It is absolutely true that boys have been neglected. But the contempt of men is a recent phenomenon. Feminism has a great deal to do with it, demonizing masculinity by construing all men as brutes and promoting the false doctrine that men are unnecessary, that women are self-sufficient, that the patriarchy is some kind of evil oppressive thing. All of that is false. Men and women are complementary, which is to say they differ in ways that complete the other in some way. They need each other to help realize and become who they are. This doesn't necessarily mean every man and woman will marry or can marry or must marry, only that in the great social scheme of things, men and women have their unique genius to offer and range of roles to play in service of the other and the common good, even if it is remote.
Boys have different needs than girls. Treating boys like girls will not do them any good. All children need fathers, but boys are perhaps especially sensitive in this regard as men help model for boys what masculinity means. We see how the absence of a father translates into higher rates of various pathologies and delinquency in single mother households. Father also have an authority no mother can have, an authority that helps boys, and children in general, achieve the kind of moral formation need for adulthood.
There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good, beginning with the family unit. It provides the structure and order that enables everyone to flourish. Can things go wrong? Sure. But that's true of every social order or arrangement. You don't abolish something because it can go wrong or goes wrong sometimes. This is like solving poverty by exterminating the poor, or cutting everyone's hands off to "solve" theft. A healthy masculinity, the via media between effeminacy and brutishness, is sacrificial and it is good not only for men, but all of society, including women. The common good depends on it.
Maybe in a society where leadership is based on challenges of physical strength (i.e. 1v1 combat for the right to rule). But that hasn’t been true of most cultures for millennia. It goes deeper than that.
Against my better judgment, I'll comment in this thread.
I think the mistake in the post above is saying that physical strength has not been an issue for a millennia.
The strong have been using the threat of physical violence to take power right up to and including today. In the home, at work, and in society at large.
To put it bluntly, men are dumber. They're wired for task-to-task thinking, and their purposes are heavily motivated by challenges.
Women, by contrast, are wired for safety, which is a far more holistic approach to purpose because they consider connections men wouldn't even _consider_.
The downside of being smarter, though, is more unease about things you see that may present as a risk. It keeps females away from the bottom of the performance bell curve (men rank lowest in most metrics), but also from the top (men rank highest as well).
All of it is reprogrammable by operant conditioning (a large part of it often happening within marriage), but those are the biological primitives.
That’s not what’s being said here at all. As has been said in multiple comments pregnancy and everything associated with it physically and biologically is the most likely factor. It’s not bigoted to point out that women are biologically different in ways that make them unlikely to be rulers.
We need to lay to rest the idea that patriarchal societies arise just because men are physically stronger. There are known quite a number of matriarchal tribal societies where inter-tribal warfare was a significant focus of their society, so physical violence was strongly tied to social status. I"m thinking of pre-contact North America in particular.
It’s probably less the strength and more the fact that before contraception women would be pregnant a substantial amount of the time. Hard to be engaged in the world when you’re having to do a bunch of pre-scientific rituals to try and ensure a safe and healthy birth a lot of the time.
But that doesn’t really mean they weren’t involved in decision making, it just means they aren’t involved in the sorts of places where people will write any of it down for posterity.
I don't think it's that simple. The fact that women give birth, have periods, and have a hormonal cycle that has wide ranging impact upon their psyche and decision making processes also has probably had a major impact on most cultures trending patriarchal.
What do you mean by 'impact on their psyche and decision making processes'? They are less mentally capable in some sense? I'd like you to spell it out.
This comment doesn't make the point that you think. Yes, people in physical pain tend to be more emotional than they otherwise would, but there is no comparison across sexes that is relevant here. It is possible that women are generally more aware of their emotional state and remain better able to deal with it than men, even with hormonal fluctuation. Men also experience emotional cycles powered by hormones.
A woman’s mental state is altered by their hormonal fluctuations during their menstrual cycle. This is documented scientific fact. Sorry that it’s not politically correct or convenient to the current narratives. There are biological differences between men and women associated with their ability to give birth to children.
Men also experience hormones that affect their mental state, including periodicity. Men’s primary hormone is also associated with aggressiveness and risk taking. Given that, I would say (as a man) men are at least as emotionally affected by their hormones as women are! We just don’t have an obvious and painful reminder the same way women do.
If you plot human height by sex, it's roughly a normal distribution for each sex, and the women are a few inches shorter than the men.
Women are, indeed, physically different from men. They are shorter. What's often forgotten is how much the two populations overlap. In other words, a man who is the height of an average woman is unremarkable. A woman who is the height of an average man is also unremarkable. If there's any innate psych or cognitive differences -- an idea I'm not fully opposed to -- it's likely a distribution like that. But probably even more overlap. Not really something that would allow you to predict something about the person. No more than knowing someone is 5'8" would allow you to guess their sex with confidence.
Every study I've seen on the subject has said that children of same sex parents, including having two mothers, do as well or better than their peers across any metric of wellbeing or success.
The 1st comment said boys need fathers to model masculinity. And there is no advantage to say children need a father and mother if the truth is children need 2 parents. 2 parents covers more cases in fewer words.
Yeah, I'm going call bullshit on this. Almost every society is historically patriarchal because for thousands of years, human attributes tied to testosterone (strength, endurance, athleticism, aggression) were extremely valuable. The world is changing, and we need to change with it by developing a new, healthy society, not retreating into traditional structures and patterns that no longer serve us as a species.
I disagree. Things are the same today as they were thousand of years ago, and they'll be the same for the next thousands of years.
Believing this period of unusual prosperity and extended peace in human history will last for long is delusional. The only thing that matters is that we're still biologically the same.
I've seen multiple women wearing shirts in San Francisco that said something about 'mediocre white men'. I was kind of blown away as I have always been pretty hard left, but it was shocking how blatant racism/sexism if it's targeted at one particular group is almost fashionable.
It's embarrassing for Hacker News that this is the top-rated comment.
> All children need fathers
> Father[s] have an authority no mother can have
> There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good
Really?? Where's the research that supports any of this? If you're going to make charged statements like this, you better at least bring some research to the table.
Let's all take a good long hard look at ourselves. Just because we might feel frustrated, or displaced, or ignored, doesn't mean that we (and I'm talking to the men on this site who upvoted this comment) need to abandon the truth-seeking parts of us that desire the gold standard of logical, evidence-supported arguments. If you blindly support any statement in favor of "your side" just because it feels good to you emotionally, regardless of how speculative or questionable the reasoning is, then you have little right to criticize the "other side" for doing the same.
With respect, there are some errors in your thesis. Specifically, you're attacking some strawmen.
Here's the steelmanned version of the ideas you're saying are causing issues:
- Instead of defining men / women, think of each human as a person. There are no strong men, sensitive boys, intelligent women, vulnerable girls - there are only strong people, weak people, hard people, soft people. Our job as society is to compassionately accept people as they are and encourage them to be their best authentic selves, instead of arguing there is some role they must force themselves to fulfill because they were born with a set of genitalia, because this promotes individual happiness and is the kind thing to do.
- People's virtues are learned, not innate. Independent people can learn to accept help. People who are unsure of themselves can gain confidence. People are allowed to be vulnerable, but also to have the space to find roots, solidarity, strength and growth. Roles that traditionally would have gone to someone with a penis - head of household, soldier, provider - are achievable and manageable by anyone, because the virtues needed to hold those positions are learnable and not rooted in biology. The same holds in reverse - roles that would traditionally have been held by women are open to everyone.
- People should be given freedom to flourish as they best see fit. They have rights to their bodily autonomy, securing their financial futures, achieving scholastic pursuits, respect and equality for their contributions, and more. Historically, this has not been the case, and this does not just apply to women's rights here - it applies to anyone who has had these opportunities denied.
- Some human but deleterious attributes we should all grow beyond. Brutishness is an excellent example - as is shallowness, closed-mindedness, entitlement, ignorance, greed, dishonesty, and more. Some attributes are contextually awful - being stoic, for example, is a boon when you need to handle stressful situations, but it can also manifest as a lack of empathy for other's emotional lives.
Note that none of these are attacking masculinity - if anything, point two contradicts exactly that, literally anyone can learn the virtues associated with masculinity and is why trans men are supported even conceptually. Rather, point four holds - there are a subset of awful virtues that are unacceptable or contextually awful from anyone that have been attached to being a man, such as entitlement to sex, resorting to anger in lieu of healthy expressiveness, and assuming they must shoulder all burdens instead of being allowed to seek help. In other words, mainstream movements are attempting to abolish toxic masculinity, not masculinity itself.
You discuss the emotional needs of boys and girls as being different (which may or may not be valid, depending on the best available evidence), but then you argue that treating boys like girls is not the right thing to do, which is not what anyone is proposing at all. Again, the idea is that people are people, not their bodies. Girls and boys are people, capable of feeling, wanting and expressing the full range of emotions. People want to treat children in ways that allow them to be emotionally expressive and mature adults.
Further, when you talk about the patriarchy, you are again not taking point one and two into account. Nobody wants authority, strength, boldness, vitality, etc. to go away - these are all great virtues. Rather, they want the idea that these qualities are somehow gendered to go away. If you want strong leaders, find them in both genders. Additionally, historically, the patriarchy you are discussing has tended to enshrine point four virtues rather than eliminated it - it's the same system that inflicted foot binding tortures, made Indian women throw themselves into funeral pyres when their husband passed, allowed female infanticide to flourish, and so on. These are all terrible things and bundled into a parcel of ideas about what men "should" be: not just protectors, but architects of their offspring / wives / sister's fates. We have managed to overcome many of these core underpinning beliefs, but there still remain a lot that should not go unchallenged.
So, respectfully, I would ask you to at least attack the right thing. It is possible your value systems are opposed to all the points above, and that's fine. But if a value system has to reach towards attacking strawmen of other viewpoints, then it is not a good sign that that value system has been arrived at fairly.
But these qualities are gendered. Women are in general not wanting to be leaders in the same fields as men, and these fields are generally in prominent prestige (think roles like banking, lawyers, leadership, etc). In fields like medicine where there is more gender balance and even more women at the lower roles (like Nurses), we see these fields have more qualities of care imbued as well as the leadership that a physician need demonstrate. But even it was controversial for women to be doctors in the times that physicians had a lot more authority... now when the field has curtailed physician autonomy and become more about shared decision making, it is interesting to see that more women are entering the doctor role.
Still when it comes to leadership, it suits a man by his qualities to be a leader, while a woman is suited for other roles. You can just see this by the role mothers play in their families versus fathers. If you have an imbalance or the women starts taking control or leadership in the family when the men are still present, then you get a lot of wonky results.
Here's one. When people collect datapoints and observe a difference in one case not present in the other, they sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that their dataset is exhaustive - that it captures all the variables that matter.
In other words, it's easy to start with the observation "women tend to be more represented in fields that exhibit qualities of care and less represented in leadership roles" and conclude that the absence of the variable "has leadership" makes up the core difference.
But this is a conceit that you, the observer, made. Your choice of variables to look at influenced your observations of what is different and therefore important.
Here's a counterpoint that contradicts your observed conclusion. Female heads of state and politicians have been increasing in number throughout the last century, and have done remarkably well in those roles. Has the nature and autonomy of executive power changed like medicine (according to you) has? It has not. It is a sign that you have not taken all variables into account.
Here's another error in your reasoning. Why those variables specifically? How do you know those are the variables your subjects are thinking about? When women sign up to be doctors and nurses and not CEOs, are they expressly telling you the shared decision making are the important variables? Or is it because you inferred that those variables are important because you can measure them?
In the interest of correct methodology, here are some other variables that people have suggested to explain the same data: women are conditioned or socialized into early expectations of caregiving roles; women are rewarded for pursuing caregiving roles in a way men aren't; there are more barriers for women than for men, and so on.
Now are these variables the correct answer? We don't know. It is a complex topic, because humans are complex. It is possible biology and perceptions of role play a part, as does socialization and others.
But what we can do is go a little meta and ask the likelihood that a biological variable is a good explanation in the first place. Consider what a good explanation has to do: it has to provide a causal mechanism, and be able to explain how the cause led to the effect you see. The trouble with every single biological explanation that's been proposed in this area is that they don't provide this causal mechanism. What exactly is it that makes women gravitate towards submissive roles? Is it estrogen levels? Hormones? Menstrual cycles? But then people on hormone therapy, people born with extra chromosomes, people with hermaphroditic parts, and so on should all display manifestly different behaviour and choices, which they don't. To explain these differences, you need to invoke more and more factors, until you end up with epicycles all over again.
More generally, the history of biological explanations simply don't fare all that well in comparison to sociological explanations. A reasonable prior is to assume that it may play a small part, but that larger effects are driven by how society treats and works with people.
Thanks for your reply. I would like to see social factors put to a similar rigor of analysis then, since it seems to me that you are proposing socialization is (1) a major factor and (2) that the socialization of women towards non-leadership roles is incorrect from a normative standpoint.
My counterpoint is that motherhood, pregnancy, chastity, fertility, these are tied up in the biologic of a woman, and these fulfill important roles that can’t be explained by social factors. We are not at the stage where we can replace women with mass artificial wombs and then no child has a “mother” they know and grow with. Rather we know from studies that a nurturing mother is incredibly important for a child at the epigenetic level all the way to the social level.
So much of a social role is devised around motherhood and so much of male mating and paternity is focused on not wanting the woman to have children who are not his.
This is why it is said polygamy is a natural choice for people, women are more likely to accept and be ok with having one husband even if he has multiple wives, compared to the inverse. From a biological paternity standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.
I also challenge your notion that scientific studies conducted in a research study fashion are the preferred criterion for evidence. A study without context and understanding is dangerous. And there are many truths we know without putting them to the now industrialized scientific process of producing studies —- many of which suffer political and ideological pressures in terms of what they can study when it comes to the relationship between human behavior and controversial social issues.
So when you say women are pushed into caregiver roles… this is obvious if you understand the concept of motherhood. As for a rise in women leaders of countries, I will say overwhelmingly the political and business class is male, and generally women are not suited for leadership of a country. We saw a rising “feminization” of society in terms of corporate interactions and corporate decorum now being a default in many respects for how society operates; there are also ideological reasons to elevate “women leaders”; all of these are reasons I suggest you see a rise in women leaders of countries. If you look at societies where ostensible crude military control and authority are important to display, or even in war situations, we see that men are by far the ones involved in combat.
A big question to ask, why so few women in the military roles then, if they have been open to women now? If you look at women’s physical performance it becomes obvious. We aren’t at the stage of all robot armies yet; and the militaries of today are still by far men.
> I would like to see social factors put to a similar rigor of analysis then, since it seems to me that you are proposing socialization is (1) a major factor and (2) that the socialization of women towards non-leadership roles is incorrect from a normative standpoint.
This is accurate, though, to be clear re: (1), I am saying that socialization of both men and women plays a role in these disparate distributions. Men are also socialized, to a great extent.
> My counterpoint is that motherhood, pregnancy, chastity, fertility, these are tied up in the biologic of a woman, and these fulfill important roles that can’t be explained by social factors. We are not at the stage where we can replace women with mass artificial wombs and then no child has a “mother” they know and grow with. Rather we know from studies that a nurturing mother is incredibly important for a child at the epigenetic level all the way to the social level.
I think you are blurring an important distinction here: motherhood during pregnancy and parenthood of a child. Yes, you clearly need women for the first, but that doesn't have anything to do with the latter - a nurturing parental figure is needed, but not necessarily women. Surrogate children, for example, thrive despite their biological mothers being absent in their developmental lives, as do adoptive children from early ages.
If you think about it, children have a variety of developmental needs, but none that are conditioned on requiring their parents to be of a specific gender. Children raised by successful gay male couples are simply not developmentally harmed in any way by any study, metric or measure, though neither parental figure is a woman.
The narrative that you need a nurturing, attentive and competent parental figure is certainly valid - but the idea that only a woman can fulfill that role isn't, because there's practical and ample evidence otherwise.
> So much of a social role is devised around motherhood and so much of male mating and paternity is focused on not wanting the woman to have children who are not his
But what about this is biological, exactly?
The trouble with the biological explanation is it doesn't explain exceptions very well. There are women who don't want children, men who don't want children, asexual people who don't care about sex but love the idea of raising a family, hikikomori who don't want any social contact, and more. That these people exist, are rational thoughtful individuals with full lives, and don't conform with the expectations biology supposedly places on them suggests biology can't be that strong a force in the first place. (You could claim these people are defective, of course, but that's circular and motivated reasoning - if biology is infallible except when it isn't, then we should just accept it's fallible instead of demonizing the exceptions).
The other trouble is that the biological explanation is very selective. As a species, we do a great deal of unnatural things. We eat cooked food, we wear clothes, we have manners, we employ language, use toilets, and more. Yet, somehow, when it comes to the topic of finding a mate, we somehow argue that our instincts, rather than our society, has shaped us into who we are, despite having shaped almost everything else.
Take one example where socialization has overridden this supposed base instinct: beauty standards. Small feet are not correlated with reproductive success, yet at some point in history foot binding was introduced. There are tribes that engage in neck elongation and other forks of bodily mutation that people learn to find attractive. Yet it would be foolish to argue that this is somehow a biological imperative - after all, we no longer include small feet as an index of beauty. Why does sexual reproduction get the special treatment?
To bring this idea back to the original talking point, the idea that motherhood is something you need to aspire to can't be something innate because there are many women who do not want (or even like!) children at all. Promiscuity and parenting preferences aren't "male" phenomena or "female" phenomena - these are people phenomena, and the currents of what we encourage, enshrine, highlight, reference, and consider weird shape how people internalize what parts of themselves are okay and aren't okay.
> I also challenge your notion that scientific studies conducted in a research study fashion are the preferred criterion for evidence. A study without context and understanding is dangerous.
Of course. But bad methodology at arriving at said context and understanding is much more dangerous, and significantly more common than bad analytical science. One rule that is usually overlooked, for example, is that explaining the outliers is much more important than explaining the average of the distribution.
> So when you say women are pushed into caregiver roles… this is obvious if you understand the concept of motherhood.
It's not just that women are pushed into caregiver roles - it's also that men are pushed away from these roles. It's an invisible pipeline that begins with how we think about feelings and how to process them. In general, men don't receive the emotional guidance women do. We're encouraged to think about sex as a prize, status as a measure of self-worth, anger as a primary means of self-expression. Close male friendships are rare in comparison to close female relationships. Suicide is much more prevalent, as is violence. The joy of emotional labour and pure authenticity is never presented to us until we experience and mine it for ourselves - or rather we are told it is only possible to have that when we are in relationships with submissive women, home with children who are supposed to love us for all our faults we never work on, at which point we explode because we cannot handle the idea that mature adult love is so much more than about just blind devotion. All these things shape our perspective on what's right for us.
So, no, I would say it is not obvious. I would say it glosses over the lived experiences of many men and many women to arrive at that specific conclusion.
> As for a rise in women leaders of countries, I will say overwhelmingly the political and business class is male,
But that doesn't mean anything? Of course they are overwhelmingly male - you've accepted that doors were formally barred to women for a long time, and there are invisible doors that continue to operate even now.
> We saw a rising “feminization” of society in terms of corporate interactions and corporate decorum now being a default in many respects for how society operates; there are also ideological reasons to elevate “women leaders”; all of these are reasons I suggest you see a rise in women leaders of countries
I don't understand what you mean by "corporate decorum/interactions". It sounds like you are arguing that it's only out of politeness that women are now allowed to be leaders. I assure you, when Boudica led a revolt against the Romans, savaging city after city, it was not because the men she led were being polite.
Take a first principles approach. It's possible to articulate what qualities or skills are required for competence in leadership: competence, assertiveness, popularity, diplomacy, and decision-making skills. No item on this list disqualifies women or even disadvantages them. There is no shortage of tough women out there.
> If you look at societies where ostensible crude military control and authority are important to display, or even in war situations, we see that men are by far the ones involved in combat. ... A big question to ask, why so few women in the military roles then, if they have been open to women now? If you look at women’s physical performance it becomes obvious. We aren’t at the stage of all robot armies yet; and the militaries of today are still by far men.
I've written a lot of thoughts above, but I'll reiterate once more because I'm tired and can't do full rebuttals: biological explanations are weak explanations, because they don't explain the outliers. The fact there are military women in the first place is the interesting finding, not their rarity.
Boys have different needs than girls. Treating boys like girls will not do them any good. All children need fathers, but boys are perhaps especially sensitive in this regard as men help model for boys what masculinity means. We see how the absence of a father translates into higher rates of various pathologies and delinquency in single mother households. Father also have an authority no mother can have, an authority that helps boys, and children in general, achieve the kind of moral formation need for adulthood.
There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good, beginning with the family unit. It provides the structure and order that enables everyone to flourish. Can things go wrong? Sure. But that's true of every social order or arrangement. You don't abolish something because it can go wrong or goes wrong sometimes. This is like solving poverty by exterminating the poor, or cutting everyone's hands off to "solve" theft. A healthy masculinity, the via media between effeminacy and brutishness, is sacrificial and it is good not only for men, but all of society, including women. The common good depends on it.