@MCcuddles2 I don't think anyone here is saying that men and women are exactly the same without societal influence. What I personally have a problem with is assuming that gender-related inequities are all rooted in immutable physical differences, and implying that those differences make the inequities okay.
Is it fair for an excellent father to lose custody of his children in a divorce, when the mother is less capable of parenting than he is, because the judge believes "women are natural caretakers - it's in their biology" and lets that unconscious bias affect his final decision?
If a firefighter needs to be physically able to haul a 250lb person out of a burning building, then we'll probably end up with more men than women as firefighters. That's understandable. Not every guy is a beefcake, but testosterone does tend to lead to a strength advantage.
But is it okay to discourage young girls from pursuing STEM careers, because we assume by default that the female brain is inadequate in that area and believe that women "should" naturally gravitate toward fields like nursing and childcare instead?
@MCcuddles2: Seems to me natural selection changes the genetic baseline—and the culture affects who gets to breed.
Select for people who aren't overly masculine or feminine (by the old standards), reproduce their genetics, and what do you know? You've changed humanity. No more men beating their chests and pounding people's heads in with rocks—no more women screaming and fainting at the least little thing.
None of that from anybody of any sex, in fact. All bred and trained out: nature and nurture working in tandem, like they always have. Yay.
Ooh. Those are some good points, @squeakytoy. Well said!
@DarrenWalker the assumption being that only people who aren't overtly masculine or feminine will get sexually selected. There is no survival driven mechanism for this to happen.
@MCcuddles2: Change society so that people find mentally androgynous types attractive (and/or overly masculine or feminine types unattractive), and the genetic selection will take care of itself.
There's a reason we have so few true redheads today.
How can you train people to be attracted to something other than what they are inherently attracted to?
@MCcuddles2: Gee, I wonder.
So as a hypothetical. Your profile says you are asexual. Is there anything anyone can do to change that?
@MCcuddles2: No need. Asexuals are a minority and we don't tend to reproduce our genetics. Just create a society where the standard for a good partner is one who isn't bound to a set of stereotypes, and watch the genes that produce hyper masculine or feminine behavior become less frequent in the population.
It's not about need. All I'm saying is that no amount of cultural indoctrination is going to change your sexual preference. That's probably true for most people.
This is in response to this comment:
Change society so that people find mentally androgynous types attractive (and/or overly masculine or feminine types unattractive), and the genetic selection will take care of itself.
@MCcuddles2: You don't have to change the genetics of currently existing individuals. Just changing their behavior is enough.
Let Generation A teach Generation B that healthy humans are attractive, and that's who the breeding population will select as partners once they're old enough to procreate (thus altering the genetics of Generation C).
Anyway, this conversation isn't going anywhere. I'm going to restate my belief that men and women in general have inherent ways of being, driven by our nature. Masculinity and femininity are useful words we have come up with to capture this phenomenon.
I personally choose to embrace and enjoy our nature and find healthy ways to channel it. I dont place value in trying to merge everything towards the center.
With that I think I feel complete with this conversation.
I'm going to restate my belief that men and women in general have inherent ways of being, driven by our nature.
Well, that's a shame. Then we'll have to agree to disagree.
Ok, last comment, haha for clarity. I dont necessarily disagree with your last comment @squeakytoy.
I have nieces and I encourage them to be anything they want to be professionally, whether its STEM or sports, without limitations.
They share my genes so they should be able to categorically kick everyone's ass at everything.
@squeakytoy: Yeah, there are definitely physical differences between human males and females—and some of those physical differences probably do lead to some natural behavioral differences.
But physical sex is a spectrum, not a binary, and drawing sharp lines in subjective places strikes me as an unhelpful thing to do.
You're right: it's terrible to assume that gender-related inequities are all rooted in immutable physical differences, and imply that those differences make the inequities okay... especially when we're not even solid on what the actual behavioral effects of those physical differences are.
Better to see people as people, and assess them individually rather than making assumptions about hormone levels, personality, strength, etc.
@MCcuddles2 Intellect comes from biology and how our brains are wired and our thought processes, brain sizes, and specific sizes of certain areas of the brains have changed over thousands of years. With knowledge comes modifications. Science does not restrain human change; it merely explains why it changes or operates in a certain matter. The genetic baseline changes as well, and any scientist worth his salt is not going to say that this will not change. Chemically, male sperm counts and testosterone levels are plummeting to record lows because of environmental concerns. Our bodies and brains will adapt and mutate accordingly. Hormones affect behavior.
We are both talking about the same thing and we are not far apart on this, but we fundamentally disagree on the degree of change.
@MCcuddles2 Ah, thank you for clarifying! That's a relief. I'm glad you have some flexibility in where you draw the lines.
@DarrenWalker Totally agreed, on all counts!!
@DarrenWalker I disagree that changes can be made in such a small timeframe. Generations have been trying and failing to recommend partners for a long time. Sexual preferences change over time, and right now there is no selection process. Everything started with evolutionary reasons for what we see as attractive like symmetry and body part size but it's never been a choice. Hypermasculine/feminine traits still harken back to humanity's old way of selecting for survival and it may be changing naturally but it can't be taught from one generation to another.
@MCcuddles2 I agree that there are some properties that have arisen from evolution that we call masculine and feminine and that they are to some extent able to be changed. Sexual preferences I see as a spontaneous brain event and without a selection process, we will see more people having non-advantageous (evolutionarily) preferences.
Is it so wrong for me as a man to want to be touched and held?
Well the notion of toxic masculinity is not that toxicity towards women, but more of toxicity towards men themselves. "Boys don't cry" is a great example. It taught males not to express their emotions in a healthy way in order to be "masculine". And that is a big part of why males are more likely to have a difficult time regulating and expressing their emotions and less likely to reach out for help when they are going through a hard time.
100% agree with everything @davebutton wrote. I never bought into feminism or any of their 3rd wave - 4th wave (- what wave is this?) agendas like toxic masculinity. Along those lines, they came up with the term "trigger warning" and now I've read you can no longer say "trigger" because the word is associated with guns and violence. It just goes on and on. It's not toxic masculinity - there are toxic men and there are toxic women. I don't even know if we can say that anymore. There are toxic people with penises and there are toxic people with vaginas. I always say if there were no men we would still be living in straw huts and crossing crocheted bridges. Sorry not sorry.
Me? I'm 100% serious.
@LAU24 Isn't it the saddest thing? Being born male shouldn't require someone to cut off an aspect of their humanity to reach some sort of ideal that was never healthy for them in the first place.
@Big_Chris says,
I disagree that changes can be made in such a small timeframe. Generations have been trying and failing to recommend partners for a long time. Sexual preferences change over time, and right now there is no selection process.
Sexual preferences differ depending on culture... and they are the selection process (or part of it, anyway).
The human species is very adaptable. We've done a lot of changing in our time on this earth. I don't think we're done changing yet: we're not extinct yet. And on a small, local scale... if it's not possible for society to create a large number of individuals who don't think crying is unmanly (for instance), why are conservative groups screaming about the loss of "real men"?
If it's really genetics that make a man rape, or refuse to cry when he's sad, or talk over others rather than listening, or assume supremacy, or kill things for the sheer joy of killing, well—I wouldn't be surprised if a man like that had trouble passing those genes on (especially now that abortion's an option).
Presented with a potential partner like that, I'd expect most people to look for a better one!
Over time, as fewer and fewer people reproduce with aggressive a-holes and helpless fainters, the incidence of those individuals in the general population decreases. Not that they vanish! But that they're fewer. That's how natural selection works.
And if it's not genes that make a man into a stereotype—well! That's even easier to change.
"It's both," you say? How fortunate, then, that we can change both.
@DarrenWalker
I agree, except genetic change takes hundreds of generations.
Societal change takes dozens of years, if not scores.
And, for reasons I’ll leave to cultural researchers, social change tends to bounce around, slowly morphing, always closer to the mean than to either end of the bell curve.
Granted, all of that might be turned topsy-turvy by technological change, but those changes are exceedingly hard to predict, let alone the effects of those changes.
Happily, individual change is something we can work towards, each of us, during our own lifetimes.
In bumper sticker lingo: Be the change you want to see.
@CharlesThePoet:
Dr Alywyn Scally, an expert in evolution and genetics from the University of Cambridge, explains: "As long as human reproduction involves randomness and genetic mutation (and the laws of the Universe pretty much guarantee that this will always be the case at some level), there will continue to be differences from one generation to the next, meaning that the process of evolution can never be truly halted."
They're mostly small changes. But they are changes, so I wouldn't say "genetic change takes hundreds of generations."
Large genetic change does, yes! But I don't think we need that to move from masculine and feminine stereotypes of psychological health to more general human psychological health.
Being the change you want to see should be enough for that.
I agree that there are genetic changes from generation to generation, but in the short term those changes are far more random than deliberate.
For myself I put far more trust, short term, in individual change.
@CharlesThePoet: Yeah. So use society for short-term change (in nurture), and let that change drive long-term change (in nature)—that's what I'm saying.
People look, feel, and sound both to me. No matter how hard each person tries, I end up perceiving each gender as masculine and feminine. There also seems to be such emphasis placed on people trying to understand each other that the change @DarrenWalker mentions looks to me to already be in progress. I'm glad to see societal changes around heteronormativity taking shape in my lifetime.
From the standpoint of the hate group that dominates whatever generation feminism has morphed into, just being the traditional male role of protector and provider is considered "toxic". Beware of the context in which any label is applied to any group. Are there toxic men? Hell yes. Are there toxic women? Hell yes. My grandma taught me to be the type of person that holds your chair for the ladies and holds the door open. For some women who were raised correctly, that is considered polite behavior. For some however, that action is considered demeaning, as if you did it because you consider womyn to be weak and needing to be controlled by male scum! Get it?