faetal on 28/6/2012 at 15:23
Vasquez says it better than me.
ZylonBane on 28/6/2012 at 16:42
If this thread doesn't resolve thousands of years of debate on gender roles, I shall be cross with all of you.
Vivian on 29/6/2012 at 13:58
efficient shutdown, ZB.
Yakoob on 4/7/2012 at 02:59
I don't have much to add, anything I said could probably be just dismissed as more anecdotal experience as I haven't really studied the topics much.
That being said, I've really been enjoying this debate and big kudos to everyone, particularly faetal (who clearly did his homework!) and even those he dismisses like Papy, ne1ghbor or heywood, all very interesting points even if I do not necessarily agree with them. Ignore-list-threats aside, i think this thread shows TTLG can have some intelligent, well-behaved and very informative debates!
DDL on 4/7/2012 at 08:44
An interesting adjunct to what faetal is saying is that really, the "war of the sexes" is every bit a part of evolutionary history, in many many species. In a species with a clear male/female divide, it is generally beneficial for males to employ some or all of the following
A) impregnate as many females as possible
B) prevent said females being impregnated by other males
C) produce giant offspring, because "hey: it's not like I have to give birth to them"
D) offload as much childrearing responsibility as possible to the female
and other assorted douchey behaviours.
Evolution selects winning strategies, and winning strategies are those that produce offspring that produce offspring etc etc. Having a fuckton of offspring reduces the burden to care for any given individual, since you can't really care for them all, and if you have enough it doesn't matter if a load die through neglect.
C is an interesting one, since this is an area increasingly well studied: you can actually trace genetic point/counterpoint strategies by males and females to ensure giant offspring (in the male case) and smaller offspring (in the female case). Males after all don't need to worry about dying in childbirth or how many nutrients the growing embryos are stealing, whereas females really really do: a female producing a smaller, less healthy child will be more capable of actually producing another child, so there's a distinct evolutionary selection down the female line for the ability to oppose male-selected 'giant child' genetics.
All of which is by the by, but I was bored.
Anyway, point is, evolution has developed a ton of different ways of tackling this problem, based on the warring pressures on the two sexes and the environment in which they find themselves. We, however, are more or less unique in that the fairly simply biological needs of "survive, breed" have become incredibly muddled and distributed (so this gender warring is far from the fairly clear cut situations often observed in nature), and more importantly (being intelligent, self-aware beings with access to a fuckton of resources) we can CHOOSE how we handle it.
nbohr1more suggests using women employ sexual selection strategies to influence this...now firstly it's worth pointing out this would be evolution by guided selection (rather than natural selection), and thus would be probably more likely to introduce unintended errors: when you're selecting based on progress toward a preselected desirable ideal, you tend to focus solely on traits that go in that direction, ignore other potential changes. Hence you end up with things like the recent discovery that supermarket tomatoes (selected for convenient simultaneous ripening and so on) have actually also lost a gene involved in producing a particular flavour.
And anyway, genetic evolution, be it guided or natural, is SLOOOOOW. We're evolving culturally far more rapidly than we are genetically, and so behavioural changes in our attitudes to gender equality are going to stem overwhelmingly from cultural factors. And cultural factors are far easier to influence and change. And then change back if we get it wrong.
We have the power and the ability to examine exactly how much or how little the gender divide actually matters culturally (despite what our genetics may indicate), and how to treat it, so defaulting to 'a fairly douchey approach' seems a bit disappointing.
faetal on 4/7/2012 at 09:05
Excellent addition. Evolution remains one of the most if not the most interesting topics imaginable.
Quote Posted by DDL
A) impregnate as many females as possible
This one is tied in with why cultures tend to treat women more harshly for promiscuity than men too. The division of an organism into two sexes is rarely equal and in our case, men get quickly regenerating, cheap gametes to do what they like with while women have 1 gamete to play with per month and are out of action for 9 months plus nursing time, hence the balance is massively skewed. So a guy sleeping with as many women as possible is an evolutionarily strong strategy and increases the odds he'll send his genes into the future with a hope that some proportion of conquests also have decent traits, whereas as a woman doing the same is being very foolhardy with her genetic material by potentially rolling a dice with it. Being selective benefits women, not men. Obviously in our age of birth control, this should no longer be an issue and it can definitely be argued that women get far less grief for recreational sex these days than they would have 100 years ago, but there is still clear stigma (stud vs. slut effect). It is clearly pretty hard to wrest culture too far from the maths of nature, hence the time taken for culture to fall in line with reality.
faetal on 4/7/2012 at 09:23
Quote Posted by DDL
We have the power and the ability to examine exactly how much or how little the gender divide actually matters culturally (despite what our genetics may indicate), and how to treat it, so defaulting to 'a fairly douchey approach' seems a bit disappointing.
This, this, a thousand time this.
Cultural changes are like software patches for the brain and can subvert a great deal of the evolutionary impulses we're born with. Note how children will ask loudly why someone is so fat, why that man is kissing another man, why some people have black skin etc... As we mature, we develop sensibilities and those sensibilities are largely served from a cultural platter, which regularly receives updates engineered by group psychology.
heywood on 4/7/2012 at 12:09
Quote Posted by faetal
There are a lot of generalisations here. Sounds like something which mostly affects teenagers and people in their early 20s. Popularity contests as a form of reproductive advantage would be the competition among members of the same sex I alluded to earlier. Not really much to do with sexism. I don't get how it pertains to men and women competing with each other.
I see this more with people who are a bit older and are exiting a long term relationship, where suddenly it becomes important to be popular again in order to maximize their chances of finding another mate, so they rally their friends and try to reinvigorate their social life. And if they have a lot of mutual friends in common with their former partner, there can be some difficult competition over who aligns with who.
Quote:
How do men and women compete with each other for sexual partners? The only example I can think of it a homosexual man or woman competing with a heterosexual man or woman, but this is only a valid concept if the person being competed
for is bisexual, else there is no real contest. I don't think this can be considered the rule. Of course women compete with
each other, I never suggested they didn't.
I never said they compete directly for the same partners. That's kind of irrelevant.
Consider when men compete with other men, they are usually competing for power, money, rank, status, popularity, etc. and not literally fighting it out physically over the same woman. Most of the time, when we compete against each other we're not also chasing the same partner. Often, we don't even have the same tastes in women. We compete for things that make us more marketable to potential sex partners.
It's the same when men and women compete. It doesn't matter whether or not we're after the same partners. We compete over many of the same things that make us appealing to potential partners.
Quote:
The former actually comes closer to what I was getting at. What nbohr1more was posting above about his wife and mother in law was talking about women basically having some global agenda for taking as much from men as men will let them take. This is a "war of the sexes" concept IMO. The larger issue of rights is more of a creating a fair balance issue. Though they are likely linked at some level.
Only nbohr1more can say for sure, but I didn't get that from his example at all. His example sounded like classic "who wears the pants in this family" posturing, to establish who is the dominant partner in the relationship.
faetal on 4/7/2012 at 13:00
Heywood, for the last point:
Quote Posted by nbohr1more
The point is not about whether men are putting on charade to fool women. The point is that such an acquiescence will leave a power vacuum that women can then swoop into and plant their flags. Once entrenched, if there is any backsliding it'll be too late to return the "evil patriarchy" back to power. Any men they capture as mates along the way will (at least) willing to
give-up their "claim" to superiority even if it's a token gesture. Men who would bow before women in such ways are much closer to "not sexist" then those who would never let a woman be "in charge". Any yes, topically there must be some simplification and stereotyping. To achieve any broad-based goals you must act in a uniform way to overwhelm the statistical variance.
Women and men described as if fungible, power vacuums create by one and exploited by the other...
It does paint a rather militant scene.
Vivian on 4/7/2012 at 13:35
Quote Posted by faetal
fungible
Well,
I had to google that. Dunno about anyone else.
