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With 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

With 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.

erenyeager 3y ago
But these qualities are gendered. Women are in general not wanting to be leaders in the same fields as men, and these fields are generally in prominent prestige (think roles like banking, lawyers, leadership, etc). In fields like medicine where there is more gender balance and even more women at the lower roles (like Nurses), we see these fields have more qualities of care imbued as well as the leadership that a physician need demonstrate. But even it was controversial for women to be doctors in the times that physicians had a lot more authority... now when the field has curtailed physician autonomy and become more about shared decision making, it is interesting to see that more women are entering the doctor role. Still when it comes to leadership, it suits a man by his qualities to be a leader, while a woman is suited for other roles. You can just see this by the role mothers play in their families versus fathers. If you have an imbalance or the women starts taking control or leadership in the family when the men are still present, then you get a lot of wonky results.
- quixoticaxolotl 3y ago
  There are some errors in your reasoning, though. Here's one. When people collect datapoints and observe a difference in one case not present in the other, they sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that their dataset is exhaustive - that it captures all the variables that matter. In other words, it's easy to start with the observation "women tend to be more represented in fields that exhibit qualities of care and less represented in leadership roles" and conclude that the absence of the variable "has leadership" makes up the core difference. But this is a conceit that you, the observer, made. Your choice of variables to look at influenced your observations of what is different and therefore important. Here's a counterpoint that contradicts your observed conclusion. Female heads of state and politicians have been increasing in number throughout the last century, and have done remarkably well in those roles. Has the nature and autonomy of executive power changed like medicine (according to you) has? It has not. It is a sign that you have not taken all variables into account. Here's another error in your reasoning. Why those variables specifically? How do you know those are the variables your subjects are thinking about? When women sign up to be doctors and nurses and not CEOs, are they expressly telling you the shared decision making are the important variables? Or is it because you inferred that those variables are important because you can measure them? In the interest of correct methodology, here are some other variables that people have suggested to explain the same data: women are conditioned or socialized into early expectations of caregiving roles; women are rewarded for pursuing caregiving roles in a way men aren't; there are more barriers for women than for men, and so on. Now are these variables the correct answer? We don't know. It is a complex topic, because humans are complex. It is possible biology and perceptions of role play a part, as does socialization and others. But what we can do is go a little meta and ask the likelihood that a biological variable is a good explanation in the first place. Consider what a good explanation has to do: it has to provide a causal mechanism, and be able to explain how the cause led to the effect you see. The trouble with every single biological explanation that's been proposed in this area is that they don't provide this causal mechanism. What exactly is it that makes women gravitate towards submissive roles? Is it estrogen levels? Hormones? Menstrual cycles? But then people on hormone therapy, people born with extra chromosomes, people with hermaphroditic parts, and so on should all display manifestly different behaviour and choices, which they don't. To explain these differences, you need to invoke more and more factors, until you end up with epicycles all over again. More generally, the history of biological explanations simply don't fare all that well in comparison to sociological explanations. A reasonable prior is to assume that it may play a small part, but that larger effects are driven by how society treats and works with people.

erenyeager 3y ago

But these qualities are gendered. Women are in general not wanting to be leaders in the same fields as men, and these fields are generally in prominent prestige (think roles like banking, lawyers, leadership, etc). In fields like medicine where there is more gender balance and even more women at the lower roles (like Nurses), we see these fields have more qualities of care imbued as well as the leadership that a physician need demonstrate. But even it was controversial for women to be doctors in the times that physicians had a lot more authority... now when the field has curtailed physician autonomy and become more about shared decision making, it is interesting to see that more women are entering the doctor role. Still when it comes to leadership, it suits a man by his qualities to be a leader, while a woman is suited for other roles. You can just see this by the role mothers play in their families versus fathers. If you have an imbalance or the women starts taking control or leadership in the family when the men are still present, then you get a lot of wonky results.

quixoticaxolotl 3y ago
There are some errors in your reasoning, though. Here's one. When people collect datapoints and observe a difference in one case not present in the other, they sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that their dataset is exhaustive - that it captures all the variables that matter. In other words, it's easy to start with the observation "women tend to be more represented in fields that exhibit qualities of care and less represented in leadership roles" and conclude that the absence of the variable "has leadership" makes up the core difference. But this is a conceit that you, the observer, made. Your choice of variables to look at influenced your observations of what is different and therefore important. Here's a counterpoint that contradicts your observed conclusion. Female heads of state and politicians have been increasing in number throughout the last century, and have done remarkably well in those roles. Has the nature and autonomy of executive power changed like medicine (according to you) has? It has not. It is a sign that you have not taken all variables into account. Here's another error in your reasoning. Why those variables specifically? How do you know those are the variables your subjects are thinking about? When women sign up to be doctors and nurses and not CEOs, are they expressly telling you the shared decision making are the important variables? Or is it because you inferred that those variables are important because you can measure them? In the interest of correct methodology, here are some other variables that people have suggested to explain the same data: women are conditioned or socialized into early expectations of caregiving roles; women are rewarded for pursuing caregiving roles in a way men aren't; there are more barriers for women than for men, and so on. Now are these variables the correct answer? We don't know. It is a complex topic, because humans are complex. It is possible biology and perceptions of role play a part, as does socialization and others. But what we can do is go a little meta and ask the likelihood that a biological variable is a good explanation in the first place. Consider what a good explanation has to do: it has to provide a causal mechanism, and be able to explain how the cause led to the effect you see. The trouble with every single biological explanation that's been proposed in this area is that they don't provide this causal mechanism. What exactly is it that makes women gravitate towards submissive roles? Is it estrogen levels? Hormones? Menstrual cycles? But then people on hormone therapy, people born with extra chromosomes, people with hermaphroditic parts, and so on should all display manifestly different behaviour and choices, which they don't. To explain these differences, you need to invoke more and more factors, until you end up with epicycles all over again. More generally, the history of biological explanations simply don't fare all that well in comparison to sociological explanations. A reasonable prior is to assume that it may play a small part, but that larger effects are driven by how society treats and works with people.