3 land mines out of about every 1000 will be duds that will not explode. You want to go dance around in a mine field, be my guest.
I’ve wondered myself about ‘what went wrong’ the way I wonder about many different disasters that I’ve seen. Perhaps social archeologists will look back on this time someday and also try to figure out what went wrong.
If I were forced to speculate, I’d probably go with the theory that for eons, males and females had well defined roles that were necessary for the survival of the species, so they weren’t all that flexible. Evolution demands that a species eat reliably, and reproduce reliably, at every generation without exception, or face immediate extinction at the first generation that fails to achieve either one. As with most vertebrate species, females have had the greater share of the physical risk and effort required to reproduce, and males have had the greater share of the physical risk and effort necessary to acquire the resources to make sure everyone eats everyday.
With animals who don’t have much higher order thinking, this is mostly driven by instinct. With humans, as civilization progressed, the behaviors of each gender became driven by a social construct of learned behavior within societies. The behavior of each was taught and expected, but not so tightly driven by instinct as in most animals.
I was not the first to write the theory here, but I don’t argue with the suggestion that human males have been so successful at not only acquiring resources, but also in building societies to insure the day to day survival of everyone in the species (medicine, industrialized agriculture, mass distribution of water, electricity etc)… that the roles are not so tightly imposed by the threat of extinction anymore. Perhaps without the instinct to drive behavior, and without the threat of extinction to contain behavior, there has been an opportunity to tinker with the learned social construct that defined the behaviors of genders.
Feminism can be viewed as an attempt to tinker with the female role. As I view it, feminism teaches women that they can change their role to be indistinguishable from the role of men. At its core, it seems to me to be a lie because it only seeks to share in the role of men where it is attractive and comfortable to individual women. Feminism has never even pretended to seek to share in the down side of being male. The most obvious example is that feminist women believe that a woman should be president, because equality. In many western countries, presidents are the ultimate commander of all military forces and women believe they should share equally in that power. But when you start suggesting that there should be a memorial wall following the next war with the names of thousands of dead women on it, stuttering and stammering and back pedaling result.
Perhaps giving women the ability to vote essentially allowed them an equal say in the navigation of a society that they had little role in building. Having little to no stake in it, they are more likely to experiment with it. And as a result we find ourselves in a situation where women trying to be men have abdicated their evolutionary role in reproducing (population growth is flat or negative in countries where feminism in strongest) in an attempt to replace men in their role of making sure everyone eats. In many of those same countries, women with power seem to believe that socialism is the best way to make sure everyone eats. (Though it has failed in every place in the world where it has ever been tried, it isn’t hard to convince individual women to believe that they are ‘special’ and so it won’t happen to them…).
3 out of 1000 women might really be unicorns. But since this isn’t really enough to sustain the population, or steer away from socialism, I don’t think it makes much difference. 3 of 1000 is not a high enough ratio to make it worth the effort to seek them out and sort them from the live land mines.
Ultimately 3 of 1000 has the same impact on my decisions as 0 out of 1000.
Look, it's not my fault that tornado dropped a house on your sister. Now get back on your broom and get your ass out of here... and take your monkeys with you
Anonymous 2 years, 11 months ago.
