I don’t think that the idea of “women and children first” in the context of escaping from a dangerous situation conflates women and children.
Do you? Do you think that that idea is at root toxic? When getting people off a sinking ship, who should get priority?
Those people who are the most vulnerable…ie women and children.
I note the conspicuous absence of a counterargument.
(Note: Simply declaring that everything I know is wrong, up is down and short is long, is not a counterargument.)
Since I straight-up said "outside outside of stuff like ‘producing sperm’ " in the post to which you’re replying, I’m pretty sure that literally everything in your post was countered before you wrote it.
Yes, men and women have physical differences, which sometimes put a skew on their baseline skill at various things. The vast majority of these baseline skill differences have nothing to do with anything anyone considers “masculine” and “feminine”, though. (Hearing frequencies? Seriously?)
In fact the only impacts that I can see that physical maleness has on cultural masculinity is:
If you are fighting with fists or swords like a lawless amoral barbarian, then men tend to be more skillful at harming people. This doesn’t matter in modern society and the very idea that physical force with fists or swords is a tool that’s cool to use on other people in modern society is toxic.
Testosterone tends to make men act like dicks, if they’re not mature enough to control themselves. The notion that acting like dicks is a thing to be valued is definitely toxic.
Beyond those two things, the concepts of physical maleness and masculinity don’t seem to have much overlap - for example males tend to be taller, but being taller isn’t really seen as being ‘masculine’. Being short doesn’t make Wolverine a girly-man.
Men are just as vulnerable to drowning as women and children are. You do know that saying is about who gets to be in the lifeboats, right?
At their most basic levels, masculinity and feminity relate to fatherhood and motherhood.
Since only a man can be a father, traits of good fathering would be positive masculinity.
Since only a woman can be a mother, traits of good mothering would be positive femininity.
The question beyond that is what of men and women who do not have offspring?
The other question is: Obviously, fathers and mothers have very different roles in a child’s conception. But once the child is born, or at least once they’re weaned, what are the differences between “good fathering” and “good mothering”—and are those differences inherent, or culturally defined, or specific to the individuals involved?
Yes. The Birkenhead drill.
We have discussed this here before. Research has shown that in cases where the Birkenhead procedure was not followed (like on the Estonia) the death rate of women and children was higher.
In disaster situation, the strongest, who will be men, tend to survive.
Right.
I wasn’t trying to imply women are perfect judges of character and only like virtuous guys like on TV. It is more complicated than that.
I’m just saying: any guy who’s looking for dating advice and tries to follow things like “be the alpha male” is almost certainly taking the first step down a frustrating and painful road. Where they will not only crash and burn, but keep blaming the wrong thing.
As for the nice guy thing…I guess it’s one of those terms that has shifted in meaning and I can’t insist everyone go back to the original meaning and drop the connotations. But if “nice” means being charming, sociable and receptive to other’s needs then these are very desirable qualities for being not only happy but successful in life.
But if it means being a doormat, or sitting around feeling entitled to a beautiful girlfriend because you didn’t do anything bad recently…yeah notsomuch.
Well, duh. Yes indeedy, when you put fewer of the women and children on the things that let people live, fewer of the women and children live. That’s…not really an impressive observation.
That would depend entirely on the type of disaster situation. I am not even slightly convinced that it’s always the case - if you’re handing off people from a cable car that’s about to fall into a chasm, I figure that that’s equally fatal for everybody that stays behind and falls to their deaths.
There might be reasons to favor saving the women and children first (they’re lighter and easier/faster to get to safety; they take up less space on the life raft and thus more people can be saved; the men are uglier and thus deserve to die) but I don’t accept the idea is that we leave the men longer in the burning building because their masculinity makes them fireproof.
Take it further. What difference does it make who fills these so-called fathering roles and mothering roles as long as they get done? None. No good comes from micro-managing peoples roles in an “enterprise”. As long as the roles are filled it should not matter who fills them. A woman can have traits considered good fathering skills and like-wise a man can have good mothering skills. Its only stupid cultural baggage that interferes.
What’s wrong with the simple time-honored principle of “Don’t be a dick”?
I remember talking to a (male as it happened) friend a million years ago about the whole idea of why you would get women and children into lifeboats first, and he said, “because they’re more valuable, of course.”
The Pedestal Problem again.
It’s unmasculine.
To the degree that behaviors are masculine/feminine, anyway.
I’m saying it because just because something is expressed (or seems to be) does not mean that it’s innate in the biology of a demographic (see: why are Black people so bad at school?). Maintaining institutions and systems that rely on or encourage those expressions take the observed expression as inevitable.
How did you come to this conclusion? How do you know it’s a true reflection? More importantly, how much of the male aggression that you see (or lack of female aggression) is learned behavior as opposed to a “natural” tendency?
Ultimately, I’m incredibly skeptical of any analysis of behavior of a cohort and ascribes inevitable outcomes independent of culture.
It’s great to give aggressive men, or dudes who like power tools, or whatever, healthy ways to express themselves. But let’s not pretend that that challenges anything fundamental.
Society supports toxic masculinity whenever we say “men like power tools” (for example), as it encourages the significant portion of men who don’t have that skill or interest have to either feign interest or be ridiculed for being “unmanly”. Whenever we describe an activity or behavior as a “male” activity, we are simultaneously saying that men who cannot do or are uninterested in that activity are not fully being men.
Men are aggressive. If I’m not aggressive, am I less of a man than other men?
If I’m a woman who is aggressive, am I acting manly? Am I less of a woman?
Well, there are some people (not you, but others) who use this as a circular logic fallacy:
“Women are attracted to nice guys”
“But James is a nice guy, and women don’t like him”
“If they don’t like him, then he must not be nice.”
Physical strength influences ones ability to perform hundreds of jobs. How’s that for outside of producing sperm?
And yes being better able to hear a child cry can still make you better able to care for a child.
Being better able to distinguish colors ( a trait likely developed in harvesting food) could easily help you be a better decorator or artist.
I wouldn’t define masculine as strictly male nor define feminine as strictly female.
They literally mean male-like and female-like.
I sew, I’ve sewn for many people who didn’t even know a word for a man who sews and tried to modify seamstress to seamster. I’d say I can comfortably say it’s thought of as a pretty feminine thing to do. I also could not care less if people think so. Its not a problem, I have many masculine traits and I don’t define my entire being by any one of my masculine or feminine traits.
Women, children, elderly… Most men are far more apt to help them then another man. It’s innate. It simply comes down to whether a person is viewed as perfectly capable of fending for themselves just as easily as you are in a given scenario.
Follow that by simply exaggerating the innate tendency by stating the rules and enacting a little peer pressure and it’s pretty easy for a man to be self sacrificing in such a scenario.
What people say they are attracted to and what they are actually attracted to are very different things.
IME the more you hear a woman say she just wants a nice guy the more often you see that woman with a total dick.
She’s most likely repeating it so often because she repeatedly finds herself with not nice guys. Why, she’s attracted to not nice guys.
In the post to which you responded, did I say that men and women have physical differences, which sometimes put a skew on their baseline skill at various things? Why, yes I did! Glad we’ve settled that.
And I think that it’s erroneous to describe the ability to sew as feminine, or skill at sewing as feminine. It’s not an error just you made - errors like this are burned into our culture. It’s part of the self-fulfilling prophecy that pushes men out of some fields, and women out of many fields - far more than biases derived from physical gender, in my opinion.
Cooking well is feminine. Unless it’s for money as a professional chef, in which case it’s masculine. Or maybe it’s neither, and all that is bullshit that’s been floating around our culture as part of the artificial gender roles that have been pigeonholing people for centuries.