That's not to say it's the only virtuous thing a woman can do, but it's so incredibly selfless to continuously drain your body and mind intentionally for the sake of a child's well-being.
This is gonna sound a little facetious, but... aren't you also doing the same?
> it's so incredibly selfless
Perpetuation of one's genes is far from selfless. (Unless perhaps one views one's genes as the important entity, and oneself as their mere vessel. But that's too deep for this post.)
Indeed, I've heard from one such emotionally immature would-be mother that pregnancy and motherhood is basically her license to be selfish. ("From now on I get to only think about myself", were her words. Personally, I'm not OK with anyone raising children while holding such mentality, as I believe they would not be able to empathize healthily with the needs of the child. I strongly advised her to reconsider, and got a response that she "wished she lived in a jurisdiction where abortions are illegal". This is your brain on patriarchy!)
I'm happy that you and your wife find it worthwhile to raise children. More power to you! But I responded to:
> Can you think of anything feminine that takes more strength than motherhood
with: remaining childless. So I think your counterpoint misses the mark.
---
On a related note, the discussion in other subthreads largely focuses on the role of "good" and "bad" father figures in the emotional growth of young men. The loss of good role models is lamented, and the men of the past are idealized as "the men of a a more cohesive society" or smth as if the 20th century was an idyllic utopia lol.
But wasn't the previous generation of men even less in touch with their emotions? And wasn't it more accepted in past generations to solve problems through violence and destruction? So why weep for this cycle being broken, instead of inventing something better? Last time I checked this was Hacker News, not Curmudgeon News ffs
I believe we should more openly consider the possibility that some percentage of males grow up fucked up because it was their mother who was not a decent person? Or perhaps she was a perfectly decent person who made a bad choice in the given circumstances, resulting in a poor environment for an infant to receive initial limbic calibration.
Because hey, nobody is infallible, not even childbearers. Crazy I know. This is a huge blind spot of our culture: being a mother is a tremendous responsibility, and we just sort of decide that there's no way for it to go wrong?
At the same time, virtually everyone means well to mothers and children. Nobody wants to make mothers more anxious, because that might just unleash a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which is the last thing anyone needs in this climate. So it's a really touchy subject - with which I unfortunately have a smidgen of experience - so I'll allow myself to elaborate for diversity's sake.
You know how in some traditional societies, people are considered mature and ready to start a family soon after puberty? While in our hi-tech utopia we remain infantilised throughout our 20s (which are prime reproductive age, biologically speaking), for the sake of an education that may or may not bring the promised benefits?
So there's an ubiquitous mix of vaguely contradictory cultural and biological factors that strongly pressure women into motherhood. Whether they want it or not. Whether they are in fact mature enough to make this decision or not.
This pressure is generally stronger than the willpower of an individual human being. Therefore, it takes considerably more fortitude to resist it, than to go with the default.
It's institutionalized misogyny on the deepest level: our society's self-perpetuation depends on this cycle of morally sanctioned self-delusion, and good luck unrooting that one without conceding ground to even harsher ways of life!
Many young women have been are conditioned throughout their lives that their ultimate "purpose" is to be mothers, and that their validity as human beings depends on their child-bearing potential. In the meantime, just like young men, they are deprived of opportunities for maturation and personal growth, and only offered a shallow existence in a maliciously confusing environment.
And this is how you end up a whole lot of very broken children who subconsciously wish they have never been born. Those children then grow up as insecure assholes who cause suffering for themselves and others while they blindly stumble to independently achieve the sense of personal safety and integrity that their caregivers failed to bestow upon them. (Source: am one.)
Men being pressured into parenthood by women who are themselves pressured into parenthood, is how you end up with absent, abusive, or ineffectual fathers. It's far from the only factor - but without this secret ingredient, they'd just harmlessly do their thing till they die, and not perpetuate their immaturity into the generations.
See also: rise of abortion bans, survivorship bias, falcolas and Pigalowda's posts.
Yeah, I am. Can I think of something more masculine (in a positive way, given context from thread) and challenging than being a good father and husband through it all? Maybe, but they're same order of magnitude and direction.
> Perpetuation of one's genes is far from selfless. (Unless perhaps one views one's genes as the important entity, and oneself as their mere vessel. But that's too deep for this post.)
My genes are not me. The societal pressures here are not to perpetuate and have children any more. At least not in most non-catholic circles (mostly joking). I should be making money, staying fit, finishing my side projects, kicking off a business, DM'ing sessions with friends, fixing up my house, taking up long-distance running, writing engaging linkedin posts, going for long bike rides, continuing boxing training, getting happy hours with my old buddies, blah blah blah.
I fight those urges every day, effectively sidelining my hopes and dreams because I'm nurturing one new singular hope: That my kids will have what they need to succeed. Just because I signed up for this when I decided to have kids doesn't mean it isn't challenging to keep it up. Just because my DNA moves on, doesn't mean I don't have to practice an order of magnitude more self discipline than I ever had to before. The payoff went from 1-2 years away for most things I'm usually engaged with with, to 20. I'll be near dead by the time they graduate college and start to have a fully functioning executive center. In that time, most my spare money and time will be spent on another human, with the only external payoff I can think of being that they might pick me a nice nursing home, and I can post cute pics of them on Facebook, if they don't get shot, run over, or OD on something before then.
> Can you think of anything feminine that takes more strength than motherhood
I don't think remaining childless takes more strength than motherhood. I think they're different directions, and that's ok. But my wife agrees, it wasn't hard to not have kids for most her life, she just had a good family that accepted her decisions whatever they were. She built a busy and full life, which took work, but it wasn't harder. Not at all. It may be different for others.
Everything below '---' is a lot of rhetorical questions, but I generally agree with the sentiment.
But actually having a child and raising it in this silly environment? I don’t even want to imagine. Maybe just do private school and try to ignore the awfulness that is modern western philosophy and “values”.
Sure. Enduring this kind of misogynistic classification of their womanhood when they don't have a child (regardless of the cause). The idea that someone isn't "feminine" or "strong" if they haven't pushed a child through their vagina† is complete and utter horseshit.
† Take note sometime of how much crap women who get c-sections will get from society.
That the US flag is routinely desecrated by reactionary conservatives up to and including police departments in the form of thin blue line, punisher flags, Molon labe lapels etc to explicitly advertise anti-American ideals seems at least as likely to be the cause of growing anti-flag feelings as any liberal agenda.
Masculinity can be wholesome or toxic.
Femininity can be wholesome or toxic.
Which one is discussed more, by a literal order of magnitude? [1]
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Toxic%20ma...
When it came to handling the things that go bump in the night, a social species with thumbs, a bit of fire and a few sharpened sticks went a hell of a long way.
And after bumping back for long enough, we were the only monsters left standing.
I think that one of the problems with toxic feminity is that it's a quieter and less explosive form of destructive behaviour - but it's very much a real thing.
As a weird little note regarding societies tolerance of the hatred of men, "misandristic" isn't even worth inclusion in the spell checker's dictionary.
What happened was the government has successfully co-opted the social contract between men and women so women now can reap most of its benefits while men carry most of the risks. That doesn't make things all hunky-dory for women, but it certainly doesn't do men a whole lot of good when some of their biggest assets in a relationship are stripped away and redistributed, without accommodating that in some form.
Meanwhile, society has done very little to put men in a positive light or encourage women to accept the 'new man'. If anything, it has done the opposite: women seem to respect men less than before, and men are expected to be more competitive than ever before, even on aspects which are practically immutable. Now society is slowly showing signs of how dysfunctional things become when men aren't incentivized to be men, while women aren't taught to respect the 'new man'. The men quit trying, the boys get stressed out, and the women run around asking the government to fix it somehow. Virtually no one is happy, and Socrates is rolling in his grave.
Not what I said; men are still needed - but it's been a damned long time since we spent our nights waiting around the fire in case of tiger.
I think it's the opposite. During the prehistoric times most food was actually gathered by women IIRC, and both sexes could use fire to scare away predators, so men were relevant for breeding nearly exclusively.
Today we have far more risky activities where men dominate, such as high-rise towers construction, firefighting, law enforcement, security, sailing etc etc.
The simple truth is that men handled the vast majority of situations where combat was required - we're bigger, stronger, faster, more aggressive.
Our aim is better, and (best of all) if half of us die it doesn't severely impact intergenerational population levels.
Women may have gone gathering, but men went hunting.
Fire fighting is some scary shit - but our ancestors took on short faced bears with sticks.
I think you greatly overestimate how much combat people faced during prehistoric times. Population was distributed sparsely, most food was gathered, not hunted, and was abundant, and you don't fight predators to scare them off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_warfare#Paleolithi...
In fact, I'm damned near certain of it.
~Modern humans have been around 30 times longer than that.
I'm not fighting tigers but the women around me sure are happy when I can carry something alone they struggle to do with three of them. There's a significant difference between a direct display and a bunch of commercialized abstractions. All those abstractions make people forget the value others have. We just so happened to push a lot of those abstractions onto men and the value they tend to bring as men.
The most interesting part was not how much women failed to survive, and how successful men were (which makes sense, as men are designed for survival), but the feeling of how much easier in that world is to show the need for masculanity (which is mostly not needed anymore).
Evolution doesn't only "design" a single sex for survival. (With the possible, arguable exception of some insect species.)
Women are structured as a compromise between their own needs and the needs of their children.
If you think for an instant that men and women aren't optimised for very different scenarios, then think harder.
Seriously, you can tell just by looking at us.
Or do you think that child bearing hips and big vulnerable mammaries are useful things to have in situations that call for physical action (other than birthing and feeding infants)?
As I understand it men have greater strength because they are optimized to fight other men for reproductive opportunity. This doesn't increase their opportunities for survival since fighting other men can get you killed. It increases their opportunities to reproduce.
Our advantages in a hostile environmental come from building tools not physical strength. If physical strength was important a male human would not be 5 times weaker than a gorilla.
So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
> So no, I would not say men are "designed" to survive on an island better than women, or whatever. They are designed to fight other men in a zero sum game.
False dichotomy. Also, what fraction of explorers do you think were men? Pretty much fucking all of them.
We don't get pregnant, so having children is not a physical inconvenience and (as I mentioned elsewhere) half of us can die without impacting the next generation's population.
If you think that men and women had the same evolutionary imperative to develop the skills required for navigating strange environments then you're not adequately considering the innumerable trade-offs involved.
????? I'm talking about the above claim men are "designed for survival", not whatever the heck you think we are talking about.
I like how humans have existed for 300,000 years, have 5,000 years of recorded history, and you think your ability to name explorers is a data point on who survives better on earth, or something?
No, they die far more often. Because they enter unknown risky situations.
Humans explore in search of new lands and resources, and in search of safe paths.
When they take the more vulnerable members of the tribe, they generally have a better idea of where they're going, what the path is, and what risks are involved.
If a path is too dangerous then they don't tend to take pregnant women and small children.
So because it is primarily adult or adolescent males that go on the more risky adventures, they're the ones that have the costly adaptations required to maximise the likelihood of survival.
Have you ever made a tool with your hands? Physical strength--especially grip strength--not just dexterity, is required for tool making. There are no vices or pliers in the Wild.
Men have a huge advantage in grip strength, and hence tool making. This study[1] suggests that elite female athletes in athletic disciplines that require grip strength only rank in the 25th percentile of grip strength when compared to men as a population.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
I suspect any of the western desert women would merrily laugh and wiggle their little finger were they to hear you speak.
If you look at the series, they took 14 random people for each group and gave them 2 days of survival training and basic helper tools.
Just looking at how the men killed the crocodile in a team work with their bare hands first time in their life without any help from experts looked awesome.
I don't think of anything aside from obvious physiological differences
> but there are right questions that boys dealing with a burst of testosterone should ask themselves
I mean, everyone's different, different personalities, different trials and tribulations of life. I have no idea how you can generalize across all teenage boys without making a bunch of stuff up
I really struggle to understand this question. Between masculinity and femininity is there one that is supposed to be obviously healthier?
If we go by what the marketing is pushing it's a toxic tarpit on both sides (see The Rules vs The Game).
There is a general corruption of the concept of masculinity in American culture. It’s similar to what’s happened to the symbol of the American flag, but more insidious.
When I say masculinity, or masculine values, what do you think of? When you think of someone who values their masculinity, who do you perceive? Now do the same for femininity. Which model is healthier?
Men and women have, on average, physiological differences. These differences are pronounced in puberty. That’s when these frameworks matter the most; they thus must be embedded in childhood. There is no right answer, I think, but there are right questions that boys dealing with a burst of testosterone should ask themselves. That we’ve ignored or even repressed that seems to link both failures in boy and fatherhood.
It also seems to naturally extend to trans and non-binary kids, another situation we are culturally bankrupt in addressing. Boys understanding and speaking to their feminine sides is, ironically, a classically masculine strength in the way women understanding and acting on their masculine sides is, traditionally, a classical sign of motherhood and through that feminine strength. (The linking of feminine strength and motherhood is obviously dated, though as someone who lives in bear and moose country I can see why it was originally embraced.)