If you need urgent support, call 999 or go to your nearest A&E. To contact our Crisis Messenger (open 24/7) text THEMIX to 85258.
Options
Essential support for under 25s
Essential support for under 25s
Take a look around and enjoy reading the discussions. If you'd like to join in, it's really easy to register and then you'll be able to post. If you'd like to learn what this place is all about, head here.
Comments
You can listen again here
Perhaps because of the fact that men are expected to be violent, aggressive individuals within society. Not that they are genetically predisposed to it. Or that because they have testosterone that they are more violent. If that's the case, how do you explain females who are incarcerated? They want to be men? They are more manly because they are in prison. That if they use violence then they are more manly?
Just because loads of men watch MMA or boxing doesn't mean that there is a correlation between biological sex and violence. How about all the women who attended the gladiatorial fights in Rome, or female boxers, or female rugby players, or female soldiers? Again, do they want to be men? So, I guess that all the men out there who look after themselves, style their hair, use moisturiser after they shave, who wear aftershave want to be women, cause it's only women who look after themselves in this way, right?
And maybe the reason that we don't have loads of female football hooligans is because the social use of violence is different for women than it is for men, and that's not predicated on the biological aspects. Violence is a socially meaningful act. Read Robert Sampson's chapter's "Placing American Urban Violence in Context" in Violence and Childhood in the Inner City, J. McCord (ed). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: pp 1 - 30 for some details on how violence is used differently by men and women.
More useful is Anderson's discussion of the code of the street and the subculture of violence in the same book, "Violence and the Inner-City Street Code".
http://web.syr.edu/~jaclar01/gender.html
really interesting
But in relation to gender difference, these aren't instincts which can be overcome, given their obvious primacy in evolutionary terms.
If people want to live contrary to their instincts, I'd agree they should have the right to do so - though quite why someone would want to go against their inner nature, I don't know.
But i've already said living by unfettered instinct can't be possible if we are to live in a civilised society; what we can do is keep true to our instincts within the boundaries of necessary legality. Which we largely have done for a long, long time.
And in relation to the topic in hand, that means recognition of inherent difference between the sexes and allowing that difference to manifest itself naturally.
However, two points I've read when skimming that I'd just like to bring up. Kermit mentioned there is still a large pay gap between men and women. Are you sure? Is it the case that for the same job a man will be paid more? Becuase in all my experience unless you negotiate your contract (and then, it's up to your persuasion skills isnt it?) any job I've had pays per position not sex. Although there is ageism, in that younger people get paid less. Is it a case that less women are in more high paid jobs? If this is so, why is this the case? As I think skive or spliffie pointed out, is it because men are more objective driven by societies norms and also by their own biology? Even if that was the case, even now, I read recently in the news that men are more likely now than ever before to not take a promotion in order to spend more time with their family. Change takes time, and I don't think it's an issue about prejudice and wanting to opress the other sex, I think it's an issue of expectations and norms.
Second point to Namaste. You said that men before our generation who worked full time and had no choice but to provide for their family was a failing of capitalism not sex inequality. But what if there was a family where the man had been the main carer, and the woman had been the breadwinner. In a previous era (and even now, to some extent) it would be seen as odd, that the male was perhaps lazy or not pulling his weight by not providing for his family, which was always seen as very much a male role, just as childcare was seen as a female role. I think gender inequality has effected both sexes, though to different degrees of course.
Though as has been said, there are differences and there will always be differences. I often think when someone talks of the oppression women have suffered for millenia, if you spoke to 10, completely random women throughout that period, would they be discontent with their predetermined 'woman role'? Would a man be discontent with his predetermined 'man role'? When you look at Islamic nations where the record of gender equality is not fantastic, there are many women who say - they are content to be a good wife, to be a good mother. Not that I am advocating we take away the freedom that we enjoy in the UK now that a man can raise his children and a wife can provide for her family or even just have a highly succesful career and lots of cash (a point - why do many of the images of what it is to be a very successful 'modern feminist woman' generally have a single woman without a family - I would argue most people would say family is the most important thing), but I am saying that when we look back retrospectively, we didn't live then and we shouldn't judge the way society was run then upon our own standards from today and then cast judgement, and especially not on all of a group up to present day (like blaming white people for the oppression of black people today, because as a white person I'm not opressing any black people).