AskWazzup
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Last edited by a moderator:
Feminism and why it's bad.
- Thread starter Beaushizzle
- Start date
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Vault17
Banned
Ignorance is never good, which is why I don't believe that closing your eyes to innate differences between the sexes, and how they interact with one another, is a good course of action. Trying to fit individuals into the mold of equality when they are not equal only creates problems, namely denial of reality and creation of hostility and conflict.
Now let me say it plainly - I don't hate women, I don't want to "oppress" them, and I don't think that men are superior to women. I simply think that each sex has its own physical traits, behavioral patterns, hormones, etc. that makes them more suited to certain societal roles than others, i.e. a woman's motherly instinct makes them the (generally, not in every case) better choice over men for childrearing; a man's increased muscle mass (on average) makes them better for hard labor and hunting. These are very plain examples, and of course there are millions of factors branching out into others, but this is generally what I meant by gender roles being a necessity. It's not patriarchal oppression, it's our nature as animals doing our best to survive in a hostile world. When things get down to brass tacks (early hunting-gathering humanity, post apocalyptic rebuilding) comfortable, safe notions of equality and independence go right out the window. Without a stable, functioning society, such philosophies have no place in a world where you and your people could die with the slightest misstep. Equality is a false god, the opposite of quality and optimization.
That's what I think is wrong with feminism - like Marxism, it portrays an "oppression" that doesn't actually exist for the reasons that are posited, and advocates destruction of the traditional, time-tested way of doing things for the sake of the vague ideal of equality, often causing more damage than could be foreseen. In fact, some circles think that feminism was a tool by Communist subverters to undermine the Western family unit and thereby undercut social health, making a weaker target. It's an interesting notion to consider.
Nuclear family is as much of a cultural choice as it as an evolutionary imposed organization of a family unit. Nuclear families have been the most basic and common method of raising a family for thousands of years, and has, so far, proved to be the most successful one. Extended families too, but in terms of gender roles, nuclear and extended family are working on the same principle.
In any case, this is not the only option on how to organize a family or bring up children, and one could argue that it is in a way forced upon the individuals who wish to make a family, especially in today's day and age and given the society's demands, but if my sociology and psychology knowledge serves me well, it is shown to be the most efficient and beneficial way for healthy upbringing of children.
As for women not necessarily being the caregivers - that is true, especially in an advanced modern society where there are many ways to circumvent the issue, but then again, let's not overlook the fact that in evolutionary terms, females are in the majority of cases the primary caregivers to the offspring. It is the female's body that can breastfeed the baby, not the male's, among other things.
LordAshur
Banned
@Vault17 All you say is pretty much on the spot, except for the commie boogeyman. Coming from a former socialist country, what the communists did was give women the right to vote, teach the illiterate ones to read and write, encouraged them to learn to drive and the like. They did teach them to be independent, but when it wouldn't stick they wouldn't really give a fuck. Most self-declared communists who lived back in the day are in fact conservatives. Feminism was given a pass during and after WWI because they realised that if some of the men have to stay behind to work in factories, they can't send them all to the front. Then it just carried on, slowly. Nobody expected feminists to go on irrational crusades once they were legally equal to men.
What's a nuclear family? If your sentence doesn't start with mutation and radiation don't even bother to reply though.
Okay so, none of what you just said is really true -- or rather, none of it is supported by science. We don't know what the ancestral environment during which we evolved really looked like, and we have absolutely zero clue what gender roles looked like at the time. All we can do is look at modern-day hunter-gatherer society in very different contexts and try to extrapolate from that, but that is obviously extremely fraught -- and also leads one to the conclusion that there were a large range of possible ways of organizing family and child-rearing, with a variety of gender roles. Regardless: what was true in the ancestral environment need not be true nor efficient nor desirable now, and is hence largely a redherring.
The nuclear family as a dominant mode of organization is actually a very recent and almost exclusively Northwestern European development of approximately the last five-hundred years or so. It is specifically linked with the Western European marriage pattern, which is very different from that in other societies. And yes, it's very, very different from societies where the family is an extended family -- these are not at all the same things, because the division of labor, inheritance and the accumulation of wealth (among many other things) look very different for rather obvious reasons. For one thing: the nuclear family necessitates children moving out of their parents' homes at marriage. A mother being primarily responsible for child-rearing is also very different from a large family being responsible for child-rearing.
More than that, there is little reason to believe that this way of living is more successful than the more extended family-oriented variation we see in China, or some community-parenting oriented ones we see in Western Africa, or many other variations we've seen throughout the globe. The fact that it is currently the dominant form doesn't make it the most efficient one, and there's little reason to believe that it was this child-rearing mode that led to the West's separation from the rest in economic terms -- if economic terms is really how we want to measure "success". That, by the way, is another problem with your thesis: what is "successful" and how are you defining it, and why that way? And where's your evidence that it is, in fact, more "successful"?
@Vault17: All those physical differences are much smaller, and do not necessarily have the consequences you think they have. For instance, being smaller agile could be a lot more beneficial for hunting than being big and strong -- men could stay at home and work at building the village, carrying out tasks requiring physical strength like harvesting grain and plowing earth, while women can go out and use their size advantage to sneak up on animals. Oh hey look I just thought of a just-so story that fits evolution just as well as yours does. Mayhaps post-hoc rationalization of modern-day gender roles in the context of an evolutionary environment we have very little knowledge isn't quite the same as actual biological truth.
Also what is up with bio-truthers and their whole post-apocalyptic obsession. We don't live in a post-apocalyptic society. There is precisely zero reason to instate gender roles as if we did -- and I would further strongly suggest that limiting women to caregiving roles is actually a terrible use of a scarce resource in a hostile environment. Instead, I think the whole "women biologically want this" is just a manifestation of your searching for reasons to justify your nostalgia for a fictional time when women were objects you could have sex with and who would do all that boring caregiving work you hate.
Last edited by a moderator:
I have a hard time to believe that males never raised children and females never hunted prey in the so called hunter gatherer society. I don't think that would be very economical. Nor a good thing considering the capacity of our brain. You would eliminate at least 50% of the intellectual potential in a society. Imagine if for some reason all males or females would dissapear. And there is so far no reason to believe that one is intellectually superior to the other. I am pretty sure that outside of breast feeding a male could take care of young children and that a mother could hunt as well. But, take this from someone who is just giving out his opinion. I am not a scientist.
Gonzalez
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
I seem to remember there are studies that do say that men and women get rewarded dopamine by their brain, so to speak, "get kicks" from performing different kind of things, thus encouraging them to perform different roles. This is off the top of my head, so take nothing for granted, but I shall look into these studies.
What your brain does and doesn't respond to with dopamine is also mediated by culture and training.
LordAshur
Banned
The extended family model was also the norm in eastern Europe, but it was mostly replaced with the nuclear one because it is the most compatible with modern economies. Japan also follows the nuclear family model, unless I'm mistaken, as do the developed parts of China. Although China is a different matter entirely due to things like the one-child policy, rapid development, huge population, huge gap between the country and the cities, and the likes.
Is there a reason for us to look to Africa, the Middle East, or India for guidelines on how to manage our society?
And as for the hunting thing, ask a large or even medium-size breasted woman how comfortable she feels running without a brassiere. Not the social kind of discomfort, but purely physical. Periods of uncontrollable bleeding aren't helpful in that regard either.
Is there a reason for us to look to Africa, the Middle East, or India for guidelines on how to manage our society?
And as for the hunting thing, ask a large or even medium-size breasted woman how comfortable she feels running without a brassiere. Not the social kind of discomfort, but purely physical. Periods of uncontrollable bleeding aren't helpful in that regard either.
Vault17
Banned
Agreed. Women can hunt birds and small game just as effectively as men. But I was more talking about the dawn-of-society or rebuilding-of-destroyed-society in which the contrivances of gender roles appeared in the first place. I'm talking about large game hunting, mammoth, elk, predators like bears and wolves. Cleaving through their muscle and bone, transporting hundreds of pounds of meat back to the village/camp/whathaveyou. A man is more suited for this job with their height, weight, and strength advantages over women - those qualities make it easier to kill or defend yourself against an animal much larger than you or your group. Far from being useless, women in the meantime would gather other things, small game from snares and traps, berries and other fruit, firewood for cooking the meat. There is no oppression in any of this, it is instead a sensible symbiosis and the maximization of practicality. This would be just one example of many. Even in the modern world, where a sharpshooting woman can hunt these large animals without strength entering the equation, there still remains the dissection and moving of the carcass, in which strength is still a requirement. So unfortunately your explanation of switching the hunting and gathering roles makes no sense.
There is still reason to instate gender roles; not only is it practical and useful, but they help express an individual's conceived role in society, in other words, satisfaction at executing their role. People in general try and "fit in" and "have a place" in which their strengths are on display and made good use of, and in turn that increases happiness among these people. Who wants to do things they don't like, or even worse, be forced to do things they don't like in order to merely survive in society? It also raises other questions - Why do people still hunt when it is unnecessary in a society in which food needs are met by ranching and mass production? Could it be innate drives and instincts toward violence, predation, exertion of power? And in expressing these instincts, what is generally found in the hunter? Exhilaration, satisfaction, happiness.
So where am I going with this? I'll posit an expression of the self on a primal level is a release, which in turn increases a sense of belonging and happiness. This applies to all things, from the mundane to the critical. Optimization of each of the sexes' roles, in turn, increase social cohesiveness and happiness in general. To work against this is (feminism) is to sow conflict, distrust, contempt of nature as well as your fellow human beings.
____
I would like to add, civilization is only nine meals away from anarchy. Society in it's current form is by no means permanent. And nobody is asserting that traditional gender roles mean women raise children while men do everything else - as you point out, that is a horribly inefficient waste of resources. There are other jobs that women could also do, that I already elaborated here, that would compliment and complete the jobs that men would do. That could apply to everything. Aside from physical labor, women are usually more sociable and group-oriented than men, who tend to be more independent minded. It would be up to women to foster good relations with other families, to be the diplomat essentially, in order to help pull society together.
"Women biologically want this" is a straw man. My whole view is "women and men are biologically more suited for this, so it makes sense to assign them generally in these categories." Women are more than sex objects and always have been, they are the other half of humanity and deserve commendation for their part in making society possible. To assert that I must be a chauvinist that wants to subjugate women into a lesser class of being because I think we have different roles to play is a poor misrepresentation of my position.
Yes, those countries that adopted Western modes of living adopted Western modes of living. This does not mean it is the best let alone only way to live under modern capitalism, nor does it mean it should be our aspiration, nor does it mean that the *reason* we're economically successful is our mode of family living.
Again, more ad-hoc rationalizations. Periods were infrequent historically for a variety of reasons (nutrition, for one) and they don't actually stand in the way of physical activity, and using a bit of cloth to tie breasts is not some high-falutin' modern invention.LordAshur said:
What you're doing is looking at the way you would like to see society organized, and then making up stories about how that would be the most logical way to live in some made-up ancestral environment. You can do that for any mode of living, and there's nothing scientific about it. And I should reiterate once again that even if specific gender roles were useful in an ancestral environment that says absolutely nothing whatsoever about the way we should organize our societies now.
@Vault17: There is no reason to believe that modern gender roles "appeared in the first place" in the dawn of society. In fact, a lot of the gender norms we have now are demonstrably very recent and Western inventions, not artifacts from some ancestral environment. Moreover, it is not that difficult for women to build up upper-body strength -- and large game hunting was most likely a group effort anyway so again: moot point.
The rest of your post is such obvious post-hoc rationalized claptrap I don't feel the remotest need to respond to it.
I think your phrasing women as "the other half" is rather telling. I also think it's pretty telling that the "different roles" you have envisioned just so happen to line up exactly with what I described.
LordAshur
Banned
I forgot that SJWs believe biology to be a social construct.
Would you send a pregnant woman out to hunt? And the fact that we're here today is some pretty damning evidence that all our female ancestors were pregnant at some point. Looking at our numbers, they were pregnant quite a lot.
Vault17
Banned
I disagree for points I have outlined above. What gender norms are you referring to, and how recent is recent? Women have ~70% the muscle mass of men and smaller frames on average. Furthermore, they have more higher amounts of fat to muscle compared to men, meaning that a man of equal weight will always be stronger than a woman of equal weight, even if the woman has added more muscle than the man to reach the target weight.
I'm just spilling my thoughts here and invite you to as well, disdainful dismissal of it isn't much fun. I get not wanting to be as verbose as I (my trains of thought are often runaways) but to refuse to respond entirely isn't in the spirit of discussion. I was hoping you'd bounce more ideas that could be addressed, which is why I bothered going into detail in the first place. Please keep in mind there is nothing personal here and in actuality I am less idealistic than what I'm posting - playing devil's advocate is a good way to spur conversation.
Telling of what? That women should be loved and cherished for completing men, for picking up where they fail and for being the voice of reason where men are ruled by instinct? Perhaps "The Better Half" wouldn't have stoked any ire. But I'm not prone to using that kind of language. And the way you describe it is also perspective, I don't think there is any coincidence here. We just view the same thing differently.
Gonzalez
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Here is an article about it. It does suggest that social constructs can affect things but that biology does affect as well. The opinion of the article does not necessarily reflect my own, which is practically non existent, do with it as you will.
Women weren't pregnant all the time or even all that frequently, for the same reason that periods weren't all that frequent. And women can certainly be active late into their pregnancy.
I forgot that SJWs believe biology to be a social construct.
Would you send a pregnant woman out to hunt? And the fact that we're here today is some pretty damning evidence that all our female ancestors were pregnant at some point. Looking at our numbers, they were pregnant quite a lot.
Biology is not a social construct, but gender and especially gender roles are. Those who seek to justify those gender roles with post-hoc rationalization often don't realize the extent to which gender and gender roles are cultural choices rather than biological imperatives.
Which reminds me: once again, even if those gender roles were in place in the ancestral environment due to selective pressures, this says absolutely nothing about what we should be doing now.
@Vault17: The phrasing is telling because you frame women not as individual people with individual goals they may achieve, but solely solely as people who are there to help men achieve their goals. You literally see women as "completing" men, rather than living life on their own terms, for their own reasons.
The fundamental error you're committing is that you are looking at the way you would want (and have been taught to want)a society to be constructed, and then trying to reason backwards as to why this is the ideal way to operate. There is no reason to create a highly dimorphic society given the extreme adaptability of men and women.
Last edited by a moderator:
Vault17
Banned
Then I phrased it clumsily, since the former is more in line with what I was trying to emphasize. Of course they are individuals. And when I say completing, I mean it mutually, not one sided. Two dots where a single was, halves of a whole, Plato's Symposium and how humans originally had four arms and four legs until the gods pulled them apart, that kind of thing. Essentially the idea that an individual man or woman are nowhere near as strong as when they are united.
I haven't been "taught" to want this in any way. Just five years ago I was on the feminist side, making many of the same arguments that I combat today. I changed, as most people do, due to conversations with others, airing new ideas, weighing the practical and the ideological. I wasn't raised to be this way, much like my opinions in politics, religion, philosophy etc. have similarly evolved over time. I'm not reasoning anything backwards, I'm calling it like I see it. I haven't reached a conclusion and attempted to jigsaw evidence to fit it, I have seen the evidence and formed my conclusion. If anything was post-hoc in my thinking it was my earlier liberal mindset that equality could even exist or is even desirable. But that's another story.
And I don't know if you read my entire post, but I agree that men and women are extremely adaptable, and they could complete almost any social role we have in society, especially with modern technology. But where you are hung up on the equality aspect of it, I am concentrating more on human happiness and how ideally roles fit natural qualities. In short, your position is more about abstract ideology, rather than practical compromise.
Last edited:
I forgot that SJWs believe biology to be a social construct.
Would you send a pregnant woman out to hunt? And the fact that we're here today is some pretty damning evidence that all our female ancestors were pregnant at some point. Looking at our numbers, they were pregnant quite a lot.
Yeah, because all know that pregnancy last for a life time right and that all females did was serving as birth-machines not unlike those machine-guns poping babies out where every they go.
It just doesn't make sense to me. Both males and females, that is what studies say, have the exact same intellectual power. So why on earth should a male not be able to raise a child or a female to hunt, even mammoths - if they have to. It seems that big game hunting is actually more about communication than raw physical power, what's a male gona do really? Wrestle it down in mortal combat? Do people even know how the people hunted mammoths? And omg, if a female has to take a bit less meat with her! The horror! I think neither females nor males have been practising body building, so the difference might not have been THAT big. If you have a group of 15 females working on it that is really not much of an issue, I am sure they will have not many issues with hard labor, infact when you see what females can do on their own today in more rural environments, they seem to do just fine even without males. I imagine that a group with extremly stict roles would have quite some trouble. Imagine if males would be the ones important for getting food. What happens if the males all dissapear for what ever reason? Or what if the females dissapear and leaving the males alone with the children? It's understandable that infants would stick with the mother, I mean males can't breast feed and giving birth is exhausting, so much is a given. But there is no reason in my opinion to believe that when it comes to survival that the cave-mans and womans of the prehistoric time had this rigid social structure we believe in or practised for the last no clue 10 000 years. It just doesn't make sense to me. When it comes to survival, fending off predators, defending your tribe, hunting etc. Nature doesn't give a shit if you're male or female. All that counts is can you make it? Thus it seems reasonably in my opinion to believe that when the need arrises both genders can do the job.
Last edited:
Vault17
Banned
Sounds like a Vault experiment is the only way to solve this Crni, maybe Vault-Tec was right!
In all actuality, I think the takeaway here is still off the mark. Of course when you need to survive, anyone could attempt to do anything, to fill any role. But what is optimal and comfortable? That's different than what is possible.
In all actuality, I think the takeaway here is still off the mark. Of course when you need to survive, anyone could attempt to do anything, to fill any role. But what is optimal and comfortable? That's different than what is possible.