength and more the fact that before contraception women would be pregnant a substantial amount of the time. Hard to be engaged in the world when you’re having to do a bunch of pre-scientific rituals to try and ensure a safe and healthy birth a lot of the time. But that doesn’t really mean they weren’t involved in decision making, it just means they aren’t involved in the sorts of places where people will write any of it down for posterity.
- lllllkkkk 3y ago[flagged]
- thrixton 3y agoI’d put higher aggression (and capability to act on such) into the mix as well. From a long time ago, we were the aggressive hunters, warmongers, protectors of everything that “belonged” to us, including women and children. To this day, we’ll often be the protectors (and usually aggressors) in a violent situation, for the reasons above.
- jimmaswell 3y ago> All children need fathers Every study I've seen on the subject has said that children of same sex parents, including having two mothers, do as well or better than their peers across any metric of wellbeing or success.
- Panzer04 3y agoIs the implication instead that children should have two parents? Ie. Sharing the burden, more perspective and the like cause the benefits? If so, given that most children are born of conventional couples, it makes sense to say they should have their father in their life.
- pseudalopex 3y agoThe 1st comment said boys need fathers to model masculinity. And there is no advantage to say children need a father and mother if the truth is children need 2 parents. 2 parents covers more cases in fewer words.
- diogenescynic 3y agoI've seen multiple women wearing shirts in San Francisco that said something about 'mediocre white men'. I was kind of blown away as I have always been pretty hard left, but it was shocking how blatant racism/sexism if it's targeted at one particular group is almost fashionable.
- mustyoshi 3y ago[flagged]
- santoshalper 3y agoYeah, I'm going call bullshit on this. Almost every society is historically patriarchal because for thousands of years, human attributes tied to testosterone (strength, endurance, athleticism, aggression) were extremely valuable. The world is changing, and we need to change with it by developing a new, healthy society, not retreating into traditional structures and patterns that no longer serve us as a species.
- lllllkkkk 3y agoI disagree. Things are the same today as they were thousand of years ago, and they'll be the same for the next thousands of years. Believing this period of unusual prosperity and extended peace in human history will last for long is delusional. The only thing that matters is that we're still biologically the same.
- santoshalper 3y agoWhat a depressing worldview. I sincerely hope people like you fail to drag us back to our base instincts with your cynicism.
- csallen 3y agoIt's embarrassing for Hacker News that this is the top-rated comment. > All children need fathers > Father[s] have an authority no mother can have > There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good Really?? Where's the research that supports any of this? If you're going to make charged statements like this, you better at least bring some research to the table. Let's all take a good long hard look at ourselves. Just because we might feel frustrated, or displaced, or ignored, doesn't mean that we (and I'm talking to the men on this site who upvoted this comment) need to abandon the truth-seeking parts of us that desire the gold standard of logical, evidence-supported arguments. If you blindly support any statement in favor of "your side" just because it feels good to you emotionally, regardless of how speculative or questionable the reasoning is, then you have little right to criticize the "other side" for doing the same.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal The Americas has strong, persistent matriarchies. And even Sparta had a politically-active group of heiresses who rivalled the Kings for power.
- quixoticaxolotl 3y agoWith respect, there are some errors in your thesis. Specifically, you're attacking some strawmen. Here's the steelmanned version of the ideas you're saying are causing issues: - Instead of defining men / women, think of each human as a person. There are no strong men, sensitive boys, intelligent women, vulnerable girls - there are only strong people, weak people, hard people, soft people. Our job as society is to compassionately accept people as they are and encourage them to be their best authentic selves, instead of arguing there is some role they must force themselves to fulfill because they were born with a set of genitalia, because this promotes individual happiness and is the kind thing to do. - People's virtues are learned, not innate. Independent people can learn to accept help. People who are unsure of themselves can gain confidence. People are allowed to be vulnerable, but also to have the space to find roots, solidarity, strength and growth. Roles that traditionally would have gone to someone with a penis - head of household, soldier, provider - are achievable and manageable by anyone, because the virtues needed to hold those positions are learnable and not rooted in biology. The same holds in reverse - roles that would traditionally have been held by women are open to everyone. - People should be given freedom to flourish as they best see fit. They have rights to their bodily autonomy, securing their financial futures, achieving scholastic pursuits, respect and equality for their contributions, and more. Historically, this has not been the case, and this does not just apply to women's rights here - it applies to anyone who has had these opportunities denied. - Some human but deleterious attributes we should all grow beyond. Brutishness is an excellent example - as is shallowness, closed-mindedness, entitlement, ignorance, greed, dishonesty, and more. Some attributes are contextually awful - being stoic, for example, is a boon when you need to handle stressful situations, but it can also manifest as a lack of empathy for other's emotional lives. Note that none of these are attacking masculinity - if anything, point two contradicts exactly that, literally anyone can learn the virtues associated with masculinity and is why trans men are supported even conceptually. Rather, point four holds - there are a subset of awful virtues that are unacceptable or contextually awful from anyone that have been attached to being a man, such as entitlement to sex, resorting to anger in lieu of healthy expressiveness, and assuming they must shoulder all burdens instead of being allowed to seek help. In other words, mainstream movements are attempting to abolish toxic masculinity, not masculinity itself. You discuss the emotional needs of boys and girls as being different (which may or may not be valid, depending on the best available evidence), but then you argue that treating boys like girls is not the right thing to do, which is not what anyone is proposing at all. Again, the idea is that people are people, not their bodies. Girls and boys are people, capable of feeling, wanting and expressing the full range of emotions. People want to treat children in ways that allow them to be emotionally expressive and mature adults. Further, when you talk about the patriarchy, you are again not taking point one and two into account. Nobody wants authority, strength, boldness, vitality, etc. to go away - these are all great virtues. Rather, they want the idea that these qualities are somehow gendered to go away. If you want strong leaders, find them in both genders. Additionally, historically, the patriarchy you are discussing has tended to enshrine point four virtues rather than eliminated it - it's the same system that inflicted foot binding tortures, made Indian women throw themselves into funeral pyres when their husband passed, allowed female infanticide to flourish, and so on. These are all terrible things and bundled into a parcel of ideas about what men "should" be: not just protectors, but architects of their offspring / wives / sister's fates. We have managed to overcome many of these core underpinning beliefs, but there still remain a lot that should not go unchallenged. So, respectfully, I would ask you to at least attack the right thing. It is possible your value systems are opposed to all the points above, and that's fine. But if a value system has to reach towards attacking strawmen of other viewpoints, then it is not a good sign that that value system has been arrived at fairly.