So, in your world, men reserve the right to define what femininity is, whereas in a gender-equal world, women get to define it. I don’t see why we should prefer your world.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m speaking of femininity as ordained by Gnon, not any human attempts to define or constrain it—in that sense, indoctrinating women into behaving like men and aspiring to masculine achievements does not amount to “gender equality”, but the systematic eradication of femininity.
There are several worrying, unquestioned assumptions in your argument: namely, that authority and competitiveness are exclusively male traits, that competition among men is inevitable in the presence of women, and that women who try to obtain and use power are “pretending to be men”. Actually, by restricting the admissible examples of femininity to those that best suit your ideal society, you are introducing your preferred definition of femininity. Shifting the blame to “Gnon” doesn’t succeed in hiding the fact that you’re the one defining “Gnon”.
But nature (because I refuse to anthropomorphize impersonal forces by giving them silly names) does not ordain a specific way of femininity or masculinity. The seahorse fish are gestated by the male, which during that period is full of prolactin. The jacana birds have a peculiar calendar of reproductive availability that resulted in the bigger and stronger females being selected by fighting over available males. The definitions of male and female aren’t cast in stone.
I’ll grant that those examples have little bearing on human societies, but even appealing to our primate past is no use: are you going with the patriarchal chimpanzee, or the matriarchal bonobo? Better, we could just abandon the naturalistic fallacy and let individual humans decide what patterns of behavior actually make them happiest.
There are several worrying, unquestioned assumptions in your argument: namely, that authority and competitiveness are exclusively male traits
Not exclusively, primarily. There’s certainly been little selection pressure for women to compete or lead as opposed to men, be it in the context of mating rights or broader societal interactions. Men are better adapted for such purposes, therefore, by taking them on, women are, by definition, acting like men.
That’s all I’m talking about—recognising the fact that men and women have certain complementary, non-overlapping aptitudes, are not literally the same, and, are better off apart in certain situations in which modern western societies force them together.
The environment we live in constitutes a new, different set of selection pressures. Features which were adaptive in the past (like dominance or aggressiveness) no longer ensure differential mating success. Willingness to negotiate roles and seek consensus is more incentivized now. Instead of promoting nostalgia for an ancestral environment that is not coming back, you could do what makes the most biological sense—adapt.
We disagree over how much it’s possible to adapt in a single generation then. Anyway, ideologies that force absurd levels of pretence at gender equality at us aren’t about adapting away these differences, they’re about pretending they don’t exist—and if you really wanted to reverse them, there are far more efficient processes to do so than ignoring them, given modern technology—but most would require acknowledging the inherent inequality in the first place. The only conclusion I can draw from the fact that nobody is pushing for this is that the gender equality movements are content to pretend to have accomplished anything by forcing people to pretend that the concept of gender equality corresponds to reality in any way.
Adaptation is actually quite efficient within one single generation: those who don’t mate, don’t mate. If enough women decide that they don’t want cavemen but feminist men, differential reproduction will sort out the results, and the next generation will feel more comfortable with a state of equality.
Edited to add: that is, assuming that opinions are genetic. They’re not. Memetics is even faster than genetics at changing attitudes toward gender roles. The son of a caveman can learn to become a feminist, and vice versa. Change can happen in less than one generation.
There will also be competition among the feminist men. Seems to me that the loudest of them are often… uhm, former cavemen who have “seen the light” and became extremists for the other side. Or guys like this one. If there is a genetic component, these guys would bring it to the future.
More generally, Goodhart’s law also applies to men signalling feminism.
So, in your world, men reserve the right to define what femininity is, whereas in a gender-equal world, women get to define it. I don’t see why we should prefer your world.
As bad as that comment was, this isn’t one of its problems.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m speaking of femininity as ordained by Gnon, not any human attempts to define or constrain it—in that sense, indoctrinating women into behaving like men and aspiring to masculine achievements does not amount to “gender equality”, but the systematic eradication of femininity.
There are several worrying, unquestioned assumptions in your argument: namely, that authority and competitiveness are exclusively male traits, that competition among men is inevitable in the presence of women, and that women who try to obtain and use power are “pretending to be men”. Actually, by restricting the admissible examples of femininity to those that best suit your ideal society, you are introducing your preferred definition of femininity. Shifting the blame to “Gnon” doesn’t succeed in hiding the fact that you’re the one defining “Gnon”.
But nature (because I refuse to anthropomorphize impersonal forces by giving them silly names) does not ordain a specific way of femininity or masculinity. The seahorse fish are gestated by the male, which during that period is full of prolactin. The jacana birds have a peculiar calendar of reproductive availability that resulted in the bigger and stronger females being selected by fighting over available males. The definitions of male and female aren’t cast in stone.
I’ll grant that those examples have little bearing on human societies, but even appealing to our primate past is no use: are you going with the patriarchal chimpanzee, or the matriarchal bonobo? Better, we could just abandon the naturalistic fallacy and let individual humans decide what patterns of behavior actually make them happiest.
Not exclusively, primarily. There’s certainly been little selection pressure for women to compete or lead as opposed to men, be it in the context of mating rights or broader societal interactions. Men are better adapted for such purposes, therefore, by taking them on, women are, by definition, acting like men.
That’s all I’m talking about—recognising the fact that men and women have certain complementary, non-overlapping aptitudes, are not literally the same, and, are better off apart in certain situations in which modern western societies force them together.
The environment we live in constitutes a new, different set of selection pressures. Features which were adaptive in the past (like dominance or aggressiveness) no longer ensure differential mating success. Willingness to negotiate roles and seek consensus is more incentivized now. Instead of promoting nostalgia for an ancestral environment that is not coming back, you could do what makes the most biological sense—adapt.
We disagree over how much it’s possible to adapt in a single generation then. Anyway, ideologies that force absurd levels of pretence at gender equality at us aren’t about adapting away these differences, they’re about pretending they don’t exist—and if you really wanted to reverse them, there are far more efficient processes to do so than ignoring them, given modern technology—but most would require acknowledging the inherent inequality in the first place. The only conclusion I can draw from the fact that nobody is pushing for this is that the gender equality movements are content to pretend to have accomplished anything by forcing people to pretend that the concept of gender equality corresponds to reality in any way.
Adaptation is actually quite efficient within one single generation: those who don’t mate, don’t mate. If enough women decide that they don’t want cavemen but feminist men, differential reproduction will sort out the results, and the next generation will feel more comfortable with a state of equality.
Edited to add: that is, assuming that opinions are genetic. They’re not. Memetics is even faster than genetics at changing attitudes toward gender roles. The son of a caveman can learn to become a feminist, and vice versa. Change can happen in less than one generation.
There will also be competition among the feminist men. Seems to me that the loudest of them are often… uhm, former cavemen who have “seen the light” and became extremists for the other side. Or guys like this one. If there is a genetic component, these guys would bring it to the future.
More generally, Goodhart’s law also applies to men signalling feminism.