The Crusade Against Social Injustice

Quast said:

One way or another you would have guaranteed inbreeding by the 2nd generation. So yeah.

Genes would remain diverse enough at ten thousand females, easily. There are human ethnicity that have sprang from fewer.

Its the gathering of sheeps, they feel comfy when baabaa-ing together

fraggle said:

Okay, so maybe this was relevant when we were a hunter-gatherer species; why is it still relevant today? We don't have to fight tigers for food any more: in modern western countries, food is plentiful and we have things like advanced medicine that keep us safe. So why keep these gender roles?

Because we lived in scarcity for the vast majority of our existence as a species and the modern era of excess is a new thing in terms of the length of the human race, so how we act in the modern world has not been so firmly ingrained into our DNA as how we acted when we had to go out and hunt for shit?

fraggle said:

Okay, so maybe this was relevant when we were a hunter-gatherer species; why is it still relevant today? We don't have to fight tigers for food any more: in modern western countries, food is plentiful and we have things like advanced medicine that keep us safe. So why keep these gender roles?

Except we haven't been a hunter gather species since the dawn of civilization around 9000 BCE. Since then we've been herding, raising, harvesting, and building Infrastructure, if at more primitive levels. You can blame sexism and patriarchy all you want but there may be a reason gender dimorphism has been relatively the same past and percent in most of today's civilizations sans the western world the past couple of decades.

But how we react to shit based on those hunter gatherer impulses continues to influence how we react to shit today because we're biologically haven't changed and men and women are still different. Men are still better equipped to deal with shitty working conditions because we've converted the same things that in the past were useful for hunting and fending off other marauding men like, being the stronger, faster, more physically adept part of the race to doing that shit in the modern part of society.

It's not just being better at "lifting" shit, it's that if you take an average guy vs an average girl that guy has better endurance, thus he's better equipped to do menial bullshit in shitty conditions and far more willing to do so because it has less of an impact on his body in the short run.

fraggle said:

I guess I just don't get the point you're making. It sounds like you're just using "biological differences" as a handwavey way to explain away gender divides; "oh, it's just 'biology', they don't want to work in those industries". Human beings are thinking conscious beings, we're not just slaves to our biology. The question is: if women can do most or all the same jobs as men, why don't they? It's an important question that deserves answering; I suspect the actual answer is very complicated, and "biological differences" seems like a shallow answer that doesn't do it justice.

I note that neither of you responded to this paragraph. I still maintain: at the very least, it's a complicated issue, and dismissing entire issue away with "biological differences" seems like a really lame excuse.

As I've noted, in our culture it's a discrepancy that has real world effects (lower average pay for women). Isn't it perhaps worth considering the issue in a bit more depth than just dismissing it out of hand as something that's just inevitable, "natural", just down to biology?

Or to look at it another way: presumably you at least accept that there was a time where women just straight-up weren't allowed to do certain jobs? Or faced real discrimination when they did? Isn't it reasonable to assume that discrimination like that doesn't just go away, that it takes shifts in cultural attitudes as well as legal frameworks to give women truly equal opportunities?

The argument isn't that sexism doesn't exist and still cause problems. No one is debating that. The argument here is that the notion that there aren't ANY ingrained gender differences that society is not responsible for, is wrong. Basically you're saying what is "manly" and what is "womanly" is totally because of society, technician and I are saying that no, most of those traits are that way because the majority of the people in that sex exhibit them due to shit that was critical way back in the day. The pay gap exists, but certain things that cause it to exist are not solvable. A man will indeed make more over his lifetime on average than a woman.

Mainly because half of this country lives with another person and the majority of the time that other person can elect to not do shitty things they don't like because the other person means they don't have to. No woman is saying "No I'm not going to work overtime because society says I shouldn't" they're deciding that the extra money gained is not worth their hours lost to gain it, vs the man who is more willing to do it.

Now if someone wants to ban women from working overtime, I'll take to the streets with guns and we can have a goddamn revolution about that shit.

or turn it on its head. Working in a female dominated sector (care industry) and being told that you are disallowed from doing certain things because of your penis. Families come in and throw a shit fit because Great Aunt Eatsherownshit has been cared for by a man. Management soothes family, tells them that their views are totally acceptable and ensures them that such sacrilege will never happen again.

It would be annoying if all the fucks I gave about my job hadn't been beaten out of me long before now.

Tarnsman said:

majority of the people in that sex exhibit them due to shit that was critical way back in the day.

So if part of is it cultural, part of it is biological, based on what do you claim that "the majority" of it is down to the latter?

A little boy playing mock battle with wooden swords in the muck because of some primal adventurous/warrior instinct? Biological. A little girl playing with barbie because of some primal nurturing instinct? Biological.

A man being considered weird for being a nurse? That's cultural. A girl being considered weird and treated unfairly because she's a nerd? That's cultural.

But you haven't actually answered my point, or maybe you misunderstood me. What I mean is: collectively, almost all women decide they're not going to work in the construction industry. Suppose through advanced superscience we have a machine that can tell us instantly what percentage of the cause of that is due to societal attitudes and what percentage of that is due to biology. You assert that "the majority" of it is down to biology. Based on what?

Tarnsman said:

But how we react to shit based on those hunter gatherer impulses continues to influence how we react to shit today because we're biologically haven't changed and men and women are still different. Men are still better equipped to deal with shitty working conditions because we've converted the same things that in the past were useful for hunting and fending off other marauding men like, being the stronger, faster, more physically adept part of the race to doing that shit in the modern part of society.

It's not just being better at "lifting" shit, it's that if you take an average guy vs an average girl that guy has better endurance, thus he's better equipped to do menial bullshit in shitty conditions and far more willing to do so because it has less of an impact on his body in the short run.

Those gender roles are mostly useless though, even back then. Women didn't hunt not because they couldn't, men were stronger and didn't want to do the tedious work of gathering so they forced women to do it. The men went out and sometimes returned with meat but most hunter gatherer societies relied on forage and fibrous roots which were gathered by women.

I say 'most' loosely since there are a wide variety of these communities that had different diets and traditions. Some didn't have traditional roles, in certain communities the women participated in the hunting. There's a tribe down south of where I live that did communal bird catching and fishing with baskets that involved both genders.

Gender roles are mostly a power relation thing, they have very little purpose.

I want to make it clear I'm talking about traits, not roles. "Parent" is a role. That's genderless. "Worker" is a role. That's genderless.

Traits are things like "aggressiveness". These are the things that influence what we like and the things that the majority of men exhibit we consider male and the things that the majority of women exhibit we consider female. Both genders have them, they're just more dominant/less dominant depending on where you fall. That's my argument. And when deciding whether or not to take a job or assignment those traits come into play.

So while say both men and women would be hunters. A man is more likely to take on the dangerous prey where as a woman is more likely to take on the deer or whatever. That difference has carried forward to modern society. Except instead of trying to take down a bison or whatever, it's standing in a 100 degree galvanizing plant sweating your balls off all day long.

fraggle said:

But you haven't actually answered my point, or maybe you misunderstood me. What I mean is: collectively, almost all women decide they're not going to work in the construction industry. Suppose through advanced superscience we have a machine that can tell us instantly what percentage of the cause of that is due to societal attitudes and what percentage of that is due to biology. You assert that "the majority" of it is down to biology. Based on what?

Because we have enough jobs that a woman can look at that and say "yeah no I'm not doing that, I have weighed the pros and cons and decided that backbreaking labor is not worth my time" where a man says "whatever money"

Tarnsman said:

It's not just being better at "lifting" shit, it's that if you take an average guy vs an average girl that guy has better endurance, thus he's better equipped to do menial bullshit in shitty conditions and far more willing to do so because it has less of an impact on his body in the short run.

Women have more endurance than men as well as better resistance to pain, which makes sense when you consider that when pregnant they have to carry a significant burden with them 24/7 for several months.

In traditional agrarian societies, it's women who have the most mind-numbingly menial jobs. Who walks 10 miles every day to fetch and carry water back home in Africa? Women. Who crouches on the ground, spine bent in two, gathering wheat reaped by the men? Women. Who spends all evening ruining their eyesight separating lentils from stones? Women. Go to the countryside and ask some grandmas over there to tell you stories about the work their own grandmas did. You'll get lots of menial bullshit in shitty conditions, guaranteed!

I think Tarnsman has it - yes, a woman can certainly work in technical IT or construction and men can work in the care industry. Some even do, but oestrogen dictates that a nurturing role is preferable whilst testosterone is all about taking on challenges and overcoming obstacles. Obviously I'm simplifying here, but I'd like to think the point is made.


Funnily enough, a couple of days ago I had my own stand for gender equality. Specifically, my brother's girlfriend decided that I'd offended her with a joke (not a misogynist one) and demanded I apologised, because she's a woman and I can't make jokes about them like I would with a man. I told her she's a person in my eyes and gets treated exactly the same, therefore she can go fuck herself until such a time as she learns to take a joke. I'm autistic and I managed it, so she should have it easy. Strange, how equality never seems to include taking the rough with the smooth...

Women have far better pain resistance, not endurance. Women do those jobs in those countries because the men are out doing other shit/being lazy assholes. I'm talking about in Western society where we have free choice and jobs aren't "the jobs the men do and the women can do anything left over" and a guy can't point a rifle and a woman and say "yeah you're doing this for the rest of your life because I said so".

Gez said:

Social justice is stupid.

There are a bunch of legitimate issues that need to be campaigned for, certainly. But when you start lumping them all together in a neat little package that you call social justice is when you start getting hopelessly lost up your own arse.

Because then it ceases to be separate issues that can be solved, and instead becomes merely a tool to prop yourself up as being oh-so progressive and right-thinking while everyone else is a narrow-minded reactionary fascist who should just die. It leads to the dumbest things, too.

While White American tumblrists are busy denouncing the oppressive Western rape culture, they tend to forget about how the issues they fight are faring outside of the awful oppressive White Western rape culture of awful oppression. Some would probably even defend things like Iraq's Jaafari Personal Status Law because "it's their culture" and "we cannot judge".

#check your privileges #die cis scum #kill all men

The thing is that all the various -isms and forms of discrimination are interrelated and connected to each other ("intersectionality" is the academic term), so trying to have all the individual movements is like trying to attack the hydra one head at a time. The Tumblr types are mostly wannabes anyway--they ride the coattails of real activists while pretending they're important and sometimes shitting on the real activists when said activists don't completely match that particular Tumblr circle-jerk.

#slacktivism #unwarrantedselfimportance #getajob

As for social justice activists who actually matter, PZ Myers among others have commented on the sort of fuckery that goes on in Islamist governments and endorsed people who used to live in Islamic countries and now write criticism of Islamic fundamentalism from an (ex-)Islamic perspective, but being a Westerner and giving such criticism puts you in a very difficult place because of the massive power imbalance and the Western world's imperial history with the Islamic world and the continued support of Islamist theocrats by the West whenever it suits them.

Gez said:

Women have more endurance than men as well as better resistance to pain, which makes sense when you consider that when pregnant they have to carry a significant burden with them 24/7 for several months.

In traditional agrarian societies, it's women who have the most mind-numbingly menial jobs. Who walks 10 miles every day to fetch and carry water back home in Africa? Women. Who crouches on the ground, spine bent in two, gathering wheat reaped by the men? Women. Who spends all evening ruining their eyesight separating lentils from stones? Women. Go to the countryside and ask some grandmas over there to tell you stories about the work their own grandmas did. You'll get lots of menial bullshit in shitty conditions, guaranteed!

Let's not forget the tremendous physical labor and considerable danger that goes into nursing! How many of the men here would be much help lifting a 350-pound immobile fatass off a bed, never mind doing that many times a day? And then add the horrible, grueling hours and the dangers of infectious diseases, needles, blades, apeshit psychotic patients, etc.

Woolie Wool said:

As for social justice activists who actually matter, PZ Myers among others have commented on the sort of fuckery that goes on in Islamist governments and endorsed people who used to live in Islamic countries and now write criticism of Islamic fundamentalism from an (ex-)Islamic perspective, but being a Westerner and giving such criticism puts you in a very difficult place because of the massive power imbalance and the Western world's imperial history with the Islamic world and the continued support of Islamist theocrats by the West whenever it suits them.

PZ Lyers is an asshole. His hug-box, Freethought Blogs, is the worst example of a social justice think tank.

Let's not forget the tremendous physical labor and considerable danger that goes into nursing! How many of the men here would be much help lifting a 350-pound immobile fatass off a bed, never mind doing that many times a day? And then add the horrible, grueling hours and the dangers of infectious diseases, needles, blades, apeshit psychotic patients, etc.

When you said "nursing" I instinctively thought breast feeding and the whole paragraph comes off hysterically funny.

Tarnsman said:

I want to make it clear I'm talking about traits, not roles. "Parent" is a role. That's genderless. "Worker" is a role. That's genderless.

Traits are things like "aggressiveness". These are the things that influence what we like and the things that the majority of men exhibit we consider male and the things that the majority of women exhibit we consider female. Both genders have them, they're just more dominant/less dominant depending on where you fall. That's my argument. And when deciding whether or not to take a job or assignment those traits come into play.

So while say both men and women would be hunters. A man is more likely to take on the dangerous prey where as a woman is more likely to take on the deer or whatever. That difference has carried forward to modern society. Except instead of trying to take down a bison or whatever, it's standing in a 100 degree galvanizing plant sweating your balls off all day long.

With respect, none of that reflects reality though and you are also not considering natural selection. Most sweatshops for example use women and children. I've worked in a variety of factories and females are not relegated to easy jobs, the food processing lines for example are worked 'exclusively' by women here, while the men operate the machinery which requires only intermittent attention. The processing lines are horrible and require the monotonous endurance of slow twitch muscle. 'Hard work' is a class trait not a gender one, the lower your economic status the shittier the job you gotta do.

In regards to traits, nurturing plays a larger factor than you give credence to but you also have natural selection to consider. Many men now are born who are small, gentle endomorphs. They suit domestic and diplomatic roles far more than any aggressive one. Likewise aggressive women are born, they love hunting etc. Society chooses traits and selectively breeds them, small weak men were less successful in breeding in the past, now however economic power becomes more important than physical so they can find a willing mate. Likewise there are women born physically stronger than the average male (remember the average male is actually quite weak and can only bench around 60kg for 1 rep). Human selection aside, natural selection to an extent selectively bred women for a higher fat to muscle ratio and dominance of slow twitch muscle. This is changing now though, both genders are exhibiting more variety.



That's Valerie Vili, you can see she is more of an aggressive mesomorph, if selectively bred that could be what women would be like. The conditions that required passive ectomorph women are probably past now, so new traits may become the standard in the future.

Technician said:

PZ Lyers is an asshole. His hug-box, Freethought Blogs, is the worst example of a social justice think tank.

Yeah the whole Freethought Blogs thing is shameful, I don't know how people like that manage to succeed.

MegaTurtleRex said:

'Hard work' is a class trait not a gender one, the lower your economic status the shittier the job you gotta do.

Eh. Women do a lot of menial slave work, sure. But you'll still have men-exclusive jobs. For example, nowhere around the Earth do women mine. As far as I know, they're not even allowed to by law in most European countries. It's just unreasonable, given the physical strain and horrible working conditions. The few mesomorphs you mention might be able to do it, but they'd wither sooner (joints giving up sooner, most probably) and they're better off following an Olympic career. :P

Technician said:

PZ Lyers is an asshole. His hug-box, Freethought Blogs, is the worst example of a social justice think tank.

A juvenile pun and a smarmy insult really don't do anything to discredit PZ Myers but much to make you look like you have no idea what you're talking about. Also I don't think PZ Myers have ever said all white cis men should shut up about everything forever (being a hetero white cis man himself!) so he's far from the "worst example" of a social justice think thank. I've read some idiot who asserted that some random "young adult" fiction writer whose name I cannot remember should be banned from publishing because he's white, his books were more popular than the SJW's favorite non-white authors (but if you're old enough to be launching political crusades on Tumblr, aren't you too old to be reading children's books?), and for no other reason. Just out of spite that this white guy was selling lots of books, Tumblr Asshole thought he shouldn't be allowed to write books. That is a Social Justice Warrior.

Technician said:When you said "nursing" I instinctively thought breast feeding and the whole paragraph comes off hysterically funny. [/B]

Well that's what the field is called. The only reason I can think of why the term was ever applied to breast-feeding was that Victorian/Edwardian people were so sexually immature they couldn't get over the word "breast". It used to be "wet-nursing", and that was only when the mother hired another woman (the wet-nurse) to do the job for her.

MegaTurtleRex said:

With respect, none of that reflects reality though and you are also not considering natural selection. Most sweatshops for example use women and children. I've worked in a variety of factories and females are not relegated to easy jobs, the food processing lines for example are worked 'exclusively' by women here, while the men operate the machinery which requires only intermittent attention.

We're talking about in a free society with surplus jobs not places where those literally are the only jobs. Sweatshops are worked by poor easily oppressed people, that's why they're sweatshops. You know who are generally the easiest to oppress? The women and the children. In western society where people are more free to chose their profession, Women aren't looking at high paying jobs in shit like sanitation and saying, "nah I'm not going to do that because society says it's not acceptable in my gender", they're saying "I'm not going to do that because I have other options that don't involve picking up shit all day"

And while the era of excess means we have a wider variety of people are breeding predominantly male traits and predominantly female traits do still exist. If you go out and grab 100 random people from the street with a 50/50 gender split and then have them beat the crap out of each other, the men are going to win that fight the vast majority of the time.

See here is the problem I have with this. Saying these things don't exists is just as bad as saying that men and women HAVE to stay confined to societal norms.

Tarnsman said:

See here is the problem I have with this. Saying these things don't exists is just as bad as saying that men and women HAVE to stay confined to societal norms.

I think you misread or overlooked some of my post, those traits exist, I even explained why. They are there through a mix of natural selection and nurture. They are malleable, and in cases of strength etc. often exaggerated; the average man is not particularly strong, fit, or aggressive. Try getting 15 pushups out of most of your friends :P

The example of women working in factories is not from a third-world country but from here in Australia, where our working conditions are higher than say America or U.K. and the pay gap is smaller. Yet still you find in factories women are relegated to just as crappy jobs.

Some industries like mining mentioned above are predominantly worked by men right? Here in Australia we have the mining boom at the moment. Most of the factors are not related to physical reasons though. The women involved directly in the industry are relegated to lower paying positions "Some jobs in the mining industry are dominated by women: 92% of general clerks in the mining industry were women, along with 90% of accounts clerks, and 99% of personal assistants." They are in the industry and could for example easily drive trucks and operate machinery but instead are given lower paying roles. They also have a role outside of the mining industry in the boom-communities, sex workers, strippers etc. where work conditions are poorly monitored.

As for the 100 random people on the street sexperiment. You would be watching the lowest common denominators duking it out in a battle of grabbing and weak punches which would do nothing to reflect their ability to sustain the slow-twitch endurance work that constitutes the majority of unskilled labour.

I guess to TLDR, there are differences, biological ones related to social and natural selection, but they are often exaggerated and malleable. The average woman might not be able to work in certain conditions but the same stands for the average man. The lack of presence of the non-average women in male dominated industries (now aided by machinery which makes physical ability less of an issue) is at least suspect.

dew said:

It's just unreasonable, given the physical strain and horrible working conditions. The few mesomorphs you mention might be able to do it, but they'd wither sooner (joints giving up sooner, most probably) and they're better off following an Olympic career. :P

Well, athletes would survive better than most :O The lady pictured above is a shot-put medallist. That particular sport requires intense weight training, (squats, bench etc.) so their bodies have better support and all-round endurance.

Woolie Wool said:

A juvenile pun and a smarmy insult really don't do anything to discredit PZ Myers but much to make you look like you have no idea what you're talking about.

I think he might be right though, PZ Myers has acted like a bit of a douche in the past.

This is a better, more cool headed video.

Better yet, just go to the comments section of one of PZ's blogs. Well, actually, PZ probably already deleted any opposing comments, but the cannibalism of that community is something to be had. tumblr-tier. There is a reason the septic community was split in half and A+ stays in their own hug-box.

Nice channel, the guy is really level headed. PZ Meyers seems even worse, very petty man.

MegaTurtleRex said:

the average man is not particularly strong, fit, or aggressive. Try getting 15 pushups out of most of your friends :P

Since the majority of my friends don't sit on the computer all day and actually go outside this is an easy task. If you wanted something the average guy can't do, you should have gone with pull ups bro.

MegaTurtleRex said:

The lack of presence of the non-average women in male dominated industries (now aided by machinery which makes physical ability less of an issue) is at least suspect.

Because I'm not talking about industries I'm talking about positions. Like welder, or galvanizer, or miner (as in down in the mine getting dirty not using heavy equipment), there are plenty of women who work in say construction in the US but very few who are actually doing said construction, and they're not regulated just to the shit jobs all the way from management down to clerks they're there until you get to the actual field guys then all those are absolutely dominated by men.

You'd be surprised how many active people aren't very strong or fit, even 15 pushups is too much for many of the people I know and that is just entry level fitness. One of my big mouth uncles is always going on about how hard he works but couldn't use my bench-press when I was 16. On the flipside, I couldn't work for as long as he did since he had built up endurance, which he rubbed in every opportunity he had XD

As for the mines, I agreed with you that women aren't in there getting dirty, they have been relegated to (or chosen to undertake) other jobs. The point was that there are women who can do those jobs, again the traits you mentioned in the post I originally quoted are exaggerated and malleable.

I mean this is a 17 year old very small girl:

She is 52kg and you can see her squatting 110kg (242 pounds) at 3:30. According to exrx.net she is squatting at the level of an advanced male. http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/SquatStandards.html

I find no reason why she couldn't do hard physical work if she wanted to. There are plenty of reasons other than sexism why women aren't in certain lines of work, I've just never seen the giant physical gap between men and women that everyone claims exists. The average person in general is unremarkable in strength and fitness regardless of gender.

dew said:

For example, nowhere around the Earth do women mine.

Nowadays, maybe. They used to. Men, women, children, everybody mined. You had entire villages built by a mining company; all the inhabitants were miners. They used their wage to pay their rent, and they bought their food at the company's shop. A closed-circuit system, very close to slavery. This was how it worked in Europe in the late 19th century.

Yeah I forgot about that. The women used to work naked with the children for some reason, you can imagine the bruising and scrapes that would get on you and there was some kind of public shaming or ostracization as a result too.