Are Women as Good as Men?

Great Debates
1

alright, this is NOT trolling… or rather… it is… but not my trolling so yelling at me doesn’t help.

on my school’s message board a topic thats up right now is if women are REALLY equal to men. my point in posting this is that I can tell that all the arguements made are wrong, and I personally strongly belive men and women ARE equal… I just don’t know exactly why…
the basic thesis of the against side is:

if women are so great, why are they always dominated by men, forever and always across all time and all culture?

thats pretty much true, untill the last hundred years 90+% of cultures hold women as inferior. some cultures hold women as equal (or roughly equal). in all of history other than the probobly fictional amazons no culture has ever had women subverting men.

it seems like for two equal sides, it sould roughly be an equal number of cultures where men are superior to women, ones where they are equal and ones where women are superior to men.

the first arguement against that that came up was that
control != be better than

with black people being the example. blacks were slaves and that doesn’t mean white people are better than them. but the counterexample is that its true blacks and whites are equal, and thats why whites subverting blacks only lasted in a local area over a short period of time (in the grand sceme of things a few hundred years isn’t very long and happening in one or two countrys isn’t very important a temporary control means less than a perminent universal one)

the second arguement was that men are just plain stronger and bigger so tend towards dominateing. if this is true why aren’t asians the slaves of the world, as they are smaller and weaker than other people. why have blacks who geneticly tend to be larger than whites get dominated at all? if bigger than = will invariably dominate.

furthermore women have some inherent strengths males don’t. such as numbers, there are always more women, dureing wars there are ALOT more women. why don’t cultures that have lost generations of men to a war ever flip over and have the women take over.

women also control err… sex… which is pretty powerful. as do they control family more directly child raiseing is definitly the relm of women over most of the world, as is teaching them values.

err… right… this is an interesting topic… it just happens to suck when argued on the school message board, am hopeing that if I post this on an intelegant board then I will hear the intelegant argueing that I was hopeing for.

mostly I just wanna hear why I’m right and why men and women really are equal… but it would be kinda nice if people pick up devil’s advocate too.

2

Putting aside your myriad of spelling, logical, and assumptive errors, the answer to your question is woman and men have different strengths across the spectrum. Men, perhaps owing to the genetic imperative, must either prove themselves superior or die trying to pass their genes along. This accounts for the domination of men in such categories as generals, stunt men, and homicides. Women, programmed to network and compromise for the comity and stability of the social group, are better at such categories as caregiver, politician, and betrayal.

In summation, there are impossible to compare on such a general basis, except to say that men tend towards the extremes, and the history books rarely write about the extreme failures.

As a side note, we’d like to send you a dictionary and a map to your nearest library, in the hopes that your next query will be phrased more intelegantly

-Ace

3

Well, sweetie, first you have to define “as good as men at what?” Arm wrestling, higher mathematics, scuba diving, what? You have to set some parameters before you can have any kind of sensible debate that’s going to be more than just an endless stream of “are not!” “are so!” “are not!” “are so!”

And second, understand that even on a spiffy board like the SDMB, you’re never gonna get any kind of final consensus or agreement, because people are never gonna agree on this. It’s not really something that can ever be “proved”, and in that respect it’s like the debate over whether God exists.

BTW, it’s not “trolling” to ask difficult or even provocative questions–it’s only “trolling” when it seems like you’re asking them just to pick a fight and get people upset, which your OP does not.

4

Cut him some slack, Ace–we’ve occasionally cut you some slack since June of 2001. :wink:

5

Well, men do tend, on average, to be physically taller and stronger than women. Women also have the disadvantage, physically, of getting pregnant, which can reduce their mobility and speed, and, make them, while in labor, pretty much helpless. Also, putting aside things like artificial formula and animal milk, only women can nurse children. Therefore, in early life, at least, they are primary caregivers. So, in a lot of ways, men are physically superior to women. This does not, however, lead to the conclusion that men are intellectually or morally superior to women, and, in a technological society, physical strength becomes less and less important.

6

I submit that women and men can be equal in worth without necessarily being equivalent in every way.

And I just want to point out that although being big and strong isn’t really the advantage it was in early history, the fact that men continue to be, on average, bigger and stronger than women is probably due to the fact that women are still selecting the biggest and strongest men for mating. So, women - you’ve got noone to blame but yourselves.:wink:

7

I think it’s just more likely that, as steroids go, testosterone is more effective in increasing muscle mass than estrogen.

8

Duck Duck Goose– Wha? I can count the number of times someone said, “Ace, you make no sense, but since you’re a good guy, I’ll overlook that” on the fingers of no hands. No quarter asked and none given, that’s my motto. Nickles, maybe. And if you think I didn’t cut him slack, you should’ve seen the redacted paragraph. :wink:

“woman and men.” Sheesh! I suck.

9

Because I value something and you don’t doesn’t make what I value inferior. Some cultures outwardly seem male-superior, but how complex is this culture? Are woman devalued in every aspect of this society or just in surface ways? As an American woman in my California culture, I feel equal to men in general. My vote, should I choose to use it, counts as much as any male’s vote. I spend my dollars as effectively as his. If someone doesn’t see me as useful as my male counterpart, it doesn’t make me less valuable or good, it makes that person’s judgement faulty in most cases. It depends on what you value when you judge what’s equal and what isn’t.

10

Bleh.

Is chalk better than cheese?

11

My evidence is entirely anectdotal, but, to date, no man has ever insisted that I get up in the middle of the night to trim my toenails.

12

Here is a related thread.

13

sigh, this arguement is as bad as the one on the school message boards!

I mean, since its a topic you don’t like you just attack me and my spelling!? for the love of god its not my topic! this is a topic I am argueing AGAINST.

and originally it was trolling, on a diffrent message board. but they sorta raised a question that I didn’t instantly find a good answer to. I am totally in the belife that men and woman are equal. that neither is better or worse.

the point (not MY point) is that “if woman are so great why have they always been second class citizens all over the world all through time”

why IS that?

again… I don’t belive women are inferior… someone else does… makeing fun of me for asking the question helps nothing… I just found it an interesting point in an arguement AGAINST me.

here is the question again:

Asumption: Men and Women have equal but diffrent strengths

Question: if this is so why have women never used their skills to become the top dogs of an area. is the female side of humainity that monolithic that they all got together and decided “nah we won’t abuse our powers” it seems like in the history of earth one group of women would really decide they wanted to be the leaders. or at the very least decide they wouldn’t like to be second class property (well that HAS happened, but only very recently)
if women are inherently equal to men, why do (did) they become the universal loser every time. (and I am asking WHY not trying to prove that they are not equal)

flameing me will not help… I am not speaking my own opinions, I am speaking opinions that I dislike but do not know specificly how to fight. I really honestly want to know why there are no amazons, I don’t want to prove women are worse then men.

And for better I mean… if you had god like powers, and you could magicly take every man and every woman on earth and come up with 100,000 tasks totally at random (plant corn, sew earmuffs, hotdog eatting contest, give birth, fight lions, multiply fractions, program in logo, sing, explain how a laser works, random tasks) and added up the scores of every man and every woman on earth then normalized it. would the scores come out very diffrent? is that cultural or inherent?

14

In many cases men ARE better than women. But only given certain definitions of “better.”
The average man is taller than the average woman.
The average man is stronger than the average woman
The average man is faster than the average woman

So given purely physical criteria, women just aren’t as good. This says nothing about their mental abilities though, which is equal to man’s.

I don’t have time for a long drawn out post at this point, maybe later tonight, but here are a few reasons why women were/are subjugated and, say, Japanese, weren’t.

  1. Women passively accepted subjugation.
  2. Women were left uneducated which hindered their ability to climb societal ladders and influence opinion.
  3. If the women tried to mobalize and change society through force, the men had the weapons, they had the overwhelming strength, and they had the numbers. Why? because
  4. Not all women would have fought. But the men would have because a revolution would have been threatening to the current social order.

The Japanese, on the other hand, weren’t captured as slaves because they were technologically advanced (more so than even Europeans), and could have defeated them in any attempts to kidnap citizens for slave use.

15

Why would the fact that men have subjucated women over many cultures and centuries make men better than women?

Whites enslaved blacks in the US for many years, does this mean whites are better than blacks?

Dogs chase cats and kill them if they catch them, does that make dogs better than cats?

16

No. Dogs are better than cats, sure, but that isnt’ why.

17

Cats rule, you lousy racist!

Simple observation tells us that men have genetic and hormonal physical advantages, but the same observations can tell us that in an increasingly mechanized world, physical advatanges don’t matter as much, most of the time. While professions with high physical demands (i.e. military) are biased toward stronger, faster humans (and thus toward men), these are well within the minority and nowadays in a technologically advanced Western society, being able to read, write, use a computer and drive a car lets one be far more useful than being strong but illiterate. Paternalistic cultures that deny basic education or opportunity to women are just crippling themselves. The short-term satisfaction of giving every man a chance at power over something or someone keeps them afloat.

Izzat articulate enuff fer ya?

18

"if women are so great, why are they always dominated by men, forever and always across all time and all culture? "
In the beginning, women were busy having the children, and then raising them. While they were doing so, someone had to go out and hunt and provide. This can be seen in other species as well. When society started to develop, the women were already used allowing the men to be the “protectors” so the men were able to easily slide into a position of power. Also, eventually it was a social thing for women to be considered inferior to men. If a person is raised with a certain belief, with few challenges to it, then chances are that they will continue believing this. Or at least that’s my theory.

Also, throughout the ages, the idea of “behind every great man is a woman” became more evident. Women became more skilled in being the brain behind the power, while letting the men believe that THEY were making the decisions.

19

Well looking at a historical analyses, a more accurate way of portraying male/female roles is that males were typically dominant in social/political spheres, and females were dominant in family/sexual spheres. Unfortunately because men were in charge of the political stuff they tended to write all the books, which is why we get all that drivel about women being inferior and that they should obey men. In fact writers across history spend so much time complaining that women ought to obey men that many historians believe it is unlikely that women ever ACTUALLY were subservient. Just wishful thinking on the part of some mysogynists who have come along. But people get ahold of their writings and assume they speak for everyone. Imagine if archaeologists 1000 years from how get ahold of Hustler. What will they think of us?

Some on this thread suggested women are “programmed” toward compromise. Technically that is not true…it is a myth that has grown out of the observation that women engage fewer acts of physical aggression than males. Females are just as competitive as males, perhaps even more so, but just in different ways…less so physically. More socially and emotionally. If you don’t believe me, watch women as they pick up an issue of the Swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and what they say about the models.

20

Biggirl, you misunderstand me. I’m not saying subjugation proves that men are better, I’m saying subjugation ensured women didn’t have the power to prove anything.
When you deny someone an education, an occupation, a position of power within society or the household, it’s easy to point to that person and say “see? you’re inferior to me.” How would one argue back? Who would listen?