While it won’t get this thread back on track this story about the AMA’s recent release on the subject shows that it is just not this thread that goes off rails, but that most discussions about this topic end up in the “men’s rights” world because we can’t seem to have a real discussion about real problems.
Hopefully one day us men as a group won’t be so fragile and will be able to talk about actual solutions.
Bumped for the new light cast upon the subject by the burst of toxic-“macho” poutrage over the recent Gillette advertisement.
Whatever happened to the simple time-honored precept of “Don’t be a dick”?
I feel like these ads are gimmicked for outrage so they can go viral. Like the interracial family/cheerios commercial. “Look, there are at least 20 assholes who will leave nasty comments. Media runs with it as ‘racists are livid over those commercial’, everyone Facebooks it and BAM, everyone is watching our commercial and feeling warm fuzzies for our company!”
Sorry for being cynical. The message is fine but ultimately they’re out to sell shit, not reform malekind.
No mention of the new APA guidelines on masculinity? (I only read the last few days’ posts, but it’s only been a hot topic for about a week.)
So for those who haven’t been following the kerfuffle: the APA has released a report making recommendations for clinical psychologists that calls masculinity “socially constructed” over and over, but never mentions genetics or testosterone. :smack:
Steven Pinker rightly calls this report “ludicrous”. This is a good time to point out that although Pinker’s book The Blank Slate is now more than a decade old, this APA report illustrates that it is as timely as ever. That book is a must-read to understand why the ”blank slate” idea—that differences between men and women, and between people more broadly, come down to all nurture and no nature—is so wrongheaded and fundamentally paradoxical.
A real question here, for both gender and race you like to assign differences to biology and not nurturer. And you always ignore the fact that complex factors are always involved and that all of these behaviors are on a spectrum and not binary. And to justify this you find fringe scientists who make these absolute false dichotomies while dismissing more accepted science that tries to explain the subtleties.
I get that you are a black and white type of person, but what I want to know is how you mentally justify in your mind that anything you believe is in anyway scientific?
You do grasp the concept that science is a tool to get past our human thought biases?
Because a thread meant to help men suffer less under their societal roles has no dependency on your The Blank Slate claim. Or do you really think there is a fundamental, biological reason that men won’t do things like say, go to the doctor when they are sick because they think it makes them look weak?
I get that as a race realist, you think biology means everything but do you also believe you have zero free will? Do you make zero choices in your life? Is there nothing you can’t improve in your life?
Of course I don’t believe in free will. You do??
They know ALL about mob rule
“Lock her up!”
Remember that??? Any of them crying about “mob rule” now, can fuck off.
Why do you see this as a problem? Maybe you are confusing “masculinity”, i.e., a particular society’s gender norms for men, with “maleness”, i.e., being male?
Obviously, the fact that, say, wearing long curled hair and high heels and frilly lace cuffs was considered masculine in 17th-century Europe but not in 20th-century America has nothing to do with genetics or testosterone. The Three Musketeers presumably had just as much in the way of Y chromosomes and testosterone as the 1985 Chicago Bears. How are you going to explain such differences if you deny or dismiss the concept of masculinity as a social construct?
I definitely don’t get the impression that the APA guidelines (which btw seem to have come out last August, although you and Pinker apparently just noticed them recently) are in any way supporting a “blank slate” hypothesis or claiming that there are no biological differences between men and women. Instead, they are focusing specifically on the **non-**biological aspects of male identity. As the report states clearly,
Pinker misunderstanding this as somehow “embracing the Blank Slate” is just Pinker being a melodramatic grandstanding arse, as usual.