A question of pessimism.

Aaod · 2019-10-22T16:10:13+00:00

Are men detrimental to women? AKA are we a net negative effect to them and that they are better off without us? Do women need us, even if we as a collective is responsible for majority of atrocities, especially against them?

I think if you want to say we are responsible for all the negative then you also have to assume we are also responsible for all the positive. After that it becomes a question more so of how much of an optimist versus cynic you are and a general view of humanity as well as what your knowledge levels are.

This question also runs into the problem of agency as well.

Do you think if women were in the same roles as the men in those societies, they would produce equal levels of atrocities or not?

From what we have seen of women rulers such as queens or modern capitalists such as Gina Rinehart they produce the same level of badness or sometimes worse so I have little doubt if things were different that part would stay the same. The problem in this case is not gender it is just that people suck and a lot of these positions should not exist in the first place.

MachoSocialist · 2019-10-22T18:10:19+00:00

Are men detrimental to women?

No.

Anthropology argued for a long time over whether the very earliest human societies were patriarchal or matriarchal. That wasn't a straight split between men and women; in the 19th century you had some male thinkers who were definitely sexist against women and so assumed "primitive" society must have been matriarchal, and male dominated was a positive evolutionary development. Feminism in the '70s got very big into the idea that the natural condition of humanity was matriarchy, and a lot of neopagan religion is based on what these feminist anthropologists thought they knew about our very distant past. Others assumed that our earliest societies must have been male dominated because men have superior strength and physical power, making it easier for them to both overpower women and for women to be dependent on them for food. In this model innovations in hunting technology are also assumed to be the driving force behind the progress that lead to things like agriculture and sedentary fishing.

It turns out both sides are probably wrong. There's a lot of evidence that suggests before we invented agriculture and started settling down, men and women were probably pretty damn equal. Sure, men must have done very nearly all of the hunting and must have developed better techniques and tools over time. But presumably the left women to do the bulk of gathering for other foods, maintaining temporary settlements and making life-or-death decisions in the absence of men. In hunter-gatherer societies splitting work and responsibility according to sex differences is a matter of practicality, but each sex needs the work of the other - and there will have been cross over. Women probably involved themselves in aspects of hunting like processing the carcass, and men must have involved themselves in childcare (human males are really remarkable for how strong our paternal instincts are compared to most male animals). Real gender inequality probably came later, with the advent of agriculture and our attempt to adapt gender roles to a new way of living.

Men and women are a net benefit to each other. We always have been and we always will be. We are really not that different at all where it counts - we are all human beings - but we are inclined to be different in enough ways that we aren't interchangeable enough for one gender to get by without the other, either. One of the greatest challenges feminism has faced (and of course, chosen to ignore) is that as wealth and legal equality of opportunity increase around the world, differences in gendered behaviour also increase. Feminism fundamentally misunderstands what gender equality means. Enforced gender roles are not the same thing as natural gender preferences. I don't care if 80% of accountants are men and 80% of nurses are women (hypothetical figures here). I do care if the other 20% in either job gets shit on, disrespected or denied opportunity to do well in their career because they're in the minority gender, and I definitely care that the average accountant gets paid three times as much as the average nurse. I don't know about you, but I don't remember the last time an accountant helped save my life.

Do you think if women were in the same roles as the men in those societies, they would produce equal levels of atrocities or not?

We have no way of knowing how this would go. Truly, we don't. Everything would be baseless speculation - too much has to change for us to say with any degree of absolute certainty just how things would be different. We can't prove anything one way or the other. But consider what we do have in the historical record: no shortage of women who were thoroughly cruel, evil characters. Women who managed to achieve great power historically were hardly gentle revolutionaries. Mary Tudor was called 'Bloody Mary' for a reason. Catherine the Great brutally crushed a rebellion that if successful would have brought freedom to millions of men and women held in bondage. Close to half of white slave owners in the US seem to have been women. Activists for the right of women to have the vote in Britain ran an ultra-nationalistic campaign to get men to enlist in the First World War and many passionately opposed the right of working class people to vote. Despite its misogynistic views, a number of prominent conservative women gave generous donations to the Nazi Party and helped Hitler build his base, and there were thousands of women who worked in the Holocaust's death camps. Bangladesh has not had a serious male candidate for Prime Minister since 1991 with both major parties being lead by women - it also has a pretty shit human rights record.

If historic gender dynamics were reversed, our world probably would be different. But it would probably still be full of shit, too - just different kinds of shit. Maybe without male inclinations to aggression and competition there would have been less war, sure. But maybe the women who were more competitive and aggressive than average (because these are patterns and not rules) would have just ended up in charge and done exactly the same things. Or maybe a female-dominated world would have just come up with different ways and reasons for doing horrible things to people. Men and women are equally capable of doing terrible, evil things to other human beings.

And let's not forget that we see the past through a warped lens. We only know for sure what life and times were like for an ultra-privileged elite who were in a position to leave behind records of themselves and their lives. For most of history, regular men and women were just struggling to survive and get on with their own lives; nearly everything we know about the experience of ordinary folk before the explosion in literacy rates is filtered through the lens of what the upper classes believed to be true about them. Remember that nations and countries are pretty modern inventions - 'nationalism' was not a thing, and countries didn't so much go to war as very wealthy people who thought their magic ancestry made them divinely-appointed rulers did. I strongly suspect there were no shortages of medieval peasant men who thought war was a load of fucking bullshit the world would be better off without, too, but they didn't get a say.

Strikester101 · 2019-10-22T15:58:51+00:00

For the record, this has been bothering me for a past couple of days.

Hence, why I often ask redundant questions in this subreddit.

Melthengylf · 2019-10-22T18:20:04+00:00

No. It's your insecurities speaking.

We men are responsible for many positive things. And besides, many women are heterosexual, they do indeed like men.

Besides, almost all humans give to their surroundings much more good than pain.

Besides, most inventions were made by men, you can thank them for inventing things.

Melthengylf · 2019-10-23T16:56:04+00:00

Do you think if women were in the same roles as the men in those societies, they would produce equal levels of atrocities or not?

Also, men are not essentially evil. Everyone is capable of harmful actions. If men many times have made some kind of atrocities (as well as many many good things), that is a consecquence of the system.

Title	A question of pessimism.
Author	Strikester101
Upvotes	0
Comments	13
Date	October 22, 2019 3:57 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/dljx0x/a_question_of_pessimism/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/a-question-of-pessimism.1064442 https://theredarchive.com/post/1064442

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