Myth of Male Power[W:166,W:829]

[sangha]

Re: Myth of Male Power

We are exceptional in our ability to bend nature to our will, exterminate competing species, and massacre one another in the most time, resource, and labor efficient manner possible.

We are exceptional in more ways than that.

For example, we are exceptional in our ability to act in ways other than our natural instincts guide us to act

If anything, our approach to gender relations and social issues is bog standard for what might be expected from any reasonably social higher mammal. The simple fact of the matter is that males, unless they simply happen to not be around, are usually the dominant gender in nature, and generally conform to some sort of loosely defined social hierarchy (alpha, beta, omega, etca).

Speak for yourself. You may conform, but plenty of males are capable of thinking for themselves instead of just submissively being guided by "the pack"

 

[Gathomas88]

Re: Myth of Male Power

We are exceptional in more ways than that.

For example, we are exceptional in our ability to act in ways other than our natural instincts guide us to act

No one acts completely against their natural instincts. If they do, they tend not to last for very long, and are therefore removed from the gene pool entirely.

We are still very much the same cavemen were one hundred thousand years ago. We simply happen to have fancier toys to play around with.

Speak for yourself. You may conform, but plenty of males are capable of thinking for themselves instead of just submissively being guided by "the pack"

I deal with reality, not fantasy. Things are what they are. They always have been, and they always will be.

Societal deviants are just that; deviants, and nothing more.

 

[sangha]

Re: Myth of Male Power

No one acts completely against their natural instincts. If they do, they tend not to last for very long, and are therefore removed from the gene pool entirely.

And no one acts completely according to their natural instincts, unlike many other animals.

We are still very much the same cavemen were one hundred thousand years ago. We simply happen to have fancier toys to play around with.

I deal with reality, not fantasy. Things are what they are. They always have been, and they always will be.

Societal deviants are just that; deviants, and nothing more.

Yes, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Mary Shelly, etc are nothing more than social deviants.

 

[Gathomas88]

Re: Myth of Male Power

And no one acts completely according to their natural instincts, unlike many other animals.

According to what?

Yes, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Mary Shelly, etc are nothing more than social deviants.

What about them? Mary Shelly and Shakespeare wrote fiction, whereas Plato's ludicrous visions of "utopia" have inadvertently resulted in the deaths of millions in the centuries since his passing.

I'll take Thomas Hobbes and Machiavelli over the likes of them any day.

 

[sangha]

Re: Myth of Male Power

According to what?

Which word did you not understand?

What about them? Mary Shelly and Shakespeare wrote fiction, whereas Plato's ludicrous visions of "utopia" have inadvertently resulted in the death of millions in the centuries since his death.

I'll take Thomas Hobbes and Machiavelli over the likes of them any day.

They were all social deviants.

 

[Gathomas88]

Re: Myth of Male Power

They were all social deviants.

If you say so. :lol:

 

[sangha]

Re: Myth of Male Power

If you say so. :lol:

So was Darwin, Christopher Columbus, Einstein, and most of the others who have contributed to the progress of western civilization.

 

[Gathomas88]

Re: Myth of Male Power

So was Darwin, Christopher Columbus, Einstein, and most of the others who have contributed to the progress of western civilization.

Congratulations! You have watered down the term to the point of complete and utter irrelevancy.

Your point? :roll:

 

[sangha]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Congratulations! You have watered down the term to the point of complete and utter irrelevancy.

Your point? :roll:

Conformism is for slackers, losers and the other takers who contribute nothing to society

 

[Gathomas88]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Conformism is for slackers, losers and the other takers who contribute nothing to society

:lamo

Yea... No.

First off, nice red herring. Absolutely nothing you've brought up here in any way supports your apparent conviction that natural instinct, and the gender roles and social constructs it has resulted in, can be fundamentally altered or ignored.

Secondly, even the logic in your red herring is fundamentally flawed for the following reasons:

A) Not all forms of "non-conformity" are created equal. Going by your over-broad logic, we are all "non-conformists" in one way or another, myself included, if we so much as think about anything not commonly accepted.

This renders your argument effectively meaningless.

Neither Einstein or Columbus, for instance, were in any way "social non-conformists" in the same way that you claim to be.

B) From any objective materialist standpoint, almost literally every person you have listed so far was an objectively worthless "taker" who contributed nothing to society in general. They all devoted their time to writing, philosophizing, or studying the irrelevant while leaving the actual running and day-to-day maintenance of society in general to others.

I'm sorry, but the simple fact of the matter is that society can exist without philosophers, dreamers, and theorists. It cannot exist without workers, soldiers, or statesmen.

Even the most ethereal of "ivory towers" cannot stand without a base. :roll:

 

[Fiddytree]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Conformism is for slackers, losers and the other takers who contribute nothing to society

Yet conformism is the overriding social imperative. As important as non-conformists can be, the establishment usually wins.

 

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Gender relations place females in a submissive position to males in virtually every species of overtly social great ape we are aware of.

Why on earth would early humans have been any sort of exception to this?

Frankly, women do not possess anything remotely approaching "equality" even in the hunter-gatherer societies to which you refer. Men still do the vast majority of the hunting, and inhabit virtually all major positions of authority.

Because we're the exception to everything, if you didn't notice.

Again, your lack of knowledge of anthropology shows. You don't even understand what kinds of societies these were, let alone what gender roles were like.

 

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Now I've heard it all. Women were subjugated because they got fat. Gee, maybe they could have controlled their own fertility by, I don't know, timing their periods or just not having sex.

Maybe if you were even modestly educated on the subject about which you speak, it would surprise you less.

Yes, agriculturalists almost always have higher body fat. Higher body fat causes unnaturally high fertility.

Might have been easier if the unnatural constant pregnancy cycle agriculture brought didn't leave them so susceptible to being raped all the time.

Although it's worth noting that many women did do this, and even knew remedies that impaired fertility or caused abortion. They just weren't as effective as what we have now.

 

[Gathomas88]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Because we're the exception to everything, if you didn't notice.

Hardly. We still eat, drink, breathe, ****, and die, don't we?

At the end of the day, we're hairy stinking animals like anything else out there. We simply happen to be self-aware enough to question "why" we behave the way we do.

Again, your lack of knowledge of anthropology shows. You don't even understand what kinds of societies these were, let alone what gender roles were like.

It doesn't matter which society you're referring to. The simple fact of the matter is that gender "egalitarianism" of the kind you describe has never existed anywhere.

It has never existed in human society, and it has certainly never existed in nature.

In essence, you are chasing phantoms.

 

[Graffias]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Maybe if you were even modestly educated on the subject about which you speak, it would surprise you less.

Maybe if you were less of a feminist ideologue, you wouldn't come across as so ignorant.

Yes, agriculturalists almost always have higher body fat. Higher body fat causes unnaturally high fertility.

Agriculture is completely irrelevant to this discussion. My point was that sexual division of labor developed when humans were hunter-gatherers and not agrarian. There's a reason why men are physically stronger than women, and that's because prehistoric men needed physical strength in order to be effective hunters. Most prehistoric women were gatherers or full time mothers and were not hunters or tribal leaders.

It is easy for Western-educated scholars to fall into the trap of viewing hunter-gatherer social and sexual arrangements in the light of Western values. One common arrangement is the sexual division of labour, with women doing most of the gathering, while men concentrate on big game hunting. It might be imagined that this arrangement oppresses women, keeping them in the domestic sphere. However, hunter-gatherer women would not understand this interpretation. Since childcare is collective, with every baby having multiple mothers and male carers, the domestic sphere is not atomised or privatised but an empowering place to be. In all hunter-gatherer societies, women appreciate the meat brought back to camp by men. An illustrative account is Megan Biesele's study of the southern African Ju/'hoan, 'Women Like Meat'.[21] Recent archaeological research suggests that the sexual division of labor was the fundamental organisational innovation that gave Homo sapiens the edge over the Neanderthals, allowing our ancestors to migrate from Africa and spread across the globe.[22]

Hunter-gatherer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This totally debunks your ridiculous theory regarding men subjugating women as a result of increased female fertility provided by agriculture.

Might have been easier if the unnatural constant pregnancy cycle agriculture brought didn't leave them so susceptible to being raped all the time.

Don't try to wiggle your way out of this by playing the rape card. Please provide me with a source that shows that rape was the standard method of reproduction for prehistoric people.

Although it's worth noting that many women did do this, and even knew remedies that impaired fertility or caused abortion. They just weren't as effective as what we have now.

But the fact that they existed, and the fact that women could abstain from sex, contradicts your claim that increased fertility led to women becoming subservient to men. Obviously women then, just as now, had a certain amount of control as to whether they became pregnant or not. If women knew that getting pregnant would make them subservient to men and wanted to avoid this, then all they had to do was stop having sex with men.

 

[roguenuke]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Not to mention, it's the male contribution that determines the sex of the child.

This is true to a point. The woman's body and when they have sex relative to ovulation actually does play a role in the sex of the child as well.

 

[roguenuke]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Yep it's true. Take a near apocalyptic event left with a founder population of 100 people for a new society. Which has a better prognosis, a population of 95 women and 5 men or a population of 95 men and 5 women? I think we can all agree that the former survives based on biology.

Funnily enough, I believe the minority in either population would wield disproportionate power in relation to to their respective majority's.

Both situations would actually be horrible biologically speaking because of what was already mentioned. It would necessitate a lot of inbreeding whichever way it ended up. It wouldn't matter which situation was present. In fact, to avoid so much inbreeding, it may actually be better to have the 95 men and only 5 women (provided the women were younger), and allow a couple of generations to grow with very small numbers in order to rebuild the population with greater genetic diversity, rather than rushing to put a bunch of people on the planet who will have a high probability of mating with their half-siblings.

 

[SmokeAndMirrors]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Maybe if you were less of a feminist ideologue, you wouldn't come across as so ignorant.

Agriculture is completely irrelevant to this discussion. My point was that sexual division of labor developed when humans were hunter-gatherers and not agrarian. There's a reason why men are physically stronger than women, and that's because prehistoric men needed physical strength in order to be effective hunters. Most prehistoric women were gatherers or full time mothers and were not hunters or tribal leaders.

This totally debunks your ridiculous theory regarding men subjugating women as a result of increased female fertility provided by agriculture.

Don't try to wiggle your way out of this by playing the rape card. Please provide me with a source that shows that rape was the standard method of reproduction for prehistoric people.

But the fact that they existed, and the fact that women could abstain from sex, contradicts your claim that increased fertility led to women becoming subservient to men. Obviously women then, just as now, had a certain amount of control as to whether they became pregnant or not. If women knew that getting pregnant would make them subservient to men and wanted to avoid this, then all they had to do was stop having sex with men.

I never said there wasn't typically a division of labor, did I. What I said is that they didn't sit around at home all day pumping out children.

There were plenty of women of stature, although stature meant something different. It wasn't associated with power, but rather with age and knowledge. This was true for both men and women. There were no "kings." Or queens, for that matter.

Also, most hunter-gatherer societies don't rely on hunting very much. The overwhelming majority of their diet is plant matter.

Though males do typically hunt, there have also been female hunters observed, and they seem to be just as effective as male hunters. Keep in mind, humans use tools, and they typically aren't trying to take down rhinos with their bare hands. Humans don't hunt like lions.

Post agriculturally, most women were not given the option to not have sex with men in most cases. If you want to see how this works in real-time, just take a look at the third world. It's rare for a woman to not be raped in her lifetime.

 

[sangha]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Yet conformism is the overriding social imperative. As important as non-conformists can be, the establishment usually wins.

There's nothing imperative about conformism. And the establishment always loses in the end; it's change that wins

 

[Fiddytree]

Re: Myth of Male Power

There's nothing imperative about conformism. And the establishment always loses in the end; it's change that wins

Usually certain changes are accepted, frequently with diminished strength, and then become the new norm-enforced by conformism.

 

[Gathomas88]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Usually certain changes are accepted, frequently with diminished strength, and then become the new norm-enforced by conformism.

Exactly. Society accepts that which is useful, and rejects that which is not.

It could not survive otherwise. As a matter of fact, if non-useful standards of conformity are adopted or somehow manage to stick around in spite of themselves, it often won't.

 

[Henrin]

Re: Myth of Male Power

This is true to a point. The woman's body and when they have sex relative to ovulation actually does play a role in the sex of the child as well.

Yes, but only because of the sperm characteristics in the male and female sperm. The distance traveled needs to be lower for the male sperm due to it not being as well suited for the conditions of the womans body, while a shorter distance takes advantage of it's speed. Female sperm are better for longer journeys due to its ability to better withstand the environment which will increase it's chances against male sperm.

If you really want to get picky you could also say that depending on the man your chances of having a male or female child is decreased or increased. This is due to some men having more male sperm than female sperm and others having more female sperm than male sperm.

In the end, the sperm itself is still determining the sex, it just that chances are higher of one sex or the another in given situations.

 

[CLAX1911]

Re: Myth of Male Power

There's nothing imperative about conformism. And the establishment always loses in the end; it's change that wins

You can't stop progress

 

[CLAX1911]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Exactly. Society accepts that which is useful, and rejects that which is not.

It could not survive otherwise. As a matter of fact, if non-useful standards of conformity are adopted or somehow manage to stick around in spite of themselves, it often won't.

Very few standards are really useful. It seems we only keep them to not offend the least tolerant among us.

 

[sangha]

Re: Myth of Male Power

Exactly. Society accepts that which is useful, and rejects that which is not.

Like the way it's rejecting traditional gender roles and homophobia