Watch it for a year then.
Sure they would, cliterectomies at least. Destroying the ability of younger women to enjoy sex reduces the competition from them. It’s an older female versus younger female dynamic, not a male versus female one; you even see analogous animal models where the dominant females use biochemical methods to do something similar.
Well, they probably wouldn’t bother with rape, they’d just send their men to do it. But kill people they don’t like or who have something they want? Sure. Women have historically been very enthusiastic about war; the idea of peace loving women is a historically recent bit of gender mythology.
Watching the news for a year might yield useful and significant figures.
However, it isn’t my job to do your research for you. You made the claim. You supply the cites. If you cannot supply cites, then you should cease to make claims.
How can you know? We’ve never experienced a world like that. What if their just following status quo?
As pointed out you are talking about criminal behavior which has zero to do with this discussion. Your definition of violence and aggression is biased and artificially limited as well. Most of the people that get into bar and gang style fights are younger males but that is rare overall even if it is newsworthy. What percentage of the adult males you know get into street fights on a regular basis? If it is less than 5% across all ages, I am sure you can see the problem with using this as a main argument. The full definitions of violence and aggression are much more inclusive and some like relentless bullying are common among females as well. Again, the willingness to get into a street fight has nothing to do with launching a war against a whole country.
If you want to get concrete, think of the two or three of the most powerful female leaders in recent U.S. history. Two of them are Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton who are both very smart and powerful yet belong to different parties. Have you ever seen either of those two being opposed to war or taking an aggressive stance against U.S. force at all? Condoleeza Rice actively helped us get into the current wars and Hillary Clinton hasn’t shown a serious intention to end them. Hillary is a hawk by any measure.
That is what a real U.S. style female leader looks like and a huge part of what you are missing. Female leaders didn’t get where they are by volunteering their time at homeless shelters. They are a special breed just like the successful male ones are and generally not people you want to challenge directly in a power match.
And? As long as we are talking about that kind of hypothetical, what if they are “following the status quo” by being nicer than they’d really prefer? Why do you assume that men are only a bad influence?
Well maybe we just need more of them in there to balance things out?
So you are saying the most powerful ones we ever had didn’t do anything differently but somehow adding more of them will do…something. That is an awful lot of speculation with not just no evidence but contrary evidence. Do you honestly think that Hillary Clinton or Condoleeza Rice would be softer and kinder plus generally against war if they switched places with the presidents they served under? I don’t think I am buying it and those are real life examples.
Or maybe they’d just cackle madly and declare “let the slaughter commence!” I mean, if we can’t use their past behavior to try to predict their future behavior, why should we assume that they’d suddenly turn into Gandhi-Girls instead of Psycho-Chicks?
Scotty Mo, I am going to take a wild guess and assume you are fairly young because I know you didn’t come up with idea yourself. I heard it a lot when I was in college. Make a mental note of this thread and the reassess your thoughts when you have worked in a competitive work environment with roughly equal numbers of male and female employees and managers. You will quickly find out for yourself why people don’t buy the idea in general outside of a few circles. Successful female professionals may be sweet as pie and caring as Mother Theresa at home but they can be brutal on the job. I have worked with lots of different types of people over the years and been on a few female majority teams with female management going up as high as you can see. There is nothing kind or democratic about those power structures.
ScottyMo, if you want an idea of why we might think your arguments are a little hard to swallow, try the following analogy.
You’re basically saying that, in general, most societies have seen men in positions of power for most of their histories. Also, societies have been fighting one another since time immemorial. Am I right so far? Now, your major error is assuming that we can assume any kind of relationship between those two facts. None of this “indisputable fact” nonsense - disregarding the fact that the examples given by other forumites here have (to put it lightly) cast some serious doubt over whether that assumption has any validity, from a purely logical standpoint that’s pretty much the ultimate rookie mistake.
So on to the analogy. Imagine if I said, man, money really is the root of all evil, isn’t it? Men have been the ones making the rules for most of history, and most civilizations have developed some form of currency, or at least an economy. If women were in charge, I’ll bet there wouldn’t be any of this money business; I can base this on a few vague anecdotal experiences I’ve had with women, plus a healthy dose of “conventional wisdom.” Does that sound logical to you?
What I don’t understand is why everyone is assuming that ONE gender needs to be in control. No one is perfectly suited for any job based on divisions of gender or any other kind - wouldn’t it make more sense to populate leadership positions with people who can offer multiple perspectives? Maybe if we weren’t so obsessed with always looking up to ONE person at the top of the pyramid we could avoid the discussion of “which group should be in charge” according to the one representative…
That’s certainly an understatement.
Tell that to Catherine the Great, Queen Victoria, or Elizabeth I. :rolleyes:
However, if we’re going to speak about how “peaceful” women were, let’s talk about Bloody Mary Tudor.
And as mentioned above, Catherine the Great was seriously ruthless, as was her predecessor, Empress Elizabeth. Peter the Great’s older sister, the Regent Sophia had all of her younger brother’s relatives tortured and killed right in front of him, to prevent them from gaining any power.
Erzabet. And while there’s no proof she actually bathed in the blood of virgins, she certainly gave Vlad the Impaler a run for his money when it came to torturing her servants. All for her own amusement.
Well, Shagnasty you’re actually wrong about a few things. I did come up with this idea, thought of it yesterday as just a passing thought. I may be fairly young, but I work a sales job as of now, so I understand the nature of a competitive business.
I think it’s just simple really and perhaps some of you are over-analyzing the subject.
Have equal numbers of women in office. Make it a law. If it holds true that people look at women as sweet, kind, and caring then thats what we’ll elect. But if not enough of them are given a chance, well we all just miss out on that opportunity. Really, I don’t see how anyone could argue with this concept.
Part of the trouble with this concept is the condescension implied by your insistence that women are more “sweet, kind, and caring.” There’s been a lot of time spent trying to find examples of female aggression, iron-fisted female rulers, and all that, but the real point is that positions of power should be chosen on the merits and qualifications of the applicant, and not because of any qualities we might assume they have because of their gender or any other superficial aspect irrelevant to the position itself.
Why? You haven’t even attempted to convince us that we should do this.
We elect women now. Again, Golda Meier and Margaret Thatcher leap to mind. Why do we need some crazy law mandating that half of all offices are held by women?
Explain why women in the USA and many other countries don’t have the opportunity to hold office now. Off the toppa my head- Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, etc
It’s nonsensical and you’ve provided no reason why it might be a good idea.
Resident misandrist checking in (you guys got me all wrong though, I’m really a misanthrope).
I find it weird that a thread that’s gone on three pages is arguing about something as mundane as crime statistics broken down by gender.
Wiki on U.S. incarceration rates. Just search for female. Lots of fun graphics and tables.
Bolding mine.
FBI 10 year arrest trend tables for various crimes
2009
Murder arrests
Males - 6,437
Female - 756
Forcible rape
Males - 12,469
Female - 148
That tends to be a pretty typical ratio. Rape is even more lopsided obviously, but it’s always useful to point out how vicious men are even after being domesticated over 10K years. It’s much worse in every hunter-gather people ever studied. Civilization has been, in large part, a project at making men as docile as possible.
I’m sure this has surprised…no one? Did anyone seriously think women were even close to males when it comes to violent crimes? The only serious crimes they’re even close to are things like fraud or embezzlement.
Does this prove anything towards whether women would be less violent than men in institutions created by men which are dedicated to dominance? Nope. Does it prove that if women made their own institutions in a world where men are defanged they’d be less violent than men? Unknown, but it’d be bizarre to think there wouldn’t be a significant decrease.
There’s a problem though. For one thing, you can’t wave a magic wand and make men not violent builders of hierarchical institutions and cooperative killing enterprises. If you do, and women rule the world, then everything is gonna be different. The evolutionary path we took would be severely warped from what we know. Maybe women would flip the switch and we’d be having a debate on whether these meek men would be better at running things. Except probably not, because it doesn’t make sense evolutionarily speaking for women (especially with long gestation rates and high infant mortality) to be fighters for the same reason it’s not a smart strategy to eat your seed corn.
I do wonder how much better things would be if our evolutionary path was totally different and we were like bonobos. That’d be like every guy’s fantasy come true, but it’d also have big advantages for women. But maybe that would’ve been impossible because we would’ve been wiped out by a more violent competitor. It’s hard to know. But on the whole we may actually be lucky. For how bad things seem sometimes males could act like lions or male chimps instead, really making the situation dreary.
You aren’t looking very hard then because lots of reasonable and informed people who have been on polar opposite sides in every other thread since this board was created gave you good reasons while you didn’t do much anything. I personally think that my family should be installed as a hereditary monarchy. We are fairly well educated, good with money, and compassionate. I fail to see how you can argue with that.
You are aware that the women’s suffrage movement was already successful a long time ago right? Your arguments or lack thereof are so perplexing I think we should leave no stone unturned.
You did finally throw out an actual idea however no matter how strange. Let’s see if you can actually articulate into something that could be passed as a law in the U.S. What law or Constitutional amendment could you write that would ensure there are equal numbers of male and female politicians? Be extremely specific because your law has to apply to thousands of political offices at all levels. I don’t think you can write a coherent first paragraph based on this idea so prove me wrong.
Not really, since that article concerns the economy, and your point addressed diplomacy or perhaps legislation.
Now…just to play Devil’s Advocate for a moment…none of these women ruled in a matriarchy. Just because a country has a female head of state does not make it a matriarchy.
Elizabeth I (whom I know the most about of your list, so I’ll stick with her) was raised most assuredly in a strong patriarchy, under the rule of her father while he was so concerned with his male right to power that he cast off a whole church for it. Her little brother got the throne before her older sister because he had a penis. When Elizabeth did become Queen, she had to answer to a Council made entirely of men, and appeal to a Parliment, likewise all men, to actually get anything done. She was a woman, and she was a leader, but she most decidedly did NOT lead a matriarchy.
Which I believe goes to what **monstro **was saying above. It’d be interesting to see what *forms *of governance a matriarchy might take, were women given a blank slate and unopposed power over a significant portion of the world (if not all of it) for a significant period of time. We just don’t know, because it hasn’t ever happened that we know of. Even queens have always been working within a patriarchy, and working with other leaders from patriarchies.