Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing if those women want security rather than high-risk, high-reward scenarios (which happens to be a pretty much universal difference between the sexes). But I agree that making female participation a requirement in business is a shaky idea; it’s bad for competitiveness, it’s bad for talented driven career women who do want to make it to the boardroom but find it already crammed with female “stooges”, etc.
But the point is, it is difficult to sort out what differences are attributable to hardwiring and what are attributable to societal conditioning. Standardized testing is not a good measure, because there are no controls for societal conditioning or hardwiring.
I happen to believe that the patriarchal structure is not built on hardwiring, but on the superior physical strength and size of men as compared to women. As civilization progresses, brute strength will hopefully become less of a factor and patriarchal society will fade.
I believe there most likely are differences in hardwiring between genders. What I do not believe is that those differences warrant that one sex should prevail over the other.
Looking at my last post, this part doesn’t sit quite right with me:
I don’t think brute strength is as much of an overt factor as it was in the past, although in some societies, for example where women are killed for not wearing burqas, it is still overt. But I believe patriarchal society originally evolved because of brute strength, not because males are more fit to rule society.
I believe that patriarchal society originally evolved because non-patriarchal societies went to the wall when they bumped up against patriarchies. It seems logical to suppose that in pre-history, some cultures tried one thing, some another. As to the future, there seem to be the following possibilities:
- Some societies will continue to be patriarchal. They will prove more successful than those that are not. Patriarchy will (continue to) be dominant.
- Some societies will continue to be patriarchal. They will prove less successful than those that are not. Patriarchy will die out.
- Some societies will continue to be patriarchal. They will prove neither more nor less successful than those that are not. Patriarchy will continue, but will not be dominant.
- No societies will continue to be patriarchal. A kinder, gentler, woman-centred social model will predominate. A new Golden Age will be ushered in.
- No societies will continue to be patriarchal. A kinder, gentler, woman-centred social model will predominate. It will prove unsustainable. Humanity goes to the wall.
- No societies will continue to be patriarchal. A kinder, gentler, woman-centred social model will predominate. It will prove unsustainable. Humanity hastily abandons the experiment before it goes to the wall.
Others?
It’s certainly true that it is difficult, but there has been a good deal of progress. There are some controls for heritability vs. environment, which made possible the formulation of the Three Laws of Behavioural Genetics. For example, large scale studies testing sets of identical twins who grew up in a shared environment or who were separated at birth.
Despite the limitations, standardized tests thus far suggest that heritability has a good deal more effect than environment. There’s a summary of the state of the research at Behavioral Genetics: A second look at twin studies, which notes a verdict that “For traits that are substantially influenced by heredity, the approximately two-fold difference in genetic similarity between the two types of twins should outweigh any complications”.
Men and women are undoubtedly different on behavioural levels that appear to be based in their biology (with shared environment having some effect), and this manifests itself as the subjugation of women by men to some degree or the other in all cultures and environments. It is – like division of labour, differences in spatial cognition, or even desire to engage in casual sex – a sex-based human universal. That makes it difficult to treat as a variable product of society or culture or environment (given the wide range in obviously non-heritable behaviour between different cultures, such as language).
Like you, I most certainly do not believe that one sex must prevail over another; and I don’t think that acknowledging the biological predisposition for men to dominate women should be interpreted as a justification for some (unenlightened) men’s behaviour.
Some cultures definitely exaggerate this predisposition into rigid patriarchal structures that give us institutionalized behaviours like honour killings and second-class citizenship for females. Some other cultures have minimized (and continue to attempt to minimize) this sexual inequality with a variety of strategies. When it comes to informing these strategies (e.g., the examples from Scandinavia brought up by Rune) I suggest again that “equity feminism” has the upper hand in terms of science, reason, and common sense over “gender feminism” (which makes some claims that are untenable by today’s scientific standards, such as that gender behaviour is acquired).
7)Maybe a modified version of #4, where society isn’t necessarily women centered, but gender is not as much a determinant of societal role as it is currently?
Abe, the link you provided is interesting, and provides information about twin studies and the advantages and possible problems those studies present. I am not quite sure how twin studies would apply to gender differences in controlling for societal/environmental influences in standardized testing, since all the twins being studied would have been raised in a patriarchal environment.
I agree that there are biological differences, but I believe the reason males dominate is more physical than neurological. And physical differences will affect behavior, in my opinion. In the animal world, this is seen by the larger male animal subjugating the smaller or weaker male animals, in addition to subjugating the females. So this:
statement I agree with, but believe that the biological predisposition to win dominance is not necessarily hard-wired. Wanting dominance, however, may be hard-wired.
- Human society wasn’t patriarchal for hundreds of thousands of years. We became patriarchal when we adopted agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago. Agricultural patriarchal civilizations proved more successful than hunter-gatherer non-patriarchal civilizations and displaced them.
- Patriarchal societies are more efficient in the short run, in much the same way that a military organization run tightly with an intolerance for insubordination is more efficient than a democracy in the short run. Situations in which you want an organization that is very efficient in the short run are mostly “emergency” or “crisis” situations. The human situation with regards to food supply and security issues has effectively been such a situation, but this has largely changed in the last ~250 years, with accelerating change in the last 100.
- Democratic societies that do a better job of integrating the abilities and creativities of all members into the decision-making process are more efficient over the long haul, when there is sufficient room for a lot of trial-and-error and less unsurvivable risk associated with randomness and lack of social control.
- The modern threat to human survival lies not with lack of control but from the struggle for control itself. Failure to make the overwhelming vast majority of the species decently at ease with how social decisions are made will bring civilization down. Therefore:
A) Societies will continue to be patriarchal. Democracy will be imperiled from responses to terrorism as more and more unhappy people use increasingly lethal weapons to express their dissatisfaction with global-scale decision-making processes. Resultant, increasingly rigid and militatant governments will make increasingly belligerent control decisions and square off against each other. or
B) Societies will continue to move away from patriarchy. Its last grasps at hegemony — the religious fundamentalisms attempting to seize powers — fail, and social control continues to move ever closer to inclusive consensus models. Safety is achieved through lessening of the causal inclinations towards aggressive, violent behaviors rather than through coercive prevention thereof. (i.e, people may still have bad tempers but are far less likely to remain permanently pissed off about intolerable situations to the point of resorting to lethal behavior)
Note that a post-patriarchal society is not intrinsically woman-centered. Our western modern culture, which is kind of in mid-transition from patriarchy to post-patriarchal society, doesn’t relegate males to the sidelines, it just comes a whole lot closer to treating males and females as equals, both formally (before the law / in the official eyes of the government) and informally (in everyday interaction between everyday people).
I disagree. If that were true, the young, strong men would be in charge, not old, weak ones. For that matter, short men would never achieve power either; Napoleon being the obvious counterexample.
A theory I’ve heard ( and tend to agree with ) points out that women don’t appear to naturally form alliances as much as men do. They can ( feminist groups being an obvious example ), but it isn’t a natural impulse. You’ll note women’s rights never took off until women formed political organizations. This explains why men have historically been in charge; as a rule, it’s seldom been men vrs women, but many men vrs a few women at a time. The power = strength hasn’t made much sense for centuries; there are many other methods of achieving power.
Another personal observation : women put up with far more than they need to. For example, religious freedom is permitted in America, yet millions of women accept second class status. If, say, the Catholic Church decided that only women should be priests and that men weren’t allowed control of their own bodies, I doubt they’d have many male members for long.
These two points go together; women just don’t rise up against oppression as often or as strongly as men do. It simply takes less effort to oppress a group of women than it does a group of men.
I think it has less to do with alliances (which women do create, look at any woman with close girlfriends, look at the anti-slavery movements or pro-temperance movements - both female driven) and more to do with risk taking. Men, whether its learned or biological, are more likely to take risks. Women are more likely to value security - whether that’s biology or learned behavior I could argue either way (probably a some of both). Since gains are not made without taking risks, it follows that men have taken most of the gains.
First, girlfriends aren’t alliances; they are far more social relationships, rather than practical ones ( or at least that’s the impression I get as a guy ). Your other examples actually help prove my point - the anti slavery/temperance movements were fundamentally artificial; culture not instinct. If you reread my post, I specifically said women can and do form alliances; it is simply less likely to occur to them to do so. It’s hard to recognize this in more modern cultures; forming things like pressure groups is so much a part of our culture that we think of it quite easily as a solution to problems. Women have learned to make alliances, and are therefore doing better. Men have historically had an edge, because they tended to do so more often, and faster. Note how even in modern cultures you don’t see much of an “old girl’s network”, but do see an “old boy’s network”. For that matter, note the lack of female street gangs.
An example in nature are chimps. Bonobo chimp females form alliances, female lowland chimps don’t ( they compete with gorillas for food; when they form groups the gorillas are more likely to come after them ). Result : Lowland chimps are patriarchal, bonobos aren’t. If a male bonobo tries to harass a female, they gang up on him.
How often do you see that even in humans ? I’m not talking about a formal organization going after a man/men; formal organizations are cultural artifacts. I’m talking about a bunch of women deciding to, say, gang up on a rapist or wife beater ? This relates to your security argument; women would have been more secure historically if they have just formed alliances and stuck together.
Der Trihs says
In the animal kingdom (and there it is a kingdom), the young, strong males are in power. They have no way to store or save the power they gain. Old, powerful human males can store power through money and property.
I think males formed alliances to preserve their power, not necessarily because it is a male attribute. Women’s alliances would not have been allowed to gain power, but socially would have been allowed; just my guess.
I believe this is learned behavior from the current system.
There again, I look back to physical size and strength, not biological hard-wiring.
So sorry, this post is mine, not imthjckas’s post. My computer was working slowly so I posted on his and forgot to log off.
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- snicker * I wish. You have a curious (or American) definition of “left extremist” if you include Labour or The Center Party in it. I might grant you The Socialist Left Party, at least in their intentions. It remains to be seen if their influence ends up as anything beyond merely cosmetic. I’m not holding my breath.
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Anyway, I don’t deny that there are policies in parts of Europe, including my own country, which are specifically and explicitly aimed at improving the situation for women (as well as some aimed at improving the situation for men). Actually, I’m pretty happy about it, and regard it as positive for both men and women. And I don’t deny, far from it, that policies and practices which seem gender neutral on the surface can be, in fact, biased in favour of one gender.
What I asked Blake about was quite specific: Examples of policies which are labelled as “family friendly” but are biased in favour of women. I’m interested in seeing what “female biased” means to him. Anyway, you’ve given me another example, so I’ll have at it:
I do agree that this is meant to increase the number of fathers going on leave. If this succeeds (and the results so far aren’t all that encouraging) the result will be, in time, that it becomes more usual, and thus more acceptable, for fathers to take time off for their newborn. In my opinion, this will clearly be a huge improvement over the current situation for both men and women. In a society where the expectation of child care isn’t linked so closely to gender, it will be easier for all individuals to make the choices they feel are right for them, without that strong social pressure of “As a man/woman, you should do X, not Y”.
Can you (or anyone else) please spell out how this is bad for men? Or do you think it’s bad because while it improves the situation for both genders, the improvement might be bigger for women than men?
Virtually all human environments are patriarchal, which again suggests hard-wiring. I brought up twin studies because they are a good way to isolate variances in behaviour that may be due to genetics, unique environment, or shared environment. You had pointed out that there were no controls for distinguishing between hardwired and socially acquired behaviour, and that it was difficult to claim that such behaviour was innate. I disagreed on the bases indicated by studies on the subject, including twin studies. Intelligence, personality, mental illness, sexual orientation, even personality quirks, hours of TV watched, and level of political conservatism, all appear to have a firm basis in genetics first and environment second. That is to say, such similarities appeared far more prevalent between monozygotic [identical] than dizygotic twins even if they were raised apart in different environments.
Twin studies are also useful in discussing gender identity, which highlights the lack of support for the extremist feminist/nurture idea that basic gender behaviours are learned.
I don’t disagree about physical differences affecting behaviour, but if I read correctly you ascribe this particular behaviour pattern (of males to some degree subjugating females worldwide) to opportunism? I can see opportunism having an effect, but that doesn’t make sense in cultures where violence has been virtually eradicated, where strict laws protect women from abuse by physically stronger males, and where the average woman can get through the day - through the year even - without ever being physically threatened by a male. In such environments subjugation still occurs, even if it is an entirely non-violent and non-physical variety. Once again, this would suggest something innate rather than learned opportunism.
And shouldn’t that idea also make big strong men automatic bullies, on average, since they have greater opportunity to subjugate others (male or female) around them? Yet that doesn’t happen, and size or physical power is not a good predictor for bullying behaviour. Physical power is no longer a requirement for survival in the modern world, yet the subjugation of women remains a human universal even in progressive environments like Scandinavia. The claim that men dominate as a result of greater physical power therefore does not add up; physical power is simply one of the means through which men are able to dominate; it does not explain why in every culture, every society, men tend to be dominant.
I would say that males universally desiring dominance is the same thing as a male genetic predisposition to seek dominance. The evidence I’ve seen suggests behaviour is influenced strongly by genetic causes, and the first law of behaviour genetics states that all human behavioural traits are heritable.
As I said before, I do not see that this is bad news for feminism (well, it is bad news for “gender feminism”, which means it’s good news for reasonable forms of feminism).
The Socialist Left Party, in the pocket of the Norwegian Socialist Trade Union, recently announced that it wanted to abolish private property. The leader of The Socialist Left Party is, I believe, Norway’s Minister of Finance. As such you’re now blessed with a Minister of Finance who wants to abolish private property. How more extremists can you get without bloody revolution and lining the bourgeois up against the wall? Of course you’ve also started to cuddle up to other communistic dictators. – And boycott democratic states etc. The Swedes say you’re the last communist regime on Earth (and that was before you latest regime change for the worse), and when the socialist Swedes say you’re too far left, it’s a damn good indication something has gone waaay way too far left. Careful what you wish for! One morning you might wake up and realise you already got it.
Adult humans are not guinea pigs you can have small experiments with for the common good or small babies to be formed to your liking through social control and financial manipulation. It might be you mean well, even that the end result is admirable, but men are individuals to be treated with respect not mere figures in a grand social experiment to create a better society. And the ends don’t excuse the means. If they themselves wish to take leave with the children, good for them. If not, good for them. In any case, it’s none of the Swedish government’s business. The Swedish attempt to form a new and milder man, has a bitter aftertaste of Soviet drive for the New Soviet Man.
Abe, I disagree about twin studies because all twins would live under a patriarchal system, so it would be impossible to show differences possibly caused by that system. All twins studies live in a patriarchal environment. So twin separated at birth studies would possibly show how some environmental factors affect standardized testing, but not in this particular case, in my opinion.
You cited me here:
What I meant by this quote is that men are dominant because they desire dominance, not because they are superior to women. Sorry that I was unclear, I should have bolded the word “win.”
As I had said previously, I do believe that the quest for dominance may be hard-wired, and superior physical strength allows males to subjugate females. This does not make men superior, or smarter, than women, and does not show that women should only be in certain roles because of male superiority.
My philosophy has been that people in positions of power are often in those positions, not because they are necessarily the best qualified for the job, but because power is important to them.
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Really? Dare I say “Cite”? To make it easy for you, here’s the economy chapter of Socialist Left’s program for the next four years.
And, “the Norwegian Socialist Trade Union”? You aren’t referring to LO, aka Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions, are you? LO is in the pocket of Labour, or vice versa, not Socialist Left. And they are staunchly social democratic.
If you want to argue that Norway is ruled by leftist extremists I’m afraid you’re going to need something more firm than a wishful statement from a minority party that’s contrary to government policy, or that a minor lobby organisation isn’t invited to a party. Dig up an actual official statement from the government that can be described as leftist extremist, and I’ll start getting my hopes up.
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A lot of policies in modern states are aimed at influencing behaviour through financial means or social encouragement (like state sponsored loans to encourage establishment of new enterprises, or sponsored education to encourage people to join the armed forces, or earmarking two weeks of the parental leave to be taken by the mother just before birth to improve the health of mothers and infants). You might disagree with all of them, of course, but if so we’re far into a discussion about the overreaching principles behind political systems and government.
If saying: “These few weeks of parental leave are reserved for fathers,” is disrespectful or amounts to a mean that’s indefensible in itself (even if the ends are good), could you please say a word or two about what’s wrong with it? Is it, for instance, worse than saying “The armed forces will pay for your driver’s licence, but only if you take it while serving as a soldier”?
If strength was so important, no patriarchal man would dare fall asleep next to a woman, or let her in a kitchen unless he had a gun ( all those knives, you know ). Brute strength is of limited use, and women are quite smart enough to attack a physically stronger enemy from behind, or when he’s asleep. No, whatever has made patriarchy so prevalent, it isn’t strength.
I believe that strength is one of a number of factors that kept/keep patriarchy in place. Another may have to do with hard-wiring, males’ seeming desire to dominate. There may be number of other factors.
One point that I have been trying to make is that patriarchy is not in place because males are superior to females. If it were the desire of the female gender to dominate, then perhaps males would need to worry about falling asleep unprotected.
Another point is, that whatever the reason for patriarchy to have evolved, I believe that it subjugates women and should be replaced with a more egalitarian societal structure.
Change is gradual, however, and sometimes it seems we move backward before we go forward again. While many women are now working full time in professional positions, household tasks still seem to fall on women’s shoulders.
Madison Avenue reflects this. Advertisements for laundry, cooking, and cleaning supplies mostly show women doing these tasks.