This is fair, but considering that there has NEVER been a truly egalitarian (recorded) culture, in terms of gender, despite the fact that such would certainly be possible were the gender gap merely culturally constructed, it'd be a very tall order to overturn conventional wisdom on these matters.
Edit: Either way, America's culture of sexual repression, even in the present day, is ridiculous and harmful. I think we can all agree on that.
This is fair.
And why would it be negative for a man or a woman to want to have sex? That in itself isn't even a negative. It shows proactive attitude for one and a consciousness of basic desires.
If he or she wants to fuck around, fine. It's just sex for crying out loud.
I deal with people based on their character, sex might or might not be an expression of that. Instead of crippling ambition we should strive to enable everyone to become a strong subject with enough empathy to carry on that desire. Stop with the notion that humans aren't subjects capable of their own free will, stop making decisions for others, stop patronizing people by asuming a holier than thou attitude. You don't go about enabling people by crippling others. Even if that is just a perceived notion, it's harmfull by creating antagonistic positions instead of synergies.
For someone who purports to disagree so strongly with feminists, you sure agree with a lot of their positions. It is as if your posts are arguing against an Anti-Feminist Strawman that you have painted over with the label "Feminist."
1) Humans are more androgynous than gorillas but less androgynous than, say, bonobos. The former is a species with SHARP, evolutionarily-selected sex differences (including violent male competition over access to females), while the latter species sees few sex differences and a social currency of freely accessible sexual activity. From this, it has always struck me as eminently reasonable that humans are biologically predisposed to a level of gender differentiation somewhere between these two species.
Agreed, that is reasonable. I don't know that it necessarily makes it true, however.
2) Perhaps "gender traits" would have been a better phrase than "gender roles". The specific manifestations of such are, obviously, culturally determined, but I think that there are deeper tendencies and patterns of thought that differentiate men and women from one another.
I can agree with the possibility of gendered traits.
But I also think that whatever the differences might be, their plasticity - even nigh-ubiquitous traits - is such that these base biological differences are less important in practice than what we socialize for. This is, essentially the argument that is being presented here. For instance, you may be correct that there is some baseline biological difference in aggressiveness, but if you remember from the book, there are examples (however rare and bizarre they might seem) where male and female aggressiveness is almost unrecognizable. So while there might be some baseline difference in aggressiveness where men as a group are generally more aggressive than women (and this difference is significant enough to be generalized across individuals), it also possesses enough plasticity that it can be almost non-visible in practice. And I think you know that I agree with Mr DeafMutes on the difficulty of coming up with evidence to support these things.
And it is also true in practice that while arguments for evolutionary psychology / base biological differences can be presented in a descriptive fashion, they are more often presented a more prescriptive fashion of "Men and women definitely have differences in competitiveness
and we shouldn't try to do anything to subvert these broad natural tendencies because Nature." It is this attempt to argue from the possibility of basic differences that these differences are therefore right and we should attempt to bolster them that tends to be the bigger arguing point. I think at a certain point, if one
isn't arguing for the existence of base biological differences in service of a larger argument, I wonder what the motivation is.
It's been over a month since I finished it, and unfortunately, I don't have it here in front of me. But one thing that stuck in my craw a bit was his citing of studies of the effects of testosterone on chimps, wherein it was indicated that chimps would only become violent toward those who were lower in the pecking order than them. Aside from the fact that this is the same side that tends to argue against using observations of animal behavior as a way of postulating innate human tendencies, I also think it's disingenuous not to acknowledge that human pecking order is more complicated than that of chimpanzees, or to not address, say, "roid rage", an attested human behavior that would seem to indicate that high levels of testosterone do indeed induce violent and aggressive behavior in humans, giving lie to the thesis that the difference in testosterone levels cannot adequately account for differences in behavior between men and women.
This is
the section:
On the surface, the experiments on testosterone and aggression appear convincing. Males have higher levels of testosterone and higher rates of aggressive behavior. What's more, if you increase the testosterone in a normal male, his level of aggression will increase. Castrate him - or at least a rodent proxy of him - and his aggressive behavior will cease entirely. Though this might lead one to think that testosterone is the cause of the aggression, Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky warns against such leaps of logic. He explains that if you take a group of five male monkeys arranged in a dominance hierarchy from one to five, then you can pretty much predict how everyone will behave toward everyone else. (The top monkey's testosterone will be higher than the ones below him, and the levels will increase down the line.) Number three, for example, will pick fights with numbers four and five, but will avoid and run away from numbers one and two. If you give number three a massive influx of testosterone, he will likely become more aggressive - but only toward numbers four and five, with whom he has now become an absolute violent torment. He will still avoid numbers one and two, demonstrating that the "testosterone isn't causing aggression, it's exaggerating the aggression that's already there."
It turns out that testosterone has what scientists call a "permissive effect" on aggression: It doesn't cause it, but it does facilitate and enable the aggression that is already there. What's more, testosterone is produced by aggression, so that the correlation between the two may in fact have the opposite direction than previously thought. In his thoughtful book, Testosterone and Social Structure, Theodore Kemper notes several studies in which testosterone levels were linked to men's experiences. In studies of tennis players, medical students, wrestlers, nautical competitors, parachutists, and officer candidates, winning and losing determined levels of testosterone, so that levels of the winners rose dramatically, while those of the losers dropped or remained the same. Kemper suggested that testosterone levels vary depending upon men's experience of either dominance, "elevated social rank that is achieved by overcoming others in a competitive confrontation," or eminence, where elevated rank "is earned through socially valued and approved accomplishment." Significantly, men's testosterone levels before either dominance or eminence could not predict the outcome; it was the experience of rising status due to success that led to the elevation of the testosterone level. (These same experiences led to increases in women's testosterone levels as well.)
I think you are right that he could have been more expansive, but I'm also not sure you are contradicting what he said. You are simply replacing "Testosterone has a permissive effect on the expression of aggression" with "Higher testosterone levels are correlated with higher expressions of violence. He acknowledges that higher rates of testosterone result in higher rates of aggression in that piece; he just argues that it does not create new aggression (e.g. aggression towards one's social superiors); it only magnifies existing aggression (towards safe targets).
And he also points out in the subsequent paragraph that the causal relationship between aggressiveness and is likely more complicated than "High testosterone -> Aggressive behavior / Success"; that aggressive behavior can itself lead to higher levels of testosterone. It may be that there is simply some sort of mutual feedback effect between the two.
As for convergence - even that article you posted earlier mentions that freer societies don't see a convergence in male and female sexual attitudes, which is what I'm referring to. Even if the separation between men and women is not as wide as we might assume, it does, nevertheless, seem to exist in most things.
Oh, that.
I think that there is a difference between legal and social egalitarianism and the particular social mores associated with being male and female in a given society. I wouldn't conflate the two.
I understand that, but my point is that while specific gender roles might be culturally selected, that doesn't mean they don't stem from biologically-selected patterns of thought and behavior.
Edit: I think an examination of the sexual tendencies of the gay and lesbian communities is also revealing. Generally, gay couples tend to be the most sexually active, and lesbians the least - that is, if I'm recalling the studies correctly. And gay men in general are by FAR the most sexually active and promiscuous. I think this is pretty strong evidence that there is a marked difference in the sexual drives of men and women, for, as Steven Pinker put it, it is in homosexual relationships that you see the "purest" manifestation of male and female sexualities, given that the two partners are of the same sex and will therefore likely view the sexual act from similar perspectives. This is understandable, given that it's the sex chromosomes where there is an indisputable biological difference between men and women. The extent of this difference in other areas is debatable, but I've also found sexuality to be a very "liquid" aspect of our identity, reaching into other behaviors and endeavors in unexpected ways. After all, how many times have you found yourself doing something out of character in the hopes that you might get laid, or realized after the fact that the desire for sex was underlying some action or other that you took? I'd say many people, man or woman, could attest such instances in their own past.
Perhaps. I would still hesitate to ascribe the tendencies of gay male or lesbian couples to natural biological tendencies; as wonderful as we are, The Gays do not actually exist in the State of Nature. I think gay culture has both its own sexual mores and is also influenced by the broader culture.
Oh, and never. But I'm in that weird category of "low motivation" people.
