Well, let’s look again at what @Pleonast actually said that @Gordon_G objected to:
I think that’s a perfectly fair statement. It’s not that there are no inherent biological differences between males and females: nobody’s arguing that. It’s that cultural norms of “masculine” and “feminine” don’t have any inherent value or biological truth in and of themselves.
It’s not biologically true, for example, that men are brave and women are not, or that women are kind and men are not, or that men get violent and women don’t, or that women cry and men don’t. Assigning such attributes as blanket stereotypes of masculinity and femininity isn’t useful in actually helping us understand the nature of human thought and behavior.
Now, you’re not wrong about its being impossible to just eradicate existing cultural gender norms with a wave of a wand or something. Cultural gender norms are a huge part of how we interpret and regulate thought and behavior in practice. But IMHO @Pleonast is not wrong in pointing out that they don’t have inherent value.
[ETA: as @Cheesesteak rightly observes and more quickly types. ]
I remember an evolutionary psychology study that hypothesized the reason women are attracted to pink is all those days we spent picking berries when we were hunter gatherers.
I used to be fascinated by it until it dawned on me they so very often did little more than reinforce cultural norms, offering little in the way of evidence for their claims.
I’m implying that a survey of 11,000 nurses (as per the study) in 1989 is going to potentially skew the data by virtue of the fact that all those women are likely in a similar education level, income bracket, and exposed to a similar pool of potential husbands.
Does that mean ALL? No. But it does imply some factors that might not be evident in the data. For example:
Being a nurse would tend to expose you to more doctors during a time (the 80s) when it was not uncommon for doctors, lawyers and such to marry a nurse or secretary at work, if for no other reason than proximity. Indeed many women often went into professions or studied specific subjects in school (disparagingly called MRS degrees) to increase their odds of meeting a potential husband.
It would not be surprising that men would get more out of marriage if the culture was such that women tended to not have equivalent professional options and were thus more disposed to keep their husbands happy.
In most cases, a nurse marrying anyone is going to increase their household income. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it does reduce financial stress.
All I’m saying it’s not as simple as “marriage is best for everyone because this study said so”.
Perhaps.
I might also hypothesis that married women traditionally experienced less happiness because they felt obligated and trapped by the dependent nature of their marriage. That is to say, until relatively recently the expectation was that the man was the main provider and the woman supported the family. Often the woman didn’t have the education to provide a similar level of income for herself That inherently creates a dynamic where there is an imbalance of power in the relationship. And if the man suffers some sort of downturn or misfortune, that could lead to resentment.
These days women are more educated and have more professional options. But then that creates a dynamic of competing career interests, possibly resentment on the mans part of her career overshadows his.
Or sometimes it creates a dynamic where both partners are so equal and independent that the marriage is more like two coworkers managing the same project.
Exactly right. I may be pissed off and stressed about not having a job, but I still have to raise my kids and get along with my wife.
IMHO it’s really more about if you are avoiding marriage and kids or a real career because you don’t want to ever be stressed or challenged, that’s like Lost Boys Peter Pan shit.
Tyler Durden’s gives this speech in Fight Club that seems to resonate with a lot of men and echoes what you are saying a bit: “Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
FWIW, Barbie gives Ken a speech similar to Tyler’s “You are not your Khaki’s” monologue at the end of that film.
The themes are still relevant in that we want people to be strong, smart, and capable so they can make positive contributions to society. But a lot of people feel like they are being excluded and told they have nothing of value to offer other than as consumers of useless products and services.
It’s the gender norms that are the problem, not the expressions of sexuality. People need to express their sexuality, and it’s the limitations imposed on those expressions that are causing the unhappiness. Every man who needs to cry but feels he can’t because of gender norms is harmed. And maybe the norm “men don’t cry” is so baked in that he never even realizes that’s why he’s unhappy.
And so much of it turns out to be wrong. “Men hunt and women gather”. It turns out that when archeologists actually examine who used which tools, lots of women hunted, too. And it’s hard to imagine that men didn’t also gather, although gathering leaves less physical evidence behind. A lot of stereotypes from whichever society did the archeology get assumed about the past.
Are gender norms arbitrary? Often they are. Are they meaningless? Of course not. We are intensely social creatures. We live in a society. Any norms imposed by our society are deeply meaningful, and important to most members of that society.
That’s why the question is what role models we can and should set for boys (and girls) today.
Yep, and what actions does Tyler initiate in order to help resolve these issues? Unionizing workers? Promoting community reforms to make surviving as a wage earner less burdensome? Nonviolent actions to advocate for legislation like universal health care etc. that makes workers’ lives better?
Nope, he gets a group of guys together to punch each other and engage in criminal activities for revenge against corporate oppression, ending with a pointless act of terrorism in blowing up office buildings to destroy credit card company debt records, which realistically would be backed up offsite anyway. Much strong, so manhood. Sigh.
I totally don’t blame this fictional character or any man who finds his viewpoint sympathetic for their resentment of society’s exploitation of them, and their frustration with the unrealistic expectations placed on them. But OMG, talk about toxic masculinity predictably making problems worse instead of better, eh?
That’s the point of that movie, though. It’s been hijacked by men who think Tyler is some kind of role model, but the whole point of the movie/book is that Fight Club is not the answer the protagonist was looking for, and Tyler Durden is a narcissistic, destructive asshole.
One of the best movies of our times, I think. I enjoyed the book but its development of theme was never so clear than in the film. The book, according to Pahlniuk, was a literary experiment using a recurring motif (Fight Club) to ground the reader in the absence of clear structure. I don’t think he gave it a lot of thought. Though he’s also hinted that it’s a romance story (and it is, among other things.)
For an interesting female parallel, I would watch the film Tully starting Charlize Theron as a married SAHM who becomes overwhelmed pending the birth of her third child and hires a nanny named Tully (Mckensey Davis). The father (Ron Livingston) means well but is sort of always off doing his own thing and their oldest implied to have a spectrum disorder. At the end…
…it is revealed that Tully is a hallucination of the wife imagining herself in her 20s.
In Fight Club a man get overwhelmed and depressed from isolation, underutilization, and lack of purpose. So his psyche invents an idealized imaginary friend to form an brotherhood to go to war.
In Tully a woman gets overwhelmed and depressed trying to fulfill what she believes is all the obligations society has placed on her. So her psyche invents an idealized imaginary friend to help with the housework.
Another interesting parallel of male and female behavior in film is the whole Barbieheimer phenomenon a few years back.
Barbie’s big conflict is really about figuring out who she is as a person rather than the idealized embodiment of perfection society places on women. In parallel, Ken is on a similar Fight Club-esq journey to figure out his purpose beyond the inane job and commercium forced on him.
Oppenheimer’s main conflict is mostly “Guys! Let’s build this fucking bomb!”
I’ll admit to not understanding Fight Club (emotionally as opposed to intellectually) at the time it was released, and still not understanding it today. Considering that it was released in the late 90s, which in some senses was the peak of American society (although I’d be willing to consider any other time periods between 2000 and 2015), it makes whatever message the movie has even more confusing. If the late 90s was such a bad time for masculinity, then when was there ever a time that was both good for masculinity and good for society at large? My brain draws a blank to that question short of going back to the days of the hunter gatherers.
I don’t know if it was the peak of American society. But I tend to view the 90s really as a time of transition to the digital age from what came before. I think it’s sort of why any film or show portraying anyone under 40 in the 90s presented them in this sort of ambivalent state of ennui where they were sort of just going through the motions of life - jobs they didn’t particularly care about, trying to find relationships with people they actually did care about, a lot of down time just sort of hanging out grabassing. Basically just trying to figure out their place in the world without any clear direction.
Looking back, they actually seem like great times compared to our current situation.
If there are inherent biological differences between males and females, then cultural stereotypes of masculinity and feminity that are based on those biological differences do have some value in that they will reflect biological truth.
Although not true in the absolute terms you expressed it in, the general statement: “men are more violent than women” is true and AIUI can to a significant (but not absolute!) extent be explained by biology: viz. the effect of large doses of testosterone on both the body and brain.
A cultural stereotype then, that says that: men are inherently more dangerous than women; vice versa women are at greater risk from men than from other women; therefore should regard strange men with caution and e.g. prefer the company of an unknown bear; men who object to this are imposing an unjustified burden of risk and aggravation on women and are therefore Bad Men while men who are respectful and take pains not impose themselves on women are Good Men- is probably a good one.
Regardless of intent, the whole man/bear thing is mostly an argument that men in our society should avoid relationships with women beyond the purely sexual. If women really regard men as worse than wild animals, then any affection in the relationship is going to be entirely one-sided.
Women are free to look at men as monsters if they feel like it. But men are likewise not required to like being regarded as monsters.
I think there’s a pretty big gulf between fear of unexpected strangers and fear of men you know and have a relationship with. (Speaking as a women who has a large number of non-sexual friendships with men.)
Women (mostly) see men as men, not monsters or animals. The problem is that our society encourages or tolerates, to varying degrees, toxic and dangerous attitudes and behavior in men, and there’s no good way for women to determine which men are dangerous without a lot of time and effort. Thus finding oneself alone with a strange man can be as frightening as being alone in the wilderness with predators.
The way women safeguard themselves around men, in general, is entirely reasonable, in today’s society.
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