Masculinization of woman

[Accipiter]

I'd definitely support dropping traditional gender roles. Humanity has made a lot of progress in the last 50 years, but I still think the biggest obstacle is just the mindset women have or were conditioned by society to have.

You may disagree with this random example here, but I heavily believe that with the same training and strength, 3 men would have successfully subdued the target, and the issue (besides lack of experience and training) was mainly the mentality of the officers. Maybe the difference in thinking comes from testosterone, or maybe it was socially conditioned, take your pick, but willpower would have won the fight, and they backed off when they clearly had an advantage.

[Kalinoche buenanoche]

what does dropping gender roles mean? most meek example that comes to mind is a parent thinking they should get yellow instead of pink or blue for their baby so that they won't feel bad about reinforcing color-sex associations. i'll-do-x-because-y thinking is still there.

[Accipiter]

It can mean a lot of things, each person may have their opinion on what gender roles are. The obvious parts are that men should have jobs, and women should stay home. If attacked by a mugger, the man will defend and the woman will stand and watch or flee. A woman will do household chores, even if in the situation where she also works and makes the same income as the man. Women must be emotional while men must be stoic. You can find plenty of examples online.

The only place I can really see this kind of thinking still being useful is regarding population in a war. Sending men/women 90/10 is much more important than sending 50/50.

[Kalinoche buenanoche]

@Accipiter what if all sides would send 50/50? maybe women would be so opposed to it (thanks to gender roles) that the war would end sooner

[Metamorph]

@Accipiter what if all sides would send 50/50? maybe women would be so opposed to it (thanks to gender roles) that the war would end sooner

As it is most societies don't have enough tough women for 50/50 and no one is risking their society for that. If a society had enough women for 50/50, the women wouldn't be opposed to it. The only societies which have had anything close to 50/50 have been pretty bloodthirsty.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

Well, gender roles simply don't matter until they do. I remember at Starr they took extra precaution if two female staff was working and often had a male come in just in case. Perhaps it was just paranoia, but this sort of thing is rooted in everybody's brain. When trying to create a civilization, I'm sure things like homosexuality will be discouraged as you need males and females into select roles to populate the communities. However I feel what conservatives don't understand is that type of thinking is only useful/limited to the area in which it was born -- and only for awhile. They live too much in the past. As we naturally evolve, so will our gender roles- and those 'pure' heterosexuals will give birth to some weird gender hybrid babies anyway. There is no way to make the gene pool 'pure 100% heterosexual normal' because the very act of trying to do so ironically makes even more cute little gay babies. These very differing viewpoints about gender are thought to be competing with each other but on a grand scale, as far as mother nature goes, they are working together in harmony. I for one am thankful we don't go 'ew we gotta burn it' anymore to every male who doesn't like to fish and hunt, and to every woman that does. Most of the people who say they want to go back to harsh times like that are fibbing to me and when push comes to shove they would just hide behind a powerful gay male witch anyway.

"No ultra suede is a miracle. This is just good timing." <3 John Waters.

[Metamorph]

Honestly "straight" stereotypes seem much more a function of Social Class than anything. I dare anyone to earnestly say the men in Steve Harvey's Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man who are into sports, cheap beer, not listening, and being slobs are somehow related to the Roman ideal male citizen. Apparently until the 17th century people thought females were defective males who didn't have enough heat to push their genitals out, but nearly everyone was defective anyways so there was no Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus nonsense then yet even if the actual situation wasn't much more ideal in modern terms (I don't think modern terms are right either.) Minus the defective part since we have for example the Queens of England who have been much more important than the kings since the idea of Elizabethan England existed, I'm not sure that's wrong. Skinny females and fat males do often end up with phenotypical traits of the opposite sex, and and androgens are metabolized into estrogens in fat tissue, so I think sex probably is a fairly direct function of body fat. However, "heteronormative" traits are kind of the opposite of normative in most cases.