RPS coverage of Sexism, Misogyny

[DDL]

Also, technically, I believe most species are asexual.

Because most species are bacteria (or viruses).

[gamer0004]

Okay so to try and steer this somewhat back on topic again.

Do you think activists (both feminists and climate/green movement activists) actually hurt their causes, now the internet provides people with readily accessible information that point out logical flaws?
Has the internet, with all its information, actually made solving problems more difficult because the general public won't notice if either activists or scientists present a complicated and to some extent uncertain phenomenon, while a simplification that draws attention is easily gainsaid by the Forces of the Internet?

[AEmer]

In my oppinion the internet has merely supercharged rhetorics.

I mean, yeah. I can deconstruct arguments much better because I've been an internet dweller for almost 20 years.

Unfortunately, a lot of discussions can't be determined using deconstruction. You can only criticize the way something is said, not what is said, using deconstruction. We generally put the onus on the person saying something to say it well, and if they don't, we reject it, but it should be clear that this approach has a lot of weak points.

If you rely on deconstruction to dismiss arguments, you will necessarily be dismissing points of view which are correct, but which are hard to argue are correct.
So it helps, but it's not like some universal tool that make being wrong inconceivable, and make you able to always sniff out stuff which is right.

And the whole slew of arguments which rely on higher order logical mechanisms that are too intricate to grasp, or instincts, or emotions, you can basically do nothing about those with deconstruction.

@DDL:

Or "on average males have a lower chance of being a father than females do of being a mother"?

This is what I'm talking about exactly; as a male, you have to earn the right to fatherhood (and a significant number of males fail to do so). As a female, it takes some very special circumstance for you to need to earn the right to motherhood. Either you're unlucky and you basically cannot have children, or you can.

[AEmer]

@ddl (more proper response)

Ok, that's fair. Yeah, it _is_ a naive argument, and yeah, it _is_ specific to our current society but the ideas of male inheritance and male limits on reproduction seem to have shaped a lot of the gender roles of the past 2000 years of western culture...and that all comes down to being a specific solution to he problem of having one gender being able to bear children, and the other one being unable to.

Is it silly to say that it is the source of modern day sexism? Probably. I can't argue very convincingly in favor of that assertion, at least. Is it fair to say that it has had a very big impact on how sexism works? I think so. I still question whether sexism could exist at all if both men and women could bear their own children.

[DDL]

Physical power comes into it, certainly: purely because men are on average more muscular, bulky and damage-resistant. If you had both sexes able to bear children but one was (on average) stronger, there's very high probability that the stronger will become more dominant. That state of dominance based on physical power might become some prevalent that it would persist throughout a shift from physical to political/financial power.

Now you could argue that the strength differences themselves stem from childbearing/not-childbearing, and there would be some merit in that (though as noted this is simply ONE strategy nature could settle on), but I'd argue that the strength issue is more at root, regardless of source. It is simply easier for men to physically dominate women than vice versa, and this sort of background perception can probably pervade even a wholly non-violent society.

Physical differences are going to continue to be relevant, I suspect, even though they shouldn't be. And a desire for "equality" is going to have to account for that, either by compensating, or perhaps by arranging things (assessments for promotion, etc) to be as gender-blinded as possible, wherever possible.

Tricky!

[VectorM]

Oooooor, people might learn not to obsess over cosmic justice.

[AEmer]

Now you could argue that the strength differences themselves stem from childbearing/not-childbearing, and there would be some merit in that (though as noted this is simply ONE strategy nature could settle on), but I'd argue that the strength issue is more at root, regardless of source

This is pretty much exactly what I would argue; I'd say that you couldn't even tell who were male and who were female in the world laid out like that.

I guess you could still have gender issues, though, if mother nature was an asshole about it and decided it would be better for the species to have physically unequal genders 'just because', in spite of necessitating generally similar reproductive rules.