but arent there places where women will gather and be happy?
Singing, laughing, but not in the bars, but with nature?
I felt that in that cases, you are living like goddess, unless, going to the bars are the same?
Well, men and women do have differences in the way they process their perceptions: by a polled margin of 60 to 40, men are more apt to “think” in processing information whereas women are more apt to “feel”.
Women are cooperative nesters by nature, whereas men are competitive hunter-gatherers by nature.
Women are simply more social, in helping other women pick up the kids from school, getting them to soccer practice, caring for each other’s kids when sick, being there to help out when needed, keeping social institutions staffed, etc., etc. … while men are out “conquering” in the world.
Social … socialism – the realization is natural.
Women are cooperative by nature, whereas men are more competitive by nature. Aberrational exceptions are irrelevant (except here with regard to the mama’s boys who “created and implemented” socialism and its really feminine cousin communism), and as the 60-40 statistic shows, despite the influence each gender has on the other from birth, women remain more feeling oriented and thus more warmly coooperative than men. That’s just the way we are.
Capitalism is a cold, competitive system, socialism is a more warmly cooperative system. Thus capitalism is a “man’s” system, whereas socialism is a “woman’s” system. Hot and cold, yin and yang, men and women – surely I’m not telling you anything new, am I?!
Nothing difficult about that realization.
No matter who does what, things are the way they are, and there’s just no getting around it. And, on the down side, men are prone to succumb to individualism and women are prone to succumb to collectivism, obviously.
Why advances in civilization itself correlate to increased activity of women (directly or indirectly, overtly or covertly) in the socioeconomic and geopolitical arena.
That’s the truth of it.
At least that’s what my mom tells me … and I believe at least half of everything she says.
Taken from an outsider’s perspective, using the only controlled gender-segregated social groups I can readily think of, I am more inclined to think that the society created by men is more harmonious and sociable.
The societies I am talking of are Frats and Sororities.
Now, I never was a member of either, but I had friends in both and the societies broke down into these two systems:
Frats: There was a strong, established order to the society that was rarely challenged, but there was also very little strife. Members of the Frat, regardless of their place in the pecking-order would work towards a common goal together having a very strong ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality. Granted, their goals were anything but noble, but they did work together on them quite efficiently.
Sororities: There was a strong order, but it was in a constant state of flux. The degree of backstabbing, social climbing, and overall instability was insane. Talk about Boethius’ wheel, people who be on top one day and literally kicked out the next day! There was an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality, but the ‘us’ consisted of small, ever-changing in-groups within the sorority.
More social indeed! I can’t say I’ve ever been stabbed in the back by a male friend.
Well, then, you’re obviously biased. Having never been a woman, you’ve never been cheated on by a man. Of course, how many times did you vie unscrupulously with another for the hand of a woman? How soon we forget when the shoe is on the other foot.
By the way, I understand that fraternities and sororities are merely club homes away from home where “brothers” and “sisters” can family together. Home, of course, is where the mom is while the dad is out working in the classroom. Home is where the family lives with mom as the anchor.
It would seem, then, that the idea of these university families is … a feminine one. It works well to “civilize” the men and provide a ready-made supply of “acceptable” dates for the women.
Ahhh, but one-on-one interaction is very different from group interactions, correct?
So, compare the group dynamics again. I’m not saying that men don’t cheat individually, but as a group men are much more cohesive than women are as a group.
Sabrina, be careful with words like “natural”. 60-40 is a pretty slim margine, considering the level of social indoctrination that goes on. Clearly, since you’re referencing your mother as the source of your beliefs, you’ve been fed the same prejudices as the rest of us. But not all women are warm and fuzzy, and not all men are Rambo. If despite the fact that men and women are intentionally raised to be their stereotypes, men and women still defy norms nearly half the time, the sexual differences you play up are not all they are cracked up to be. The fact of the matter is that we don’t know what men and women are like ‘naturally’, because men and women do not live in a state of nature.
Considering indeed the level of social indoctrination that goes on, 60-40 is HUGE!
Now I only said that I believed HALF of what my mom tells me (and, of course, facetiously). I did do a little “research” on my own.
Indeed, there are exceptions, small percentage exceptions, to the “rule”. But focusing on exceptions can be blinding. The rule is obvious, and pretty darn strong. We would do well to pay attention to the truth it can teach.
We know that women carry their offspring inside of them and breast feed and thereby have a closer physical bond with their children … and men don’t. That’s HUGE. We know that women, thereby, are natural nesters, assuming they haven’t been indoctrinated against their natural differences with men, and thus the word home and neighborhood, where the nest is, does have a deeper meaning to women. When women are compelled against their nature, we experience cognitive dissonance to a degree.
Men, by virtue of their child-attachment independence, go out in the world, and they “learn” from the “harsh, cruel” world the “lesson” of capitalistic dog-eat-dog neurotic hierarchical competition and survival of the fittest. They’ve done that for eons. It’s become part of their genes.
These statistics are very meaningful, and the reality of the endemic differences between men and women do indeed give rise to different preferences of socioeconomics.
Women are less likely to embrace systems that facilitate the starving and exploiting of children, whereas men are more likely to defer to social Darwinism’s “survival of the fittest”, “despite the cost”.
Men, left to their thinking “you’re too touchy feely” nature, are simply more likely to knowledgably embrace capitalism, therefore, and women, left to their feeling “you think too much” nature, are simply more likely to knowledgably embrace socialism.
That we do effect each other, “contaminating” the genders, isn’t a bad thing – it, in and of itself, is natural.
But even though we do, the 60-40 HUGE statistic speaks to endemic differences between men and women that hormonally, etc., affect how and when they think and feel to a substantive degree across the population.
Women are what they are, and so are men, and the aberrations are merely interesting, but ultimately irrelevant.
You base your whole case on arm chair science and one dubious and incoherent statistic.
First, please elaborate on what your statistic means. I suspect that the male and female populations do not mirror each other perfectly. Whatever the explanation, I’d like to see a source other than your mom.
Secondly, whatever the sourve, whatever the statistic, your reasoning does not prove that men and women now are “naturally” as you paint them. Males and females certainly evolved to fulfill certain distinct evolutionary roles. But that divide was in place long before the modern human brain developed, and your conjecture that primitive biological differences affect such complex reasoning as governmental systems is weakly justified at best.
Even if there are differences that emerge along gender lines, that doesn’t show that the difference is biological, and that infants raised in a genderless environment would result in adults with the same biases. Indoctrination is widespread, it is universal, and it is subtle. The level of societal influence needed (especially for something as mundane as using different words to describe mental processes) is not that great.
And finally, be careful what you call natural based on statistics. Statistics for a long time have shown women to be vastly inferior to men in a number of cognitive abilities and in most every physical ability. Should we have believed the statistics and denied schooling and suffrage to women? Clearly, since the civil rights movement many of these statistics were shown to be societally influence, and it was unequal treatment, not biology, that was to blame.
This is what people say in polls. People’s opinions of themselves are hardly the best measure. As Cixous notes at some length, the typical association between the binary oppositions male/female and rational/emotional is in that order, with the former term corresponding across the two pairs. There is also a largely tacit privileging of the first term in each pair. All that poll really illustrates is that men are more likely to conceive of what they are doing as being motivated by a rational thought process, whereas women are more likely to conceive of the same as being motivated by an emotionally felt process.
This is an anthropological/archaeological metaphor for which there’s little material evidence and there’s any number of examples that contradict it. If a woman hunts or gathers she isn’t doing something unnatural for a woman. And here we see the problem of such a limited ‘feminism’ as the one you’re proposing, that in delineating gender difference you are actually holding back the move toward ‘emancipated equality’ or whatever name one likes to slap on it.
More fundamentally, if one says ‘a woman is X, a man is Y’ one commits a fallacy to begin with, as there is no ‘a woman’ nor ‘a man’, there are men and women, and they’re pretty similar. The finest people that I’ve met are a sound blend of masculine and feminine traits.
i.e. Women like to gossip. Yes, we know this.
You like saying things are natural. The naturalising of ones perceptions is also a logical fallacy, but we needn’t get into that for the sake of this discussion.
Then why is it men who came up with the philosophy of socialism, and men who’ve tried to implement it? I can’t think of any female socialist leaders, though there probably are a few, and the vast majority of socialist philosophers are men, despite there being numerous female political philosophers of other stripes. I don’t think that political philosophies are gendered, but if socialism is then it’s male.
So the creation and implementation of a philosophy is irrelevant because they are mama’s boys?
Right, and Hitler was emasculated due to only having one testicle and that’s why invaded central Eastern Europe…
Now you’ve moved from naturalising your perceptions to fatalising them. Basically the same fallacy…
In truth, no, I’ve heard this all before. But just because I’ve heard something that I’d like to believe doesn’t mean that I believe it.
Precisely why one should question it. If beliefs are so easy to come by, but we know that some beliefs are wrong, then…
Ah, obviously. Of course, I didn’t get it before, but now that you’d said ‘obviously’ it all makes sense.
Is this meant to be a question?
Word up. Truth, Sister. Right on. Stick it to the man.
I’d suggest that you have a lot yet to learn about gender difference and relations, as do most of us, myself included. Making hasty generalisations and dressing up personal observations as cast iron rules of nature or fate doesn’t help if we’re trying to be progressive. Of course, you may not be trying to be progressive, in which case 90% of what I’ve said doesn’t not apply.
I think that us men should just give it up and let the women take charge for a while.
We could organize meetings about seminars to discuss our feelings about planning a conference to discuss our feelings about having a convention to discuss our feelings about organizing a symposium about an assembly on how men think women think about their feelings.
Then we could actually plan these things and attend them.
Then we could organize a series of post assembly convocations to discuss our feelings about how the meetings, seminars, conferences, conventions, and assembly went and how we could make the next ones better and immediately make plans to begin a new round of meetings, symposia, conferences, etc.
We could publish our reports and findings in leading scientific journals like:
The Journal of Scientific Inquiry into Male Emotion
Male Emotional Response
Relationships
Vanity Fair
Cosmopolitan
The best part is that we would get to hang around for decades in sports bars doing this and they would pay us.
Sabrina, you are so goddamned backwards. Your warped sense of female empowerment is sickening. How dare you speak for all women and claim that they want to be homemakers and have big strong men to hunt, gather, and run the world, while they sit at home and prepare the nest. Your statements are factually untrue, unless by “we” you intend “oppressed and unenlightened females who enjoy their minority status.” If that’s the case, spot on.
What’s so “oppressive” about ruling the roost and raising children to be loving and great people? Why, we’re made for that job in management!
And did I say “he” was “in charge” when he came home? No, I didn’t.
And where do you get this “unenlightened” and “minority” status stuff as well? I’m wondering if you’re African American and perhaps still fighting an old battle.
It saddens me to hear people still talk about “female” empowerment in terms of women trying to become “better men”.
Your beef isn’t with a woman being a woman as she was created to be.
Your beef is with a man’s system of socioeconomics – capitalism – that financially punishes women for being women.
The solution to that problem isn’t for women to lose their gender identity by trying to become more “successful” like men.
The solution is to work to create and implement a socioeconomic system that, instead of punishing women for being women, punishes no one, ever.
Now that would be truly empowering for all.
And that is much preferred to groveling at the feet of capitalism at the expense of sisterhood.
Best is for us women to be our natural female-self, and to let the unnatural male-biased system do the changing.