RangerDave wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
Our social conditioning is what it is because of our biology.
That's a massive overstatement, DE. Of course biology plays a role, but exactly how much in any given aspect of life is nothing more than a question mark at this point.
Our social conditioning is driven by our social evolution from the past, dating to before our invention of basic language, hunter gatherer societies, etc. Our biology is still tailored to that and our social evolution has proceeded along a path driven by that origin. It's not an overstatement at all. The only question is how much is driven by our biology directly, right now, as opposed to past habits driven by previous biological imperatives. Either way, it all starts with how we're put together. Feminists are notoriously unable to explain where all this "patriarchy" came from in the first place, except to appeal to it in the past, without explaining how it came about to begin with - it's always just treated as if it just magically happened because penis.
Diamondeye wrote:
Yes, that is the flip-side of the coin. Women face pressure to prioritize family over career, and men face pressure to prioritize their career. Sexist social expectations hurt both men and women.
Except that isn't sexist. Women have more options; men are mostly restricted to one option but are able to better optimize for it. That isn't sexist or unequal at all - it's just different, and it's not "hurting" anyone.
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Well, first of all, just because there was an allegedly legitimate reason for gendered roles doesn't change the fact the male role involved controlling the power and resources (i.e., patriarchy).
Except that men didn't "control the power and resources". Most men had no control over any power and had very few resources which they labored very long hours to obtain - just enough to get by. They were further obligated to use that resource for the maintenance of women and children. For those men that DID have overt power and more resource, they were still obligated to provide for women and children in a manner befitting their station, and women had considerable covert control - through normal marital give-and-take, social pressure, and most importantly lack of legal responsibility. Men were responsible for the crimes and debts of their wives.
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And secondly, the manual labor excuse was never as true as you suggest. Women always performed manual labor; it was the white collar roles (medicine, law, business, government, etc.) that were closed to them the longest based on bullshit prejudice about women being too stupid, flighty, emotional, or whatever. And thirdly, whatever validity the manual labor thing once had is largely irrelevant now outside of a handful of occupations where raw strength is a significant contributor to productivity.
Except that it isn't irrelevant now. women still heavily avoid the hardest manual labor jobs, and even in the past when they did them they tended to do jobs that involved sitting, doing them from home, and skills around the house. Even today, women are in no rush to take jobs as coal miners, merchant marine crew, garbage collectors, and such despite whining about numbers of women CEOs. When they do take "manual labor"jobs, they inevitably want those with status and glamor (at least in the eyes of some people) such as police, firefighting, and the military. When they DO take these jobs, they inevitably demand that both standards and environment be tailored to their sensibilities and physical capabilities, all the while complaining that they supposedly work twice as hard as males do to get there.