Apologies for the monster post, but these are complex issues.
Originally Posted by
DianeT
Lori, I don't think anybody said that women were prone to backstabbing. The quote from which the meme was extracted just mentions it as a possibility. You derive a whole line of reasoning from that hypothesis, but don't you want to verify this hypothesis first?
In fact that's not the case, Diane. It's true that Sophia Nelson's quote was addressed specifically to women, from which one might infer that she believes backstabbing (etc.) to be more of a female vice. However, the same assumption was implicit in remarks from Miel and from Micki, who both intimated that women's frequent hostility toward other women was the fault of men (or the evil Patriarchy) who "trained" women in particular (not men) to act this way as a "divide and conquer" strategy to "keep women down." (As if men don't also fight among themselves, though usually in a more direct way.) Most of all though, it's an impression I've gained myself from multiple sources over life in general. If I didn't have that impression already, I would have said :Who says women are more prone to this behavior anyway? It's just a human trait."
Is it true? Others seem to think so. Here are a couple of sources from the Web:
Women vs. men: Who likes to backstab more?
Then here's a more formal paper from Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa:
Do human females use indirect aggression as an intrasexual competition strategy?
She starts off by saying outright:
Indirect aggression includes behaviours such as criticizing a competitor's appearance, spreading rumours about a person's sexual behaviour and social exclusion. Human females have a particular proclivity for using indirect aggression, which is typically directed at other females, especially attractive and sexually available females, in the context of intrasexual competition for mates.
So she places this behavior in the context of competition for mates, but I'd say it occurs in broader contexts also. In any case men also compete for mates--often with physical violence toward other men--but that's "direct" aggression as opposed to "indirect."
As for the rest, it's an exaggeration of what I said to claim that "all" women love looking after a home, or hate mechanics. These are tendencies, that's all. in the case of mechanics, it's not so much that women "hate" mechanics, but that most would rather do other, usually more "people-oriented" jobs. Anyway plumbing and especially auto mechanics can be "dirty" jobs, and women are less tolerant of dirt than men, as I said earlier. Rosie the Riveter at least had a clean job (if you're familiar with that American icon). A more pertinent question might be "if gender imbalances are the result of discrimination engineered by men, why are men so anxious to keep women out of ordinary working class jobs like plumbing, but far more willing to allow women into "power professions" like doctoring, lawyering, journalism, politics and others?"
To talk about the past is to open up a colossal can of worms, hence many details to follow. Yet I'm not concerned about the past, because it's over. And we can't judge the past by present day standards. But in summary, there's a tendency by some to blame men for "oppressing" women in the past, where the truth is that men and women alike were both oppressed by Nature--until humans, men especially, got the upper hand over Nature in very recent times. Nature gave men more physical power than women, that's all.
For nearly all of human history we struggled for survival in brutal conditions that in turn brutalized our ancestors who lived in them. They routinely practiced cruelties intolerable to us in the comfort and security of today. Starvation, disease, pain and death were rampant, along with the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse": War, Famine, Plague, and Pestilence. War in particular was inevitable, given humans' propensity for breeding and overrunning their resources, leading to competition for territory. Most wars in history were caused by overpopulation. (My wife had a favorite high school history teacher who pointed that out. He told the truth about humans.) This was still true of the war in Rwanda in the 1990s. It wasn't "all about 'tribalism,'" as some people claimed. The past was often a world of cut-throat competition for survival at every level, including robbers on the road. Highwaymen were still common in Britain in the late 18th century, as we know. As for the Wild West, it was still wild even a century later.
Voting? Never mind women; most men didn't have a vote in medieval times. In those days it was logistically impossible to conduct an election in a territory the size of a nation. The resources to do such things didn't exist. Often it wasn't even safe for women to travel unescorted, so control (and defense) of a nation naturally devolved upon a feudal hierarchy of armed men. At the time of England's Great Reform Bill of 1832, if I remember correctly, only one in eight men had a vote, due to the need for a (real) property qualification. Earlier in 1780 it was one in eighteen. It was probably assumed that if men weren't accomplished enough (and therefore educated and intelligent enough) to achieve property ownership, they weren't fit to vote wisely.
Women owning real estate? Sometimes they could, but in primitive times it was no use "owning" property if you couldn't defend it against marauders, and men were needed to do that. Noblewomen of course owned lands in their name, but they had armies of soldiers to protect it. Men were considered responsible for their wives' misbehavior, so they were permitted more control over their wives. And so on.
All this changed slowly over the centuries as civilization evolved further, but originally societies were far more dependent upon men, including individual men, for survival. Men's superior strength and toughness were essential for hard manual labor, for dangerous work, and for fighting and defending territory. So entire cultures looked up to and valued men for these qualities. "Gender roles" of course were vastly simplified, exaggerated and absolutized in more primitive days. There wasn't as much room for variation in a simpler, mostly agrarian society. Millions of would-be "intellectual" men never got an education--no resources to do it, and few job opportunities except as monks and priests--so were forced by default into manual labor or warriorship to survive.
The way men were valued more highly than they are today was demonstrated in an anecdote I read a long time ago about some American radical feminists trying to indoctrinate women in India. The feminists were excoriating men as "oppressors," while the Indian women were staring at them as if they'd come from Mars. They placed a far higher value on men in their own culture, and didn't hold contempt for men. The reason was simple enough. With India being a less "developed" nation than the United States, industrially and economically, these women were far more in touch with the days when men's physical labor was, and often still was, so necessary and valued.
Men's trade and technologies created wealth--even such simple things as clocks and eyeglasses and an 18th-century advance in crop rotation--slowly improved life over the centuries and made it more secure, while authority became more centralized and stabilizing (partly thanks to the invention of gunpowder). It all culminated in the Industrial Revolution and everything that came after. As physical conditions changed, so did society. More wealth, more safety, more resources, more sophistication and job possibilities, a greater diversity of roles for everybody, including women, who took advantage of them,
Men, through the technology for which they were chiefly responsible--in the past anyway--gave away much of their power to women, and "liberated" women from the restrictions formerly imposed on them by Nature, due to their lesser physical strength and toughness. Plus of course women's need to be preoccupied with infant and child care, while men had other things to do. Which is not to ignore the fact that women historically have nearly always contributed to the food supply as well, by farming, gathering and so on.
But the role of biology and instinct can not be ignored in all of this. As far as gender roles were exaggerated and rigid in former times, at least they were based on natural differences between women's and men's instincts. For instance, it's not just the physiological fact that it's women who have babies, but the accompanying psychological fact that women in general are more motivated toward infant and child care. Not exclusively of course; "good fathers" are needed too. And some women just "aren't motherly." But on average, women are more motivated to invest time in child care. It's not just a "social rule." It's in their DNA.
Also, some traits that people might call "sexism" are not imposed by "social rules" at all, and for that reason cannot be easily changed. No doubt they were formed originally under survival pressures of some kind, but that's so far back in our evolution that they've now become instinctive. An interesting example is the fact that men and women alike subconsciously perceive deeper voices as "more authoritative." Nobody "teaches" people to see them that way. It's instinctive. Interestingly, CEOs with deeper voices tend to earn more money as a trend. It can work for women too. Women with shrill voices attract more attention when they're in distress and need rescuing, but they're less likely to be seen as reliable leaders. So it's not just a men-women thing, but it may have originated with men being seen as authoritative in the most vital fields of security and survival; or perhaps the difference between adults (powerful, wise) and children (weak, inexperienced). Maggie Thatcher took advantage of this by getting voice training to sound more authoritative, and won big-time. People do not reject women leaders out of hand. But to my knowledge, Hillary Clinton did no such thing, and lost. Evolution has programmed a lot more into our brains than we realize.
Once our environment began to change, starting especially with the Victorian era, we saw women responding by changing their roles rapidly, certainly by historical standards. If women had internalized the notion that "men were the superior members of society," as they were in Victorian times, that idea has vanished into thin air like a puff of smoke from a steam train. Another notable example was that women always had to be wary of unwanted pregnancy, but after the birth control pill was introduced in the 1960s, it was swiftly followed by a loosening of women's sexual inhibitions and we had a so-called "sexual revolution" the very next decade. (And also, regrettably, a sudden tide of divorce.) But if some women at the time imagined they wanted unattached sex the way men supposedly do (though that's not the whole truth either), at the end of the 1970s we were hearing "Women want relationships after all!" That was women's natural instincts reasserting themselves after a decade of experiment.
Something similar happened after a generation of second-wave feminism. By the 1990s, numerous women were starting to complain that "feminism" was focusing too heavily on trying to turn women into substitute men, pushing women into careers in the name of "equality," while ignoring women like themselves who preferred to stay home and raise their children. Some felt feminism had devalued the mission that to them was most important and rewarding in their lives, so if another woman asked them "What do you do?" they felt embarrassed to say "I'm just a housewife and mother." That's when the backlash really set in, and more and more women started saying things like "the NOW doesn't speak for me." Again, women's instincts reasserting themselves.
The bottom line here is that I don't see any evidence that women in general today are obeying any "men's rules" they've supposedly internalized. For one thing if men were so much in control of women's thoughts and motives, how come there are so many radical feminists around blaming men for everything that's wrong with their lives? If men were programming women's behavior, they sure did a lousy job!
While we all internalize some social rules, overall I don't see women today acting in ways that can't in the main be explained by their natural instincts and variations among individuals, as opposed to some set of rules devised specifically by men, solely for men's advantage. Occam's Razor and all that. Men and women have had tens, even hundreds of thousands of years for evolution to shape their aptitudes and behaviors differently. Despite decades of "equal pay," "equal opportunity" and "antidiscrimination" laws, not to mention "sexual harassment" laws and whatnot designed to promote "equality," "equality" does not mean "sameness." So it doesn't surprise me in the least to see women behaving differently and making different life choices from men, as a pattern. It's exactly what I'd expect.
Women of course aren't all the same, any more than men are. When it comes to "gender conditioning," I've never forgotten something a woman told me back in the 1990s. She was trying to argue that "social conditioning" was responsible for men and women being different. She described how, when she was a girl, her father insisted on her brother being the one to mow the lawn, because that was a "man's job," and as a girl she wasn't supposed to do it. But her brother got fed up with doing it all the time. Meanwhile, she was fascinated by the motor mower. So she came to an arrangement with her brother, where she had fun mowing the lawn while he went off to do something he wanted to do instead.
What was the outcome of all this? As a woman, her hobby was building engines and racing cars! Well, good for her! People should do what they'd good at and enjoy the most! But I had to laugh because she blew her own argument right out of the water. She demonstrated that attempts at "social conditioning" exist, yes- But she also proved that they didn't work!--certainly not in her case. Instead, she followed her own natural bent. Many people do things in defiance of their "social conditioning"--including crossdressing of course--and if they seem to go along with this conditioning instead, it's more likely because it's in harmony with their natural leanings to begin with.