Aaron wrote:Lording what over who? And it sounds to me that you favor women, so do you? But anyway, how do you know that I am denying that I favor men? When I tell you I don't and you ignore me; then you already assume I'm a liar. Give me the opportunity to have this discussion with you.
I think you are confusing being a decent human being with categorizing people into roles/classes. A very masculine man can still be a caring, loving, nurturing person.
A very masculine man can be that. However, under the dominant rubric of masculinity in the US, a very masculine man has the tendency towards traits that run counter to caring, loving, and nurturing. (He can "still" be that, which implies he isn't any of those by default.) Already, a man has to be given the flexibility to bend his own gender somewhat. This is necessary, and why your insistence on fixed gender roles is naive and incorrect.
Where I think it is strange is when people decide to cross dress or something like that and still maintain their role of a father figure or something to that sort. I think the picture of Haku is a good example. That is just strange to put in a children's show. Ironically, in that example and in the Zophar example, their status as villains is magnified and perhaps even considered confusing by their feminine features.
You completely ignored the differences we stated between Japanese culture and our own culture. It's not cross dressing in their culture at all. That is commonplace. When seeing these images, you can only fairly judge them on the basis of where they come from.
That is what they wear. Their masculinity has no rule against flowy robes, like ours does. It's called a Hakama, look it up! American and Japanese masculinities are different. (I'll let someone more knowledgable in the culture tell me how the requirements for a children's show are different.)
On the other hand if a man is a blithering, crying fool, who can't get through a tough situation without crying then they are perceived as weak especially by women.
A trait which is not biological, by the way, but conditioned at an early age, like nearly all gender traits. In studies, parents are shown to comfort a female child that is crying much more quickly than a male child, who is sometimes given negative reinforcement to discourage him from crying.
A good example of the roles being blurred to the point of stupidity are female fire fighters. There is no reason to have a female fire fighter unless she wants to be behind a desk.
Really? What can a male firefighter do that a female can't? The only stupid thing is denying anyone a position if they're able to do the job well. There are lots of females who are strong enough, rigorous enough, smart enough, and determined enough to be a firefighter, a police officer, or a soldier. Just as a very masculine man can still be caring and nurturing, a very feminine woman can still be all of these things. (I'm fortunate enough to be dating one right now.)
Even here, gender roles are nothing more than a status quo, an excuse for limiting options of expression for both men and women. It is already flexible, and that flexibility is a good thing. I wouldn't have the gall to check the gender of the person saving me from a fire.
There are times too when gender roles are blurred such as a single parent house holds. I think though that 99% of the time when the blurring occurs it results in some sort of confusion and even disability for the child. Perhaps they express it through acting out in school, or just a general sense of passiveness or even pacifism in the face of danger or extraordinary circumstance like a bully, or a car crash.
It's easy to make up that data. I'd have lots of friends that would be offended by that.
It is tougher for a single parent to raise a child, but lots of times the child grows up to be even more responsible than his or her peers, because they've had to help with siblings, had to help with household income, and so on. There are some issues that can arise with the lack of another strong parental figure, but that's due to there being only one parent, and can easily happen even with a mother and a father. The blurring of gender roles is insufficient alone to make your point.
And wait, what's wrong with pacifism? Also, pacifism is not a passive reaction to a situation, but a reaction to a situation where one precludes the use of force. There are ways of dealing with bullies that don't demand punching them in the face. (I've tried both approaches.) Your association of pacifism with weakness is telling.
Ironically, as you push your call for acceptance for the blurring of gender roles you contradict yourself with the statement about mothers. Does that mean a gay male couple with an adopted son/daughter cannot provide motherly love.
Not a contradiction. I quote the offending passage.
"Mother, however, is used only to describe a woman, so your sentence makes even less sense. (Note that I am not claiming that only a woman can provide nurturing, just that "mother" is actually specifically biological, unlike the purely societal constructs of nearly every other distinction between man and woman.)"
She means that a mother is a biological category - a mother is the one who gives birth to a child. That's pretty much just a female. You'll notice, though, that she said that nurturing (among other traits that provide motherly love) is separate. Nurturing is associated with gender, but gender is not a prerequisite. So a gay male, a straight male, a gay female, a straight female, an asexual male or female, and a bisexual male or female, or even a transgender male or female can provide nurturing to a son or daughter.
In fact, the genders now appear more blurred here than before, since anyone can be nurturing, and anyone can be strong. Anyone can be a firefighter. It is mainly our culture that encourages our gender distinctions.
If that is in fact what you mean then you have proved my point that the genders are not equal and have their own time honored roles throughout the world. *NOTE* I am not talking about caring, nurturing love. I understand that you understand that males can provide that too.
Of course genders are unequal, which is why it's good that they're flexible, and I'm hopeful that they will change in time to be more equitable.
Why shouldn't roles be blurred
Let men be men. Let women be women.
Who says we haven't? I'm all for
letting people choose.
Biologically we have "evolved" to accomplish different tasks for one and other.
I'll say you're half right here. If gender, the collection of clothing, accessories, personality traits, and so on, is cultural, it's not biological. Thus the dominant roles may have evolved in the way that cultures evolve, but it's not hardwired, which is why there are so many flexibilities, so many exceptions that they nearly seem to form their own little genders.
It makes sense on that basis to not have the roles blurred.
Evolution, even biological evolution, is never a best-case scenario. It is only a change into what works sufficiently well in a particular environment. In the case of cultural evolution, where there is some degree of choice, what works well appears to be flexibility in gender, and what works best for many people can be anything from a traditional role to nothing resembling it. What makes sense, in our pluralist society, is allowing each person the choice.
But clearly as life becomes easier through technology the need for some of those roles is changing. For economic reasons a woman who is paid more then her husband might become the head of household leaving the husband to be a "stay at home dad". Are the children at a loss because their mother is the bread winner and the father is a caregiver? I don't believe so. But it is so circumstantial that I wouldn't want to endorse it nor condone it as a "progressive" lifestyle.
And if that is your stance, and you are married to a wife who agrees to it, more power to you. But these roles are changing, and there are already many different gender roles already, in different parts of the world and in different points of our past. The only thing left is to decide what to do with the time that is given you.
It also reduces the value of a man and the value of a woman by literally shunning the majority of the world who believes that the "traditional" roles are the best roles. It in effect creates a class of "highly educated" individuals who cannot comprehend why their perceived "lower IQ" peers choose a life that confines both sexes. Resulting in ridicule.
There are some who do the ridiculing, but in a lot of cases they wish to point out the flaws with the hope that the gender roles improve for both men and women. They are also reacting from being ridiculed by those gender roles. The onerous guilt goes both ways.
And I don't see how the value of men and women is reduced. If anything it is heightened, by disentangling men and women from a zero-sum game where typically only one at a time can have value.
The majority of the world may appear, at the surface, to have the same traditional roles. But they do not. It is slowly getting more difficult to see with the advent of globalization, but even a hundred years ago the differences would've been more readily apparent. A majority is not always right, and a majority is not always a majority.
It really comes down to that. Personally, as a male I really, really enjoy the feminine aspects of women.
Cool, I guess.
And women, always, always choose the more masculine men, its biological.
It's primarily social, with some biology thrown in there. They don't always choose the more masculine men. Sometimes they choose other kinds of men. Sometimes they choose women. Sometimes they choose... I've done this before. So your statement is wrong on several counts.
They all have a little check list of things they look for in a guy. All of them are traditional stereotypes of men otherwise we would have nerdy guys with women all the time.
That's a wrong generalization again. And that's why we don't rely on stereotypes to make overarching statements about everyone!
***EDIT***
I forgot to add this in here somewhere:
I wanted to mention that in Asian cultures the roles of men and women are FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR more restricted then in Western and even Mid-Eastern cultures. So much so that Japanese women have a stereotype of being subservient. I would challenge you to find me a culture/country/people that do not have traditional roles. I'm nearly positive it doesn't exist.
Perhaps somewhat more on topic. I'll ask Alunissage or Kizyr to talk about detailed roles of men and women. I would only say that, before interference from the West, and perhaps persistent even today, the gender roles are somewhat different from ours, and somewhat similar.
Your question is difficult, because the concept of traditional roles is nebulous. It's an easy thing to say, but not easy to do.
An extreme example, but let's take Classical Sparta. The women from a young age are trained to be warriors. They are hardly nurturing, dashing the skulls of infants onto the rocks if they are born malformed. The boys, from the age of seven, are raised in communal barracks to be soldiers. They are made to marry a woman when they are old enough for childbearing purposes, but they often have sexual relationships with other men, which is not seen as effeminate at all. I'd say we're breaking several traditional rules here, that homosexuality is effeminate, that women are nurturing, that men and women always lust after one another, that women are weak and incapable of wielding weapons, etc.
I know there are matrilineal tribes where the women have several men as sexual partners. This is not seen as promiscuous or in any way degenerate. It is perfectly normal to both the men and the women.
While in Western society doctors have by and large been male until the past 50 years or so, in RUssia the opposite was true. The medical profession was the domain of women.
There are many Native American cultures where women held a large amount of power, whether as leaders, visionaries, or so on.
Gender distinctions were not as firm in the Middle Ages as we might imagine them today. There are many late medieval images of Jesus which feature feminine imagery. This was not emasculating or otherwise degenerate in any way, but was a normal way of depicting Jesus as the wounded body on the cross, and Jesus as the mother of humankind.
And of course, our own culture should be able to count.