In instances in which it actually happens, as opposed to humorous suggestions of it. Are there any conditions under which you might have a moment of social adeptness sufficient to recognize the difference?
Hammer, don’t hurt 'em. They’re just so fucking delicate, ya know?
For the win.
With “safe” I was trying to describe another concept succinctly, and I guess it wasn’t really the right word.
I didn’t mean safe as in expected outcome, I meant more that the man is physically strong and/or assertive enough that she feels safe from the rest of the world. And further that the guy seems confident and in control, and is therefore reassuring.
None of this is to imply that women are damsels in distress. I’m purely talking about what floats people’s boats.
And it’s the same the world over. If there were some place where unconfident, nervous guys could go to get laid, there would be a mass exodus tomorrow. 
They had hoped it was the Interwebs, but alas…
ITR champion is a creationist. Likes to bash evolutionary psychology, Darwin, etc.
DianaG, imitation is a poor strategy in competition. Just saying.
Monstro, your co-worker is right. He’s not talking about how things should be. He is making an observation about how things are. Try to understand the difference.
Try to understand the difference between saying, “There are some folks like that within this group of people,” and “All people in this group are like that, and I refuse to acknowledge anyone who doesn’t fit that.”
It’s not really a subtle difference.
No, you don’t understand, he’s making a general statement, not universal. Most, not all.
Yeah, he said the exact same thing, and in the same condescending tone. That he was just making an observation, stating the facts, blah blah blah. And you know what I told him? Just because “that’s just the way things are” does not mean “monstro must like it.” Or even agree with it! I mean, goodness. He complains all the freakin’ time about conservatives and their madness. Telling him “that’s just the way it is” would be a mindless, stupid response to his complaint…and also a way to claim authority or expert knowledge on a subject that one lacks.
But doesn’t that run both ways?
I think you feel offended at the idea of women being protected and coddled by men because it may mean women are weaker. It doesn’t.
As for danger, I think the question is about what degree of precaution is reasonable to take. Women are often expected to take precautions that are WAY out of line with the actual risk.
We had a poster a while back post that he didn’t think women should walk anywhere in Washington DC at night. As a single women in DC, who takes night classes, this would mean I’d have to drop out of school and spend most of my life under house arrest. Obviously that is a huge disruption to my life to manage a threat that could probably be managed much more reasonably taking less extreme precautions.
I also think there is an element of “rape is a fate worse than death” here. People talk about the risk of rape as if it is the most terrifying risk there is. In reality, while rape sucks, it sucks A LOT MORE to get killed or permanently injured during a robbery. I’m not sure why women are supposed to be redesigning their entire life around OMG rape, when that is just one of many risks that we all face.
As for being coddled- I think you’ll find across cultures there is a lot of variation. I’d argue that the seeming universality of these specific stereotypes is not a result of biology as much as it is a result of agrarian culture, where the specifics of inheriting land makes people extremely concerned with controlling female sexuality. These things seem universal because so many of the cultures we are familiar with are farming cultures. In non-farming cultures you find a much greater variety, and indeed the moment we stopped being a farming culture our own ideas of gender and sexuality began to change rapidly.
Yeah, that’s it. At first I thought it was a bit off but then I saw one of the comments: “This was edited down … if you liked this… try to find the original vid-clip… it is MUCH better.” Another commenter mentioned that the male was spotlighted in a Natural Geographic documentary and labeled “The Hyena Killer” because he targeted the matriarch and the other females thus leaving the group in shambles without any females to breed and repopulate with.
A lot of Evolutionary Psychology, especially pop Evo is non-scientific. I know many Evolutionary Anthropologists who speak despairingly of it and there’s several well written books explaining why it’s problematic. I had one class where a Professor ripped on it mercilessly. The existence of tribes in the Amazon who practice different things isn’t a matter of nitpicking, but showing that a lot of the things that individuals proclaim to be the result of biology and evolution are, in fact, the result of culture.
What women seek in a mate varies amongst cultures and there are some cultures where men provide nothing at all but semen. There are also cultures where women are encouraged to have lots of sex with a variety of men so that their children will have multiple offspring, and each different male is thought to give a different trait to the baby.
Resource distribution greatly influences sociology, and that’s so obvious that I can’t believe anyone would doubt that.
As for the fragility of women, that varies from culture to culture. In some cultures, such as our own, women are considered more attractive if they do less physical labor and are less physically strong. This also correlates with class, in that, the more high class a woman is and dates, the less likely she is do to physical labor. In some cultures, such as parts of Malaysia, women function as mules and do most of the heavy lifting. Among the !Kung and other HG groups, women often carry around a baby, water for a day, and several pounds of food/tools while gathering.
In mammals, the males are normally bigger than the females, but in other species, females tend to be bigger on average. Generally, the more sexual dimorphism there is (difference between males and females), the more polygynous a species is, and the more males fight for access to females. In species where females fight for access to males, the females tend to be bigger. Humans are a species that originally exhibited high levels of sexual dimorphism, but through our evolutionary history, we’ve grown more and more alike. Human males are still more aggressive than human females overall, and tend to be larger overall, although there is lot of overlap, and the within gender differences are large as well.
In the context of the phrase “fairer sex,” think of “fair” as the opposite of “coarse.” It may connote prettiness and physical delicacy, but it’s really more about attitudes and mannerisms.
In the “best” sense, it’s a self-deprecating thing said by men who respect and cherish women, and still harbor certain illusions about them. Refraining from cussing in the company of women, for example, isn’t so much because of a belief that women haven’t heard these words, or even necessarily that they would be offended, but because of a belief that women are in some sense better than that.
Yep. That’s why I prefaced my post by acknowledging that the subject can be stretched too far by some.
But few anthropologists or other scientists would throw out EP when it comes to mate selection / mating behaviour. Aside from the wealth of supporting data, it would be a helluva coincidence that humans have culturally decided to have similar mating strategies to our hominid relatives.
So if we know a hundred populations that exhibit a pattern, but a single counter-example, we have sufficient reason to suppose that the pattern is entirely cultural?
In any case, many “counter-examples” I’ve seen are based on a single anecdotal observation. When I’ve subsequently researched the population in question, I find that there is data indicating similar sexual behaviour as everywhere else.
Really, where?
Agreed.
Compared to other mammals the difference between human males and females is actually quite large. How did that come about?
And it’s interesting that men are more aggressive than women, as you describe. Is that not EP?
Actually, that’s where I hear the greatest professional criticism. Most of what EP says about mating habits that I’ve seen has been utter hogwash. In my Biology of Sex Differences class, we had a paper assignment where we looked a pop EP claims about the sexes and critiqued it. It was not hard to do that assignment, as there were plenty of examples that were just shoddy science.
What research have you conducted? Have you taken Cultural Anthropology classes or read some of the excellent books there are out there on the variety of human sexual expression?
It’s not single counter-examples, but many counter-examples. If the sexual behavior can be better explained by resource distribution, which it often is, then that’s a far more parsimonious explanation.
Here are just two examples of cultures that run contrary to your assertion. The Mosuo in China. The shared paternity cultures of South America. Shared paternity doesn’t only occur in South America.
Actually no, they are not. In fact, the level of sexual dimorphism in humans is less than would be expected for a species of our size. Generally, as the species increase in size, there is more sexual dimorphism. Our ancestors had more sexual dimorphism than we had in the past, but we’ve evolved to less and less sexual dimorphism. If you compare charts of typical male traits alongside charts of typical female traits, you will notice a lot of overlap in humans.
No. Evolutionary Anthropology is not Evolutionary Psychology because Evolutionary Anthropology does not rely on the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, the evidence for which is rather sparse. EP people might come up with various theories as to why this aggression occurs, but, if these theories are like many EP theories, they would not be falsifiable.
As for why aggression is seen in several cultures, there’s heavy debate within the Anthropological community as to where that came from and how much aggression actually exists. Frans de Waal is rather famous for arguing that we as a species are peaceful and the idea of ‘demonic males’ arising from ancestors shared with chimps as put forth famously by Richard Wrangham is false.
It’s also worth noting that part of the problem with comparing rates of aggression between the sexes is that males tend to be more outwardly aggressive. In fact, for a long time, female rank was completely ignored in primatology because female dominance is typically less overt than male dominance. It may be that in humans, like it is in many other primate species, females are just as aggressive as males, they just tend to be more subtle about it.
A few thoughts on that.
The first is that humans in nature tend somewhat towards the male-with-harem model, which in turn tends to produce larger males since they needs to fight each other for dominance. And on top of that humans are highly social; women can biologically afford to skimp on muscles and such and let the men do the fighting, because the men can actually be relied on to do so. Rather like ants, greater sociality allows for greater specialization.
Second, humans are highly visual. Scent isn’t nearly as important for us as most species, so our differentiating features (natural and artificial) tend towards the visual. A beard or long hair & breasts can be seen a long way off, while with humans scent would make a terrible long distance gender identifier.
Third, humans are clever and manipulative, including women. Women are built with special “look at me I’m female” characteristics like breasts, they further enhance that with female-specific clothing and so on*. They have the highly unusual features of lacking an easily identifiable fertility sign and of being horny year round. Women are built to attract and mate with (and occasionally sexually manipulate) males all year round; it biologically pays for them to have obvious gender-signals at all times. Women are also highly competitive among themselves in trying to attract men, so again it pays for them to flaunt being female. And being clever, they can actually prosper by persuasion, negotiation and manipulation better than they could by being slightly more muscular and trying to use brute-force**.
I have the same physique pretty much that I did when I was 14, even though almost 20 years have passed. A guy could overtake me as easily now as he could back then. So essentially what this guy was saying was that I shouldn’t be walking the streets either. And he wasn’t citing facts to back his assertion, but harkening back to the olden times when a woman’s “virture” was the only thing that mattered about her. Apparently it’s alright for him to play intense sports and live in constant pain because of jacked-up hips and legs, but women can’t even think about taking the risk of walking down the street because OMG!? They could be RAPED!!! Why would he focus so much on rape? That’s craziness!
And you’re saying you wouldn’t be offended by this argument, if you were me?
The Mosuo are an interesting example of a matriarchy but the wiki page you cite, like other sources on the web, stresses that their sexual behaviour is not significantly different from ours in the West.
The shared paternity examples are fascinating. But even in the link you’ve posted here, we have:
I would agree with many of the points of the cite, but I don’t think it shows what you think it does.
If you think EP is about “men like sex and polygamy” and “women don’t like sex and prefer monogamy” then you may have shot down that hypothesis in your Biology of Sex Differences class. But it is not the hypothesis I’m describing, nor does it bear much relation to any EP papers that I have read.
Indeed the paper itself alludes to much of EP thinking.
I’m not sure about this rule of dimorphism increasing with increasing size.
In any case, it remains true that humans exhibit greater sexual dimorhism than many other hominids. And again, what selection pressure do you suppose might produce such a difference between the sexes?
Your language earlier made the generalisation that men are more aggressive than women. It’s interesting that you weaken this now when the suggestion is made that it may support EP.
I don’t think this theory has had much traction in the EP community either.
Isn’t that true? Doesn’t testosterone cause aggression? And don’t men have it in abundance when compared to women?
I think so.
I think you’ve missed the context here. I haven’t made a claim about aggression, I was just pointing out that a couple of kimera’s remarks don’t sit well together.