It seems like avant-garde gender and sex theorists/activists are reacting to the most conservative picture of masculinity and femininity. The stereotypes of Madison Avenue and Hollywood define real men as tough and insensitive and real women as soft and caring. This old-fashioned and fading view of gender and sex has never typified real people.

If you distribute sex and gender characteristics of typical men and women, what you find is a large area of overlap--not just now, but in the past. So much overlap, that the most intensely heterosexual (or lesbian) masculine women are more masculine than all but the most masculine men, and the most intensely heterosexual (or gay) feminine men are more feminine than all but the most feminine women.

That's why heterosexual men can be very good caretakers and heterosexual women can be good mechanics or construction workers. That's why typical women can dig ditches and typical men can take care of a home. That's why some heterosexual men dress in female drag and why some homosexuals dress in biker drag. There are women who can beat the shit out of most men (they've got strength and aggressiveness) and there are men who make better caring nurses than most women (they've got sensitivity to emotional/physical needs).

The whole 'trans-sexual, trans-gender, gender-fluid' quest is built on the false premise that the standard definition of masculinity and femininity provided no "home" for people out on the extreme ends of the distribution. "You can be anything you want to be" is an old American meme. It isn't true, but it sounds very uplifting. So, fuck the xy and xx chromosomes, fuck the testes, ovaries, vagina, penis, beard, breasts, and build. A surgeon can whip up a penis or a vagina and the druggist can supply the missing hormones. Biology be damned!

Except biology can't be damned. XX and XY chromosomes mark every cell of the trans person (in 99.999% of the population). Males remain males and females remain females whatever the surgeon, pharmacist, or cultural theorists does. And it is unnecessary, because biology already provided for a very wide range of sexual dispositions.

All the language of the "trans" movement reflects nothing new, really. It's just a new argot and a new market. No, you are not "gender fluid" -- you are out there on the far end of the biological distribution of possibilities. ALL of us, whatever we think we are, have features that are out on the far end, too. There are extremely sharp and extremely blunt brains; there are extreme athletes; there are musicians with extreme memory capabilities; some people have perfect pitch, some people can't sing if their life depended on it. Some people hear or see far more acutely than others. Some people are extreme risk takers, others think twice about jumping over a puddle.

Each of these extreme characteristics manage to exist without a special identity, argot, or political agenda.

I think the gender identity bit has gone done a rabbit hole, but look: If I met you, I'd be polite and call you by the name you provided. If I liked you, I'd be a friend.

Some people have been told to stop coming up with so many great discussion topics. Are they paying you to do it? I noticed you have become a regular font of fertile topics.

I think people should be worrying A LOT LESS about god and A LOT MORE about life here on this celestial ball.

One of my all time least favorite quotes :grimace: . My parents spewed that garbage from a young age, but even a few questions from a 16 year old (me) would cause them to him and haw about how much they loved working 55 hours a week, every week. As they are approaching retirement, and are looking forward to it, they are somewhat willing to admit they were wrong with that quote. — ZhouBoTong

Hear! Hear!

"If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life" is the kind of scuzzy lies that one finds on motivational posters.

Work, labor, in this world tends to be a pretty alienating affair, whether it be run by capitalists or commissars. The reason people are paid to work is that no one would do it, otherwise.

Work is death on the installment plan.

Language and music are intertwined. Of course, a lot of language is "un-musical" just as some music is "unmusical". Otomotopaeia is the use of words to create a "sound" or musical effect -- like Poe's Bells. And how can you listen to the lyrics if there are no lyrics? You like Beethoven's 5th? No words.

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this would be more of an investment in my relationship with him — Stanley

You might get paid back. Time will tell. In the meantime...

Don't mix business with familial love. Loans are loans, love is love. Don't confuse the two.

The investment that matters is the relationship that has been created and built up over time and with common experiences between you and your brother: you grew up together in the same home. You (plural) have invested decades of time together in each other. You are invested. You don't need to invest cash in your brother's failed business venture to bolster your relationship.

Business dealings between family members and friends can (and fairly often do) turn bitter. It can be hard to separate out loans and love.

There is a small moral hazard here. A moral hazard exists when loans enable people to take risks without having to shoulder the consequences. Loaning businesses money sometimes creates major moral hazards -- sometimes really really big ones, like when the government bailed out AIG in 2008 to the tune of $67,835,000,000. There was moral hazard up to Wall Street's eyeballs that year.

As I indicated in another post, the primary mechanism of evolution, natural selection, acts only on individuals. I'm not sure if that contradicts what you are saying or not. — T Clark

It's a difficult knot.

The 'species' doesn't think, react, hunt, shop, cook, and eat. That's all done by individuals. On the other hand, individuals don't survive, thrive, change, or die out over long periods of time. Individuals are a flash in the pan. Individuals do not decide to talk in 7000 different tongues; language belongs to the species. But each individual has to learn their language one by one. If you and I had gotten run over by a Lamborghini Veneno ($5 million) roaring down the street at 200 kph, before we (well, you) had reproduced, the net effect would be zero. Not because you are unimportant, but because your (our) part in the scheme of things is vanishingly small and transient. The species has been evolving for what... 14 million years since the last common ape/human ancestor, and maybe 200,000,000 years for all of us mammal species. We've been around for a measly 70+ years.

On the one hand every individual is more important than the species, but the species is where our future lies, or doesn't.

Ahem...Hayseed? — T Clark

Hayseeds of the Bread Basket Unite. The urban parasites have nothing to lose but their bread and butter, their pate foi gras, their fried chicken McNugguts; their almond milk, salad greens, chick peas, and steak tartare.

by "collective" I meant all the members of the species who do whatever they do from day to day. If "we" go extinct, it will be because "we" all died without leaving successors. We didn't "fit". We were not fit. it would not be any one, two, ten, a million or a billion persons' fault. However, if you'd like to blame somebody for our being closer to extinction than we would like, here's a very partial list;

The Koch Bros. (David Koch is as dead as a doornail; Charles Koch has sadly not achieved that state yet. However, there are more Koches where they came from.
Donald Trump (whatever is wrong, blame him)
influential climate change deniers
the stockholders and BODs of coal, petroleum, gas, autos, tires, airlines, and power generation industries.
Agricultural multinationals like

BASF. Country: Germany. ... Part of the old I.G. Farben (forced labor camps in Nazi Germany)
CNH Industrial NV. Country: The Netherlands. Revenue: US$10.12 billion. ... (aka, New Holland)
Bayer AG. Country: Germany. ... Part of the old I.G. Farben (forced labor camps in Nazi Germany)
Syngenta AG. Country: Switzerland. ...
Monsanto Company. Country: USA. ...
Nutrien (Formerly Agrium Inc. and PotashCorp) Country: USA. ...
DowDuPont. Country: USA. ...
Deere & Company. Country: USA.

All capitalists and commie dictators

Most of the work the average person does has nothing to do with their survival. With this being the case, it doesn't make sense to talk about survival of the fittest/fit, or whatever. — Anthony

Right and wrong. From the individual's point of view, our efforts at work or education have approximately NOTHING to do with our individual survival, as you said. But... From the view of collective society, it does. The account clerk at a brokerage, a social worker, a housewife, a city street worker, the check out at Target, etc. are all engaged in the maintenance and reproduction of society as a whole.

Individual bees and birds aren't in the race to survive; it's their species that survive or not. Same with humans--which is not to say that individual humans are at all indifferent to their personal situations. We are quite concerned about it. But individually, we, birds, and bees will all die. Collectively, we endure -- or not.

Congratulations! You are the first person on The Philosophy Forum to use the word "bricole".

Unfortunately, you missed the boat. "Bricole" refers to the rebound of a ball from the wall in court tennis--basically a term describing balls bouncing around. Bricolage, which is what you were probably aiming for, means...

(in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things.
"the chaotic bricolage of the novel is brought together in a unifying gesture"
something constructed or created from a diverse range of available things.
"bricolages of painted junk"

Perhaps you were using a French verb form? (I don't know -- my French is quite deficient.)

It is unfortunate that your brother's business did not work out well. Loaning someone (total stranger or your beloved brother) money to save a failing business is a poor use of your assets. It's a poor use of anyone's assets to prop up a business that is going broke--as many of them do. Give him enough of your money to keep the shop afloat and you may both end up without the cash you started out with.

Your brother and his family are not going to die of starvation if you make no further loans. I suppose your brother and his wife are sufficiently resourceful people who will find ways to put food on the table, pay their mortgage, and so forth. Your brother's business venture belongs to him and his wife -- not you. It's his gamble, not yours. Sometimes gamblers lose. Sad, but that's the way things worked out.

You have already helped your brother. You didn't deny his request for assistance. Just because you helped him in the past doesn't mean that you should continue. He hasn't been able to make repayment so far, and that will probably continue.

Chances are you and your siblings will not receive another large inheritance. You have needs too: college costs money. It would be helpful for you to finish college without debt -- and with some assets in place.

Question: under what terms did you loan your brother money? Was it more like a gift masquerading as a loan? Was there a contract written up and signed committing him to repay you? Was all this a verbal understanding?

Polonius says to his son Laertes, before the boy takes off for Paris (this is in Hamlet):

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend.

folk will always take more than they ought. Someone will sneak in an extra cow.

And doubtless they are right. But I still prefer the third option. — Banno

Prefer whatever you like (which is why you prefer it) but what kind of sense does it make to ignore what you say are sound observations about behavior (taking more than they ought)? If option 3 occurs, then there is no problem; sometimes it occurs. Fairly often it does not occur and individual people ignore common interests.

Hanover's support for democratically determined rules for grazing, fishing, or sex in pubic parks is nothing like establishing dictatorship. What happens most often is that the commons are privatized and then everyone is excluded except the new owner. I'd rather have a cop on the prairie, by the river, or in the park enforcing the rules our elected representatives imposed, than have no access to the prairie, the river, and the park at all.

The first time I waded into the Atlantic Ocean on Cape Cod, I was informed that I was on a "private ocean beach". "Private beach" just didn't compute. How could such a thing even be the case?

"On the sign it said "Private Property". On the back side it didn't say anything -- that side was made for you and me!" Woody Guthrie. This Land Is Your Land

If you switched the races ten thousand years ago, and put the Africans into Europe, and the Europeans into Africa's lands, then the history would have repeated itself, with the only exception that it would have been the African Black race, living in Europe, who would colonize the world. — god must be atheist

Of course, we know that Africans WERE in Europe, and everywhere else, since we all came out of Africa. So, Africans did colonize the world.

So, why did that particular batch of Africans living north of the Mediterranean have such a big effect on the whole world? Will the Geographical Determinists please take their seats on the podium, now, and we will explain it all.

Caucasian Africans were in Europe long before they started conquering the world. Our various Homo sapiens forefathers and foremothers had been wandering around for roughly 300,000 years of hunter-gatherer existence. Around 12-15 thousand years ago, in the lands east of the Mediterranean, we Caucasians) stumbled on grain growing agriculture. Agriculture required staying put. More calories, more people.

So, why didn't the sub-saharan Africans take up grain-growing agriculture? Because their geography wasn't suited for the transfer of grain-growing practices. Grain growing spread east, west, and northwest because those directions provided suitable weather and geography. agriculture spread into Europe, along with cows, and horses. Bovine and Equine animals provided food, transportation, and traction power. Why didn't Africans use cows and horses? Because they weren't in sub-saharan Africa.

With traction power, fodder, grain, milk, and so on, Europeans were able to build up greater technology. Asian Africans located along the same latitudes followed suit: grains, traction animals, milk, and so forth. They too developed more technology. North and south of these latitudes grain didn't do well. Amerindians developed their own grains (maize), and other crops which became distributed in the hemisphere. Amerindians also didn't have traction animals, so never developed the wheel. Definitely a technology limitation.

Europe happened to have accessible minerals which the had the wherewithal to work with. Metallurgy advanced.

After the Roman Empire deteriorated, and Europe had split up into many localities, sea-going technology was advanced, and the Europeans were off to the races. China did too -- before Europe, actually. But they didn't pursue their opportunities.

Europeans had two big advantages: Technology (metallurgy, sailing ships, guns, armor, gunpowder which they got from the Chinese; and germs. All humans are equally germy, but because of their history with animals, Europeans had developed partial immunity to several bad animal-origin diseases like small pox and measles.

Guns, Germs, and Steel were our big advantage. (we didn't know about germs when we were doing our conquistador shtick, but germs were definitely helpful.

Europeans had their own problems with germs -- the Black Plague killed off a third of the population.

Understanding that success and failure is not entirely up to individuals, helps one stay in the present. Worry yes -- but remember a lot of it is out of your control, so relax.

the point of the question I suppose it what would convince you outside of simply faith. — MiloL

Nothing would convince me of the soul's existence outside of simple faith (or complicated faith) because it is a question of faith by its very nature. I might be mistaken about this because I son't have a strong grasp of the history of philosophy, but it is my impression that "mind" existing apart from "body" is as old as Plato who thought "mind" was capable of perceiving the "highest, eternal, unchanging, and non-perceptible objects of knowledge, the Forms" which the body could not perceive. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses the term "soul" as well as "mind". "Soul" is loaded with different meaning in Christian thinking than "mind". So, soul/mind... confusing terms.

The mind imprisoned in the body (Plato's idea) is part of a system which I don't accept. Do you think your mind (soul?) is imprisoned in your body, and that your mind can perceive the "highest, eternal, unchanging, and non-perceptible objects of knowledge, the Forms"? Do you think your mind or soul flies free of your body when you die? I don't.

Double check: Are you sure you subscribe to the philosophical systems which produced a separated mind and body?

How is mind/body separation consequential?

1. It places the whole process of thinking in a realm which is not subject to examination except through philosophical examination. There is nothing in your head except your brain which is busy running the body and is somehow (mysteriously) related to your mind, which exists... somewhere else.

2. The essential substance of our existence--sensation, perception, memory, sex, needs, wants, drives, emotions, feelings, self-identity, and much more--is all based in our bodies, which the platonic theory considers an inferior facility. This leads to some highly unfortunate consequences for embodied beings, like you and me.

3. Separate mind located in the body's inferior facility hinders our acceptance of an integrated existence where physical realities and mental realities are intimately intertwined and not separate at all.

4. Feminists are death on Cartesian dualism, because they recognize in it a tool of oppression. This quote is from an article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I'm not a feminists, but they have some good arguments against mind-body dualism.

for feminists, the opposition between mind and body has also been correlated with an opposition between male and female, with the female regarded as enmeshed in her bodily existence in a way that makes attainment of rationality questionable.

I would add that we are all -- male and female -- enmeshed in bodily existence which, if it doesn't make rationality questionable, at least regularly trips up rationality. Women are dominated by their bodies? What man hasn't been guided by his stiff cock at one time or another?

You could spend grant money until all the foundations went broke supporting your research without positive results. And why bother? There is nothing deficient in the concept that the mind and body are one. We are embodied beings, made of flesh, and our minds are part of our flesh.

Soul? Another can of worms. (If you were reaching for the idea of the immortal soul, there is no way of proving or disproving that. It's a matter of belief. If you like thinking you have an immortal soul, fine.). Cartesian dualism (separate mind and body, after René Descartes) is a consequential theory, which is why it is held in low esteem.

I've been saying that Man created god for years.

I count our 'theogenesis" as one of our more notable cultural achievements. "God" is real in that sense. The forgotten, no-longer-named gods aren't real anymore. Once they were.

Using logic-not emotion-Trump should be impeached?

Sure, impeach the bastard, but be aware that it might not make any difference. A merely impeached president isn't bounced out of office. He has to be convicted in the Senate of the crimes on which the House found him guilty. If he is found guilty in the Senate, then his presidency is over.

OK I edited it out, just give me a second I'm eating dinner — 3017amen

Eating dinner?! Hey, get back here. Trump is way too dangerous for you to take time out at the trough.

I used logic. Logic said that on some official and unofficial functions, Trump was doing badly. I checked out my emotions. They concurred with logic. I checked the auspices by ripping open a live, vegetarian-fed-never-given-hormones-or-antibiotics chicken with gloved hands and examined its gut. There was a large cancer visibly pulsating. I threw it into the fire and heard the dead chicken cackle.

Looks like a negative result to me.

So, more seriously: There are some events the presidency has little control over. Most of the time the White House can not claim credit or blame for a good or bad economy. The president is not responsible for most of the social events which have histories stretching back decades. The president can not pass legislation: What can be done is amend administrative rules (no small thing). The President in his role of Commander in Chief can instigate military actions. This has been the source of some big problems over several presidencies (Kennedy's to start with).

I loathe Trump more than I loathed Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. He is most loathsome in the area that has little direct effect, but considerable indirect effect on political discourse: the use of his mouth, and his fingers on Twitter. He set and maintains a low standard of discourse.

He is simply wrong (or worse, not even wrong) on issues such as global warming, environmental protection, world trade, and social services--all vital concerns. He is wrong either on the basis of policy or on the basis of knowledge. Which is difficult to tell, quite often.

Hillary Clinton, or Jesus for that matter, given the Democrat controlled House and the Republican controlled Senate would not have been able to pass so much as the salt and pepper, let alone major legislation.

No recent president has been entirely successful or a total failure, maybe since... the Harding Coolidge administrations? But Harding and Coolidge were before my time, and I haven't nailed down everything that wen ton in the 1920s.

Love 'em or Loathe 'em.

card-blanche — Tzeentch

people hate this, but it' is "carte blanche" -- the 'e's are silent, short or soft 'a'. It means unconditional authority; full discretionary power. It's what Donald Trump thinks he has,

Is it hysteria or just a realization that there was previously inadequate protection of children? — Hanover

Both. Here is a good summary of a sex hysterical sex abuse case in Jordon, Minnesota in 1983-84: http://www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org/assets/Olson%20Sex%20Ring2.pdf

If there was a valid case against one individual to start with, the number of accused ballooned, and after causing much damage to innocent people. The Scott County prosecutor, Kathleen Morris, whipped up hysteria and ruined a number of innocent people. Instead of 1 sound case, she created a case of three dozen which was in the end thrown out by the court.

The article is also a review of the book, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s by Richard Beck. He covers a number of sex abuse hysteria cases from the period. I have not read the book.

Maybe a discussion for another thread, but if you have any good theories for why almost half of US voters chose Trump, I'd read 'em. — tim wood

I wish I knew much more about the why; so do a lot of other people.

One can sift through the election results, electoral college strategy, demographic analysis, and so on. The answer lies in the foundational delusions of our political system which are operating now, in the run-up to the next election as much as they were operating in the last election.

The foundational delusions are that the two parties are fundamentally different; that the two candidates represent real alternative futures; that the Presidency determines whether the economy will do well or not; that representatives, senators, and the president valiantly strive to perform the will of the people.

It's a fraud in ever so many ways, and I wish I understood why the fraud is not recognized. But as you say, it's a topic for another thread.

"Certain children opened the flies of my trousers and started to tickle me," he wrote. "I reacted differently each time, according to the circumstances ... But when they insisted on it, I then caressed them."

Right, the 1960s (running into the 1970s) are not the 2010s. Given episodes of more recent mass hysteria about pedophilia, his story and his denial of its veracity are not going to fly in some quarters.

Wilhelm Reich died in an American prison in 1957, not for child abuse, not for rape, but for promoting his corny invention, the "orgone box" which was an adult-sized box in which one could accumulate orgasmic energy. The government said it was a medical fraud. They could have said the same thing about the then dominant practice of psychoanalysis, but the couch was in, the organ box was out.

Unfortunately for us all, Reich's really excellent ideas got buried along with his sillier ones.

Likewise with voting, 16 in Scotland, there's been no constitutional collapse — Isaac

The voting age in Scotland was lowered from 21 to 18, in 1970. The voting age of 16 was used once for the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2013.

I don't know what the average level of political literacy is in Scotland, but I have a hard time imagining the average 16 year old in the US making sensible voting decisions--or the average 35 year old, for that matter. A good share of the population display a reasonable level of political literacy, but there are a lot of adults whose political thinking is just screwy.

Screwy thinking coupled with a rigged political system...

I haven't recently read Wilhelm Reich (like the Mass Psychology of Fascism or The Function of the Orgasm). It seems to me he promoted greater sexual autonomy for adolescents.

During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police. I am excited out of my skin by the nonpareil strategy of Parisian students. Would such a tactic work here? Where can one buy many inexpensive copies of his book?

Age-of-consent-laws are a can of worms as far as discussion topics go. Various arguments have been made for the legitimacy of sex between people below whatever age of consent is in force, and between people who are older-than and people who are younger-than the specified age of consent. People tend to go ballistic over the idea that over-25 and under-16 people could have sex that was not crudely exploitative. Drag in North American Man Boy Love Association, and you'll have a riot on your hands.

My view is that lots of arrangements aside from the one we have ARE POSSIBLE, but would require pretty large changes in our sexual behavior from childhood up.

I've forgotten the details, but I read an anthropological study of a tribal group where sexual contact between persons in the tribe were acceptable from childhood on up. Children tended to have sexual contact with children, adolescents with adolescents, adults with adults. The upshot was that children, adolescents, and adults had pretty clear ideas about what sex was like, what were reasonable expectations of a partner, and so on.

Our society does its best to hinder free and open sexual experimentation among children and adolescents, and sex is maintained more on a scarcity basis than on a free and plentiful basis. We are not ready, even remotely, to emulate the open sexual habits of the tribe described above. It would be like letting a starving crowd into a grocery: instant destructive chaos.

If patriarchy was a real thing, it is still in business. But things have changed quite a bit in this country, and in many other countries--not everywhere however. If maybe 50% - 60% of Americans are now tolerant of homosexuality, 40% to 50% are not reconciled with gay marriage, gay adoption, and certainly not gays lurking in dark parks doing unspeakable things. The percentages of people in many other countries who are tolerant is smaller than in the US or Europe.

One of the ideas that some gay liberation thinkers developed in the 1970s was that gay men and gay women were separate cases, in terms of oppression. Gay men were a psychological affront to straight men--not because straight men all feared they themselves were homosexual, but because gay men failed to fulfill the collective social expectations for men. A lot of straight women also thought that gay men were failures.

Gay men didn't have all the burdens that straight men had to put up with in the typical marriage --supporting one's wife and a bunch of whining, crying, sick, shitting, vomiting children, commuting to a fucking job, all sorts of social demands, no time of one's own, etc., etc., etc. Gay men were objects of disgust, displeasure, and hatred (jealousy?)--in the same way that anti-war protestors, hippies, communists, and so forth were objects of loathing and hatred by "red-blooded American men and women". All these deviant people were disgracefully shirking their sex-linked responsibilities. (And they might unforgivably have been having more fun.).

As a consequence, gay men had been coming in for a much more severe social repression than gay women did. Homosexuals besmirched the reputations of real, red-blooded men. That's serious business.

The situation for lesbians was asymmetrical. Men weren't very upset with lesbianism for three reasons: A) lesbianism didn't have anything to do with masculinity; B) whatever women were doing with each other just wasn't very important. Lesbian sex was sex between unimportant people. C) an unknown percentage of men found lesbian sex titillating. They were less subject to social condemnation because their lives were peripheral to start with.

Lesbianism seems to be more challenging to heterosexual women than heterosexual men (in general; whether this is still true, not sure).

I'm not a big fan of patriarchal theory, so my opinion is biased. I blame capitalism for a lot of our problems. Capitalism and Christianity. But all that has changed too. It isn't that Capitalism has become humanized, and most people are finding fulfillment in their work--fulfilling Luther's view that all work is holy, whether it's the work of a farmer, a miner, or a priest.

No indeedy. The extractive, efforts and alienating effects of capitalists haven't softened up one bit. It's just that Europeans, Americans, and maybe 1/2 billion middle-class people in China, India, South America, and middle east petro-states are not currently the subjects of crude value extraction. The curse of profit weighs most heavily now upon the backs of lower working class Chinese, Vietnamese, Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis, Jordanians, Mexicans, Brazilians, and so forth. The Folks Who Live on the Hill, the well-off Americans, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, etc. still have to produce, but it's managerial work and idea production. Idea work can be pretty tedious, too, of course. The primary purpose of the middle class is to work enough to afford to consume all the peripheral products that are being turned out, from fast fashion (that falls apart after a few wearings) to the latest gadget.

"Hey, you middle-class parasites: if you don't earn enough to buy all this crap into the foreseeable future, then the economy crashes and you crash along with it. So, let's see a little enthusiasm for that Octoberfest White Sale!!!"

Castration has never been a universal cultural practice the way that female gen. mutilation is — uncanni

Well, I didn't really mark out an aristocracy of suffering.

No, castration was not universal practice, but eunuchs were handy to have around guarding harems or singing counter-tenor, or higher. FGM is hardly universal (which is not to lessen its awfulness). As far as I know, most of the world outside of the Islamic sphere has not practiced it--but there are... a billion Moslems.

Just for your information, if a guy is not circumcised, then his foreskin gets cold in a breeze--maybe colder than the head. For Minnesota winter bicyclists, one's whole dick can get cold. Peninsular structures are dead ringers for freezing solid and falling off. Very inconvenient, Yes, foot binding is bad. Read about it in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, about Gladys Aylward, a Foot Inspector. Apparently it was done to make young girls sit still and work all day at boring tasks like weaving, which families sold for income. Economics again. Without foot binding, the young women would have jumped out of their stockings and devastated the countryside (per Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary).

And how do you know, anyway, that circumcision isn't traumatic?

I mean the creation of cultural institutions as well as art. Cultural institutions include religion, politics, education, military organization, govt., distribution of weath (class system), etc. — uncanni

I don't think women are from Venus and men are from Mars, and Saturn really should have been named Athena to Zeus's Jupiter. Pluto could have been named Persephone, and Neptune Demeter. But... those damned patriarchal astronomers.

It seems very unlikely to me that in the penultimate stretch of human evolution (modern homo sapiens wandering the Veldt for 300,000 years, at least, hunting, gathering, and living an exceptionally sustainable lifestyle, men and women were in constant war with each other. It wasn't the Peaceable Kingdom, if Steven Pinker's theory about the state lessening violence is right, but it had to have been been fairly good, because archeological/anthropological evidence indicates that they were reasonably healthy and long-lived. An inhospitable, inharmonious society living where willing cooperation and fellowship was a requirement would have difficulty surviving and thriving as well as they did.

10-12-14 thousand years ago life changed dramatically -- the agricultural revolution. We settled down on the land. Now, there are some interesting theories about how and why that came about. With agriculture came the tilled fields, the city, and the state. Some anthropological historians suspect that there was a conspiracy. Agricultural was promoted vigorously by the state (initially consisting of one family stronger than the rest living in a bigger rock pile than everybody else) because surplus food could be TAXED, and the tax would feed the state. Compared to 300,000 years of amicable wandering the earth, agriculture, the state, and the city took off like a rocket. It wasn't long before family life (the prime reason for humans existing) was severely altered by work, religion, politics, trade, economy, state, garbage heaps, shit piles, (what happens when people stay in one place), and then domesticated animals in addition to our canine alter-egos, writing, etc.

All this happened VERY FAST. Agriculture brought with it the need for control and regulation and our cultural inventions turned on us -- not in the 19th century a.d. but in the 10th millennium b.c. I don't know what life was like back then for ordinary people. Probably a mixed bag.

We know more about the high culture of ancient Greece in the age of Pericles. If not patriarchal, it can certainly be described as male-oriented. Women were expected to stay at home. Important men were the public eye (unimportant men were irrelevant). But it was also a harsh society, despite the high levels of culture. The punishment for unpaid debts (not a dollar owed for a cup of wine, but more like bankruptcy) was enslavement for one's entire family, and not a symbolic slavery either.

But then, there are a few plays that survived like Lysistrata or Antigony where women play important cultural roles.

Our view of ancient cultures, or for that matter our own culture several hundred years ago, is pretty limited because the lives of ordinary people just aren't recorded. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England by Barbara A. Hanawalt suggests a reasonably happy existence of men, women, and children. The Decameron by Boccaccio and Canterbury Tales by Chaucer aren't anthropology, of course, but suggest a reasonably decent society for better-off people in the late medieval-early renaissance period. (Nobody wrote Tales of the Proles, unfortunately.)

Putting together 10,000 years of 'civilization' practically had to involve everyone. Well, that's my take on it. I don't imagine any period of women's liberation that would resemble the current time, but it doesn't seem reasonable to impose a ghastly tale of universal, unending female oppression, either. Yes, there are ghastly practices imposed on people: foot binding, castration, female genital mutilation, circumcision, etc. But those weren't universal.

Sounds like you agree that what is generally understood to be the definition of patriarchy exists, you just don't like the label. — Artemis

I suppose that's a possibility. I'll have to think about it more.

↪Bitter Crank Your hostility is such a turn off that I can't be bothered to read your response to me. You are a hater. — uncanni

You feel what you feel, but disagreement with your views really shouldn't be taken as evidence of hostility or hate.

Women can partake in this just as much as men. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But the assumption always seems to lurk in the second row (not in the distant background) that it is women who suffer, whether women partake in the oppressing or not.

It seems clear that in the history of capitalism--hell! The history of the world--the suffering has been abundant for both sexes, whether women have participated in oppressing or not. Capitalisms concern for the family is two fold: One that they consume, and that they reproduce the culture--maybe capitalist bosses are concerned about reproducing patriarchy, but mostly it seems like they are concerned with reproducing a population who fit into the capitalist system of production--eager consumers and docile workers.

I'm not a female or a feminist, so... I probably don't get "patriarchy", or maybe I have patriarchal genes or a patriarchal biome, or something.

There's no current need to neuter the term when men systematically kept women outside of all spheres of power and cultural creation — uncanni

All spheres... That's too sweeping a term, particularly in the area of cultural creation. Hollywood isn't the world.

Women have gained a great deal of purchase in politics in some large constituencies, like the European Union. Women played a much larger role in the sciences, for instance, and in government in the USSR. True enough, there were once zero women voting in the US and UK, but that has changed, you probably noticed (though I'm not claiming the vote is much access to power, if it is access at all). Women played a zero to almost no roll in government in the US up to 1920, but over the last century that has changed. Around a quarter of congress are presently women. that's a huge change over 50 years ago, when there were 15 altogether, and zero a century ago.

Power is conservative and change in who wields power is slow. Progress is being made.

What do you mean by "cultural creation"?

It seems like women do play a a fairly large role in culture--from creation to criticism. The contribution of women in cultural production has certainly increased a great deal in the last century, last 50 years, last 25 years.

I don't know what you meant in saying women are not oppressed. In some contexts they are clearly not oppressed; in some contexts they are very much oppressed. The same could be said of men. I'm not denying that women are oppressed here; I'm saying that "patriarchy" isn't real. What oppresses men and women these days are the usual culprits: corporations, churches, and states--all large institutions with domination-of-everything-else on their agenda.

I perceive many patriarchal characteristics in most public women: patriarchy is the master brain-washer. — uncanni

It brainwashed you, apparently.

Which is why "patriarchy" is meaningless. If a few women are just as patriarchal as men and oppress most women, if a few men oppress most other men as much as they oppress women, then clearly there must be some other principle at work besides hormones and genitals. At the present time (present = last 400 years, more or less) human economic function has become dominant. The kind of work we do defines us, and most of us are defined as the class which labors to produce surplus value, and outside of that function, we have little value to the elite. We (about 95% of the male and female population) are oppressed by a small minority of men and women. Capitalism isn't patriarchy.

In Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times – 1996, Elizabeth Wayland Barber asks the question, "Why were women at home taking care of children and spending much of the day weaving, when men were out and about hunting, chopping, and digging? Her answer is that weaving was safely compatible with child rearing, in ways which hunting, chopping, and digging were not. (20,000 years ago is towards the end of the hunting / gathering stage of activity which had gone on for maybe 300,000 years.). She notes that at least some women developed economic independence in this model. We know this from 4,000 - 5,000 year old records on clay tablets from Babylonia (et al) recording directives of "business women" to male trading agents in other cities, telling them what to buy.

Later on after agriculture and animals came together, and horses, cows, goats, pigs, etc. were domesticated, and tillage and harvesting replaced hunting and gathering, men's work was more dangerous for children because of the large animals and tools involved.

Primate males evolved into larger and stronger animals than primate females. That's our pattern too. Men have tended to do heavier, harder, more dangerous labor, the activities of which would put little children at risk.

Feminists hate the idea that biology is destiny. In some ways it is, like it or not: pregnancy and lactation are just not fairly distributed between men and women. At least some of what is biologically sensible for men isn't biologically sensible for women.

You can't have it both ways. Either "patriarchy" exists or it doesn't. Indeed, some religions restrict women more than others, but even within Islam, there is a fairly broad range of relationships between males and females with respect to women's independence.

There is no debate that males tend to be more powerful, more dominant, and so forth. Biology makes it difficult for the male of any species to assure his genetic contribution. In humans this has resulted in women being controlled by men. Yada yada yada -- you know the drill.

But "patriarchy" is the practice of an ideology, projected backwards onto history. It's a great theory because it is vaporous and can claim anything it wants. (And patriarchy is by no means the only vaporous theory that gets regular use.)

Minds without bodies do not exist. We have bodies that produce mind. The personalized god, the bearded fellow Jehovah, or the voluptuous Aphrodite, or the powerful female god Athena have bodies and mind, therefore gender. It's hard to relate to the formless spirit. The Logos, the Word, isn't embodied, isn't gendered.

My shtick is that our best take on god puts IT (not him, her) beyond gender. Jesus had a body and gender. God did not. Apparently the Archangel Michael or Gabriel, which ever one was responsible for fucking Mary and leaving her a virgin, was embodied enough to get the job done, but let's not get into angelology.

It just depends on how you look at god(s). Indian gods like Shiva or Vishnu are embodied and gendered -- they actually exist in their temple forms (or so I have read). That's fine, nothing wrong with that. It just depends on what culture you are operating from.

The mills of the economy grind away without consulting ideologies.
— Bitter Crank

The economy is the most concrete form there is of how ideology is operating in a given society. I don't know about feminists "blaming" patriarchy; the ones I've read describe its operations in a given social realm or institution. — uncanni

Your formulation is spot on Marx.

But Capitalism isn't about men exploiting women. It's about capitalists exploiting everybody -- men, women, and children -- the earth itself -- for the purpose of maximizing profit. Capitalism is the equal-opportunity abuser, and whether men or women are on the board of directors or in the executive suite makes little difference.

For a god who is all knowing, ever present everywhere, all powerful, gender is irrelevant. The 'personalized' god is likely to be gendered, because we can't relate warmly to an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient eternal being who is spirit to boot.

Our most elevated conceptions about god (God) are beyond gender.