Hacker News Reader

Comment by rekabis | Hacker News Reader

I would agree with the vast majority of your sentiment.

Unfortunately, biology and evolution has seen fit to make the sexes noticeably different, for which some amount of “division of labour” makes absolute rational sense.

And the flip side of the problem involves a majority of women demanding “the patriarchy” when they overwhelmingly choose men who are taller, stronger, wealthier, and in more prestigious positions than they themselves are.

You will rarely ever see a female CEO or well-paid female member of upper manglement date and marry a younger male barista who makes a tiny fraction of what they do, but flip the genders and it happens all the time.

View on HN

There are few if any true differences in mental abilities. The construction of gender in social societal terms is being dismantled. There are casualties, and there is backlash in masculine reverb and even terror but the construct of patriarchy is dying - that’s what needs to be discussed, not Galloways take.

> There are few if any true differences in mental abilities.

Science disagrees with you there:

• https://stanmed.stanford.edu/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-...

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6418873/

Navigation is just one such major mental difference, where women are far more effective with waypoints and landmarks in familiar spaces, whereas men are better at dead reckoning over unfamiliar land.

But I’m NOT talking about mental differences, but physical ones:

• grip strength,

• overall strength,

• height,

• gait,

• physiological responses to stressors,

• ability to better survive physical (unarmed) combat,

• some forms of physical endurance (each sex has its own specialty),

• reaction time,

• lactation,

• childbirth,

• and many more

All of which confer a distinct advantage to one sex over the other.

For example, the reason why we have the trope of the pickle jar being opened effortlessly by the man and the woman being entirely unable to open it, comes down entirely to gender differences to how collagen exists in the palms of the hand. Women have collagen running in just one direction, which allows extreme forces to begin tearing the skin and causing pain at much lower levels of force applied. Meanwhile, men have cross-linked collagen which allows extreme forces them to impart far more force on something in their grip before experiencing tearing and pain.

Strength is another male feature which completely blows women out of the water: almost all men are stronger than almost all women. It’s why female Olympic athletes can and frequently are trounced by teenage male athletes.

And of course, there is the big doozy: it is impossible for a genetic and physical male to become pregnant and give birth. And while a tiny handful of men have been able to lactate with sufficient stimulation, it is still exceptionally rare to achieve and may rely on non-typical (for a man) hormonal balances to achieve.

So physical differences can and do lend themselves very logically and rationally to a limited range of separation of concerns.

These mental differences do not confer dominance. This is obvious! Don’t fall back upon ye old patriarchal arguments splitting hairs on hippocampal endocrine adjustments.

Physical prowess is no longer convincingly conferring a definitive route to dominance unless there’s a patriarchal overreach into coercion that defies growing universal regularities of equalities in bills of rights etc.

The fact women give birth does in no way restrict them into submission.

Please reject all patriarchal myths in order to discus partnership goals.

Humans are not like other primates, we’re a mix of evolutionary and biological factors that result in a continuum rather than a strict dichotomy, humans fall somewhere between "tournament mating" species and "pair-bonding" species. We’re not locked into any certain gender dominant if you know endocrinology and evolution.

There is no true dominant outcome once the mental playing field is leveled. Male aggression is uniquely equalized in feminine control.

If you read my comments, at no point did I ever veer into anything approaching dominance.

Having a physical advantage is not dominance. It is merely capability with regards to the objective in play, which is where the argument of division of labour comes into play.

You want to have people play to their capabilities and (metaphorical) strengths. It’s how a society (or any cohesive unit of people, actually) maximizes its effectiveness and utility for everyone concerned.

To not do so is akin to having two people paint a wall, and for the sake of appearances you have the tall one paint near the floor and the short person paint up near the ceiling. Unless other attributes significantly overcome the massive disadvantages of the height difference, it would be madness to force them to paint the wall like this.

There are no distinct advantages that confer dominance that affords such a construct as patriarchy.

Hypotheticals regarding where optimums are best expressed are irrelevant in terms of a partnership future, they will be negotiated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com