Its 3014, and we have achieved gender equality…

1. Women choose to have babies because they want to spend some time with them.
2. The default childcare arrangement is therefore a mother and some other people (this has nothing to do with SAHMs).
3. If gender did not matter, the other people would be equally likely to be male or female.
4. The only way of making the amount of childcare done by women as a class and men as a class equal is to either a. stop birth mothers spending any time with their own children or b. make up a male role that is considered equivalent to that of birth mother, and insist each birth mother has such a male around. That is patriarchy.

Nope, still no idea. Sorry.

I will say in answer to you not understanding my post, that is because you are assuming that I am talking about SAHMs or women individually looking after their own children, and you have then responded with a SAHM vs WOHM debate.

I am not suggesting women stay home. I am suggesting that almost all women who choose to have a baby will do so because they want to spend some time with that baby. That does not make them SAHMs.

If gender does not matter outside of pregnancy, the gender of the other people providing childcare would be totally random. There would be no reason for there to be any such thing as a 'father' at all.

I am not going to get drawn into a debate over whether single mothers, SAHM mothers or mothers in general are selfish. The arguments are well rehearsed elsewhere. I am also not going to get into a critique of global farming compared to women's small holding.

This is a matter of simple probability.

Let's say women's childcare time is green balls in a bag, men's childcare time is yellow balls.

Most women choose to go through childbirth and pregnancy because they want to have a relationship with their baby. Having a relationship involves spending time with someone, if that someone is a child that time is childcare (if you are uncomfortable with referring to what birth mothers do as childcare, then call it looking after children or whatever you are happy with, but I'm not typing that out each time).

So in selection of childcare, we almost always start off with a green ball preselected.

If you want ten childcare workers, so that each person does 10% of the childcare time, you randomly select another nine balls from the bag, that may be either green or yellow. But because you always have one green ball to start with, the probability is that most of the ten balls will be green. So most childcare is done by greens.

To make it simpler arithmetic, if you want two childcare workers, and you have preselected a green ball, you then randomly select a yellow or green ball from the bag to make it up to two balls. The probability is then that 50% of your pairs will be green yellow and 50% will be green green. That means that 75% of the childcare balls are green.

The are two ways around this:

1. Don't preselect any green balls. This means convincing all women to give birth to children that they have no intention of spending any time with, and then randomly allocating newborn babies to people.

1. Preselect a green ball every time but also preselect a yellow ball. This means convincing all women that they must, by their own means or by allocation by their state or their parents, find a man to share childcare with if they want a child.

2 is a. a patriarchy and b. absolutely dependent on society forcing couples together based on gender. Which means gender would have to be at the very heart of their society, and the whole question the OP was asking, would gender cease to matter... Well, no. Gender would matter more than ever before.

"single or lone"? I meant single or partnered.

Hmm, I would say that enabling (paying) women to raise their own children individually and in isolation from others makes no sense from an economic or societal viewpoint. Yes, traditional "women's work" should be valued. But sorry, I disagree that "reproducing" falls under "useful work". It's really not - it's a personal choice, which, until we get population growth under control, is inherently selfish.

Caring for children has always been done in groups, allowing mothers (parents) to get on with other tasks that benefit society/the community. Each mother sitting around looking after only her own child is a pointless waste of human resources. Community supported childcare, great. Individuals paid to raise own children, not great. I'm always puzzled when people try to compare the worth of a SAHP with a nursery worker. I look at it like farming. Proper professional farmers raise crops that feed a vast number of people and benefit the economy. This would be like the nursery worker who has excellent training and is looking after a number of children, freeing parents to work and make their own contribution to society. SAHPs are like people with an allotment. Fine for you if you have the time and money to grow your own food (or raise your own children), but only really of any great benefit to you and your family - not to anyone else. So why should society financially support it?

I would agree that childcare would be free (state-funded), of excellent quality, and readily available in this utopian future, and that no-one should have to have a partner to ensure that childcare could be shared. I doubt any of us intended it that way. I think we were looking at it more from the angle that when a couple choose to have a child together, there will be no expectation that the woman will be the one who sacrifices her career and does the bulk of the childcare. A couple will be absolutely free to choose to divide the childcare or both continue to work. Or if one parent really wants to take on the bulk of the childcare and take a career break, to be able to do so and hopefully not face obstacles or prejudice on his/her return to work. Equally, lone parents will not have to face any additional financial burden of childcare. But I still maintain that single or lone, only the financially independent should get to stay home with their children. I see no benefit to the state supporting parents to stay home beyond the first year.

I really don't understand a lot of your post. What do you mean about mothers having children but not wanting a relationship with them? What do you mean about women providing men with children? And about work and childcare being spatially and temporally divided? Are you talking about parents being more free to take their children to work? Also a good idea, if practically possible. I certainly don't get what you mean about women still being oppressed by having to form a romantic relationship with a man or their relationship with their children being secondary. I'm certain that's not the angle most of us are looking at this from.

This gender equal society seems to be based on resolving three issues - pregnancy, heteronormativity and the division between work which is paid and work which is not (mostly reproductive work - childcare. care of the sick and elderly etc).

There are always going to be some children who have no contact with the birth mother due to wished for surrogacy and not wanted death of mothers. But most mothers will want to do some childcare of their own children (be that 10, 20 or whatever percent). The only way of getting rid of the vast majority of mothers doing some childcare is to create a society in which most women, for some reason, wish to give birth to children who they don't want a relationship with. What would be the other reason most women would get pregnant for? A public service?

If no such reason has come into existence for mothers to do this, then they will still be doing some childcare. For men to do the same amount of childcare, each mother must find a man (or a number of men) and make a private arrangement with them to carry out the same amount of child care of her children as she is doing. The proposed method here is through heteronormative pair bonding, although it could also be done through friends, brothers, uncles etc. But what if no such men are to be found by the individual mother? What if she doesn't even want to find such men, as huge numbers of women, both straight and gay, currently don't? Why is her pregnancy and childcare only compatible with gender equality if she makes such arrangements?

Such a scenario seems to reinforce some of the major modes of oppression of women - that their relationship to children is secondary in the organisation of society to romantic relationships, and that her equality and access to social position is dependent upon her ability to negotiate private arrangements with a man or number of men in her personal life.

These problems are a consequence of making a division between paid work (which has a set of rights, status and payments in the proposed utopia) and reproductive work (which is unpaid and seems to have no status), and importantly that the division is to be reinforced spatially and temporally You are either at paid work or you are having time off for childcare but the possibility of doing both in the same place at the same time will be exceptional (which it isn't, in many parts of the world now).

Rather than attempt to either convince lots of women to go through all the difficulties of childbirth or pregnancy to provide children for men who don't have access to the pair bond (i.e. a woman agreeing to be his sexual partner) or to devise a society where most women must pair bond with men to gain equality, wouldn't it be better to simply accept there is no just and egalitarian way of ensuring private caring responsibilities are equal?

Which leaves two options - a. get rid of unpaid childcare and pay mothers (or mother plus uncle, brother, partner, sister grandmother if any of those people are sharing care with her and/or b. provide high quality childcare through the state (and if 50/50 childcare between males and females is wanted, then most of those employees would be male to balance out the paid mothers).

But for a female descendent of mine to have to make private arrangements with anyone (be they male or female) to do childcare if she wants both children and gender equality, well that isn't equality. It is telling women they can only have kids under private contract with men.

Yes Kulam that's exactly it.

Oh, no, Flora, we definitely need equality first before any M/F designations can be cast aside. Because, as I suspect your worry is, then anyone can turn around and tell us that discrimination against women doesn't exist because there's no such thing as a women anyway.

Buffy I would agree with that. I feel some discomfort with this thread but I think it is because I have a sense (probably unjustified) that it heads into the realm thinking that removing M/F designations now would help us get to this 3014 nirvana.

kulam I agree generally however I don't see it as a "need to know" piece of information so much as a "so what" piece of information. Maybe that's just a different emphasis.

Say, hypothetically, blue eyes were linked with a higher chance of developing a medical condition. In the same way that being female is linked with a higher chance of having a baby . So doctors would need to know that I have blue eyes and a uterus, as and when it was medically necessary for them to know. But otherwise, I would hope that my breasts being visible in public (under clothes, I imagine!) would be no more relevant to anyone's perceptions of my skills, abilities, personality and preferences than my blue eyes. And if someone was sexually attracted to people with breasts or blue eyes, then that's fine too, and they may or may not decide to try to pick me up dependent on my displaying those characteristics.

We have equality, so I still don't see why sex needs to be relevant in defining me as a person.

I'm not saying it defines you if you mean that in some existential sense. Our sex exists in a very simple, observable sense (for the vast majority of people). It doesn't "define" us but it certainly impacts us and it would continue to do so.

Buffy do you mean "gender would be obsolete" as in sex-roles would be obsolete or sex would be obsolete. I'd agree with the former but not the latter. In that situation, M/F would be a simple description, necessary for some purposes, but largely lacking in impact in our lives.

sorry, that's me going off topic again

yes i agree

the other thing is that even in a "perfectly equal" society as described above in 1000 years' time, it's hard to know what socialised / social structure hangovers might still remain, which may be unrelated to equality of the sexes but influence infrastructure etc

have those things also been completed razed to the ground and rebuilt, or adapted from current structures?

it's a different scenario to trying to imagine what things would be like if the patriarchy had never existed, but equally impossible to fully imagine due to our own deeply ingrained socialisation

yes i think there is always going to be an element of seeking sexual pleasure for a good proportion of the population

how that sexual pleasure is sought and defined would be different - genuine, enthusiastic mutual consent paramount and PIV not seen as the end goal for the majority

and without an outward influence of what is "normal" in terms of sexual attraction then in terms of appearance it would be less defined and i expect there might be fewer people only interested in sexual encounters with members of hte opposite sex

but i still think that there would need to be a way to say, for example, "person with vagina seeks person with penis for mutual sexual pleasure"

Yes, because I think the instinct to attract the opposite sex will survive a long long time, even if medical advances have made it unnecessary for procreation.

minpie - assuming advances have been made in medical science so that mating for the purpose of procreation doesn't need to be a m/f pairing any more, do you think your theory still stands?

Considering what a proportionally tiny part of my life was taken up with carrying and giving birth to children, I would prefer not to be defined by this ability for my entire life, assuming that excellent 31st century medical care was available and post-natal childcare/work balance was expected by society to be equally shared by me and my partner. We have equality, so I still don't see why sex needs to be relevant in defining me as a person. Surely that only opens the door for discrimination?

So is this a society where nobody knows what gender anyone is? Hmm.

Gender would still be very relevant for many medical purposes. Illnesses/diseases present differently and have different risks between the genders. So medical personnel would need to know gender.

As you say, employers would need to know gender if a person was actually pregnant. Not otherwise.

So, with these exceptions, it's not necessary to know gender and there is no reason to use he/she or have gender recorded on official docs.

But.

Humans have a strong mating instinct. Most people are heterosexual (I presume this is still true in 3014). Most hetero people instinctively want to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex. For pretty much all species, including humans, making oneself attractive to the opposite sex involves emphasising biological differences or at least visibly demonstrating one's gender in some way. I doubt those instincts will have gone by 3014.

What this means is that even if there is no he/she pronoun, and even if fashion is theoretically fluid, I suspect that many men and women (at least of mating age) would choose to emphasise/demonstrate their gender by their presentation. (If only by not strapping down their boobs!) So you'd still be able to tell from looking at most people what sex they are.

That would mean that the dropping of he/she and the dropping of gender from records would not make much difference. Women/men would still be identifiable and women would therefore be subject to potential prejudice as potential mothers.

The potential impact of childbearing impacts all women and the actual impact of childbearing impacts only women. People don't currently choose to be defined by their parenthood so I can't imagine why anyone would choose that in a non-patriarchal society. People either are parents or they are not. How that affects their lives largely depends on how society treats people who are actual or potential mothers. I'm not talking about physical or psychological but societal treatment and how women are treated by society as potential mothers or actual mothers. To ensure women are not disadvantaged in society because of their actual or potential motherhood, it would be necessary to indentify and understand that fact.

But the impact of childbearing on women only impacts women who have children - for many XX humans it's completely irrelevant.

And by 3014, hopefully the 'impact' - physical and psychological - would be far less problematical than it can be now; much of the inequality is more in the M/F expectations post-birth which we're presuming would have been equalised. A person might still choose to be defined by their parenthood but it wouldn't be so biologically and socially predetermined.