I’m keen to track down this issue of NG. This is one of the most interesting social phenomena of the time in my opinion. My bias is that we are witnessing a new phase in human evolution.
I think first we need to ask why it was ever advantageous for there to not only be two sexes but also two genders. For most of human history, the basic premise of survival was much more challenging that it has been in recent centuries. The gauntlet of tasks required to eat, stay warm, raise children and remain protected from threats ranging from wild animals to aggressive neighbors was a much more drastically wide set of skills compared to what is needed today. Many of those skills were mutually exclusive. For example in order to have the ability to track down a dangerous animal in exhausting circumstances just so you could eat took high physical strength and a desensitization to emotions. However, in order to raise human children one needed be sensitive and compassionate. They would also have to more physically robust because while looking after the children, basically in the wilderness, they would have to wait for food to arrive. Therefor, they could not have the physical strength of the hunters because it would be to “expensive” for the body to maintain the muscle mass if is was not distinctly being used for survival. So, back then gender was needed to split up the mutually exclusive skills needed to survive.
Flash forward to the post industrial revolutionary age. The skill set needed for a human to survive now is still demanding… but much less diverse. The skills needed to be a stay at home parent or a head of state are not mutually exclusive. Pretty much, the bottom line to being a successful modern human is being a critical thinker and good communicator. The rest are auxiliary skill set and do not need to be gender specific.
I think the erosion of gender is an evolutionary step because we may actually be more successful without it. Gender is becoming more like a hurdle for individuals with specific talents to have to overcome if their talents don’t match what their gender is supposed to be good at. In addition, the most successful humans in the modern world are those with the most balanced characteristics of male and female. For example, an individual with the compassion associated with being a woman, but also the ability to make calculated analytical decisions makes an ideal person for a position of leadership. The highest quality individuals that not only make aggressive and calculated decisions but can also be diplomatic and work with those around them. Being overly female or overly male is a weakness in the modern world.
I think the point is that if you didn’t fit into an extreme nurturer or an extreme hunter, you didn’t fit into society very well and didn’t have good reproductive chances in earlier societies. In modern society, that’s less of an issue and so there is an increase in the ability for people who break gender norms to reproduce. Similar to the idea that people with poor eyesight were maladapted to the world, but today can get along just fine with glasses.
It could definitely be an adaptive process, but it’s probably about the environment no longer selecting out certain types rather than the idea that those types are somehow optimized to our technological environment. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t some aspects where having people like that are in some way useful or productive, or make new kinds of things possible of which some may be advantageous, it just means that the increase in these types does not automatically indicate that such people are optimized for the modern environment.
Also, it is important to realize that natural selection ONLY selects for things that improve fitness UP TO ONE’S PRIME REPRODUCTIVE YEARS. This is why tons of health problems start after about 35 or 40. By then, the vast majority of people have passed on your genes if they are going to, so all the contributors things like cancer, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, etc., don’t get taken out of the gene pool. There’s no way to adapt away from these kinds of things via natural selection. The closest we could come is by some kind of Gattica-like prohibitive reproduction, and that would require (aside from the moral quagmire) that we have a good genetic understanding of how these things happen.
that is exactly what I am saying. In fact, I think the process has already been happening for centuries and the male and female gender, from and physiological stand point, are more similar than they ever had been. What men and women look for in their partner when offspring in mind are not necessarily gender specific attributes. Most of all, (physical attractiveness aside) people want a partner that is successful and well adjusted. Men want an emotionally stable mother for their children that cope with the intellectually complex world with clear headed critical thinking skills. Women want fathers for their children that can be comfortable with the emotional participation it takes to be a present parent. As far as physical attributes go, men more and more have a tendency to prefer fit women and women more and more honor emotional availability and communication skills over physical attributes in men.
I think that may be true in a few cases but if you look at different societies and cultures, and even within the different classes in the U.S., manly men and feminine women have more kids. The really driven hunters and gatherers males will have more resources than those who don’t for their families. As much as people want to believe that they want leaders who are caring, it all comes down to results and the bottom line. Those women who drift from the traditional, sensitive, nurturing, and caring roles into professional ones either have fewer kids later or no kids at all. Nothing wrong with either but both of those types of men and women have traits that seem to favor having fewer kids than more. It seems, like birth rates have fallen (Europe, Japan (?) where the gender roles are less defined.
I think centuries may be a stretch, this talk about gender roles is only in the first world and I don’t think people even really talked about it as much as they do now before this decade. Not long enough to change 1 generation much less human evolution.
Ok, you definitely have some valid points. It may be true that those benefiting from more androgynous personality traits are not necessarily having more children (in fact, maybe less). However, I think for sexes to become less gender specific (at the genetic level) it would not necessarily need to be specifically selected. As long as gender specific traits fail to be consciously selected they would eventually be faded. That is what I presume has been happening for centuries since as I explained earlier, they are no longer of benefit to human survival. Whether or not gender specific traits are still sought out in partners, as you say, is still a question mark for me. I think it is possible that culture and/or fantasy suggest that men want submissive and sensitive women and women want dominant and cold men… but when it comes to who they actually pick as partners (realistic and viable partners) this is not actually specifically who they pick.
It is only recently, within a modern socially tolerant culture, that gender non-specificity has been able to be suggested and uncovered even though it may have been present with out being expressed. Whether or not people like it… I think the future could be androgynous. I mean, there will be two sexes, but the title of male or female will be reduced to a character trait. It could be a 5th letter in the Briggs Meyers score.
Meh, I’m pretty skeptical about the whole thing. I think it’s a meme in Western society, entirely cultural, aggressive brainwashing to make men feminine and women masculine to prove “we are all the same”, and to maximize profit by getting rid of bothersome natural behaviors…zero biological anchor. In other words, in a dark ages event we revert right back to 30K BC behavior, like none of this gender/sex nonsense ever occurred.
Meme: an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
Yeah, I think people are routinely far too quick to extrapolate trends on biological and societal issues.
Career oriented women (which is really the big change here, women still like rugged men and artistic men aren’t necessarily less masculine in their interactions with women) are less likely to produce as many kids or have them as early in their lives so their population growth rate actually lags. Moreover, even in the professional setting, powerful and rich men are often just as domineering and rarely require a career oriented female.
It’s also true that throughout history, societies have fluctuated in their tolerance for gender fluidity. In the 1920s for example, there was definitely more fluidity allowed in the US and Europe. The. The harsher 30s and 40s clamped down on that. Aristocratic Europe also had male courtiers who seem in many ways effeminate and some examples of women being more assertive.
We are in a time that may be unusually open to non traditional gender orientations, but it would be a mistake to think that this cannot be repealed either deliberately or because of increased economic hardships that push people back into more traditional structures.
I suspect it has less to do with genetic factors in evolution and more to do with social trends that fluctuate over time.
Occam’s razor… Bchad, BS, and PA… you guys are probably more right than I am. This leaves me with two thoughts. 1) How much of gender is meme (nurture) and how much is genetic? 2) If we were to pick one extreme or the other: distinctly and genetically different genders or the erosion of gender all together… which one would be most beneficial to human survival?
I understand the argument for gender roles even in the modern day. I already explained why I thought they were critical for pre historic humans (mutually exclusive character traits). I can see how modern society would benefit from organized nuclear family units where everyone knows there place. However… it makes me cringe.
In order for the gender roles thesis to work there has to be true symbiosis happening (to steal an idea from PA). It implies men and women have distinctly different skill sets. It implies men would naturally be attracted to the male experience and women to the female expectancy. That would have to hold true for it to be symbiotic. Both men and women’s skill sets would be exploited and both would be happier for it. This is not the reality though. I speculate men and women’s skill sets are not different enough at the genetic level to build a symbiosis based on specific roles.
Growing up as female, from the start was more attracted to the things boys did. No, it was not a society that wanted to push girls into careers or some sort of anti homemaker propaganda that lead me in that direction. It was more like… hey the boy scouts get to learn outdoor skills, rock climbing and, like, how to fix cars. Girl scouts learned how to make friends and bake. Hands down… I was more into the stuff the boy scouts did. From an early age I simply felt more akin to the male experience. Forcing me into the female gender role would have made me miserable… _but more importantly, I would probably have been bad at female’s work ** _. That is the important part. I’m not trying to make a precious snowflake argument. I’m saying, you would not force an introvert to do an extrovert’s job. It simply is not efficient and not for the greater good.
I would argue that letting gender “float” could actually end up strengthening family units as those best suited for certain roles are allowed to find them. So yea, it goes with out saying that I am really in support of this whole challenging of gender movement.
** before anyone wants to chime in and point that that I am a dancer… which is “women’s work” I will say this. The club is just the place I go to harvest the money I need to pursue the things I actually care about in life. Those have mostly been masculine pursuits … competitive sports, college education based in science and mathematics, and now intraday trading. If you want to split hairs, stripping is a very masculine expression of femininity
Sounds like you have a superficial understanding of what a “male experience” is. Men are into outdoor sports and working on cars while women are into baking? That’s what your parameters are?
Don’t blame me… isn’t this what the gender meme does? It makes assumptions about what men or women should be good at or enjoy based on their presumed predetermined skill set.
There are huge hormonal differences between men and women as well as documented differences in the brain structure. These things are not trained. Having had kids and watching my brothers and friends raise children has been eye opening. Most people without children operate under a lot of idealistic naivety. It’s why most parents have a relatively “tame” pragmatic view and most of your ultra progressive folks are under 30 or single.
Not saying exceptions aren’t frequently out there but for the vast majority (and without exception within my directly observable sample size of about 20 young families) parents say the difference between boys and girls from birth is night and day. I’ve seen it myself, even within the same family. The boys just go hard from the start, driving their parents nuts and breaking every toy they abuse, while girls will sit there and quietly play with toys in the correct way. We went out of the way to say no dolls for my daughter, but whenever she sees one at a friends house it’s all she wants to play with, same with kitchen sets. Never seen a little boy really do that. The general consensus is boys are much harder to raise until the teen years then there’s a bit of reversion. I come from a family of all boys and my older brother who has two daughters and a youngest son is constantly a frustrated with how much of a wrecking ball that kid is. I just don’t think reality fits the theory of a textbook world.
Similarly, I feel like theres a constant trend in contemporary theory by progressives to patronize women in the name of equality. Milo Y points to a stat in the UK and the US where surveys show less than 15% of women consider themselves feminists but 80% believe in gender equality. The feminist response is that women (in f*cking 2016) must not know that feminists stand for gender equality, which to me is as ironically condescending as it gets for feminists to pin it on women’s stupidity. Milo makes the point that instead, women in these surveys are fully aware of what they’re saying and they know that 1) equality does not need to mean sameness (surrendering your gender identity) and that 2) while feminists preach equality they often stand for something wholly different and women aren’t fooled. In a similar way, many people don’t object to the teachings of Christ as shown in the Bible, but they wholly dislike Christians. Because they aren’t stupid and can read through a lie. I just think conflating equality with assimilation or sameness is inherently blind and in many cases wrong. Like granting racial equality as long as they surrender cultural identity.
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of articles calling out a flawed social education system because many STEM majors have >80% male graduation. Meanwhile nobody raises concerns that more than 90% of nurses, child education and social majors are women. It’s the height of male nerd STEM hubris to think that writing code for tinder or shopping apps with a Monty Python poster on your wall is somehow represents a superior career choice to childhood education or nursing. I just think the modern trend has forgotten pragmatism and gotten a bit carried away with itself.
The more I read these type threads the happier I am with my willful ignorance of the state of social psychology ‘knowledge’. Studies, theories, drivel seem to unnecessarily complicate human interaction. Instead of helping people interact with nothing more than a general concern for mutual benefit/happiness, it seems to create prejudice and separates us from one another.
Don’t know, seems like one big intellectual circle jerk.
Thanks, BS, for that in depth point of view. Good observations. I would agree that yes, currently there are definitely genetically based differences in gender. In addition there are anomalies of varying degree from the girl on the NG cover to someone like myself that has embraced her sex while exhibiting more masculine character traits. (yea, i was a absolute terror as a baby ) My point is what will gender look like in a couple thousand years. Where is it heading? Will the anomalies become the norm?
Meanwhile on the feminist front, I concur, I do not consider myself one. I am of the opinion, as i said earlier, that gender should float. Indeed the sexes are fundamentally different for the time being (even though, I think, by lessening degrees) then there will be more females in nursing and more males in banking. Im cool with that. That is what I mean by float. Let what comes natural happen. That could mean a little boy becoming a girl or a woman being a proud homemaker.
) My point is what will gender look like in a couple thousand years. Where is it heading? Will the anomalies become the norm?