On one hand, you want to have permanent strength, aptitude, and complete lack of weakness as unchangeable male characteristics, on the other hand you feel upset about the case of Johnny Depp's victimization being taken lightly. Have you ever considered that the former approach to masculinity will certainly lead to the second result ?
That's an interesting way of looking at it. I've yet to see any evidence that feminists are actually achieving much of anything nowadays, other than make every other group hate them. Maybe where you are from they are doing differently, I couldn't possibly say. Can you point out where I claimed any of those things are immutable masculine traits?
Whenever I hear someone calling this and that "Marxist" I automatically ignore their entire argument. These people just repeat the same fox news, red pill, alt right nonsense. Same with calling things communist, socialist, etc. You just sound like an angry old boomer ranting on Facebook lol
That's fair enough lol. A lot of decent points being made I think but the longer this drags on the worse it's gonna get! Might want to bail before you get dragged down lmao.
That's actually not true. More recent surveys of ACTs show females with identical math scores to males, which should make @she-dernatinus happy for two reasons. It shows males aren't better at something, and that girls are getting equal instruction in the classroom. BUT men still pack the field in math intensive STEM fields! That confirms it, men are actually better at math. OR that confirms it. Men are using their control over STEM fields to deny women entrance, to protect their power. Because men are evil. See, you can use the data to support whatever biases you already have. It's like you don't even need data. You can have whatever ideas you want, and let new information be a Rorschach picture for you to interpret however you want. I think there are power imbalances and some injustices going on, but most differences between men and women result from natural differences tracing back to biology, reinforced by cultural norms that tend to support those biologically based preferences. Fortunately for me, there's an interpretation of the data that supports this assertion. The same survey that showed more or less equal math scores across the board also showed the males who are good at math tend to be only good at math, where the females have good math scores and good language/reading comprehension scores. Again this should make @she-dernatinus happy, because Girls Can Do Anything! But that means some girls will choose to do things other than STEM, where the boys are going to do the one thing they are good at. I'll note this make sense with the stereotypes about men in STEM fields; smart in their own way, but painfully inept in social situations. If you doubt the stereotypes, go visit the math and science building at your university. Don't pay attention to the students, those could be anybody. Look at the grad students, look at the professors. Of course you'll find exceptions to the rule, but then, there's the rule. This accounts for some of the overpopulation of males in STEM fields, but surely not all of it. There's also gendered preferences to take into account. Women have indisputably been shut out of numerous professions over the centuries, from law and advanced medicine to acting (why? if you sincerely believed women were less intelligent [they're not] then fine, I can see them being shut out of courts and medicine, but the stage? what are you doing, protecting the audiences from wooden dialogue? give me a break), but it has long been acceptable for women to work in health care (typically nursing, branched out now that medicine is more advanced & specialized) and education. The anti-male voices of feminism will say this is because patriarchy doesn't care about children and nursing is scut work, so men were and are comfortable allowing women to do these undesirable tasks. An impartial observer would be willing to explore the possibility that women might prefer nursing and teaching, and some data does suggest this is the case. Scandinavian countries have always been remarkably progressive on the egalitarianism front (viking women were allowed to initiate divorce and own property), and now they are on the cutting edge of equal rights in terms of systemic reinforcement. If men and women are basically the same, when given the option, we would expect their populations in all professions to be more or less the same. The opposite has happened. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway all have more women in nursing and education, and more men in STEM fields, and this is frustrating because STEM continues to pay more. Why would women choose a lower paying job? It has to be the patriarchy! There's two parts to the answer, and yes, part of it is patriarchy, but perhaps not how one would think. First, some analysis shows another general gendered difference; males tend to be more interested in things and how they work, and females tend to be more interested in people and how they relate. These are strictly tendencies. When it comes to interest in things vs. people, there's more overlap between genders than not so it's very easy to find a woman more interested in things than most men, and a man more interested in relationships than most women. However, the tendencies are distinct enough that, in aggregate, there's a noticeable grouping of males and females in certain professions. The second portion is that women tend to value family and personal care more in relation to money than men do. Women work fewer hours, take more sick and vacation time, and are less likely to relocate than men, meaning they choose jobs with greater flexibility in hours and draw lighter paychecks. That wage gap the feminists harp on and on (and on) about? That might not be misogyny. That might be women choosing a more healthy work/life balance. Now, this is an interesting situation because I've seen all of these dynamics play out in real time in my own marriage/career situation. My wife is a physical therapist, one of those specialized health care professions. In terms of numbers, her field is absolutely dominated by women. According to the APTA, a staggering 74% of licensed therapists are female, and this has been reflected in every clinic she's worked. However, PT research is driven by male therapists, which means treatments and PT theory is advanced primarily by men. The textbooks are written by men. The upper management is dominated by men. My wife sometimes comments on the patriarchy running her profession, and it was far more frequent when her direct boss was a real bro. You couldn't get more stereotypically bro than this guy. Yes, he is a physical therapist where most PTs are women, but he entered through the Sports specialization, expressly so he could hang out with athletes. He is aggressive, loud, thinks he's a little more charismatic than he really is, tended to hire hot blonds, had an affair with one of them, and a string of bimbo girlfriends at the Christmas parties in the years following his inevitably messy divorce. He tended to ignore my wife, who used to be more soft-spoken and is not a bimbo. His name is Brett for chrissakes. Why was this guy, of all people, in charge of eight females clinic directors? So I asked my wife if she was so upset about it, why not gun for his job? As she frequently reminded me, she was objectively more qualified than him anyway. No thank you, she said, she didn't want his job. She preferred to see patients, mentor her staff, and set her own hours, so that she could spend more time with family. Brett spent his time wrestling spreadsheets, kissing up to upper management, and attending meetings with other bros. He wound up being a decent boss, and she has since switched her job to something even more family friendly, because COVID was brutal even for PTs and she needed better balance. So my wife, like a lot of women, is drawing a lighter paycheck than her male contemporaries, but I know for a fact it's because this is her preference, and this leads into the insidious nature of Patriarchy. At least, how I understand Patriarchy. Feminists have been so obsessed with inequality, and looked to the abolition of gender for the solution, that they attack any difference between men and women, and try to make women be the same as men. But who, for f*cks' sake, decided men were the gold standard? Feminists demand women be given the same jobs, without asking women if they want the same jobs. They demand women draw the same paycheck, without pausing to ask why money is the metric for success. By insisting that men and women are virtually the same but for a few physiological traits rooted exclusively in reproduction, so we should dress the same, work the same, talk the same, choose the same, think the same, feminism is allowing the Patriarchy to define women. My radical proposal is, maybe we shouldn't? Allow old systems of thought we hold in open contempt to determine how we try to live, I mean. Maybe we shouldn't automatically assume every difference between men and women is a direct or indirect result of oppression, but that it's possibly the beauty of self determination at work. Maybe we should remove the barriers, and then let women choose who they want to be, without pressure from men who want to control them, and without pressure from other women who want to control them. Maybe we should be okay with it when they choose something we wouldn't. Maybe we should let women be women, not a knockoff version of men. And while we're at it, let men be men, not a feminized shadow of their own potential. Let me be me.
My god, I'm behind. While I'm thinking of it @she-dernatinus , they didn't name it specifically, but I think fatherhood falls under the umbrella of "providing for his family" which was mentioned. Note the materialistic verbage, though, as opposed to the relationally motivated word "parent." Is that traditional gender roles? Is that a subconscious prioritization of things over people? Maybe a little of both.
@Meshuga since you bring up STEM fields observations, I think it mostly applies to the western world. In my homeland, you'll find just as many female students as male students in STEM fields. In fact, I am an electrical engineer, and no engineering school in my homeland shows the symptoms you are talking about. In the high school national exam, most of the high-ranking students for STEM are girls in my country. Before jumping to this conclusion Don't be so confident in observations without verifying whether they are restricted to your culture or not. This is what makes me believe the observations you make are mainly rooted in stereotypical gendered views about professions. A lot of westerners have been surprised to know I pursued engineering, and some blatantly called it a man's career. With those two pieces of information, we can deduce some professions are still seen as typically masculine while others are seen as typically feminine. That is certainly a contributing factor, quite a lot of this mindset is due to early childhood rearing, and how little boys and girls tend to be 'pushed' in some specific directions. If those differences had originated from biology, then can you @Meshuga please explain the reason those observations don't apply to my homeland? After all, even in my country, we have the same biological male/female dichotomy and are given equal access to many professions; health care and STEM-related.
That's ironic, the way you speak of it shows you consider being 'feminized' a constraint to your great potential as a male. In other words, being 'feminized', in your definition, is a regression.
That's true but I consider masculinizing women to be a constraint on their great potential as females. I don't think of men and women as less than. I think we can be different and equal.
Yeah suuure. But anyhow, be confident your observations about STEM fields are rooted in cultural views about professions. Like I said, in my homeland most high-ranking stem students are girls.
Except there is no way to feminize men, nor masculinize women. Our biological bodies will never change. All we can alter are our gendered expectations, the rest is kept intact. And altering cultural roles, indoctrination of children, ditching profession-gender associations, won't make a man something else, nor a woman something else. But it will change how people approach professions and the drastic gap between sexes observed in each field.
Sorry, but I approach this with more pragmatism. I tend to evaluate the impact each difference has, see if it's rooted in culture, and precise the cultural origin.
@Meshuga I am still waiting to have your answer to my questions. Don't tell me you were so confident about your observations you felt surprised they didn't apply everywhere else.
I said so because it's the truth. You are much more in tune with positive masculinity and perfectly learned to dissociate your identity as male from entitlement, implied supremacy, or some unfounded 'innate' intellectual aptitude. You should be delighted with that, not many men have the required strength to reach that level.
