njlauren
Posts: 1577
Joined: 10/1/2011 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LizDeluxe quote:
ORIGINAL: njlauren Women in many cultures are supposed to be the 'weaker' sex (which I dispute, if men had to have babies, we would probably have died out millions of years ago *lol*) One of my close male companions says that while women must bear the children men have to put up with women. He swears that it is a fair trade-off if not slightly in favor of the women. :) I think these gender based discussions are somewhat futile. There are so many environmental and societal influences that work on us from an early age... how do we strip away all of that to determine who is naturally this or naturally that? I say it's virtually impossible to do so. I agree, Liz, I think they are somewhat futile, much as with gender roles it tries to take arguments about nature versus nurture and make simple explanations for complex things. For example, with gender roles, the nature types will tell you that men were genetically meant to be more dominant because of survival and their strength, while women were naturally submissive because of their nurturing kids, less strength, but that leaves out that there have been societies where women culturally are dominant (As Oscar said to Felix in an episode of the Odd Couple "Felix, Men chase women, except in certain societies in the South Pacific, and certain bars in Greenwhich Village" *lol*). A woman could be dominant who is 5' tall and 100 pounds and use the strength of a sub male. For all the talk of male strength, when it comes to leading, directing, figuring out what to do, physical strength has little to do with that, and I could argue that testosterone doesn't lead to great decision making all the time... There are the nurture types, who claim that gender roles are all man made, societally driven, yet with type I trans M to F's (or F to M's), they are brought up as boys or girls, socially imprinted with all the standard stuff, yet a type 1 trans girl is likely to want to play with dolls rather then trucks, to want to play with girls rather than with boys, where a type 1 f to m might want to be out roughousing with the boys. One famous case, one that should have gotten a certain gender expert brought up on charges of professional ethics, a baby boy had his genitals mutilated, the parents were told it would be better to bring the child up as a girl, and with the help of all these experts, they raised the child as a girl, they did all kinds of psychological programming on her, made sure the parents reinforced her being a girl, went through female puberty (without menses, obviously), and was absolutely fucking miserable, later on transitioned....intersex people are often 'changed' at a young age, before they can express their gender, and in a lot f cases the parents and doctors guessed wrong.... I think part of the problem with dominance and submission is the idea that it comes only from physical characteristics and strength. While I appreciate a tall, strong woman, I submit because of who the person is (for the record, my wife is fairly tall, not particularly strong, and most people consider her a softie personality wise....what they don't know *lol*).....the therapist I worked with was all of 5' tall, but take it from me, even the most macho male dom types respected her, and the couple that tried to tell her she was really sub found out who much *lol*.....Domination can come from force of personality and intelligence, and as Dreamless points out, as society changes it becomes less and less about evolutionary genetics, if it ever was (I personally think a lot of the 'natural dominance' was men using their strength to force their rules on women, rather than women naturally submitting). One of the reasons for the incredible backlash you see in society IMO, that is played out in politics and on right wing talk radio, about how society is being 'emasculated', how boys are being degraded to 'build women up' and all that jazz, is in large part I think we live in a society where a guys muscles mean less and less and where dominance is achieved through education and skills and the old assumptions of men being dominant and women submissive as an automatic thing, where dominance is earned, is causing that anger, because the old inbred assumptions and 'unearned privilege' of dominance has been lost.
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