Inferiority based on sex and moral implications.

[Jro]

I just have a hard time buying in anything other than the fact that there are gender roles because men and women are different by nature, according to evolution or God.

Humans are enormously plastic creatures, and it's also extraordinarily difficult to separate social differences from intrinsic, physiological differences. Although some behaviors may very well be evolved, how do you even study those? We can't go back in time and say "primitive man MUST have lived this way, and that MUST explain how things are the way they are now."

The bodies are different, the behaviors are different. They both were useful for their roles in hunter gather and agrarian societies. Men can't produce milk naturally like a pregnant woman can. It seems to be that evolution or God is suggesting that women were intended to raise young children.

Men say fewer words than women, useful for hunting. Men have a large body and muscle mass, useful for hunting and farming.

Do you think that your body should determine your occupation? Do you think that farm yields these days depend upon the muscle mass of the farmer? We don't live in a hunter gatherer society or an agrarian society anymore. Sex mediated differences may have been important at one point in time, but I'm unconvinced that it's important anymore - why does a politician, engineer, scientist, etc. need muscle mass?

Sexual inequality also manifests itself in far more pernicious ways than "girls on that side of the room, boys on this side." Our society condones and supports violence against women, it commercializes and commodifies their bodies and it begins insisting at a very young age that women go like this "Doo doo" and men go like this "Daa daa daa." Although there may be intrinsic differences between men and women, our social and political treatment of women should be blind to this - it doesn't matter if a group of folks have different attributes.

 

[Cabal]

I think the great flaw of modern society seems to be its ability to ignore the obvious in a world of sophisticated technology.

It would be more accurate to say that the great flaw of modern religion is its ability to permit people to continue ignoring the obvious.

 

[Daniel25]

Do you think that your body should determine your occupation?

because men do not have uteruses. Tough break denizens of brave new world, but your ideology outstripped the necessary technology.

 

[Jane_the_Bane]

because men do not have uteruses. Tough break denizens of brave new world, but your ideology outstripped the necessary technology.

How does pregnancy prevent women from having an occupation other than housewife and mother? Clearly, that does not follow. Nor does it stop men who desire to be so from being housekeepers, educators and/or stay-at-home-dads.

I don't think we've already found optimum arrangements as far as child-care is concerned as of yet: the "core family" envisioned as an ideal by the bourgeois classes was dysfunctional from the start, the classical extended family (with several generations living together in economic dependency) does not seem to come back anytime soon, yet handing your children over to some paid strangers doesn't strike me as an ideal solution, either.
I think this new century will see new social forms emerge; personally, I'd prefer a model where several small families who know each other quite well bond together, taking care of the children as a communal effort rather than sacrificing one parents' career in each individual case.

(And in case you want to know why the middle class "core family" is dysfunctional: the psychological strain produced by the bourgeois gender roles of the 19th century is what prompted women to take action against gender-based discrimination to begin with. If it wasn't for the suffering of the middle-class ladies, feminism would not have developed the way it did.

 

[Psudopod]

Do you think that your body should determine your occupation?
​

because men do not have uteruses. Tough break denizens of brave new world, but your ideology outstripped the necessary technology.

How does this affect anything other than birthing a child? And would the invention of an artifical womb change your answer?