I've never understood the illiberal desire to treat boys and girls so differently. I'm glad I live in a country where sexism is illegal at a fundamental level -- this kind of law would be quickly struck down.
Like with most religions which "the science" very much qualities for at this point, there believers will just pick and choose what to believe and use to get there way.
They're super close to chimps (and definitely much closer than us), rather than "a very different species".
Should particularly strong girls be "treated like boys"?
Should girls and women without functioning reproductive systems be treated like boys?
What differences in social roles have been proven "necessary"?
Is the fact that chimpanzees do things a certain way remotely good evidence that we should do something that way too?
Answer key:
- no
- no
- no
- which gamete you supply?
- no
Given that we're in a huge democraphic crisis which will bring untold disaster and misery, a huge depression crisis, marriage crises, and a loneliness epidemic, perhaps we're not the best arbiters of whether they've been proven "necessary" or not.
As for the questions, to some degree they indeed do, so partly yes, but also those differences in treatment are not on a case by case basis, but on average.
If the west would stop vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin, we'd realize that humanity as a whole does not have that much of a demographic problem. "We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments, unless people are honest about racism.
Humanity as a whole has a demographic problem. A few countries are just outliers (being still quite above > 2.1), but nowhere enough to offset anything at a global scale, and besides, they're on the decline too, just earlier in the curve.
Second, caring about your ethnic culture is not the same as "vilifying people of different skin color and continent of origin". It's just not treating nations as comprised of interchangable consumer/worker units whose shared culture and history (or lack thereof) doesn't matter.
Most countries have a long history tied to a culture created from one or a handful of ethnicites, they're not just pieces of land for settling associated with a civic contract, like the us has been (and of course even that came at the erasure of the native cultures and populations).
>"We are too many" as an argument to keep borders closed and "we are too few, get more kids" are incompatible arguments
They're totally compatible if you don't treat people like interchangable units arbitrarily exchanged, but as humans with a past, a history, an ethnicity, a culture, and so on, they've build over time.
Same way you wouldn't just exchange one of your kids with another kid, but that doesn't mean you think the other people's kids are inferior.
Nobody talks about individuals or people as arbitrarily interchangeable units. That's a populist exaggeration.
The "natural state" of a culture and an ethnic group is the continuous exchange and intermingling with other cultures and ethnic groups. It's a success of the nationalist right to make people believe that it's the opposite.
E.g. if people were apt to believe girls preferred green peppers more often than boys, there will always be plenty who say "Well, having both girls and boys, I can concur". It could be true, it could be false, or the cause could be something else. E.g., because people think there are certain differences it shapes differences in development which lead to some of them actually being more common for nothing more than the sum of environmental factors - even if those biases only started as misconceptions.
Whichever it actually is, there will usually be large segments of the populations who would observe it to be conflicting things from an individual at-home view and it takes a lot of work & really good data to be able to make a meaningful claim about what and why differences exist.
With girls, you'll get the same corrective effect from an uncomfortable grimace as you would a wooden spoon.
I'll also add since this is about bullying, the type of bullying behaviours girls engage in is much less physical and a lot more underhanded. It's much harder to correctly identify who's the victim and who's the perpetrator.
Kids need "an approach" that helps them learn necessary boundaries. That approach differs by gender (I have both boys and girls and that's obvious)
I'm not saying girls should be beaten too. But the ethical blindness here is striking.
Besides, girls are just as much capable of bullying as boys are. Society might have taught them to use different methods, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable or any less vicious.
The Singaporean habit of caning is a very modern practice of industrial and military society that has no biological analog, an offshoot of mass discipline society of the 20th century and gender roles of Victorian Britain where groups of men needed to be 'whipped into shape' and women were feminine and pure, but it sure is convenient to randomly invoke biology when one runs out of arguments
Girls and women receive greater physical protection, as required to manage reproductive capacity and long‑term demographic stability.
Yes boys are strong. You know what's stronger than a boy? Gun. Girl with gun is stronger. It's not fucking 400 AD and this isn't Rome and we don't have slaves. Things are different today.
Yes, there are biological differences, but they definitely matter the least now as opposed to ever. Think about jobs. Women can do basically every modern job a man can do, and definitely the high paying ones. Now think about ancient societies and why that wasn't the case.
Which country would that be? Unless you are from a select few Norther European countries your military enlistment/draft laws are likely quite sexist.
Should we call up women and put them in equal roles? I don't even know how you'd solve this so keen to hear any suggeations/thoughts
Why the hypothetical? In Israel, for example, women often serve in equal roles during wars, although neither at the same rate as men, nor are laws there completely gender-neutral. I would imagine in Northern European countries with actual gender-neutral military regulations they will be called up similarly to men.
Even if you were, conscript training is not equally distributed: 24% of conscripts in 2023 were women in Sweden, 32% in 2024 in Norway.
Maybe one day it will get there but it's been a decade and has not got there yet.
I know but OP was talking about laws specifically, not their application.
that doesn't' mean trans people and nonbinary dont' exist. We need to make accommodations for them where appropriate. However, it doesn't do any one any favors trying to homogenize how we teach kids. you inevitably help one at the expense of the others.
The fact that a small group of special interest groups have made "boys and girls are different" into some divisive political issue is absurd.
Interesting, which metrics are a result of ignoring the very obvious statistically significant dimorphism between genders, and not say political corruption, or corporate consolidation? Which statistical significant dimorphism causes this “screw up”?
The fact that teenager boys can't tell that Andrew Tate is a characture of failed masculinity or that looksmaxxing is straight up idiotic is a pretty glaring example of that.
I'm not saying that something is not rotten in the state of Denmark, I just don't think you've managed to clearly articulate it at all, I think it's much more complicated than "we need to respect the differences between the genders" as your word salad reflects. In fact, as usual I think within group differences are much greater than between group differences, and "We need to respect the difference between the genders" is culture war nonsense that gets the prescription wrong.
In fact, couldn't you argue that the problem is too much of a focus on the difference between men and women leading us to help women get to college and not men? Shouldn't we treat them more the same?
describing my points as "word salad" seems a bit dismissive and unnecessarily pejorative - but I digress. I'll ignore your obvious ideological axe to grind and see if we can at least reach common ground.
Watch any group of boys and girls at play. sure you have outliers but by and large they do tend to conform to one of two specific behavioral groups that historically we associated as ways boys and girls act. And I say this as someone who is fairy noncompetitive which itself made me somewhat of an outlier among boys when I was a kid. it doesn't change that the vast majority of boys found motivation in being competitive and historically pedagogy used that fact in order to motivate boys in their matriculation.
In my own experience, I tried to get my nieces more into tech and programming. trying to motivate them from a "hey isn't systems based thinking about how these things interact is cool" did absolutely nothing. Showing them how they can make a cool website design to show their friends (with a bit of vibe coding) absolutely got them more motivated.
But if you want to go further, lets start with the entire generation of boys who were told to sit still and listen and got medicated when they couldn't. We expected them to behave like girls and because we changed pedagogy to favor girls, we didn't notice when boys fell behind.
consider the two statements
- boys and girls exhibit dimorphism in behavior, motivations and interests.
- two boys can be more different from each other than between a boy and a girl.
These are only contradictory on a 2 dimensional graph. at 3 or higher, you can definitely have groupings of traits heavily skewed towards one group or another while having a different distribution on other traits.
I don't think the issue is us focusing on getting women into higher education. We changed the way we pick our educators and tuned our methodology primarily to benefit women. Its only a problem because we expect boys to excel in that system. its no more fair than what we had before when women were excluded at every level. treating them the same means shifting our methodology will inevitably benefit one at the expense of the other.
Historically teaching has always been “women’s work”. It’s skewed a bit more female in recent years, but that’s because it skewed male temp rotation before then. it’s always seemed like an odd retcon to say that we turned education female, combining that with the low pay of education which will turn away more men.
I also feel like school has only gotten more flexible over time, my parents generation talked about how easy we have it and school was more about sitting still for them, as it was for me twenty years ago.
I’m not saying the education system is great, or that there aren’t ways to improve it, or that we couldn’t improve it based on gender differences, or that there aren’t more “college prep for girls” programs than “college prep for boys programs” just that your specific description of concerns I don’t think is quite historically accurate. I think it’s weird to complain that we need to treat men and women differently when most people’s problem seems to be that we treat women differently; we’ve had 60 or so years of women’s studies and feminist theories playing out. Should we start caning boys? Is that the solution to all our problems?
As with most things, it’s probably just the end of postwar American Economic domination. Go before World War 2 and the high school graduation rates aren’t high enough to describe anything about the way things “used to be”.
Yes, girls can be bullies too, etc..
Sure it does. Boys and girls are different. Hence, they receive different treatment, which the OP was originally befuddled by.
This part I really do not understand. The undeniable fact that boys and girls are different in several aspects does not make either superior or inferior in value or in dignity.
On the other hand, anything can be read negatively if you put enough will and effort into it, as so many people around here demonstrate.
How about being a bit more constructive in our criticism?
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To bring some context:
I have a friend who called up other friends in the group and repeats over and over that there's no difference between the sexes, that it's artificial, ect. He did this when he dated a trans woman, yet didn't seem to realize that his partner felt so strongly about their gender that they changed it.
Also, what kind of humans do you generally interact with? How many of these are children?
I am a proponent of paternity leave. The counter argument is always based on biological differences. So are the arguments for not having women in many roles in the armed forces.
> gender is a human invention.
That is a tautology. It is by definition.
The only circumstance in which there are men strong enough to so something that women can't do is at the most elite level of athletics. Any role relevant to society that would require that level of strength, we have machines for, because the majority of men and women are not elite powerlifters, and because they probably need way more strength than is safe even for those elite athletes to require all the time.
And then yes women can give birth and breastfeed (though it doesn't seem like being raised on formula alone is much of a problem these days). I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
Also, ask women how their mood and abilities swing during their cycles. Both menstrual and life cycle with menopause and stuff. Some have it easy, but many women I know have quite big swings in both cases. And yet modern society requires one to perform the same day in day out. Which works out pretty well for men, but for women... I'm not so sure.
I am interested to hear what career or societal role you think a women cannot or should not do because of menstrual related mood swings. Because it clearly isn't President of the United States or billionaire CEO.
I don't think that women cannot or shouldn't do something. I see they don't exactly enjoy to suck it up and do the job regardless of their body needs.
We as a society used to tell boys to „man up“. Now that's frowned upon (and that's good). But now we started to tell girls and women to „man up“ and ignore their cycles. And both are just as bad. At least we should give teenage girls and young-to-middle-age women few extra days off school/work in a month. Scheduling might become a nightmare with irregular cycles though. Dealing with menopause for significant portion of women is awful too. But I've no idea how modern economy could deal. Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
> Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.
More "lax" working conditions all round.
For individual specialty (be it skills/abilities or lack of them), people can choose career or life paths accordingly. E.g. I’ve met a dead/mute constructions dude. He specialized in line of work where he works solo. If I accidentally wasn’t home while he was here, I wouldn’t have ever noticed.
On the other hand when you have massive groups with some specialty that match similar pattern… Over time it becomes a „norm“. It's not like some people decided what gender norms we should have a millennia ago and rolled with. It was rather a society trying to accommodate some groups of people with some skills and abilities and gender norms becoming a thing were a side effect.
As for more lax working conditions all round, it would be nice. But I’m not sure how modern economy would handle that in a fair way. And once you start institutionalizing more lax conditions for certain groups… I want to see that shitshow.
Bricklayers? Much manual labour. Some women can do it, some men cannot, but far more men can do it than women.
> People with different skin colours have different resiliences to sun exposure, but just because the sun is a big part of our life doesn't mean we NEED to shape society around those biological differences.
We have very simple fixes for that - such as clothing and protective sun creams. The same does not apply to physical differences between men and women.
> I don't see why those biological features need to affect roles as much as (some) people seem to think they should.
Not as much as some people think they should. It really depends what specific views you are thinking of. There are important differences: for example, women do initially need more parental leave to recover from giving birth. I think its a good idea to give men as much, but with different timing. Pregnancy has huge physical effects for quite a long time.
It goes both ways too. There wold be real social advantages to having more men becoming nurses (which can benefit from physical strength) and teaching (so boys, especially disadvantaged boys, have male educated role models).
Brother do you hear yourself. Your key example, the thing holding your entire argument together was brick layers. Fucking... brick layers.
And you think we don't have anything to eskew gender differences? Brother, look around you. 99.9999% of jobs can be done by men and women thanks to modern technology. Including fucking war!
Because you know what's stronger than men? Guns. And you know who can hold guns? Women. So, there you go, that's why the US army accepts women.
Almost every flight I take, a woman asks (or appreciates the offer) for me to help put her bag in the overhead compartment.
My wife appreciates that I can can carry a double stroller with the kids on it up a few steps.
The fact that you can't think of such examples might reveal more about you than about the necessity of strength in modern society.
Yes, as a man, our "strength" is mostly for show and is redundant in modern society. Also most men are not even very strong because we live sedentary lives. Because - surprise! - 99.9999% of all economic activity has nothing to do with strength.
This isn't ancient Rome and you aren't a spartan. Most men are fatties sitting at an office job. They don't have, nor need, strength. They need statins and metformin.
Physical possibilities are differences, drives are different, temperament and it's swings are different. Also many other differences. But hey, let's hide all the differences, strengths and weaknesses... And pretend everyone is equally good at everything.
We need equality, not sameness. Brute-forcing equality-through-sameness sucks on both sides. I'd say girls and women are more affected though. But men ain't taking it easy either. It's a hill I'm willing to take downvotes on.
> but gender is a human invention.
So you don't believe a person can be transgender, right?
If the law punishes one demographic less severely for the same actions, that's injustice. No different in principle from pre-modern practices where if a noble maimed a commoner, they'd just need to pay a fine, while if a commoner did the same, they'd be put to death.
In many systems of law, the punishment should mirror the crime. You gouge out an eye -> the government gouges out one of your eyes.
In every country, men commit almost all violent crimes. In school, boys physically bully other boys. Hence the physical punishment for them.
> What does this teach girls - that they can get away with more? That they're more fragile than even a prepubescent boy?
Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
Which systems aside form sharia law would that be?
And also the claim was that this law also applies to cyberbullying. So why should boys that cyberbully someone be caned and girls not?
As I've said, and @echoangle repeated, caning is used for cyberbullying, which girls do too (at a rate relatively close to boys actually). If the law was caning in response to physical bullying, and it just so happened that the vast majority of offenders were boys, I would not object on the basic of sexism (I still would not approve of schools being allowed to physically punish students).
> Yes, for homo sapiens, the female is more fragile than the male. This is basic biology. I'm sure that in praying mantis society, females get harsher punishments.
There's no way the typical 16 year old girl is more fragile than the typical 9 year old boy, yet only the latter is subject to this punishment. Until children reach the age of 12 or so the strength difference is quite minor (and there's even a brief period where girls are taller and heavier).
Also it's absurd to punish demographics differently based on their statistical averages. Redheads are less sensitive to pain, should your hair colour determine how many strokes of the cane you get?
That's just something people tell themselves. Yes, we socialize boys not to cry. That doesn't mean boys are "stronger", it means that they have a pathological fear of being perceived as weak which will cause them sexual and relationship problems until the day they die.
It's kind of a weird take to say that the issue here is that girls aren't being whipped too.
Your society will become an extinct group of people that probably will not even be remembered in another 200 years. If there is another advanced civilization yay attempts to understand the past like Europeans did, they will have an impossible time understanding what happened over the last 80 or so years when people lost the ability to tell the difference between males and females.
Have you ever heard the term “functional extinction”? It’s when a population still exists and it may even be reproducing, but the surrounding conditions and characteristics make it effectively inevitable that the population will go extinct over time. Being unable to differentiate between males and females and treating them the same is clear evidence of a terminal mental virus in humans. This very idea that males and females are the same will invariably die because it is not a successful reproductive strategy by definition.