International women's day (1 Viewer)

[MDR]

Testosterone and the urge to reproduce has such a big influence on men's
behaviour. Men are unconciously obssesed with being right, not showing weakness,showing off, getting power etc, these things were good for reproducing back in the stone age but are detrimental in society today. Not the root of all evil, but responsible for many fuck ups I'm willing to bet.

To be fair, we're a little more complicated than that.

 

[MDR]

I think the problem with this type of discussion is that you end up thinking of problems in a one-dimensional way, as if social class, race, religion and other factors were not interefering. In my experience with reading surveys/research on human behaviour in society and attitudes, the the most prevalent influence is standard of education rather than gender.

 

[Super Dexta]

also i think people can confuse science explaining something with science excusing something.. just to pick an example i'm familiar with: in his work on evolutionary psychology, steven pinker has always said "just because evolution/genetics can predispose X group to do Y thing, doesn't mean it's not still morally wrong as fuck when they do it." i think/hope that any scientist worth their salt wouldn't confuse an explanation of a behaviour with a vindication of it... but a lot of non-scientists seem to.

also i think some people hear things second-hand and get up on their moral high horse without ever actually examining what the scientist is actually saying.

 

[1000smurfs]

There was a women only political party in Sweden, sometime last year, but it quickly descending into a squabbling mess and split up.

here's the tale:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,,1636617,00.html

I think any single issue party is going to run into problems.
Sweden by perception is a country doing well, with a very nice social welfare policy which provides a saftey net for all it citizens.
Nearly half it's MP's are women.
At the very least this proves that more women in power does not imply
disaster

 

[MDR]

I think any single issue party is going to run into problems.
Sweden by perception is a country doing well, with a very nice social welfare policy which provides a saftey net for all it citizens.
Nearly half it's MP's are women.
At the very least this proves that more women in power does not imply
disaster

I think the only conclusion you can draw from that is that a country full of, and run by, swedish people will generally do well.

 

[1000smurfs]

the problem with science a lot of the time is that it becomes an ideology....

i agree with a lot of what you say , however it's a problem with people
not of science. I also just want to add a few points...

science these days is hailed as absolute truth and as such is very powerful evidence.

Whoever hails science as absolute truth is badly mistaken, All scientific
theories are provisional. They may actually be the truth but we can never know for certain. Some theories are better than others in that
they are more easily verifiable and falsifiable , and provide clearer predictions and retrodictions.

Evolutionary theories of behaviour feature lower on the realtive scale of good theories, mainly because of the complexity of this behaviour and the many external variables to take into account. However they can still offer good explantions and may even be true.
But as super dexta says above , they may explain behaviour but they don't excuse it.

a man's function of passing on his genes that is now taboo but still functions as an innate biological function of nature. so does this explain away rape as something that is gonna go on happening and we have little influence over it? - "he couldn't help himself", etc.

It may explain why rape happens, Suppose for argument it's the only explanation. (ie negelect environmental factors)
Being aware of it we as men should take steps to ensure
that our evolutionary urge is satisfied in way that doesn't harm others (if ya know what i mean , nudge nudge, wink wink).
it could be used to explain why we see a lot of warped behaviour among catholic priests. Do we excuse catholic preists ? should we?

You said you see a lot of this kind of thinking in legal cases about rape,
is this refelcted in the jury's verdict or the judge's sentence or both?
At the very least there should be a balanced jury of men and women
and there also should be a male and female judge. It is possible
that men on the jury/judge see rape as less of a crime because
it's a behaviour they are more predisposed to carry out than women, this
is more evidence to me that more women need to be involved.
So we've come full cirle , evolutionary arguments favour more women to be involved in creating a fairer society for humans.

 

[1000smurfs]

To be fair, we're a little more complicated than that.

we surely are. But would you agree that many of our bad traits are evolutionary in nature?
Men are more predisposed to violence than women?
violence is bad

 

[classic seanc]

From what I understand it often has a lot to do with the defendant's lawyer badgering the victim. The victim is vulnerable, she's being forced to talk about herself being raped. And I'd imagine courts can be intimidating anyway. The lawyer know's all the legal ins and outs and can twist the victim's story so that the defendant looks less bad. The lawyer can be male or female, but he/she is acting as a lawyer, not as a member of a gender.


Jury-wise, I doubt there would be many men who would see rape as less of a crime. We all have mothers, sisters, daughters, wives/girlfriends.

 

[MDR]

we surely are. But would you agree that many of our bad traits are evolutionary in nature?
Men are more predisposed to violence than women?
violence is bad

No.

No.

Yes

 

[1000smurfs]

I think the only conclusion you can draw from that is that a country full of, and run by, swedish people will generally do well.

when you say 'run by swedish people' you imply an even mix of swedish men and women
do you not? in fact in reality that is the case sweden is run by an even mix of swedish men and women

so you say even mix of swedish men and women => doing well

If your average swedish person is like your average person,

(maybe that's not the case and that's a fair point, and is maybe your core argument ? My counter argument would then be , maybe what makes them different is that swedes involve women more in society !)

then even mix of men and women => doing well

that's a stronger conclusion than i made but it's certainly what I
want to suggest.

 

[1000smurfs]

No.

No.

Yes

fair enough!

I want to hear an argument though why men aren't more predisposed to violence than women. I see tons of evidence to the contrary.

 

[classic seanc]

I know lots of violent women.

 

[snakybus]

I bet you do.

 

[Super Dexta]

I know lots of violent women.

first the man-haters, now the violent ones.. you really need to get some new friends.

 

[classic seanc]

first the man-haters, now the violent ones.. you really need to get some new friends.

They're not friends.

 

[classic seanc]

I bet you do.

 

[1000smurfs]

http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/menshealth/feature/men_and_violence.htm

 

[nofunchee]

Whoever hails science as absolute truth is badly mistaken, All scientific theories are provisional. They may actually be the truth but we can never know for certain. Some theories are better than others in that they are more easily verifiable and falsifiable , and provide clearer predictions and retrodictions.

i agree. what i was trying to say was that science is commonly seen as the source of all truth. the political agendas and ideological underpinnings of the researchers is often underplayed, which is problematic due to the possible influence over their work. i was talking to a friend of mine a while ago, a great believer in science and the determining factors of nature, and he said that research could generally be trusted as if a researcher is not objective and allows their own opinions and preconceptions to enter the lab then they will be called up on it and fuck up their careers. i don't think things are as simple as that and scientists can be influenced both unconciously and conciously. a very worring recent trend for example is the rise in private funding for research in public universities. i reckon where there is money, there is influence. there's something to be said for not getting research jobs again due to not comming up with the correct findings. negative findings produced through both private and govt funding are often buried too.

the answer, i reckon, lies in stuff like interdisciplinery approaches, taking into account the researchers position in the study and what influence they might have, and transparent publicly funded projects.

also when findings are related to general society it is often distorted and simplified and it is here where the problem lies. dominant beliefs and understandings don't just exist, they are constructed by various factors and power relations.

It may explain why rape happens, Suppose for argument it's the only explanation. (ie negelect environmental factors)
Being aware of it we as men should take steps to ensure
that our evolutionary urge is satisfied in way that doesn't harm others (if ya know what i mean , nudge nudge, wink wink).
it could be used to explain why we see a lot of warped behaviour among catholic priests. Do we excuse catholic preists ? should we?

i would reject that view myself as overly simplistic and highly problematic in that it ignores social and cultural constructions of masculinity and how the masculine archetype is promoted. we are individuals, we don't have to fit into every aspect of our tidy little gender roles but it can be very compelling to do so if they are constantly promoted as normal. and it is this percieved normality, in my opinion, that factors in biological determinates to partially explain what is in fact a complex social phenomenon.

You said you see a lot of this kind of thinking in legal cases about rape, is this refelcted in the jury's verdict or the judge's sentence or both?

i haven't really read too much on jurys and the way the judgements are offically recorded you only get a brief run-down of the evidence, weither it was allowed or disallowed, and what the actual judgement - i.e. what precedents the judge is referencing, what s/he regards as mitigating circumstances, and a good dose of what they think (shock horror the legal system isn't impartial ). in one case that i can remember off the top of my head the judge accepted evidence from a doctor that the girl who was raped did not suffer any mental repercussions of the assault after one year of the incident. now how the the fuck something like that is quantifyable shows some very dodgy logical reasoning - bad science indeed.

another case i can remember was where multiple charges were brought against a pedeophile by a number of different young girls. in one girls' account the man in question used to take her for drives and got her to sit on his lap, which was obviously getting him going and led to him assaulting her. the judge preciding over the case said to her in the wittness box something along the lines of "did you not think that that was a stupid thing to do". i think she was something like 5 or 6 years old. so he is basicly blaming a child for unessicarily sexually exciting a pedeophile. apparently the lawyer for the accused said in his closing statement "perhaps his only crime was that he loves children too much". crazy shit.

 

[1000smurfs]

i was talking to a friend of mine a while ago, a great believer in science and the determining factors of nature, and he said that research could generally be trusted as if a researcher is not objective and allows their own opinions and preconceptions to enter the lab then they will be called up on it and fuck up their careers. i don't think things are as simple as that and scientists can be influenced both unconciously and conciously. a very worring recent trend for example is the rise in private funding for research in public universities. i reckon where there is money, there is influence.

I have to say i agree with your friend, the recent example of the korean cloning doctor would suppourt the view , that eventually, dodgy research is outed, whatever it's original
motivation. You can never trust isolated research, you need many independent transparent bodies providing indpendent verification
of results as you suggest.

there's something to be said for not getting research jobs again due to not comming up with the correct findings. negative findings produced through both private and govt funding are often buried too.

best example of this is in the good ol USA where the current regime only ever mentions controversial findings about the environment, ignoring the vast amount of uncontroversial confirming evidence that we are fucking things up. You can be paid well by bush i'm sure for doing research and 'finding' that C02 emissions aren't heating us up.

also when findings are related to general society it is often distorted and simplified and it is here where the problem lies. dominant beliefs and understandings don't just exist, they are constructed by various factors and power relations.
i would reject that [evolutionary explanation for male behaviour] view myself as overly simplistic and highly problematic in that it ignores social and cultural constructions of masculinity and how the masculine archetype is promoted. we are individuals, we don't have to fit into every aspect of our tidy little gender roles but it can be very compelling to do so if they are constantly promoted as normal. and it is this percieved normality, in my opinion, that factors in biological determinates to partially explain what is in fact a complex social phenomenon.

While i agree with you that our behaviour is determined by a whole host of factors besides our immediate biological concerns, i can't
help speculating that many of these other factors are themselves linked to evolutionary hangovers.
For example "social and cultural constructions of masculinity". don't a lot of these arise out of hangovers from our previous natural state
'men hunt, women raise babies' . A feeback system is then created: My hormones are telling me to be violent in this situation
and society is telling me that to be a man, i can't be afraid of violence so... . But as you say we have free will to choose
and thus we can't excuse violent behaviour if we want a stable and humane society.

you could fairly accuse me of oversimplifying again but I think we need to make some simplification, approximations and generalisations
to make progress, which we can then go on to refine. otherwise we just have to throw our hands up and say it's all too
complicated. On the off chance that there may be an understandable and true explanation for something, it's worth trying to make
attempts to get at it.

the two legal cases you mentioned are shocking to me, maybe not surprising though. how recent are they?
They reinforce my conviction that more women should be in these kinds of roles setting precedents.

hmm i'm assuming both judges were men !! ? What is the gender ratio in the irish legal industry?

 

[1000smurfs]

I know lots of violent women.

i have a vague recollection of reading something about how
bullying in schools these days is getting much more common
among girls.

It's terrible a thing. i wonder what the reasons for it are.
anyone?