Kelvyquayo wrote:
AnimalOnSylph wrote:
I would probably be more upset with a daughter than a son. I know that it shouldn't happen that way, but treating boys and girls differently is something that I think a lot of us have ingrained into us from how we were raised
Is this not the equivalent to a man simply rationalizing his supposed right to keep a woman subservient? "It's just ingrained in us"
I think it's overly simplistic to say it's about rationalizing men keeping women subservient. At least, not necessarily in the context of the social pressures that still exist today. How many males on this forum have been taught to walk up to the door first to open it for a woman? What about walking on the side of the sidewalk closest to the curb when walking with a woman? How about holding her chair for her? Or opening her car door? Or standing up when a woman gets up from the table and you are seated (this ones become far more rare)? Some maybe. Some maybe not. But the point is that at no point were we taught these things (and for some of us possibly berated for failing to follow those etiquette rules) with a justification of "this allows us to keep women subservient".
We can talk about how these rules were created within the context of a culture that did assume men were the providers and protectors, and women were to be treated as objects to be protected (and perhaps more cynically to bear and raise children), and we can even talk about how continuing these traditions is some kind of oblique call back to those times. But for most, they're just nice things to do, that we were taught to do, and not meant in any way other than "Hey. I'm being nice to this person". Does the fact that we may do that for a woman but not for a man still kinda suggest a different standard for each? Certainly. But is society really harmed by this? I don't think so. I think that sometimes it's ok to have "rules" for interacting with each other, and as long as those rules don't extend to things like hiring preferences or how we treat people professionally, and are otherwise just harmless niceties that make social settings go more smoothly, I don't see much problem with it.
I'm sure some feminists will disagree though. And honestly, I get their position. I just think that this is like worrying about the table decorations, while the food is burning in the oven. There are much bigger fish to fry. Also, it actually does become a double standard, because men are often pressured to treat women "better" than men, but then sometimes called sexist for doing so. And sometimes women expect us to treat them differently than we treat men. And honestly? Usually the women asking us to treat them different/better are the ones we're in relationships with, while those calling us sexist for doing so are not. And that's not really a tough choice to make, right? A man will treat his wife/girlfriend how she wants to be treated. That's kinda rule number one. If that offends some feminists out there, they're just going to have to deal with it.
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This began as a religious debate about why the bible God seemed to prefer men over woman and hold women more accountable for certain things... I basically said "God could have made 27 different genders and let us asexually reproduce but there is a clear reason that both were created as we were" ..... however I realized that most of these things were NOT actually religious arguments but social arguments.... as I know I would have felt the same way before I "got religion".
I also wouldn't necessarily categorize that as "the bible God". As you state, this is less about religion and more about social norms at the time the bible stories were written. From an intelligent design point of view (or from an evolutionary point of view even), there are clear biological differences between men and woman, and thus clear social roles that both would naturally play in early civilizations for those civilizations to be most successful. At the end of the day, the tribe that has the men out hunting and fighting, while keeping the women safe in the village will tend to win out over time over the one that does things the other way around. Survival for most of human history was a fight between attrition via various forms of death, and birth rates. Anything that maximized the rate of children being born and then surviving long enough to procreate would maximize your odds over time. Women had to be in the baby making business, and men had to be in the "protect the more or less continually pregnant women" business. You can argue that most of our social roles derive from those necessities. And those rules would certainly have still been in effect when the bible stories were first being told and later written down.
And one can also argue that this necessity has only really gone away in the last few centuries, as industrialization has created less total labor hours needed to provide the necessities for a society, and as medical advances have improved both our life spans and infant survival rates. It's not a coincidence that women's rights issues have advanced during this same time period. As with most things, it's the realities of the world we live in that drive our cultural changes, not the other way around. I guess my primary point is that it's more than unfair to judge past generations (especially really really past ones) based on the norms of today. And I don't think God really has much to do with it.