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xssve -> RE: do you think society has made it hard for men to be real men? (6/23/2011 6:50:05 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: orchid77
We live in a male dominated society. So it isn't society who has made it hard for men to be men but Men have made it hard for themselves. They want everything and nothing all at once. That want the nice lady in public and the freak in the bedroom. They want a submissive woman but want a strong woman too. Men can't make up their minds what they want...and then blame women. They disrespect a woman one minute and then regard them the Queen of all. If men were more secure with theselves we would have a society of stable, secure, and sane men.
Remember 95% of sexual assaults are women. As well as 95% of females are subject to domestic violence. So until men get themselves together women will be just as confused.
Good point, but I think your analysis is incomplete: the nature of it being male "dominated society" (androcentrism) requires social structures to educate and enforce the various permissions and restrictions assigned to each gender, to furnish "the script", expectations that each gender is expected to follow.
Men open doors, women graciously allow it - according to the script - it's one of the compensations for the fact that in the androcentric script, women's freedoms tend to be fairly constrained, due to the fact that rogue males exist and can be expected to attempt intercourse with an unaccompanied woman, at least hypothetically - thus women, traditinally, were expected to stay home and raise the kids, not hang out in the bar.
Of course this means the men are hanging out in the bar, or wherever, where they tend to form associations and exchange ideas, and from that you get the whole range of male associations and institutions, from organized religion to the Kiwanis Club, where men associate, based on a common set of social ideals, reinforce those ideals, and indoctrinate new members.
Thus, it becomes for all practical purposes, at that level, tantamount to a conspiracy, although it arises originally, quite naturally, and on the one hand, in the absence of these values, there are fewer common social ideals: is it OK to bang you neighbors wife if he's at work and she happens to be horny? Stuff like that, i.e., there is a risk of arbitrary social behavior, which because of the male libido and competitive instincts, can easily get out of control, at least theoretically.
Once institutionalized however, a given paradigm has a social advantage: it tends to be become more widespread geographically, i.e., adjacent communities will tend to have similar sets of ideals/values, which will resonate with an institutional script, which has the additional advantage of being more easily maintained over time as well as space - the Catholic Churches views on gender have not changed in almost 2000 years, and reflect similar views held in Judaic tradition and institutions, as well as Roman, Italian, etc.
Change is slow, and often even violent: Martin Luther didn't think much of priestly celibacy, seemingly a relatively minor variation, but this reasonable departure from the orthodoxy on the subject touched off centuries of warfare that split families, and altered the entire political landscape.
Bottom line is, people do like to have some idea what to expect, where the limits are, even if we sometimes push them, and a monolithic paradigm of gender expectations does do that - at the cost of alienating anybody who falls outside what may be an unnecessarily restrictive role - i.e., these things seldom allow for much in the way of diversity.
The evolution of modernity is the definition of a wider range of meta-values that are less restrictive, yet still maintain a relatively stable and peaceful social ecosystem - but under conditions of social stress, you will often see these older paradigms re-emerge: and the practical aspects these value systems have often been submerged under the layers of magical thinking that has typically been used to enforce them.
In a lot of ways, it's almost as persistent as biology: women, for the most part, are biologically motivated to find a man who will share reproductive costs with them as well as donating sperm; she becomes physically vulnerable during pregnancy, thus, some deference, etc., and most social institution enforce this - I don't know of any religion or social institution that encourages men to abandon women - quite the opposite, although when it comes to biological diversity, it's quite a different matter.
That is the hurdle this particular culture has been trying to get over for the last century at least, beginning with serial monogamy which maintains a K strategy in terms of childrearing while still allowing some genetic diversification to occur - and to a large degree, informal social controls have created a relatively stable social structure, dating, etc., which has it's own set of informal social controls, but none of it, as far as I know, has been formally institutionalized on more than a localized scale.
Anyway, it's a much more complex issue than some corrupt "patriarchy", and women enforce that patriarchal paradigm just as much, because in many ways, it works to their reproductive advantage.
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