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Vexcalibur
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23 May 2012, 1:18 pm

I do think men take their masculinity to an extreme, and they make others guys feel feminine if they don't follow suit, and it can and does lead to stupid decision making.

Maybe the extremes of feminism is a result of the extremes of masculinity, like much of the modern Islamic extremism is a result of the West and Jews meddling in the Middle East?


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WilliamWDelaney
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23 May 2012, 1:42 pm

Vexcalibur wrote:
http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2012/05/its_not_feminism_that_hurts_men
My SO was a history professor during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Now, his field of specialty doesn't really have any bearing here. However, we were discussing some political stuff today, and he recalled to mind a colleague of his who worked in the field of genetics. Genetics was a young science at the time, but the better colleges were finding some material then that is still trickling slowly into mainstream knowledge. Unfortunately for him, he had to learn the hard way that actually knowing what you are talking about can really get you in trouble if politics are involved.

The colleague in question became a target of criticism, at one point at the height of the CRM, because he tried to point out that it's not strictly speaking accurate to say, "all of the races are the same, and the differences are only skin-deep." He tried pointing out how people with Asian backgrounds tended to have certain health problems that people from European backgrounds didn't have, and he tried discussing some of the special issues relating to black people's health. What he argued was that it might be inappropriate to treat everyone the same or expect them to be the same.

Well, even though the things he was saying were actually quite accurate and based on valid science, he didn't seem to grasp the concept that there is usually a big difference between what is accurate to say and what is socially acceptable to say. The Civil Rights activists were actually so angry, they tried to get him jettisoned from his position in the science and medicine department. Fortunately, his colleagues knew his field well enough to understand that he actually knew very well what he was talking about.

Anyway, nobody listened to people like him. For a while, the schools had a policy of pressing milk on school children, though. The theory was that, because milk contained calcium, making the children drink milk with their lunch would help them build strong bones. It wasn't really being taken into account that the studies had been done largely on people who had a European background. You see, there is a gene that almost all people of Northern European lineage and most people of other European ethnicities have. It gives them a resistance to developing lactose intolerance by promoting the synthesis of the lactase enzyme. People of most ethnic groups don't actually have this gene, and it's sort of a gonzo trait for us to have. Sadly, a lot of black and Asian children became very sick from being force-fed something that was poisonous to them, which their white classmates had a unique "immunity" of sorts to.

In the 1960s, pointing something like this out made you a racist. You would have been labelled an ignorant, uneducated and toothless hillbilly from some country backwater, and your opinions would have been held to be of no account whatsoever. It wouldn't have mattered if what you were really trying to do was to get some ignorant politician to understand that, if you force all of the children at a school in a predominantly Asian or black district to drink milk with their lunch, you would inevitably have some of them who were especially sensitive being hospitalized. It would not have mattered that you only spoke out because you cared. If you violated the taboo, you were pretty much tarred, feathered and carried out on a rail.

I have occasionally found myself in a similar position when trying to discuss issues relating to gender. For example, one issue in healthcare that is still not widely addressed is that women tend to respond better to kappa-opioid agonists than men do. If this were being taken into account, it could somewhat improve the ability of doctors to work out the right kinds of painkillers to give to their patients.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8898754

Unfortunately, most people's ears are plugged to this kind of information. I don't know whether they simply don't understand it or don't want to accept it, but most people are somehow impaired at understanding this kind of detail. I think it's materially a very important women's issue to figure out whether they are getting the best medical care that they can receive.

The fact of the matter is that men and women also differ mentally, and this has been studied pretty extensively for a long time. Boys and girls can have different learning styles. In fact, boys are arguably at an unfair disadvantage in environments in which they are expected to sit still and learn passively.

http://blogs.clc.co.nz/LearningStyles/a ... tyles.aspx

Quote:
The male autonomic nervous system causes boys to be more alert in colder temperatures (Learning Style Element - temperature), as well as when they’re moving (Learning Style Element - mobility). Girls prefer warmer temperatures and they often learn better when seated.


Curiously, forcing boys to remain seated and silent in a classroom does considerable damage to their potential. It's not something that they are taught to do by their culture. They are just different. However, educators will continue ignoring this as long as we keep this subject taboo. We ultimately end up just cheating young people out of realizing their potential.

Another problem is that our educators have been continually punishing boys who fall asleep in class, even though boys are a bit more likely than girls to actually REQUIRE stress and stimulation to keep their brains awake.

Quote:
Curiously enough, stress in boys helps them stay focused by directing blood flow into their brains. Girls respond to stress differently, with blood flowing to their digestive system and making them anxious.


And their learning styles can differ even at the level of how they respond initially to visual input.

Quote:
Research revealed, for example, that boys and girls see differently: male eyes are attracted to movement and to cooler colours (such as blue, black, grey), while female eyes are enticed by textures, details and warmer colours (red, yellow, orange). Learning Styles cater for this difference by assessing the student’s preferences for visual input (see the LSA Pyramid).


However, by the same token, a lot of teaching strategies that would work very well for boys would be damaging for girls. We don't gain anything from keeping our ears plugged to the natural differences in male and female brains. These differences are significant throughout our lifetimes, and it can greatly impact our future how we deal with these issues early in life.

I'm not going to push the issue any further, though. I have never had any luck with it, and it seems to get more hopeless every time I approach it. You can't just chalk every gender disparity up to "patriarchy." I see that as criminally ignorant, and I think it's actually socially harmful. Men and women are not the same, and they never will be.



techstepgenr8tion
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23 May 2012, 2:35 pm

In reading this article, not knowing a whole lot about the MRA, I have agree with most of what's said.

Guys are held in male roles most out of the real threat from other 'alpha' and more callous men who'll 'sort them out'. It seems to happen with both genders as well; I was working out of town and was on an elevator with a group of field-trip students, probably six fifteen'ish year old girls moving the exact same way, same alligator-with-a-wig expression, and I watched one girl try to broach a conversation and get hammered down by the 'alpha' of the group. Bullying is what I'd call it 'human' behavior, just that with women traditionally the physical violence factor (woman vs. woman) hasn't been quite as prevalent than men vs. men (partly because guys are cultured that they're either protectors or they've barely have any right living and violence is seen as a testing ground for who is and who isn't).

On MRA though, I'm getting the misogynist allegations right - that's something I'd call an 'activist' issue. Activists are generally been-done-to types of people, they've been through an eccentric amount of trauma at the hands of whoever they're forming activism 'against' or trying to gain their liberation from, and its a given - people who've been through an unusual amount of absurdities will have a distorted lens on life. On one hand its something that gives them the drive to 'shake-and-move' rather than simply think of it transiently and moan but, at the same time, that also means that the messenger trumpeting that something needs to be done may themselves be one of the larger insults to their own cause.

Unfortunately, since this 'men's activism' is new it also means we may see many masculist names who are saying things as crazy as some of the far out female supremecists of the 70's; its sad but I think that kind of "Go beyond the pail, hit the extrema, turn everyone off, and make the changes take decades longer than they needed to" is just something that's built in. Society and people in general, unfortunately, don't have much of a way around it.

Another note - its a tough world, we have to be competative and tough for jobs (men or women), and for as much as we want to stress psychological health, sharing emotions, etc. etc., sure happy people are great for human resource but I think for both genders there will always be a tradeoff where in some situations they can drop their masks and throroughly share, and other parts where a stiff upper lip needs to be kept just in respect of and courtesy to the given situation. The 'everyone wins a prize' mentality is another thing that was an overreaction, a bit of a generational absurdity, and hopefully that's gone, but clearly all of these things in bettering our culture are going to take a much more wise and nuanced approach than what the media outlets and political pop culture have really lent people to entertain.


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Apple_in_my_Eye
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23 May 2012, 8:12 pm

WilliamWDelaney wrote:
...

Interesting post. Another front where that happened involves people with intersex conditions, i.e. David Reimer, "there are no neurological differences between men and women outside of enculteration."

WilliamWDelaney wrote:
I'm not going to push the issue any further, though. I have never had any luck with it, and it seems to get more hopeless every time I approach it. You can't just chalk every gender disparity up to "patriarchy." I see that as criminally ignorant, and I think it's actually socially harmful. Men and women are not the same, and they never
will be.

I've also given up any hope of this subject being discussed reasonably and don't bother to try, anymore. I.e. "do women in any way at all contribute to oppression?" There won't be an honest answer to that question in less than 1000 years.

To play devil's advocate, though, any interpretation of data made by scientists -- in any direction -- is going to be seized upon and used by political zealots to justify their agenda (and likely through twisting the meaning of the scientific data). There was something I heard recently (but can't clearly remember :x ) that was used by some anti-gay group to say, "see? it really is a choice!," whereas the author of the work has said, "no, that's not what that means."