I agree that our brains are extremely flexible, and keep on developing generation after generation.

However, cultural transformation (and as a consequence, brain transformation) cannot be forced. People must see real value in it, and voluntarily participate.

I’m not arguing that we can change almost anything. But do people want to change gender differences?

1) Our species pays an astronomical biological price for our “big brains”. We are slow, we are weak, and we are subject to an enormously expanded vulnerable stage as infants.

2) Whatever advantages our “big brains” yield must be equally titanic, to make up for these crippling physical limitations.

3) Our brains can only manifest usefulness if they have the capacity to modify our behaviour.

Hypothesis: The human species is uniquely able to modify its biological heritage by rational thought.

Evidence: Imagine that you, me, and a third person, all strangers to each other, are sitting on a park bench eating sandwiches. You then observe me yanking the sandwich from the third person and taking it for my own. You will feel my actions as a collective offence against “all of us”, including yourself. Children and our distant ancestors do not share this collectivisation of offence to the invented concept of “property”. Our social programming has has replaced our biologically wired “might makes right” instinct into something that we find more compatible with our current lifestyle.

Proposal: Forget the strong biological differences between men and women. We can change them if we want to. “Do we want to substitute our biology with a gender neutral perspective” is a rational question. “Can we do this” is not. Our culture can, and has, changed much more profound biological hard-wiring, when needed.

I further propose that the “history of history” is the story of how a series of these amendments to our biological heritage were incorporated into our cultural heritage. Gender neutrality is nothing special in that regard.

I’m not saying that men have all the power, I’m simply analyzing why men have the leading positions in all societies.

If you read more of my blog posts you’ll also see that I talk a lot about the price men pay to reach these positions, and that a major reason that women don’t rise to the top is that they aren’t ready to pay this price.

I just think you need to read more of my stuff to get where I’m coming from.

Women DO run many societies, they just do it differently. Women run societies through back room subversive techniques (for lack of a better term at this moment in time).

While the men may have their formal councils to discuss and decide on courses of actions, over the days prior to the council, the women have been convincing the men of a particular course of action. The men go in, and what a shock, they decide what they were convinced of by the women who are actually in power.

This runs rampant in many primitive and evolving societies. Of course it becomes very difficult to measure as societies evolve into more complex governance and decision making.

Thanks to those British Anthropologists that couldn’t handle the idea of women being in charge they ‘defined’ male rule in certain terms ignoring the extreme influence that the women (often elder women) had on the decisions made by men who ‘thought’ they were in charge.

I guess this kind of truth doesn’t exactly serve the feminist movement, so, like the British anthropologists, it’s ignored out of convenience by those arguing for feminism.

Nice shroud though.

Nicely summed up. This is my dilemma, how to calibrate between those extremes.

As to the topic in question, I think what advantages men statistically in their dominance of positions of power is their greater tolerance of risk. This has good effects and negative ones. The good effect is that men are more likely to take risks and innovate, helping advance society, which also makes it more likely for them to reach positions of power when the risk pays off. The negative effects are that they are also more likely to fall on hard times and it kills men faster than women, something to which nature has adapted, as in a cohort of 100 kids, about 52 are male, but since they die more frequently in childhood and adolescence, when they reach the age of sexual maturity the ratio is about one male for a female.

Again, when talking about these statistical differences, it is important to try to maintain a balance in our understanding of them. It is too easy to fall into extremes where you either underestimate them or overestimate them. If you underestimate them, you end up always protesting against the effects of them and ascribing those effects to “oppression” or “discrimination” (a common problem with feminists), but if you overestimate them then you fall into prejudice because you start to judge individuals based on the dominant characteristics of the group they belong to instead of on their individual characteristics.

That’s actually a completely usable translation, thanks a bunch!

I agree with the nuances that Andreas adds.

Josef Boberg said:
“Hmmm = read and considered.”

And Andreas Dahlin said:
“I assume that your facts are correct, then there was a single matriarkal Civilization. That sounds reasonable. I also agree that this leads to the conclusion that biology should be involved.

To explain why such behavior occurred in men more than women, I think is best done with an evolutionary perspective. That it is testosterone that makes it is not quite a complete explanation, in my taste. Testosteronet happen to be just the tool that evolution used.

But the interesting thing is that you say how to proceed on the basis of the given fact that men and women are statistically different in their behavior. Reality is not as simple as gender science to believe, that all is tabula rasa at the outset, and everything’s social structures. In the long run, we must accept reality as it actually is if we are to change our society that we want.

In the case of discrimination I think the most important is to emphasize that the differences is about statistics and that there is great variance. Discrimination is wrong not only morally. It is also stupid from eg an employer’s perspective to believe that someone is more or less suitable on the basis of sex.

The next important point is to accept that we can not expect a 50/50 gender distribution in all sections of society because men and women make different choices. The dominant gender idea does now 50/50 and this is crazy. Equality should be about combating prejudice, in accordance with the above principles.

Of course, it can go to get close to 50/50 target. Biology is not deterministic but can be influenced by social factors. But it can be a bad idea that influence it. As the specific nature of feminists before me pointed out, perhaps not only to search social explanations for why people in rich countries are deteriorating mentally.

Hu what I write I might have to stop now, hope it was readable …”