men vs woman

[jfoldbar]

im not sure what topic this goes in so i put it here.

so a few work mate were discussing something. id like some input.

 

the world we live in, throughout all of history, has been dominated by men. even from hunter gatherer days until now, in every society, men were calling the shots and woman were put in the "seen but not heard" category. 

so what if we lived in a world where that was reversed. if the men were "seen but not heard" and woman where in charge and calling all the shots, what would be different.

so our discussion was that ,

i think in the woman world, there is much less chance of things like going to the moon, inventing airplanes, inventing cars, big infrastructure, coming about because a womans brain works much different to mans and for woman to think this stuff  up , and implement it,  is much harder. a mans brain is more objective, a womans is more subjective. and subjective doesnt get you to the moon, objective does.

workmate thinks that whether we are subjective or objective is irrelevant to the big things that humanity has achieved. the objective mind can get you to the moon just as quick, but it would somehow be achieved a different way. a way that in this man dominated world we cant even imagine.

who is right?

[iNow]

Neither of you. Males and females not as different as you both seem to think

[swansont]

11 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

 throughout all of history, has been dominated by men. even from hunter gatherer days until now, in every society, men were calling the shots and woman were put in the "seen but not heard" category. 

 ...

i think in the woman world, there is much less chance of things like going to the moon, inventing airplanes, inventing cars, big infrastructure, coming about because a womans brain works much different to mans and for woman to think this stuff  up , and implement it,  is much harder. a mans brain is more objective, a womans is more subjective. and subjective doesnt get you to the moon, objective does.

(emphasis added)

There are a number of claims here that you have not shown are true, and basing a discussion on false premises leads to a flawed conclusion.

[zapatos]

11 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

i think in the woman world, there is much less chance of things like going to the moon, inventing airplanes, inventing cars, big infrastructure, coming about because a womans brain works much different to mans and for woman to think this stuff  up , and implement it,  is much harder.

LOL! I'm guessing none of your work mates were women or you'd be unable to type right now.

If you are going to claim men are so much more capable then women you'd best be prepared to back it up with evidence. Can you?

[Phi for All]

11 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

a mans brain is more objective, a womans is more subjective

Yet hunting an animal seems to require a more subjective focus, where gathering requires a more objective one, since gatherers have more "prey" (by a couple of orders of magnitude). 

I don't have any evidence either, but I've always thought the exact opposite. I think men tend towards more tactical, subjective thinking, where women tend to be more strategic and "big picture" oriented. I may have to let this go though, since I've never seen much beyond personal observation to support the idea. 

[Prometheus]

While female and male brains have differences, it would be difficult to pick apart what is truly biological variance between populations and what is cultural conditioning. 

I vaguely recall a study that found female hippocampi were on average smaller than in males, which was said to explain why men were better navigators. But we also know parts of the brain less used will atrophy. So is it a case of their hippocampi being intrinsically smaller, or a result of gender roles directing its use (or lack of)?

When women have risen to prominent historical roles they have pretty much done as men have done - Wu Zetian, Boudicca, Hypatia (but maybe that's because they emerged in patriarchies). There is also evidence of early societies that while not matriarchal, were more balanced. The Spartans are a probably the best documented example, and weren't significantly different from surrounding societies.

I've also heard it said men more readily pursue risky pursuits, perhaps leading to voyages such as Colombus'. Assuming this is a neurobiological difference, it wouldn't necessarily preclude risky behaviour from men. Remember Colombus was sponsored by both Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, with the former willing to sell some jewels to fund it (thoough she didn't need to).

War would still be conducted by men on the field; aside from differences in physiology making men on average more suited to those demands, sending women to fight would be a flawed strategy. The Romans lost ~300,000 men to Hannibal in the Punic wars from a total population of ~3.5 million - thats a huge proportion. If they had all been women of child-bearing potential Rome would almost certainly have fallen.

Overall i don't think there'd be gross changes to the patterns of war, economic cycles, spiritual practices, technological development etc -  just a lot of changed details which are impossible to guess at.

They say men are from Mars and women from Venus, but we all know they're both from Earth.

[CharonY]

55 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

While female and male brains have differences, it would be difficult to pick apart what is truly biological variance between populations and what is cultural conditioning. 

And on top of that, the differences are not what are typically considered to be "typical" dimorphisms (i.e. there is often substantial overlap between sexes). Also, it is difficult to correlate any neural morphologies with altered functions, which is why there are actually only rather few tests where we see reliable differences. And even there, the effect size is often not terribly huge. As mentioned, training could presumably close these gaps which makes it difficult to assess what features are truly sex differences in the biological sense. That is not to say that there are none, but given the plasticity of brains it would be strange to assume that especially abstract abilities would result in such pronounced differences as expressed in OP.

To wit, I would take any bet that if I provided a female  group with access to information, education and training while growing up while depriving the same to a male group, it won't be the latter who will figure out how to design a car or rockets first (note: don't do that, it won't pass ethics review). The point about subjective vs objective does not make any sense whatsoever, btw.

[jfoldbar]

On 1/23/2020 at 4:40 AM, iNow said:

Neither of you. Males and females not as different as you both seem to think

not sure where you are from. but in my neck of the woods men and woman are very different.

 

On 1/23/2020 at 4:47 AM, swansont said:

(emphasis added)

There are a number of claims here that you have not shown are true, and basing a discussion on false premises leads to a flawed conclusion.

can u point out a society where men are not the dominant. i can not think of any.

On 1/23/2020 at 5:22 AM, zapatos said:

LOL! I'm guessing none of your work mates were women or you'd be unable to type right now.

If you are going to claim men are so much more capable then women you'd best be prepared to back it up with evidence. Can you?

please show me where i claimed men are so much more capable than woman?

what difference does the gender of my workmates have to do whether i can type this?  

On 1/23/2020 at 5:43 AM, Phi for All said:

Yet hunting an animal seems to require a more subjective focus, where gathering requires a more objective one, since gatherers have more "prey" (by a couple of orders of magnitude). 

I don't have any evidence either, but I've always thought the exact opposite. I think men tend towards more tactical, subjective thinking, where women tend to be more strategic and "big picture" oriented. I may have to let this go though, since I've never seen much beyond personal observation to support the idea. 

hhhmmm. interesting that you have observed the opposite. i guess that just goes to show how different our perceptions are

 

 

 

prometheus.

i like your detailed response.

so if woman have smaller hippocampi that may affect their ability to navigate. this may be a factor in all the main explorers throughout history being me. just an idea?

this makes me wonder, are there other physical difference within our brains that may affect the way we think. there are obviously other differences though. hormonal etc that can play a role in our thinking.

i agree with your point about sending men into battle. from a physique and breeding point of view. but how about a marcho thing? men would probably think because they are the protectors of their woman it is their duty to go and fight for their woman. society says its the right think to do.  a bit like letting woman(and children) off a sinking boat first. (dont get me wrong here im not suggesting we dont do this)

On 1/23/2020 at 7:28 AM, CharonY said:

 training could presumably close these gaps which makes it difficult to assess what features are truly sex differences in the biological sense. That is not to say that there are none, but given the plasticity of brains it would be strange to assume that especially abstract abilities would result in such pronounced differences as expressed in OP.

To wit, I would take any bet that if I provided a female  group with access to information, education and training while growing up while depriving the same to a male group, it won't be the latter who will figure out how to design a car or rockets first (note: don't do that, it won't pass ethics review). The point about subjective vs objective does not make any sense whatsoever, btw.

so with the workmates discussion last week one example came up.

so lets say if a man is trying to reverse a trailer, and a woman is also trying to reverse a trailer. my experience is that the man can reverse the trailer better because a woman will turn be turning the wheel wrong way all the time and gets all confused.. and if a woman is cleaning the house then she can see dirt that the man simply cant see.  these are differences in the way we think/calculate etc. but it seems you are suggesting these are learned traits and not a biological thing. but this would imply that both sexes can learn the same thing at the same rate. which i dont think is the case (i have no actual evidence for this though)

 

so, to get a different viewpoint, i also asked my wife and my daughter this same question. they both agreed with me. they both think that the natural differences in woman/man would make a difference in how things are achieved in society. ie, they both think that if a woman has 5 lessons at reversing a trailer, a man may only need 4 lesson to achieve the same result (for example, on average).

[swansont]

3 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

not sure where you are from. but in my neck of the woods men and woman are very different.

Because of biology, or because of cultural norms and constraints?

 

3 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

can u point out a society where men are not the dominant. i can not think of any.

Here are six current ones.

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/g28565280/matriarchal-societies-list/

More, if you go into the history books

 

 

[Prometheus]

3 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

so if woman have smaller hippocampi that may affect their ability to navigate. this may be a factor in all the main explorers throughout history being me. just an idea?

Or men have larger hippocampi because they were encouraged to explore the world as boys, as girls were encouraged to domestic play (recently came across this with my niece who wanted a remote control car as a present but the mother over-ruled her to get a cooking toy). If we're imagining a society starting from scratch we'd need to know the direction of causality, at the moment we have only correlation (as far as i know - haven't delved into the literature). 

 

3 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

this makes me wonder, are there other physical difference within our brains that may affect the way we think. there are obviously other differences though. hormonal etc that can play a role in our thinking.

i agree with your point about sending men into battle. from a physique and breeding point of view. but how about a marcho thing? men would probably think because they are the protectors of their woman it is their duty to go and fight for their woman. society says its the right think to do.  a bit like letting woman(and children) off a sinking boat first. (dont get me wrong here im not suggesting we dont do this)

 

Again, how much of this is biological and how much cultural conditioning? My impression is that any biological differences are exaggerated by cultural norms. To imagine a truly matriarchal nascent society we need to strip away this cultural element, leaving us with a biological case from which to proceed (although it probably isn't as easy to separate culture and biology as i suggest given one emerges from the other). Maybe there are animal studies that could give us some clues?

[iNow]

4 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

not sure where you are from. but in my neck of the woods men and woman are very different.

Actually, no. Probably not. Much more likely is confirmation bias. 
 

[zapatos]

6 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

please show me where i claimed men are so much more capable than woman?

Right here in the OP. Surely you haven't forgotten what you posted?!?!

On 1/22/2020 at 12:27 AM, jfoldbar said:

i think in the woman world, there is much less chance of things like going to the moon, inventing airplanes, inventing cars, big infrastructure, coming about because a womans brain works much different to mans and for woman to think this stuff  up , and implement it,  is much harder. a mans brain is more objective, a womans is more subjective. and subjective doesnt get you to the moon,

 

7 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

what difference does the gender of my workmates have to do whether i can type this?  

 

So does that mean your workmates in the discussion included women or not?

[jfoldbar]

19 hours ago, swansont said:

Because of biology, or because of cultural norms and constraints?

 

Here are six current ones.

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/g28565280/matriarchal-societies-list/

More, if you go into the history books

 

 

im thinking then that when i say society i am actually using the wrong word.

sure, there is a place in africa when woman are the top dog, but africa as a whole is the opposite. theres a place in china where woman are top, but china as a whole has men at the top. im talking about the averages overall, not the small pockets that dont fit the norm

18 hours ago, Prometheus said:

Or men have larger hippocampi because they were encouraged to explore the world as boys, as girls were encouraged to domestic play (recently came across this with my niece who wanted a remote control car as a present but the mother over-ruled her to get a cooking toy). If we're imagining a society starting from scratch we'd need to know the direction of causality, at the moment we have only correlation

so when i had this conversation with my daughter, i realized i had to clarify something that i didnt have to with my wife. perhaps i may need to here, but hard in a forum so i will try with an analogy.

if i ask who can lift more out of strong fred and weak john, everyone would say strong fred. however if weak john went to the gym everyday and trained real hard then mayby he could then lift more than strong fred, however he is no longer weak john he is now strong john. so the point is still valid that strong fred could lift more than weak john, because weak john had to change from being weak john in order to lift as much.

let me know if this analogy makes sense to you.

16 hours ago, zapatos said:

Right here in the OP. Surely you haven't forgotten what you posted?!?!

perhaps if you read it again you will see that i claimed woman are/think different, not less capable.

 

my workmates are men. and if they were woman would not have made a difference. i still would have discussed it with them the same . im an adult, and they are adults there is nothing wrong with open philosophical discussion regardless of your gender.

[Prometheus]

3 hours ago, jfoldbar said:

so when i had this conversation with my daughter, i realized i had to clarify something that i didnt have to with my wife. perhaps i may need to here, but hard in a forum so i will try with an analogy.

if i ask who can lift more out of strong fred and weak john, everyone would say strong fred. however if weak john went to the gym everyday and trained real hard then mayby he could then lift more than strong fred, however he is no longer weak john he is now strong john. so the point is still valid that strong fred could lift more than weak john, because weak john had to change from being weak john in order to lift as much.

let me know if this analogy makes sense to you.

Not really. I think you're trying to say that male hippocampi are innately larger than females', but that's yet to be proved. You're assuming way too much. What do animal studies suggest? Are there any studies on how sex hormones affect the growth of these regions? Any studies on neonate brains? These are the things i'd start off looking at.

Even if we take something more obvious like the increased musculature of the average man and more aggressive impulses due to higher levels of testosterone, doesn't mean a matriarchal society would be less warlike (Sparta, perhaps the most famous warrior society in all of history, was also one of the most matriarchal). It might mean you'd still be sending men off to be cannon fodder, but the strategic decision to go to war could be made by a matriarchy. Decisions to go to war take months, balancing many factors, meaning impulses have less of an effect. I'm not convinced a matriarchy would be any less inclined to war than a patriarchy. There are historical precedents for this - female rulers have popped up quite often and didn't seem less inclined to war - but then they were still operating in a patriarchy. So that's another place to get clues: compare the number of wars engaged by kings vs queens.

[jfoldbar]

6 hours ago, Prometheus said:

Not really

ok ill try again.

forget the hippocampi  for a moment  and just consider that men and woman are different. in many ways. physically, mentally and emotionally.

try replacing strong fred with weak sarah. strong fred may not be a gym bunny but hes stronger simply because hes male. if sarah wants to put it over fred, she could go to the gym and become iron woman. may stil not be enough. but what if she also goes and shoots up on all these drugs that essentially make her male. she is no longer sarah, let alone weak sarah. the the question if sarah is stronger than fred is invalid because sarahs not here any more.

so the average woman has more trouble reading a map than a man. this could be some impulse/ learned trait that stems back thousands of years to hunter gatherer days. but that is what makes her a woman. those intrinsic difference are what we (generally)love about the opposite sex. take those away and they wouldnt be the opposite sex. if we could scientifically calculate every difference between man and woman and go back in time to make the adjustments so that there are no differences, then there wouldnt be man and woman. thus making the question invalid. on the small scale little girls that get cars instead of dolls can be tom boys when they grow up. so by the mum giving them cars they slightly take away 'the little girl'. stretch this over history and any change that we could have done to change the differences in people would result in there being no difference thus removing the need for us to ask the question.

 

 

so we have all variety from the most masculine men to the most feminine female, and every variety in between. we have men  that act more like woman do, and we have woman that act more like men. these are the few. of course there is no way to determine throughout history were various leaders/rulers whether male or female, a manly man or a womanly man, or vice versa. but statistically it stands to reason that the majority would have been within the normal range. what i mean is if you got every male leader from every time and lined them up, the majority of them would be manly men. but of course this doesnt take away from the fact that there would have been the opposite, even to the extreme (bad word i know) that there was probably some leader that was gay and spoke and acted very feminine and probably wanted to go shopping with the girls and look at handbags/shoes. but im talking averages, not particular examples. because there is always en example that bucks the trend.

i dont know how to explain it any better than that. so i hope you get it otherwise i would simply say something like 'better to lock the thread'

[Prometheus]

There are a number of misconceptions there, some of which have been addressed in this thread but let's visit them one more time.

 

17 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

try replacing strong fred with weak sarah. strong fred may not be a gym bunny but hes stronger simply because hes male. if sarah wants to put it over fred, she could go to the gym and become iron woman. may stil not be enough. but what if she also goes and shoots up on all these drugs that essentially make her male. she is no longer sarah, let alone weak sarah. the the question if sarah is stronger than fred is invalid because sarahs not here any more.

No one is disputing the average man is physically stronger than the average woman. 

 

18 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

so the average woman has more trouble reading a map than a man. 

How does this follow from men being physically stronger? Or is it a separate statement?

 

24 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

this could be some impulse/ learned trait that stems back thousands of years to hunter gatherer days

Or it could be cultural conditioning with nothing to do with neurobiology. Why do you keep skipping over this possibility?

 

25 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

but that is what makes her a woman. those intrinsic difference are what we (generally)love about the opposite sex. take those away and they wouldnt be the opposite sex.

Map reading isn't a defining characteristic of the sexes. But again, no one is disputing that there are biological differences between them. What we are asking of you is to try to disentangle those innate biological differences from cultural conditioning. That should be the starting point for any imagining of what a matriarchal society would look like.

Do you acknowledge that there are some purely cultural differences between the sexes - it seems you just assume every difference can only be purely biological. We know this isn't true, and you've been given links throughout this thread if you want to follow this up.

 

30 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

if we could scientifically calculate every difference between man and woman and go back in time to make the adjustments so that there are no differences, then there wouldnt be man and woman. thus making the question invalid.

No one's asking you to do that (or imagine that).

 

31 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

on the small scale little girls that get cars instead of dolls can be tom boys when they grow up. so by the mum giving them cars they slightly take away 'the little girl'. 

How do you know this? You've just assumed it's true. Provide some evidence to back it up. We don't have any societies that raise girls with boys toys so unfortunately it's not straight forward. I gave 3 types of evidence i would look for. There's probably more: for instance, there must be studies on child playing styles and toy preferences between the sexes. Have you tried to look for any of them?

But we do have historical examples of some of the more matriarchal societies being famously warrior-like. Again, why do you keep ignoring this?

 

40 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

so we have all variety from the most masculine men to the most feminine female, and every variety in between. we have men  that act more like woman do, and we have woman that act more like men. these are the few. of course there is no way to determine throughout history were various leaders/rulers whether male or female, a manly man or a womanly man, or vice versa. but statistically it stands to reason that the majority would have been within the normal range. what i mean is if you got every male leader from every time and lined them up, the majority of them would be manly men. but of course this doesnt take away from the fact that there would have been the opposite, even to the extreme (bad word i know) that there was probably some leader that was gay and spoke and acted very feminine and probably wanted to go shopping with the girls and look at handbags/shoes. but im talking averages, not particular examples. because there is always en example that bucks the trend.

I've only been talking in averages. There have been thousands of female rulers throughout human history across the globe, enough to give us the idea that they aren't so different to male rulers. There are also plenty of gay rulers, including Philip II, one of the greatest Greek (Macedonian) rulers and quite probably his son, one of the greatest rulers in recorded history: Alexander the Great. In the Greek and Roman golden ages, these weren't exceptions.

Just to give an idea of the sort of things i was hoping you might submit as evidence i found this study. Turns out female rulers engaged in more wars than men.

 

If you can't or don't want to answer these questions and points then i agree it's probably best to lock the thread. 

[mathematic]

On 1/22/2020 at 1:27 AM, jfoldbar said:

the world we live in, throughout all of history, has been dominated by men. even from hunter gatherer days until now, in every society, men were calling the shots and woman were put in the "seen but not heard" category. 

This is not completely true.  There are matriarchal societies (in Papua among other places) today.

[swansont]

33 minutes ago, mathematic said:

This is not completely true.  There are matriarchal societies (in Papua among other places) today.

That set of goalposts has already been moved. 

[jfoldbar]

respectfully, im going to leave it here. you are not grasping what im asking and i cant explaining it any better.

[iNow]

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

Albert Einstein

[Phi for All]

33 minutes ago, jfoldbar said:

you are not grasping what im asking

I disagree. I think every response so far accepts that you don't think a matriarchal society would have any innovation and would stagnate. YOU aren't grasping what they're telling you, that it's more likely that innovation is a human trait, and women would display it in proportion if they were in charge. There is PLENTY of precedent throughout history, and even more in our current day.

[iNow]

I know plenty of women physically stronger than plenty of men. It seems other variables matter and not just birth sex. 

[StringJunky]

28 minutes ago, TerryHiggins said:

Men may work hard pull more weight, they do posses more power naturally, those pyramids can not possible with out Men power. So we need accept the way things are made naturally and respect both women and men equally

You can't make absolute statements like this. It only takes one counterexample to show it's wrong. It's like saying "All swans are white"

Edited March 28, 2020 by StringJunky

[dimreepr]

1 hour ago, TerryHiggins said:

Men may work hard pull more weight, they do posses more power naturally, those pyramids can not possible with out Men power. So we need accept the way things are made naturally and respect both women and men equally

We just need to accept women and men are equally important (in all their guises); not whether some women seem more masculine than some men or some men are more feminine than some women, that's a pointless dead end.

Edited March 28, 2020 by dimreepr

[zapatos]

2 hours ago, TerryHiggins said:

Men may work hard pull more weight, they do posses more power naturally, those pyramids can not possible with out Men power.

Couldn't you have just used more women to make up for the difference in strength the men contributed?