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I always wondered how things would work if our biology was different. If men were the ones to carry the child, would they be the ones subjected to such discrimination?
Are women the ones who care for children because that's a woman thing, or is it because whoever gets pregnant would naturally become the caretaker? Do women have less muscle mass than men because theyre the ones who get pregnant or is it something else? If men were the ones who got pregnant, would they still have all that muscle, or is that antithetical to a successful pregnancy?
Stepping away from biology and thinking about society: Taking time away from school and work for a pregnancy is a huge setback. Does it matter if it's the man or woman doing it? Would men be overlooked for important high paying jobs because their employer thought they might decide to start a family?
What if we laid eggs? How would that have changed our society and values? Why did I once again overthink a meme?
Estrogen production is supposed to be intricately entwined with pregnancy or so an article somewhere said.
It probably regulates and directs the body towards bringing conception to term. Stuff like mood swings, morning sickness, yearnings, fuller breasts and milk production probably get triggered by having a high enough level of estrogen screwing you from the inside.
I say probably because I don't know it's true.Obviously big and strong
Probably because the argument completely ignores social dynamics.
I think the answer to most of your hypotheticals there is, probably yes, based on what I'm remembering. I think the working theory was that sexism comes about as a result of the idea of ownership through agriculture, i.e. land ownership, labor animals, stuff like that. Men lock down women because ensuring female chastity is a way for men to make sure that their heirs are the ones that are doing the heiring, that their kids are the ones that are going to get the inheritance, rather than anyone else.
The idea is that in parts of the world where land ownership, agriculture, labor animals, aren't as common, there's generally less sexism, and even some amount of matriarchy, since women can kind of have more power over men through the fact that they're the ones who can give birth. There's definitely an amount of "grug bigger than grugalina, grug hit grugalina with stick unless grug gets head", or whatever, and that probably happened in ancient times, but it's also a more complicated story than that. This article was a pretty good read on the whole deal, if you're interested in more of that theory.
If you reversed the dynamic, here, it would kind of depend on the mechanism, I would think. Like, are women now the "stronger" sex, or do men still have like, higher levels of bone density, higher predisposition to hypertrophy, and probably more importantly, are men still socialized to like, be basically completely insane, and more kind of hyper-specialized? Or are we just doing what's basically an entire swap of the sexual dynamics and biology? If it's the former, I think, you know, probably no shit, that everything's basically the same, but "swapped". If it's the latter, though, and there's some amount of change in the actual power dynamic, or some amount of relative change in the biology, I'd expect that to have maybe more interesting results.
This is the type of shit I'm always kind of frustrated that shows like star trek don't tackle, cause there's a lot of different and cool places you could go with something lack that, in terms of character concepts, societies, alien races. What about lizard people that lay eggs? Would they have kind of a more egalitarian society, or would they have other problems? What about people who reproduced by budding? What about, you know, as said formerly, if the women were the stronger sex, but were also the ones who got pregnant, as it is with many animals? I dunno, it's kind of interesting, you could spin a lot out of it.
thank you, fixed
I think it would be something like the Spotted Hyenas. Where one sex very dominant.
probably the autism
That's an interesting thought excercise.
I'm not sure patriarchy has much to do with biology, I think it was just luck of the draw.
I'm not sure patriarchy has much to do with biology
I'm pretty sure it originally boiled down to "I'm bigger than you. Do what I say or I'll hurt you", for millennia.
I read a pretty compelling hypothesis that in ancient times the makeup of your military determines the culture, because they have the training and weapons to coup if they want something.
Female majority militaries died out because women of military age are simply less disposable than men of military age. You can't effectively repopulate with an 80% male population, for example.
This means natural selection applied to tribes means you're going to be left with almost exclusively male dominated militaries, which will very likely at some point decide they want more power.
In terms of the "man strong" thing, the average male is stronger than the average female, but is not really a huge factor when you're selecting for the strongest across a large enough population.
The average man is stronger than women in the top 5th percentile though
That's a pretty interesting theory. Thank you for sharing it.
Yup. Men strong, Woman weak is how it started.
Which is still biology. Ugly biology, but biology
Yup. I agree.
I’m not sure patriarchy has much to do with biology
You say while using a word that is gendered based off of biology...