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Thread: Interesting Meme

  1. #26
    Senior Member DianeT's Avatar
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    KellyAnne, the same Rousseau wrote "Woman is made to submit to man and to endure even injustice at his hands" (L'Emile). And the same Schopenhauer (supposedly inspired by Rousseau) wrote "They form the sexus sequior, the second sex, inferior in every respect to the first." (On women). Schopenhauer absolutely loathed women (and his mother above all). I am afraid I can't seriously recognize them any credibility or authority over that particular subject.

    I'm still curious about the explanation for biology-originated behaviors.

  2. #27
    Super Moderator char GG's Avatar
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    It seems this meme causes a lot of over-thinking.

  3. #28
    Member Lori Ann Westlake's Avatar
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    Hi Diane,

    I wouldn't say society has no effect on our behavior. Not at all! I mentioned an example above of "social rules," about sexual mores in that case (which can change somewhat, as we know), and obviously we internalize all kind of social rules from childhood, such as "Thou shalt not steal." So yes, our natural instincts do become modified and refined by social rules. Which is just as well, otherwise we'd all be behaving like savages, doing whatever our instincts told us to do, no matter what the harm to others.

    Even then, instinct still plays a part in curbing bad behavior, because we have evolved intelligence, awareness of long term consequences, and controls over impulsive behavior, along with feelings we call "empathy," a "conscience," a sense of "guilt," and so on. And, dare I add, a sense of pride in "doing the right thing," whatever that may mean, either in general human terms or by the rules of a particular society, which can vary. All of these feelings are natural too, and serve as inhibitions against harming others, though of course they don't always prevail when temptation looms. They don't have to be "taught," though admittedly people can feel guilty simply for breaking the rules of their own society or subculture, which may not apply in another. I expect the rules of any particular society evolved to be functional in whatever environment they lived in (with a certain amount of randomness thrown in), though those rules can linger long after the environment has changed, as we know. But if humans at large had no "conscience," we wouldn't have a "society at all. "Welcome to the Jungle!" as "Guns 'n' Roses" sang!

    Getting back to your question, I thought I explained this in my response to Micki Finn's post, but I'll try again. If "society" actually encourages backstabbing, whispering and plotting secretly behind people's backs, getting "gangs" together to attack and undermine a single person, and suchlike skullduggery, why should women be more prone than men to act on this injunction? That is, assuming that they are--a point I was careful to mention--but I think it's fair to say that women, more than men, have a reputation for indulging in this kind of behavior. Not that it's exclusive to women of course; a lot of men have done the same to other men, especially in politics. There are no absolute differences between the sexes. But it does seem by reputation to be more of a "women's thing," even out of petty motives. Teenage girls in high school for instance often practice "exclusion games," forming a "clique" of alliances and excluding the "unpopular" girls from the clique. But the alliances can also shift and change. Best friends today, daggers drawn tomorrow.

    In any case I don't believe for a moment that society "encourages" this kind of behavior. Especially men. These are not "men's rules" at all. "Men's rules" say things like "Play the game! (by the rules). Play fair." "Fight your own fight." "Two onto one ain't fair." "Pick on someone your own size." "Don't hit below the belt." And so on. Of course these rules are often broken, but that's beside the point. They're still ideals that society teaches. So could it be that men teach them to other men, but not to women? That's a possible hypothesis, but I don't believe it. Rules of that kind are meant to apply society-wide, to women and men alike.

    If women are indeed more prone than men to whispering, backstabbing and other manipulative behaviors, the explanation has to be sought elsewhere. Specifically in the innate differences that have evolved between women and men in their adaptations to survival.

    The world of living organisms has always been competitive in the cause of survival. But with men, the competition has more often been directly with Nature itself, both animate and inanimate: a world of "Things." I mentioned that in my post about "people versus things," a female versus a male world. Of course there's an enormous overlap between the two. But the whole notion of "survival alone in the wild" tends to be a male one.

    Researchers have observed that men's self esteem depends more on being capable of maintaining independence from others, while women's self esteem depends more on maintaining "closeness" to and alliances with others. This reflects women's greater "social" orientation compared with men. It's a survival technique, as is men's conquest of Nature. Women are not as physically tough and muscular, have infants to care for, and need the protection of others. But there's an up-side and a down-side to this orientation. If a woman feels "offended, hurt, or disappointed" by another woman, she may perceive it as a threat to their alliance in a way that a man would not. She may also have been reluctant to "confront" in the first place because she feared that conflict would end their alliance anyway. So her reaction is to go seeking alliances with other women by way of compensation. But in addition, the fear and sense of threat posed by the original "offender" leads the "offended" woman to turn hostile and seek help in denigrating her and trying to exclude her. I guess that's about the best way I can explain it.

  4. #29
    Senior Member DianeT's Avatar
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    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?

    As for "men's rules", you say there aren't, but still mention a few, revolving around the themes of gaming and fighting. Why just games and fights? The rules of men I would like to talk about are mostly social expectations about men and women. You are telling me there are no such rules. I find it hard to believe that men rules do not exist and therefore that women could not interiorize them when men were dominant for thousands of years, ruling states, families, forbidding women to vote, to divorce, to have jobs without the husband's approval, to even have sexual pleasure in some instances. And hard to believe that our education system wasn't built on these grounds and could not shape women's behaviours. Your explanations about women's behaviours circle back in several occasions to the assumed fact that they innately love to be responsible of their home, love children, hate mechanics, etc. I don't believe they do due to their nature. But that they were simply told from a tender age (check the girl section in a toy shop) that the home is their responsibility (and know the blame will be put on them, not their husbands, when a guess notices some missed spot), that a woman must love babies and children, that they are genetically incapable of fixing cars, that they should be the ones taking the dishes back to the kitchen while the husbands chat and drink in the garden. This is all social expectations, and like you said, we can abide by them without being explicitly told to (monkey sees monkey does is also education).
    The world is slowly changing, so do the minds. There's nothing a woman can't do. And probably nothing they wouldn't like to do, if only we didn't tell them it's not for them. Since the "society" placed us (I'm speaking as a man here) in command for so long and left enduring stigmates of this in our social and cultural environment, as men we have the great responsibility of getting the balance right when we can. After all, we too can be a human being that women can trust.
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  5. #30
    Aspiring Member kellyanne's Avatar
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    All people suffer the prejudice of their own era.

    History shows that the day will come when all we believe will be considered unacceptable, ergo should everything we think and say be dismissed outright?

    It is the nature of our times to dismiss any opinion we do not agree with as untrue and wrong, and anything else the writer says must also be wrong because it is not agreeable to the reader.

    As to Schopenhauer's enmity to the fair gender - I had mentioned that in a caveat.
    Last edited by kellyanne; 04-12-2021 at 11:41 AM.

  6. #31
    Senior Member DianeT's Avatar
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    Kellyane, you brought these examples up, I didn't ask for them. The prejudices of the era are what they are, but if I'm not interested in three-century old ramblings from a depressive disgruntled ultra-mysoginist philosopher to educate myself about women, that is my right, as it is my right to not recognize your sources as the best example of an objective point of view about women. I imagine that if an author of the 18th century had written an essay about transvestites, explaining they were inferior to men and their brains smaller, you wouldn't be defending her/him at all and would be quick to explain that gender theory has fortunately progressed since. But for (genetic) women, it seems anything will fly. Well, no. And especially not in such a thread.

    Also, I tried to be respectful in my answer, attacking your sources but not you personally. And addressed you by your name. It would be nice if you could return the favor.
    Last edited by DianeT; 04-05-2021 at 02:49 AM.

  7. #32
    Member Lori Ann Westlake's Avatar
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    Apologies for the monster post, but these are complex issues.

    Quote Originally Posted by DianeT View Post
    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.

  8. #33
    Aspiring Member kellyanne's Avatar
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    No offense intended

    ciao

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