What gender differences could be eliminated through socializations?

poppy_blu · 2018-12-19T08:04:18+00:00

Some women aren’t nurturing by nature and don’t like or want kids. But what I think is more telling is the number of men today who are active hands on parents. Whenever I’m at the grocery store, at a football game, at a kids party, I see an equal number of dads and moms.

Anyone whose ever worked in an office environment can tell you they see men who aren’t competitive and plenty of women who are.

The issue isn’t socializing away gender patterns. It’s allwoing people, who fall all across the spectrum, to do what feels right for them. Some of the best nurses I’ve worked with are men. Some of the best CEOs I’ve worked under were women. There’s literally no reason to take issue with this POV and traditionalists who do are just projecting their own insecurities.

Also why would we want everyone to be a clone? That sounds like some george orwell shit.

TheGreasyPole · 2018-12-19T11:06:49+00:00

OK,

So... this is a complicated question.

A lot of these differences in behaviour are instinctive/genetic.

However, that doesn't mean they are immutable. Genes develop behaviours only by "bouncing off the environment". In scientific terminology.... The Phenotype is a result of the Genotype and Environment.

This means it's unlikely that you'd be able to change the underlying genetic drives.... but they can be diverted to produce different cultural results by that culture.

Take motherhood instincts. Most women are going to have them, because women who didn't have them didn't leave a lot of genes behind over all those generations.

Some cultures may encourage this and ensure it gets directed solely into children and childbirth. There you're going to see a lot of that genetic instinct being directed into children.

Other cultures will offer alternatives... perhaps that culture has made a big deal of adopting/domesticating animals that trigger these instincts in females by being baby sized, displaying human neotenous traits, and requiring constant care and feeding. In those societies females have the option of redirecting that irreducible inherent genetic instinct into cats.

The genes are the same, but they're bumping off a different environment (and one very different from the evolutionary environment) to produce a different cultural result. And not necessarily one the genes "intended".

To take a male version of the example.... the genes are going to be there for testosterone, and thats intended to make males competitive (especially for mates), and to increase their propensity for (and ability to successfully pull off) violence in order to achieve their ends. Again, thats probably irreducible.

Now... Some cultures take this and push it down a particular course... And as a result are extremely warlike and violent cultures. Sparta and Rome would probably be excellent examples. The violence is condoned and encouraged, and diverted into outlets that help that society.

Other cultures take the same inherent drive and divert it another way.... into competition in sports and workplace. They put heavy restrictions on violence. They discourage competition for mates (marriage) etc etc. They do what they can to send the inherent drive down another route.

The drives the same.... but the societies divert it into different directions.

I guess you can think of the inherent genetic drive as the "huge pile of water in a lake atop the mountain". It is going to come out. It is going to head downhill. In the absence of an attempt to consciously mould the flow.... it will flow downhill in the ways the genes expect and serve the purpose for which they evolved in the evolutionary environment.

Modern human cultures have built a whole load of dams, aqueducts, weirs, and channels below that lake.... it's still water, it's still going to flow, it's still going to flow downhill... but they're sculpting the environmental landscape it will flow through to that societies own ends.

Rome diverted the "aggression and competitiveness caused by testosterone" flow into gladiatorial games, intra-roman political violence, and inter-culture wars and conquests with it's particular set of dams and aqueducts.

The modern US uses a different set to divert it into sport, non-violent competition and acceptable outlets like "martial arts" and "boxing".

The genetic drive has not changed. Whats changed is that downhill environment.... from the evolutionary environment in which it went into direct, and often violent, competition for girls (I'm talking "raid the village next door, kill all the men, drag the women off by their hair" violence).... to a modern environment where it is specifically directed AWAY from that purpose (Rape is illegal. Killing all the males in the village next door is illegal and Sport is offered as an alternative to work the aggression out in a safe way).

damaskrose · 2018-12-19T07:36:30+00:00

Anything related to fashion. Almost anything currently considered womenswear has been worn by men at some point in time.

BiggerDthanYou · 2018-12-19T08:15:09+00:00

And then there's something like motherhood. Can you socialize a woman not to be nurturing and can you control their desire to have children?

And then there's testosterone. Can you socialize a man not to be competitive?

Things that are directly based on biological factors aren't gender differences. They are sex differences

I'm not really sure whether gender is a social construct or not.

Gender is a social construct, because that's simply what it is defined as. It's a social construct because it refers to societal ideas.

If something differs from culture to culture (like pink being feminine) it's a gender role or gender difference. If something is true across cultures (like males generally being taller) it's a sex role or sex difference.

We used to think that toy preferences in children were a gender difference, but then it turned out that it is true across cultures and even for primates that females also play with toys that resemble babies. Nowadays it's known as a sex difference.

I think it's clear that society treats boys and girls differently from the moment they are born, and you can attribute a lot of differences in behavior through this treatment. But it's a case of the chicken and the egg. Why did these treatments begin to differ in the first place?

So I wonder what gender based behaviors and thought patterns can be effectively changed by certain socialization.

Well a good first step would to look at cultural differences.

Like in the US meat is associated with masculinity and vegetables are associated with femininity. There's a gender difference in the willingness to eat vegetables that doesn't exist in other cultures. We associate being a vegan with being a pussy/faggot, but that isn't universally true.

Or crying. In the west the idea that men shouldn't cry was invented a couple of hundred years ago. There's a gender difference in the willingness to cry and to seek professional help for mental health issues that doesn't exist in all cultures. We associate crying with emasculation, but that isn't universally true.

whatyoucallaflip · 2018-12-19T06:57:15+00:00

You can pump them full of contrary hormones. People create society, not the other way around.

hammerhaunts · 2018-12-19T07:20:50+00:00

Hard to say without being able to run accurate simulations of it.

Physiologymatters · 2018-12-19T14:53:10+00:00

Some interesting research results about testosterone in men and women. Seems to indicate that testosterone is at least partly influenced by whether someone is habitually in leadership or authoritative positions, as in having authority increases testosterone, and to a greater degree in women than in men. A potential implication is that adult testosterone levels could be influenced by the degree of leadership and autonomy that one experienced as a child. I'd love to see more studies on this

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4653185/#s4title

Another interesting arena to look at gender role type stuff could be the kibbutzim in Israel.. there was one kibbutz that tried to raise all the kids communally in a gender neutral way but the kids still developed some gendered preferences. That one is more interesting anecdote than reliable science though

cateml · 2018-12-19T16:23:54+00:00

The real answer is 'we can't know'.

If we eliminated all social biases, pressures, conscious and unconscious, then maybe we could say 'women being more nurturing here is because of biology'. But we haven't done that, so we can't.

If we didn't say stuff like 'Women are naturally nurturing baby lovers', we wouldn't essentially force women to conform to this in order to be accepted socially. But of course if you were a nurturing baby lover who was a woman, you wanted to be like that, you still could.

hustlemuscleracing · 2018-12-19T17:01:08+00:00

It's a bad idea to eliminate gender differences. We're already seeing it today. Men have record low testosterone. More women are being dominant and aggressive. It's going to cause a mass amount of health issues for people the more we push for this whole deal of "men and women are the same". Biologically we're not. Hormonal wise, we're not. Behaviorally, we're not. Let's keep it that way. Red piller's get it right on this matter. Men should be masculine and women should be feminine.

wobbleelbbow · 2018-12-19T18:01:42+00:00

Nothing can trump biology.

KikiYuyu · 2018-12-20T00:09:28+00:00

And then there's something like motherhood. Can you socialize a woman not to be nurturing and can you control their desire to have children?

And then there's testosterone. Can you socialize a man not to be competitive?

Lots of women don't want kids and lots of men aren't into competition. Just treat people as individuals and let them choose for themselves.

SimulatedEnvironment · 2018-12-19T06:54:18+00:00

Why do you want to eliminate gender differences? Isn’t variety the spice of life?

bonusfruit · 2018-12-19T09:47:12+00:00

We could stop mutilating all babies instead of just one sex while justifying it for the other by saying it looks better

neuk_mijn_oogkas · 2018-12-19T07:41:20+00:00

And then there's testosterone. Can you socialize a man not to be competitive?

Did you know that the sex hormone balance of humans before puberty is actually not divergent? a 6 year old female has as much testosterone as a 6 year old male and in fact there is also no physical strength difference but in a lot of cultures children are taught that boys are stronger and parents seem to believe it whilst it's not true before puberty.

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exit_sandman · 2018-12-19T08:39:55+00:00

Can't think of anything. Even the forced socialization that aimed for promoting decisiveness in women and meekness in males couldn't level the differences; and I'd argue that trying it in the first place was already a shitty idea.

radfemanon · 2018-12-19T16:33:42+00:00

Place yourself back mentally into the times where adherence to sex roles were important, let's go with the turn of 0AD.

Death in childbirth - high. Means that women of child-bearing age that survive birth are commodities.
Lots of children - Child mortality rate high as well, which makes a woman that is 1) as above even more a commodity.
Because women who can reproduce healthy children are a commodity, the last thing you would want is to put them in a war which is still conducted with swords, spears and shields. You want your progeny to carry on? You make sure women *aren't* in the middle of a war. Both sides of any given war know this, hence why they would stick to the rules of war which were: Don't attack civilians, women and children, and if you broke them it was seen as shame and bad.
A woman wants to go to war and isn't interested in procreating for her nation? SHE'S WRONG AND WE NEED TO FIND A REASON WHY THAT IS. So they default to: No, that's your role - you become a mother and have children and stay here and be safe. Enforce with religious words, politics, whatever, doesn't matter, the outcome is the same.
Go down the generations and the message is lost, all you are left with is "woman like children and cooking" "man like lifting things and fighting"
Any resistance of this is actually enforced with violence because it's become so socialized that any change in character or personality of a woman is seen as deviant and must be stamped out, cue Witch Trials, no rights and other things
???
Profit, except not at all

Women and men are just human beings. Yes, there are hormones at play, but women have testosterone and males have estrogen, just in smaller amounts in the body. The brain isn't sexed. The body is. Gender is a social construct based on historical precedent.

Now you can see how sex roles developed. They're trash, but that's how they got there. And it doesn't help us now. Human beings are a dimorphic species which is fine, but our complex brains means there are simply unfathomable possibilities to the construction of your personality. People are people, you don't have to follow a societal script if you don't want to.

TheBookOfSeil · 2018-12-19T17:01:43+00:00

I’m not sure what you mean, so probably none.

Changeable things are limited to concepts like marriage or monogamy.

Non-changeable things would be physiology and anatomy.

blackedoutfast · 2018-12-19T21:31:46+00:00

they did a lot of experiments along these lines in the '70s, raising kids in a completely gender neutral environment. and the little boys still ended up wanting to play with toy trucks while the little girls wanted to play with dolls.

Can you socialize a woman not to be nurturing and can you control their desire to have children?

yes, (((modern society))) has done this very effectively

Can you socialize a man not to be competitive?

yes, look at soyboys

esiemualB · 2018-12-20T18:55:50+00:00

It depends on the person. There are already women who do not want to have kids despire the social pressure that is put on them. There are also men who are not competitive, even though people expect it of them. I think if we removed the social pressure to conform to gender roles, there would be even more women who do not want children (or who don't make children a priority), and even more men who do not feel the need to compete. However, there would still be nurturing women (and men), just like there would be competitive men (and women).

If we actively tried to mold people into opposite gender roles, we would have the exact same problem we have now: there would be people who do not fit these roles and who are miserable when these roles are forced upon them. On the other hand, some other people would gladly fulfill these gender roles.

decoy88 · 2018-12-22T21:56:03+00:00

Ever met a woman raised by her single dad with her brothers?

Yeah she’s usually boisterous as fuck and IME way more fun.

Once everyone rids the very ingrained notion “girls do this, boys do this” from the minds of parents and teachers, we could eliminate everything except shit like tampon usage and maternity leave.

LewisCross · 2018-12-19T17:27:57+00:00

None.

It's already been tried, and it's failed.

analt223 · 2018-12-19T14:06:09+00:00

If women found more men dateable/marriable/fuckable, then maybe.

The facts are that men deem a lot more women hot, so women are allowed to gender bend way more. You want to make the social constructs of money hungry men go away? Find more men fuckable.

Title	What gender differences could be eliminated through socializations?
Author	whichbladeN
Upvotes	6
Comments	107
Date	December 19, 2018 6:50 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/a7k0jw/what_gender_differences_could_be_eliminated/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/what-gender-differences-could-be-eliminated.1183177 https://theredarchive.com/post/1183177

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