In a gender neutral future Utopia

Gina

I often see threads that contradict one another. But often it's the very superficial choice of language the OP uses in the opening post. And a subsequent post can easily turn it either way.

There are two threads going on at the moment, one the 9 year old is throwing a stop and being rude to her mother and 90%of posters think the mother should go easier as she's a hormonal wreck and there's so much emotional trauma over finishing the year etc etc.

Another thread is a nine year old boy who told a woman "that's not nice" after she told him off. He is apparently "a little shit" "entitled" "rude" probably going to be a fecking nightmare teenager.

It's weird isn't it?

Why? Why can't men and women be different? What's so wrong with not being the same? I think a gender neutral 'utopia' sounds like a beige boring one.

In what way meltor?
How should they be different? with every genderation that we give more women rights they then choose to use this rights to do things men previously did. Why do you think thatbus? The less we rigidly enforce gender people choose to not enact those gender roles. We've seen it happen, there's no big what if on that. Most gender roles are cultural and look different between countries and religions. It so clearly bullshit.

If you have to teach a girl to act like a girl, then obvious that's not acting like a girl!

The only truly feminine things I can think of are menstruation, pregnancy, menopause, breastfeeding, breasts and vaginas. And bar the last two even the rest aren't necessary to being a female.

That's an excellent list of disparaging names there Bog - I had to look up some of them.

Virago's a good example - originally female warrior (or male spirited woman), it's been turned into a slur.

What is it about society that hates strong women so much. God forbid any woman thinks she's able to look after herself it seems.

I don't think this is something we can really "prove" one way or the other rigt now. That being said it seems implausible to suggest that behavioural differences are 100% due to societal norms and that there is no "biological" impact of any kind.

Who what it's worth I suspect most, but not all, differences in behaviour are due to cultural settings, social normalisation etc. Thus in the utopia you imagine there would be far less of a difference but I think there would still be some differences. Male and female brains me not be different but on average there are differing hormone levels and we know these can have strong effects on behaviour.

As has been said, this is all just on average, differences between individuals is more significant that differences between these groups.

Yes, an angry man is never described as 'shrill', or told to 'calm down, dear'. No male equivalents to 'shew', 'virago', 'termagant', 'dragon', 'fishwife', 'hellcat', 'martinet', 'spitfire', 'battleaxe', 'gorgon', 'harpy, 'nag' etc etc.

Male anger is normal -- there doesn't need to be a specific, othering term for an angry man. Are we back in the territory of physical size and power here? Men fear/respect the anger of other men, but not the anger of women, who aren't usually a direct physical threat, so their anger can be dismissed as comic/ridiculous/undignified?

Imagine a film like Falling Down, which is all about frustrated male anger going on the rampage, and which was reviewed as important, and about the death of the American dream, and the 'core of sadness' in the heart of the American male gone rogue etc etc being remade with a female central character who goes on the rampage with a rocket launcher across LA because the air con in her car fails in a traffic jam?

It would probably be reinvented as a comedy, with Melissa McCarthy or someone in the lead, rather than a female equivalent to a big star like Michael Douglas, who was cast because he always played powerful bigshot male roles. Plus they'd have to rewrite the ending, because can you imagine test audiences being confronted with a mother of a young daughter they're supposed to find 'relatable' who shoots and kills her way across the city before tricking the police into shooting her dead in front of her child after she gives the child a parting 'gift' of her life insurance?

On a related tangent - am i the only one who thinks it's sexist that women are encouraged to manage their hormonal fluctuations and behavioural effects through supplements and The Pill while men aren't?

No, I agree. Also anger in men is a lot more socially acceptable in a dispute than either anger or crying in women.
I read somewhere about angry men being described as testerical

But those are manly tears about something that really matters, SomeDyke. Its completely different to our lady tears shed for lady reasons.

As regards men and crying, I raise you football -- the truth being they are fairly likely to cry/hug/other soppy stuff when in a situation where it is no longer so strongly socially condemned.

As regards science fiction, we have:
Joanna Russ, The Female Man. Excellent.

As regards interesting sex-based scenarios, we have things like 'Golden Witchbreed' by Mary Gentle, and also of course 'The Left Hand of Darkness' by Ursula LeGuin. In WItchbreed, the aliens are neither male nor female until 'puberty', and no way of telling which sex someone will develop into when it happens. Hence all child rearing and socialisation trains them to be adults, not men or women, or all have to learn both. But it's not really a major theme of the book. Left Hand is a brilliant book BTW. The main idea is that this particular set of humans are NEITHER sex most of the time.When individuals enter the breeding phase, they can be either male of female, and most people have no tendency one way or the other. Homosexual and heterosexual couplings occur. So, society arranged slightly differently in that anyone can possibly be 'tied-down' by child birth at any time. And social interactions skewed around sex don't occur, sexual attraction, if you will, remains set-aside for specific times, although love and monogamous couplings still exist. There is also an okay short radio dramatisation of it available to buy as a download. As well as having this great premise for an other human society, it's just a great story as well!

I think the exagerrated differences would gradually diminish, and while hormone levels would still cause some differences in behaviour and attitudes, these would become subtler.

On a related tangent - am i the only one who thinks it's sexist that women are encouraged to manage their hormonal fluctuations and behavioural effects through supplements and The Pill while men aren't?

I don't have a clear answer but might be able to help clarify the question, as I see it...

Visible biological traits:
Physical height/weight/strength
Facial & pubic hair
Breasts, Genitals

Invisible biology:
Hormones

Behaviours based on the visible physical differences, we can assume would continue - and "give away" your sex. Breastfeeding, Pregnancy etc.

The main question for me here, is how much are gendered behaviours driven by invisible hormones vs socialisation. The traits that ARE in any way sex-linked (not just gender role/socialised) would be true for every tribe and culture in humanity and in history. Socialisation could still be a major factor. There are some broad themes from one global study here citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.463.9292&rep=rep1&type=pdf but not much.

^clear as mud. In conclusion it's a fascinating subject and I need another coffee

slyvia haha I knew I wouldn't get away with that, I forgot the name of the place in Spain and washing rushing to finish posting. I meant bones stored not in Skeletons, so couldn't quickly be identified as male or female.
In terms of injuries I was talking to a prehistory PHD students who was talking about healed broken bones and the assumptions of what caused them (skulls I think).
I was also thinking about The tomb of the eagles because of the treatment of blind people, who matured to adulthood.

To be clear, the farmer who owned the land excavated the tomb himself and stored the human remains in a cupboard under the stairs. His kids used to play with the remains when they were little.

As a complete aside, the Tomb of the Eagles was never excavated by archaeologists and the human remains in it are not from a hunting society.

Archaeologists have only gained full access to the remains from the owners in the last decade, and the assessment of sex was not based on injuries.

That's on my list too! Just wish my local library had it in.

Cordelia Fine's Testosterone Tex is very good on the myth that testosterone dictates huge fundamental differences between men and women -- eg she dismantles the supposedly 'unbiased' science of the famous fruit fly experiment in the 1940s that underpinned the idea that it 'makes sense' in evolutionary terms for women to be cautious, selective and monogamous, while men had the best chance of passing on their genes if thy were as promiscuous as possible.

Squishy, Ursula LeGuin's Left hand of Darkness is also a brilliant novel. if anyone doesn't know the premise, it's from the POV of an envoy arriving on a planet where the entire population is androgynous and 'neuter' in sexual terms, neither male nor female, and with no sexual urges, for most of the month, then for 2 days, they develop male or female sexual attributes (could be either, depending on the environment or who's around them) and become hyper-sexual (and the entire planet takes a sex holiday .

So everyone can be a mother and a father (as in, you can have children you conceived and carried as a woman, and also children that you conceived in your 'male' phase). LeGuin uses male pronouns for everyone all the time, so the King is pregnant for a lot of the novel. And the people on this planet think the envoy is disgusting and a 'pervert' for only being male all the time, and he's completely baffled because he doesn't know how to treat all the officials and government ministers etc that he's dealing with, because they aren't either men or women in his terms.

I read the other day that children are born looking more like their fathers to encourage bonding and that they don't reject or kill them.

Fascinating stuff.

I think that the differences between individuals are probably wider than any male/female differences.

However. I do suspect that our biological experiences would lead to trends. Things like experience of pain or emotion. And pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding are experiences unique to women, so I would think that they would have some impact if we were to look at women and men as groups.

I was shocked by some research showing how early we inflict our socialised gender ideas on our babies. I thought I had raised my sons in a gender neutral environment, until I read the research and realised I couldn't have.

Also, some traits are self reinforcing- sex increases the appetite for sex, for example. Testosterone driven behaviour fuels more testosterone driven behaviour, perpetuating the differences.

I'd be thrilled with even some small steps in the right direction, having seen the response to a female doctor, and the BBC salary disparity.

I've heard of that book Bog and been meaning to read it. Science fiction is really good for exploring social ideas, even if you have to suspend your disbelief to get past some plot points. Ursula K. Le Guin has some interesting ideas too - I recently stumbled across The Dispossessed in a charity shop, and bought it on a whim. That is based on two worlds, which orbit each other as twin planets. The inhabitants on both worlds are human, but the societies are almost complete opposites (in one there is much more gender equality, although there are many other differences). It has some interesting ideas, but it does get a bit bogged down in detail and anthropological exposition sometimes.

It's fiction, but Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is interesting for how she constructs a 'gender-neutral future utopia' very much along the lines of 1960s/70s counterculture ideals.

The novel has an abused Latina woman committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1970s New York discover she can time travel (although it's also possible she hallucinates her trips to the future). To talk only about the gender and sexuality of the 'future' -- she often can't tell whether people are male and female, because it's an outdoor collective agriculture world where everyone is very fit and muscular and as they don't obey 20thc clothing or behavioural norms, she keeps thinking women are men, because their body language is free and self-confident in a way she associates with men.

Men and women fight on the front lines in war. Rape is a crime of the past and there's no more marriage. The norm seems to be polyamorous and bi. But the key thing is that (it's never explained how it's done) women no longer give birth. All babies are born centrally in a sort of birth tank, and have three parents, who can be of either sex, at least two of whom BF (men are given hormone treatments to allow this) with no genetic link to them. Everyone lives in their own small house, and babies and children are looked after centrally until they are adults at about 14/16, and move to their own living quarters.

It's worth a read, even though it's hugely problematic in lots of ways. (There's also a nightmarish future dystopia in the novel where the world is so polluted the rich live on space platforms and harvest organs from the poor, and everyone is owned by companies -- where women are are surgically modified to look like Barbie dolls.)

One of the things that's interesting is that the woman from the 1970s often views the future Utopians as 'childish' because of their lack of the gendered behaviour, self-presentation and ritual she associates with adulthood.

That reminds me of raging at the radio recently when they were talking about cave painting. It was "he propbably..." and "what we can tell from his hand print is that..." etc. Now, it may be that there was some really clever way to tell the sex of the painter from the hand print. If so, it would have been interesting (and relevant to the program) to explain how this was done. But I suspect not. These were intelligent, educated people with otherwise good critical thinking skills, and yet it never occurred to anyone on the program that the painter may not have been male. Its all so ingrained, and it just gets more and more ingrained like a positive feedback loop if its never challenged.

I have no sources for this (cause I can't remember where i read it, probably here tbh).
Is it not the case that in primitive societies male/female wasn't as divided. We only think men=hunting and women=home and hearth because the archaeologists projected their beliefs onto the evidence. As in, when they had I completed skeletons or in cases when bones were stored separated (like the tomb of the eagles) they (archaeologists) decided smaller frame with hunting/fighting marks were young men, when actually from a more objective perspective they were women.
I'm not explaining that well but I know what I mean.
I definitely think it's conditioning, some men will always be aggressive and shouty, some women will always be people pleasers but not because if their sex. Come to my house on Christmas Day if you want to see the opposite (with hard hat and trifle)

Exactly Spaghetti and men like to remind women of that quite frequently.