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As someone with no personal tolerance whatsoever for traditional gender roles, I am continually amazed by their continued popularity. How _inefficient_, at the very least. Social femininity seems an elaborate system for the manufacture of statists, social masculinity an elaborate system for the manufacture of militarists. I believe that traditional gender roles became inefficient the moment that education and birth control became cheap and ubiquitous. I firmly believe that gender phenomonology will beat and outcompete gender essentialism in the end.
And you believe otherwise. And we can both live in the same world, and not be killing each other. (Indeed, not only are we not in competition, but our opposite preferences are probably efficient for both of us, at the margin. Liberty turns diversity into information, and whatnot.)
That's a reminder, right there, of how incredibly rich a world we live in. It is unnecessary for me to beat your head in, or for you to cut my head off, or for anyone to be shipped out for re-education, to resolve our differences. Time will prove one or the other of us right, or more likely both of us wrong, and we can wait. That's a heck of a thing there.
More of that all around, whatever the gender. And less of everything that would require people to agree or be the same.
--G
the way males are and the way females are, controlling for environment, is contingent upon our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (EEA). addditionally, within each subgroup, there are evolutionary stable strategies (ESS). the latter means that there might be multiple strategies of "femalesness" and "maleness" (think alpha vs. beta, winner-take-all vs. low-risk-low-gain), though some strategies might be more common than others.
Social femininity seems an elaborate system for the manufacture of statists, social masculinity an elaborate system for the manufacture of militarists. I believe that traditional gender roles became inefficient the moment that education and birth control became cheap and ubiquitous.
keep in mind that for 99% of the existence of h. sapiens, we were hunter gathers. so all this talk of "statists" and "education" and "birth control" (aside from infanticide) is irrelevant in the context of our evolutionary background. natural selection does not select for a libertarian society, it selects for the propogation of genes, because genes perpetuate the next generation. like it or not, feminity and masculinity work for about 100,000 years. doesn't mean it'll work in the future, but we come to the table with some baggage.
Do you not see how the claim "men need women to be women" could be understood to mean that women should be made to go back to the kitchen?
In the original post, you said that if someone didn't automatically understand what the ( normativelly defined ) term "women" meant, there was something wrong with them. Were you wrong about that or is there something wrong with Amber, MY and Julian?
Since you made a controversial claim ( that could easily have come out of Jerry Falwell's mouth )and a crucial term of that claim was supposed to be self-evident to the readers ( which is apparently wasn't ), are you really surprised that you caught a lot of flak?
why?
careers in biology have revolved around this question, but the big point is that heterosexuality is not just a construct, it trumps asexual reproduction despite its genetic cost (you don't clone yourself, you children are only 50% you, instead of 100%).
anyway, i think that's what will was getting at, though he correct me.
If we're all blank slates, why do other mammals (without, say, advertisements and *complex* social pressures) still fall pretty neatly into gendered roles? Sure, there's some social conditioning with animals, but I'm willing to wager that in a statistically sound experiment, if you took male and female babies of another mammalian species and isolated them immediately at birth, providing for their nutritional needs, they would still generally act the same way as non-isolated kin. Are there exceptions? Sure. But that's what they are. Exception. Three cheers for you, good sir, for having the gumption to say something like this out in public. Too often people are 'shhh'-ed into oblivion.
the die is loaded in a particular way for humans. that doesn't imply that is -> ought, but, if you want to get to a particular ought you need to take into account the various is aspects.
Take even a brief look at, say, the ideal of masculinity espoused in 18th-century Europe, and you will begin to question whether there is anything essential about masculinity. These guys were our ancestors, yet they dressed and acted in ways that, well, would get them beaten up today: Wearing wigs and makeup, lace and silk, even high heels for crying out loud...
Historically, there is a massive amount of evidence that gender roles have changed over time. Experientially, we all seem to want what we want, and social construction be damned. I don't have an answer for why this is, but I agree with several others on this thread--It's part of the reason I'm glad I'm a libertarian.
this is correct. there are "markers" which differ as a function of time & space. that does not deny human universals.
for example, though there are matrilineal societies, there are, to my knowledge, no matriarchal societies where women take a dominant (as opposed to non-trivial, as in the scythians or some celtic groups) in war. this might be a function of size difference, but also is likely the result in different attitudes toward physical aggression.
some might say that comparing the pink = female & blue = male marker to say the cross-cultural tendency for males to be more aggressive and often take leading temporal roles when social complexity increase to be a trivial observation.
This is where both you and Kipnis get feminism wrong. There is nothing inherent to the ideology that dictates how feminine women should or shouldn't be (or, for that matter, whether or not men should be attracted to women with classically feminine traits). In fact, feminism at its core, just like other classical liberal theories, is about minimizing the number of restrictions placed on the personal choices people make. If this means a woman chooses to wear "pearls, lipstick, and tight sweaters", then feminism would honor that woman's decision just as it would honor the decision of a woman to get a buzz cut and wear combat boots. That's not to say all feminists respect women who choose the former, but don't pan the ideology as a whole just because one radical segment believes that the only way women can work towards equality is if they are androgynous.
Stating your personal preference for women who choose to adhere to traditional gender roles is something feminists whould respect, but stating as an immutable fact that both sexes need to adhere to traditional gender roles isn't.
did will go from is -> ought though in a general social or legalistic sense? he was speaking of himself and the *majority* of males.
Sounds like early 70's glam-rock and mid-80's hair-metal to me.
He just implied that most people wouldn't.
Which may have made the Shakers' lives more challenging. And, perhaps, had some causal relation to the human race still existing, but the Shakers' religious sect not....
Whether anyone should care about the continuance of the human race is an open question.
The fact that underlying genetic imperitaves generate stereotypical sex roles in all human cultures is not.
If you think there's something so very ironic (and why does irony always have to be "delicious," anyway?) about a "bookish, metrosexual man with interests in poetry and art museums speaking as the mouthpiece of masculinity," that says more about the narrowness of your own gender notions than about Will or his argument. Who, by your standard, is allowed to speak on the subject of masculinity? Only macho meatheads? Robert frigging Bly?
Just because Will or anyone else likes art museums doesn't mean he has to then forsake all claim to masculinity and its various social, moral, sexual, and aesthetic implications.
Quick show of hands here: who among the commenters has kids? Just curious.
;-)
It's true, you couldn't rightfully call me "unmarried and childless."
(And I'm pushing 40.)
No, I don't think Will went that route at all, although that wasn't immediately clear from his initial post. With the final sentence of my comment, I was just stating the importance of being careful when using the word 'need' to express this idea, as it could be easily construed to mean 'ought'.
I also don't deny that a majority of males act a certain way at least partially due to biological factors. I just wanted to clarify what is a very common misperception about feminism.
I guess my explicit use of the word "stereotype" wasn't enough to impart that I was making commentary about stereotypes rather than about bookish, meterosexual men? You bookish, metrosexuals are always so sensitive about your masculinity ;-) Of course, I am a bookish homosexual so I can only cast my metaphorical stones with so much force. My point was, however, that statements like "men need women to be women and women need men to be men..." make little sense (or are, at best, bland statements of biological necessity) unless we also accept the same kind of stereotypes that might question the masculinity of bookish metrosexuals - or the femininity of ambitious women with no patience for children. I am assuming Will was not just talking about the procreative necessities of sexual beings. But apart from that, the only thing men "need" women to be are effective partners and repsonsible spouses, likewise for the womanly "need" of men. The rest is just finding a complementary mix, between two people, of personality traits that don't depend at all on gender.
You seem to suggest that having kids is a trump card for masculinity. It sounds like a reasonable propositiion, to me - but who cares about that, anyway? Surely not you or your wife and kids? What does it matter whether you are "really" masculine or not? It betrays a certain insecurity to be so concerned about whether you are "masculine" or "feminine". Why bother? Isn't everyone really a blend of masculine and feminine characteristics. If you accept that, then Will's statement is pretty silly. But statements like it do, at lease, serve to reassure all those people concerned about being "real men" and a "real women" that all their effort in the direction of masculinity and femininity was worthwhile.
In short, the problem is the entire conceptualization of gender roles and masculinity/femininity that we let influence our lives and our conceptions of ourselves. Will's statement depends on these pernicious archetypes for it's validity. And these same archetypes inspire the subtle question your "childless" comment proposes: What right does a single, childless guy have to question the masculinity of a bookish, metrosexual husband? Don't we look silly having this kind of argument? That's my point: Arguing or pontificating about something as meaningless as "masculinity" is silly because the concept (and it's counterpart) is itself silly. We need to get over it... and unfortunately that means getting over our love of phrases as quaint as "men need women to be women and women need men to be men..."
I'm asking because part of the fun of the ongoing science project that is parenthood is watching other parents freak out over gender roles, thinking through one's own hangups, and speculating on which characteristics of a child are conditioned vs. innate.
That's all I meant.
Yeah, that's the trick right there!
Especially when thinking beyond the one-night-stand, it's really the personality traits that make all the difference.
And don't most of us informally sort people by "personality traits" with little regard to gender? (I'm thinking "cranky," "lazy," "funny," etc.)