Comments on: The Curious Case Against Civilization

By: Jorgen

Jorgen — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:20:03 +0000

One kind of cool factoid about how malleable this stuff is though: Orangutan males generally provide no parental attention beyond guarding females with their young, but when an infant’s mother died in Brookfield Zoo, the father, who was reared in a zoo, began taking care of his son, even letting him ride on his back, which is totally unheard of for any great ape males. So culture matters in other primates too.

By: Jorgen

Jorgen — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:17:24 +0000

Of course you’re right that claiming that all the differences we see between men and women now have to do with innate natural differences is bullshit. And of course there’s all sorts of difference in the way men and women are expected to act, particularly when it comes to child rearing. At the same time, I think that it’s very likely that women have a stronger tendency toward nurturing behavior to infants than men, and that a society in which men and women had exactly as much social pressure on them to have babies and take care of them would be a society in which the average baby was handled a lot more by women than by men.

The issue is how to get to a society in which a woman who has no interest in having children isn’t maligned for that, and where a man who wants to work part time or leave work to spend more time with the kids isn’t looked down on. It matters to acknowledge genetic differences because if you don’t you’ll keep looking at these average differences in child care effort with the assumption that they represent sexism when they may not.

By: diana

diana — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 19:55:34 +0000

Parents have to be taught to love babies. Anyone who’s ever been sleep-deprived by a toddler is familiar with the impulse to throttle the brat. Anyone who says child-rearing is completely “natural” is, I submit, someone who has never tried to rear one.

Actual children never seem to appear in any conservative’s discourse on the family, just like actual situations involving actual pregnancies never seem to matter to the “pro-life” contingent. I wonder why that is.

By: Northerner

Northerner — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 20:13:41 +0000

Women aren’t taught to love babies, and the reaction of a mother on first cuddling her newborn is not the result of either social conditioning or rational calculations

It’s quite interesting (and telling?) that in arguing for the possibility of repressing natural desires and behaviors, you compare the above to genocide, public defecation, and drug abuse. The real question is whether the desire to cuddle babies OUGHT to be stifled and controlled (as should the desire to commit genocide)? Or whether, perhaps, domestic pleasures offer every bit as much opportunity for human “flourishing” as (say) being a clerk at Wal-Mart, and hence Hirshman’s ridicule and demeaning of domestic life is wrongheaded.

By: My One Suggestion Is She Pick a Better Pseudonym than ‘Hermione Gray’ « Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:48:25 +0000

[...] DC and journo and blog arena are watching with interest [This also comes in the wake of Kerry Howley's charge that Lauren Hall's C11 feature on Linda Hirshman was bizarre and unprofessional, and Conor's [...]

By: Mike Giberson

Mike Giberson — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 13:56:04 +0000

That Kirk Cameron video on bananas is awesome!

I had no idea.

By: PFJO

PFJO — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 22:02:37 +0000

Gender-equality.

Equality.

These are absurd notions as commonly applied. Men and women are not equal universally, rather they are equal only within limited contexts. Don’t believe me? Try weightlifting.

The problem with the classical feminist movement isn’t that “men and women are biologically different and that explains the status-quo,” as you repudiate that silliness just fine. The problem is that they are universalists and guilty of the gravest of intellectual sins, namely context dropping.

There ARE gender differences that will manifest themselves in culturally distinct gender roles just as there will always be those that don’t conform to said roles. The appropriate role of evolutionary biology is to discover and define just how much of current (and perhaps historical) gender roles are the result of biological differences.

Only then can we even know what “equality” looks like. Maybe equality is an equal distribution of all races and sexes in all areas of life… maybe it isn’t. It’s hard to say what equality is until we know what humans are.