What real differences do you think kept women from leading large groups of people into war?
Childbearing. During the years that people are in the strength of their youth, we have (historically) sent men off to die, but women have been having baby after baby. Pregnancy and its immediate aftermath do not warriors make.
What makes them less confrontational? Is it just men....or are there distinct differences in personality traits between the sexes?
Are we less confrontational, or do we do confrontation differently? And how much is that because of how we are socialised to behave?
I'd argue that even as small children, young boys fighting is treated, to some degree, as normal and natural; whereas young girls fighting (physically) is strongly discouraged. Carry that kind of conditioning over for a lifetime...
Why is it that you think men make up the vast majority of prisoners? Are we just bad at crime? Or are we more prone to risk taking and confrontation?
That's a very interesting question. I note that I can find some research that in the last several decades, while men still outnumber women as prisoners, the rate at which women are incarcerated is growing very strongly relative to men. Which suggests that something is changing here.
It does seem that men seem to be more prone to committing violent crime. Again, my question would be, is that because men are inherently more violent, or is it because of the way we have been socialised?
Most importantly....if everything else were equal, opportunity-wise, do you think that general tendency towards risk taking and confrontation might mean men would negotiate better starting salaries on average?
The responsibility for making starting salaries fair between the sexes lies with the employer, not the employee. The employer should not be favouring men.
If someone works hard, invests in building a factory, carries all the risk of that investment succeeding or failing....why should they make as much as their workers? Why shouldn't they reap the benefits?
I'm not saying they shouldn't reap some benefits.
But let me put it this way: If someone has a privileged starting position, is able to employ others to work for them, why should they exploit those workers and refuse to pay them a fair and living wage?
I mean, we live in a world where these days, a lot of manufacturing is now done in the country with the labour laws which allow the employer to most effectively mistreat their employees... how is that right?
There are myriad differences between men and women. Women are more prone to stress in a number of ways....and more inclined to feel the mental and physical effects of stress than men. Men are more inclined to risk taking. Men are more inclined to confrontation.
The problem is you imagine that if not for subjugation everything would be completely equal....but it wouldn't, because we are fundamentally different.
Equal doesn't mean the same. Maybe, all things being equal, we're still likely to see statistically significant different outcomes on some measures. But what equal should rule out is being disadvantaged in educational settings, being disadvantaged in employment opportunities, and so on.
And it still happens, Ana. Legally it might not be supposed to, but I know from my own lived experience how much it still happens!
There's nothing preventing women from getting those things now....and there hasn't been for decades.
Now that you're done complaining about history....why are we still in a world dominated by men? We removed the legal barriers for women completely....heck, we've even removed the social barriers as much as possible....what's the excuse?
There are still barriers which might be invisible to you.
And there are plenty of social barriers remaining.
And remember, too, that America isn't the whole world. There are plenty of places where legal barriers are significant.
I wouldn't completely discount the effects of testosterone ...but I hardly think that's the answer itself. It's more like when you go back 100,000 years and look at what men and women did....men hunted and fought off other tribes. They are, by nature, bigger and stronger....so they had to.
You go through a few hundred millennia of men engaging in this behavior and the aggressive, risk taking, confrontational men are the evolutionary "winners". By the time mankind is starting to form societies more complex than a "tribe"....it's already hardwired into our dna.
So the idea that a "patriarchy" came about because of "subjugation" or systemic "oppression"....is honestly rather silly and shortsighted. Men and women became the way they are out of sheer necessity. They would not have survived as a bunch of egalitarian democratic groups.
Not necessarily true.
The shift seems to come with the development of agriculture. When all human beings were hunter-gatherers, it took the efforts of the entire tribe to survive; there was no food surplus and thus extremely limited specialisation of social roles.
(And by the way, the idea that men hunted while women kept the cave nice and maybe gathered local vegetables or something is not what we find evidence for. Likely most people most of the time lived on what they could gather (or trap; primitive fish traps and the like being common) but physically demanding hunting of large animals was a relatively small proportion of anyone's food-providing activity).
But when agriculture is developed things change. There's a food surplus. Some people can live without their time and energy going into food production. Now you see the beginning of specialisation of social roles, pronounced social hierarchy, and - you guessed it - patriarchy. It's not an outcome of sheer necessity, so much as an outcome of the relative lack of necessity brought about by increased food supply.
Where does that leave us? Equality under the law....we make sure men and women aren't discriminated against for being men or women and they both have access to the same opportunities. What should we expect the outcome of that to be? I would expect that we still find men in the majority of positions of wealth and power because you can't change thousands of years of evolution with a law.
So we've shifted from the argument that women are socially inferior because God made them to be, to the argument that women are socially inferior because evolution made them to be.
But even if we accept your evolutionary account - which I don't - social structures and cultural realities are not governed by evolution. They're governed by human choices and actions in the present. I reject your premises and its conclusion.
As for the suffrage movement....how long before that took off (gained significant support) were women demanding the right to vote? It seems to me you can only really deny someone something they ask for. If they aren't asking/demanding/pleading....it's not really subjugation is it?
So all you have to do is spend centuries or millennia telling a social group that they're inferior and don't deserve agency (because [insert religious, pseudo-scientific, and other reasons here]), and they've internalised that narrative enough not to push back against it
en masse, so they're not really subjugated!
Of course you can deny someone something they're not asking for. You can set up the situation so that they never think to ask, or know that if they ask they'll be ridiculed or punished. You mentioned Jehanne d'Arc, who lost her life at the stake, in the end, not for her military actions but for daring to wear men's clothes. Such social transgression could not be borne but must be punished as witchcraft!
We're talking about ideas here....and frankly, I don't think having a vagina or penis makes anyone's ideas more valid.
Having one or the other is more likely to give one insight into the lived experiences of others with the same "equipment," though, no?
I've made the claim....we have equality under the law. What else is needed?
The law is a toothless tiger in most cases. It needs to be much more rigorously enforced. Employers should be too frightened of the real and significant consequences to do all the things they routinely get away with.
We need global change so that equality is a reality not just in your country or mine but in Africa and South-East Asia and the Middle East.
We need social change so that the worth, dignity and opportunities are maximised for everyone; not just women, actually, but everyone.
We have a long, long way to go.
