Feminism - but is there some truth in the stereotype of gender roles?

[loveyoumore2]

I understand that feminism has its place, 100%. The way women are treated in some parts of the world, (and I will agree), in the western world to an extent, is wrong. And feminism is needed to that effect.

What I can't get my head around is that on some level, generally speaking, I believe women are more suited to the stereotypical 'woman's jobs,' and likewise, men are suited to their jobs. I embrace the fact that I am the one staying at home and look after my kids while my husband works (and this is coming from someone who has a very successful career and earned pretty much the same as my husband). I love cooking his dinner and cleaning the house. I don't feel oppresed. I am also attracted to my husbnad because he embraces his stereotypical male role of the breadwinner. I feel proud of my role as a women and I am proud that it differs from my husband's general role.

I know that the point of feminism is that everyone should be free to do what they want, male or female, and that men, if they want, should have the right to stay home with the kids.

But does anyone agree that on some basic level, instinctive almost, that for the majority of people (again, not all), that women do have women desires that are typical of a women, and the same for men?

ie. women are generally better at cleaning and tidying and naturally take the reigns, men prefer heavy lifting and DIY, women will be more motherly with kids than men, etc. NB. I know this is not always the case, but I am speaking generally. I believe stereotypes in this instance, are based on natural differences between men and women that we will never get away from. (Again stressing that there are exceptions).

pompodd - I agree, completely. I think philosophy has, for a long time, excluded non-humans from the social domain, when it's transparently obvious at an utterly commonsense level that not only do many animals have something representing some kind of 'social' interaction, but that these interactions are also part of our own lives. (Anyone with a cat or a dog as a pet will be able to understand this). The recent interest in a more ecological approach is starting to correct this- though I don't think anyone has yet come up with a persuasive way of thinking about the way that we are all socially conditioned (and the implications for simplistic 'realist' views of the world) and the interface with non-human beings. It's a striking weakness in a lot of current thinking, anyway.

Oh I love the thing about the gender-stereotyped monkeys. Isn't that the one where they claimed the female monkeys played more with a frying pan than the males ones did?

... leading a baffled reviewer to say that although they'd met a lot of monkeys, male and female, they'd never yet seen one that could cook?

shovetheholly - yes, I agree with you too!

The difficulty with the exclusion of non-humans is that we are evolved to understand the world and how it operates in accordance with our sensory experience, which in turn of course is evolved to our circumstances and environment.

Your comment about pets is exactly right. I've read interesting theories about how dogs might actually have as rich and complex social bonds and understandings of ours. It's just that they've evolved differently and we haven't evolved the capability to intuitively understand theirs.

That's why some of the the ludicrously simplistic ideas being bandied about on this thread ("I don't feel oppressed; I feel instinctively that I want to tidy and clean. My DH instinctively feels that he enjoys his "protective" and provider role) are a bit depressing. It feels like we're making no progress at all. I guess it is a reminder of how deeply ingrained the conditioning is.

Anyway, I'm getting a long way from the original topic. But I'm going to order the Cordelia Fine book now to cheer myself up!

My dad was your original "man's man" - bit of a dinosaur if truth were told - and he did throw out the "women's work" line once when he was doing the ironing. I promptly handed him the garden shears I had just sharpened and my sister offered him the spark plugs she had been cleaning and said pretty much in unison that we had better stop doing this "men's work" then. That was the last time we heard any of that shit.

However, the point was he was extremely good at household tasks as well as very fussy about tidiness. This was because he was one of a very large family who all learned to pitch in. Anything he didn't learn in childhood (1920s) he picked up during military training (1940s) and was therefore a neat freak; he had cooked for a living at one time so he had an excellent handle on that too. Our mother, on the other hand, was delightfully vague and always had her nose in a book, so tended to burn everything or let the washing up water go cold. She was an only child from an upper/upper-middle class household and just hadn't learned this stuff. She kept a list and did her best but was never quite on top of it. She should have been an academic really. (She did do the nurturing children thing very well though. I put that down to love. It's hard to get quite so attached to a vacuum cleaner as to one's own offspring, don't you think? You don't? OK, each to their own.)

Lancelottie I think people usually talk about this study, that it's supposed to show that we women are simply born to like Barbies: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
It doesn't mention frying pans, but they offered toy cars, and soft toys like Scooby-Doo and Winne the Pooh.
I have not seen too many monkeys driving cars either - but what the study actually found was that "males and females did not differ in their total interactions with wheeled toys, but males interacted significantly less with the plush toys ".

Considering that the sample size of male monkeys was just 21, I would personally not draw the conclusion here, that male monkeys are just born to be better drivers..

How convenient that women are naturally suited to scrubbing toilets, and changing shitty nappies, and cooking meal after meal after fucking meal while men are naturally suited to earning money by doing things like sitting in offices drinking coffee.

OP not only do these ridiculous ideas do a massive disservice to women, who end up feeling guilty for the fact that they don't in fact enjoy being screamed at 10 hours a day by toddlers and who resent cleaning other people's shit stains off the toilet, but it also boxes men into a "unemotional" role where they're expected to feel nothing and have no particular urge to be with their own babies. No wonder so many men end up depressed, violent and angry. I would be too if I lived in a world where people genuinely believed I wasn't "emotional." Dogs are emotional ffs!! Saying men aren't emotional is denying them humanity, it's saying they walk through this lovely and awful world and it has no impact on them. It absolutely does have an impact on them - they feel scared and happy and angry just the same as women do, but often they are not allowed to express it and they have no outlet to release it. My own DH (who grew up in a very sexist household and learned a man expresses nothing) said that since I convinced him it's ok to have feelings (this was a long and drawn out process) it feels to him like the world has gone from black and white to colour. He now cries at the drop of a hat, far more than I do, and finds the world a bit harder to deal with but he has said he wouldn't change it for anything - he now feels invested in life when in the past it was just about getting by.

Putting people in boxes does one thing - it closes them in. I don't see why would ever bother doing that. People are people, we're all different. Trying to lump us all together and say one group automatically likes one thing and another group automatically likes another is just pointless.

What's wrong with household tasks and changing nappies and cooking meals.. Surely it's a lot easier than aspiring to a "career" in some mundane middle class academic/office based micromanaged uptopia swilled down with copious amounts of fermented grapes....

Sex hormones play a massive part in the differences between men and women, try taking 1g of test prop twice a week and see how you feel..

Nothing's wrong with those tasks frank, if you enjoy doing them. If you don't then it's pretty soul destroying having to do them day in day out because you're naturally suited to them. Some people love household tasks, some don't. Note I said people.

Sex hormones do influence body and behaviour. Do you believe that women's hormones make them better at household tasks, changing nappies and cooking meals frank?

I still don't get how the hormones can make women better at figuring out how to use a washing machine or stove, but at the same time, making men better at figuring out the buttons and dials on BBQs. Clever, those hormones.

loveyoumore FWIW, I agree

What I don't understand is how hormones make women better at managing all the jobs that attract very little or no money, like raising children, housework, caring for elderly relatives, volunteering community projects, etc jobs that require a huge amount of energy, compassion, organisation, commitment, etc but the same hormones don't seem to make them better at jobs that require the same attributes but do attract money. Somehow testosterone means you can't manage one small child for free, but you can manage hundreds of employees, and get paid. And testosterone means you "can't see mess" or organise washing but you can manage an entire company or build a house. How does that work?

As for the moving furniture lark, I agree that men are a bit better, being often more muscular. But I'm pretty strong, and can use my weight and the laws of physics in my favour. It ain't all about muscle.

When I hear the word 'hardwired' I reach for my gun.

The metaphor of a permanent electronic circuit as opposed to a programmable/alterable one applied to humans is dodgy at best.

It's genetic determinism, which may be the old philosophy of spiritual determinism rebranded for a scientific age.

Some people, scientific, religious alike, seem to feel more comfortable with predetermined, unalterable aspects of human experience.

What's wrong with household tasks and changing nappies and cooking meals.. Surely it's a lot easier than aspiring to a "career" in some mundane middle class academic/office based micromanaged uptopia

What's wrong with them is that they are fucking boring.

Childcare, housecare is not easier than working, they can be gruelling as well as boring, and many women welcome the escape to work just as much as men. That you think it's easier implies you've never done it.

I don't 'aspire' to a career I've already got one. And I'm not interested in what's easy, but what's interesting and challenging.

'What's wrong with household tasks and changing nappies and cooking meals.. Surely it's a lot easier than aspiring to a "career"'

Easier? In what way?

Easier to do, which reflects that it's not valued.

Easier than aspiring to do something else, which also reflects that it's not valued.

Easier to achieve for people without skills, again, reflecting that it's not valued.

With the exception of cooking as a pastime rather than just because people need fed, they're boring, often unpleasant and done because they need doing, not out of choice or enjoyment and they're not valued, not by society and often not even within families...where there's an unequal split of domestic work it's usually the person doing something less valued by society that ends up by default being left to do them...and that is usually a woman.

I see what you're getting at here - yes there is variation in men and women and that perhaps on average women do X, while men do Y - but I think these days there is so much individual variation that a lot of the older stereotypes that were held strong more by culture than by natural inclination are losing their boundaries.

It's a real mixed bag in our house - I earn the money, my partner stays at home with our son. Not a choice, just an economic reality, and we have both commented how it doesn't feel quite 'right'.

I do clean the house much more thoroughly than he does, BUT he cooks much better than I do. I think he has much more 'boys' fun with our son, but he says I am a lot more creative and will make up much more interesting little games than he does. I think the only things where we are very gender stereotyped is when it comes to fixing the car - he knows about motorbikes and cars - and making our house more homely - I think little extras like house furnishings and momentos make our rented house feel like our home.

What does annoy me greatly is when people call the house and ask to speak to 'Dr ....' (me) and are then surprised to hear a woman say 'yes, speaking'.

Re 'emotions':

I'm just out of relationship therapy. It appears that lots of our misunderstandings came from who we were 'socialised' to expression emotions.

Me: Cried when I was angry (crying being more 'socially acceptable' than anger - in women).
Him: Got angry when he felt sad/vulnerable (anger being more 'socially acceptable' than crying - in men).

Result of us suppressing our true emotions and replacing them with more gendered/socially acceptable ones? Chaos, miscommunication and misunderstanding.

Slowly I am learning to show anger when I am angry. It is much better all round!

*how not who

And one of the 'strongest' men I know had tears in his eyes when I told him about my depression. There is something very appealing about a well-rounded man who can show the full range of emotions and not just the 'gendered' ones.

There's a real problem which can occur if you stick too much to different roles in a co-dependent partnership (whether the roles follow standard stereotypes or not) - it's all well and good if you're both happy with them, but what happens when one of you becomes ill or worse? Perhaps it wouldn't matter so much if you lived in more of an extended family (or had staff!) than it does in typical 21stC UK households, but I reckon it's best to try to both keep your hand in across the board.

Joysmum - where in this thread anyone said that OP is wrong in liking who she is implying that her choice is wrong?

My post refers to actual real life personal experience.

Joy - unfortunately there are always people who do this sort of thing - whether you fit the stereotypes or buck them. Or (as is probably the case for most of us) fit some and buck others!

pompodd
"JAPAB - why do you say that there was no "social construct" which conditioned our genetic ancestors? Extraordinary statement!

Surely in "cave man" days social conditioning was as strong if not stronger than nowadays. Indeed, part of our development as modern day homo sapiens was in no small part due to our ability to create and maintain complex social bonds, norms and attitudes etc. Basically our ability to organise ourselves. It happens all over the animal kingdom as well, of course. Primates, large cats, fish, insects - they all have social conditioning. In fact, I think science is only beginning to understand how complex and rich some of those animal societies are."

I somehow doubt that the reasons individual fish and insects and so on act out whatever parts they play in their "community", is because that individual has been indoctrinated from birth into think that this was their part. Because all the insect TV shows and media and conversations between older insects communicated these messages directly and indirectly, to the young.

Now sure social conditioning plays a part in us humans, but so too does 'hard wiring' (if that is the right term). I think it is wishful thinking to exclude either as playing a part in whatever generalisations that are observed.

Haven't read the whole thread.

Yes I think men and women are completely different. Of course there are exceptions but I do think we are hardwired differently (I know some posters hate that). But I think it's ignorant to think we aren't.

Every other animal on the planet has natural instincts, preferences and ways of living. As humans we admit that. But when it comes to admitting that men and women aren't the same, a lot of people (usually women...) refuse to accept it.

Genuine question fearless: If we accept that men and women are different, what does that mean? Does it mean men shouldn't do certain jobs? Does it mean women should stay at home with children?