Job Discussion Forums

[Capergirl]

[Capergirl]

[leeroy]

I think when the guys have said "women are better nurturers than men", they are not implying "so they should work harder to look after the kids".

And most would consider b.itchiness to be on an equal par with aggression in terms of "how bad" a trait is - so (again) by saying "women are b.itchy and men are aggressive" there is no subtle derision of women involved.

Acknowledging (or even speculating about) the differences between men and women does not automatically equate to sexual discrimination.

I think part of the male backlash against what they have delicately termed the "feminazis" is that while the core message of feminism is sound, the perception is that feminists are sometimes picking fights that don't exist and detecting malice and sexist intention where there is none. True, there are a lot of sexist guys out there - but I doubt there are many on this board. Thus, anything that starts with "the problem with you men" automatically feels misdirected.

Anyway,

It's been almost a year ago(!) that I joined here. Time to give it a rest for a while I think.

See ya!

Lee

[guty]

Someone said "breastfeeding aside ....."
But to me that is a hugely improtant part of an infants life.
We decided we dont want to use milk powders made by huge industrial companies, and we also decided that we would use breast over bottle whenever possible, and we would rather one parent is a full time child minder rather than both work and pay someone else to do our parenting.

Try as I might I dont produce milk, that is not a vacuous argument, but it means it is my wifes responsibility whether I like it or not, and it means she has to be physically close to our baby several times throughout the day. Assuming one of us has to work, it is both logical and practical that it is the man.

What happens in the evenings is a different matter, but for those couples who choose to breastfeed, in the majority of cases this means the woman stays with the baby and the man goes to work, there is very little choice.
So some of the arguments put forward previously may or may not hold water, the simple fact is that for many people the decision is made for practical reasons not ideological, or even cultural or historical ones.

[Roger]

I reckon most of our arguments are fashioned by social forces, not by individual insight. As Westerners we are anti-conservative. No guy on this board wants to be seen as a macho chauvinist.

But the progressive lifestyle of Westerners is the lifestyle of a tiny minority on planet Earth. Look around you in your host country, and such debates are light years ahead of our host societies even though some of those women's rights have been enshrined in local constitutions.

Have the mindsets moved with the times?
here in China, the answer is a resounding NO!

Now here is an aspect not yet covered in this discussion.
It revolves around the question: do the Chinese women want to enjoy total equality status with men?
You have to think five years, ten years, 20 and 50 years down the road of your life to see what answers a Chinese might come up with.
Of course, marriage is still a goal of paramount importance in this society. In the West, romantic reasons may be advanced to explain why a couple should be wed, but in China it's more formalistic reasons such as "it's tadition!" or "a woman should leave her parents' home and set up a family with her husband!" Chinese society still frowns on concubinage, cohabitation, premarital affairs etc., although they seem to be inexplicably indifferent to the existence of paramours and to men who maintain mistresses beside their wives.
This has little to do with Chinese national traditions; you can find similar lifestyles almost anywhere in the Third World.
Marriage, it seems, is a poor woman's right to material security, if nothing else.
Now consider a woman's interests: if she can make as much money as a man why should she marry a man?
There is another point: what happens when a couple break up?
A woman in China can legally claim half ofher husband's income from their life together; if she contributed half of their household income, then he won't need to give her anything unless we apply the bizarre logic that only the man has to share while the woman can keep all her income plus half of her ex-husband's salaries.
So, women have a much more powerful reason to get married. A man would never want to divorce his wife - unless he can afford to (and she doesn't know where he keeps his savings).
Thus, women don't really need to earn as much as men. Few Chinese women never marry.
Actually, some Chinese women live up to cliches of Western women from the 1950's: they don't earn household income, they run the household of their family, and their husbands have to act as providers.
You will find university graduates that still embrace this charming old-world custom!

[Capergirl]

[Laura C]

Hi again Egas.

I was certain I had read your post correctly, but, just to be fair, I read it yet again (I do read posts several times if I am disagreeing with the views held in them, so that I am fully aware of the other's point of view).

Yes, you said that you would like to see a world where the balance of power was held by both men and women. But, if *you* read *my* post properly, you will see that I did not dispute your view on this. What I did object to was your conclusion, apparently based *only* on your own personal example, that women are 'much worse than men' because of their 'uncontrollable emotionality, lust for attention, pettiness and jealous rages'. Surely you as a rational human being can see that this is a gross generalisation? Why shouldn't women object to this type of generalisation, which does nothing for how they are perceived in the world? And, having objected, why must they then be labelled as wearing a 'victim tag' or being a 'whiner'? But then, that is of course a very easy way of invalidating someone's argument. (It is interesting that it is only when women object to sexism that they receive comments like this, not when they object to racism or homophobia.)

You ask 'why can't a man make a litttle generalisation about women and power...?' But why should men, or women, generalise at all? I did not generalise in my post -- I satirised generalisation by saying that if I took this attitude, then I would condemn all men as aggressive. Obviously that is as undesirable as generalising women as petty and jealous. I would never write something like 'Men should not have power because they are aggressive etc etc etc', and I would expect to be challenged by men if I did.

You also wrote about feminism, and the generalisations you feel that this movement has made about men. Yet my post did not even mention feminism, so perhaps your defensive lines here say more about you than me?

I do not 'look for' sexism everywhere I go. Unfortunately I find it more often than I would like, and I am neither going to refrain from challenging its more obtuse examples, nor be apologetic for doing so.


L

[arioch36]

Actually, I do know of men who have fed their children with the mother's breast milk. Don't know if it is quite the same thing. For the development of the child, physical nurturing seems more important then food....Yes, i know the baby will die if not fed. But I can't be the only one who saw the tapes of the experiments done with baby monkeys? What were the names of those experiments?

They set up several experiments to se what was most important in bring up the baby monkey. Thoe baby monkeys who were deprived of physical nurturing, being held, etc, grew up violent, very emotionally damaged. They had one experiment where every time the baby monkey would hold the fake mother monkey he would get sour milk, but the baby still wanted to cling to the mother (lots of fake mothers) Another one , the mother had sharp spikes ar her body, when the baby clung to it, the baby would be hurt, but the baby still held the mother. Anther one, when the baby was in the fake mothers arms, the baby would be flung through the air.

The malnourished babies who were alowed physical intamacy would grow up weaker, of course. But the young monkey was able to socialize normally.

Foe better or worse, you just can't do experiments like this anymore. All those bothersome ethical questions.

[Deborann]

This discussion is focusing on western methods of bringing up children. Other cultures have very different ways of dealing with children, and there is a lot less focus on the individual mother/father role. In Australian Aboriginal cultures the uncles have the greatest say in the future of the child, and today, for a whole variety of reasons in many of the communities (some traditional, some alcohol induced), grandparents have the strongest role. Other cultures have a much broader focus on responsiblity for the young, including babies.

Therefore when we are having this discussion we are ignoring the many differences that occur in child-rearing practices around the world. The nuclear family is still only a relatively recent development and may not prove to be the best option for creating whole, healthy well-adjusted children.

Breastmilk is the most nutritious and protective food for babies - but remember wet-nurses? Even in western cultures it was not always the biological mother who did the nuturing. It is easy for mothers to use breast pumps and still continue to work, so the arguments for stay at home until completed breastfeeding can be worked around.

The most important process for babies is the loving and caring that is 'grown' into them. No matter who or how it is done.

[johnslat]

Dear arioch,

"What were the names of those experiments?"

I recall seeing the film of those experiments, too. One of my part-time jobs while going to university was working for the visual aids department. I must have seen that film about a dozen times or more. I'm pretty sure the experiments were done by a researcher named Harlow:

"Harry Harlow used the similarity between rhesus monkey and human infants to study the nature of love. He understood clearly, even in 1958, that the two species� similarities are such that what is learned about the emotions and psyches of one species informs us of the emotions and psyches of the other. He explained:

The macaque infant differs from the human infant in that the monkey is more mature at birth and grows more rapidly; but the basic responses relating to affection, including nursing, contact, clinging, and even visual and auditory exploration, exhibit no fundamental differences in the two species. Even the development of perception, fear, frustration, and learning capability follows very similar sequences in rhesus monkeys and human children.7

Harlow used these similarities to the detriment of the baby monkeys on whom he experimented. He showed that rhesus monkeys reared without contact with others � monkeys or humans � developed severe mental problems and behavioral aberrations. He apparently missed, altogether, the most profound implications of his work � the moral implications raised by the similarity of emotional need between the species. He was dead to the implications of the fact that what is learned about one of the primate species� mind informs us of the minds of the other species and that what would hurt us also hurts them in very similar and familiar ways. "

Check this website - and scroll down a bit - and you'll see a photo that'll probably seem familiar, if we're talking about the same educational film.

http://www.primatefreedom.com/essays/howmuchlikeus.html

Regards,
John

P.S. Like the creator of the web site mentioned above, I felt sorry for those poor monkeys every time I had to show it.

[Stephen Jones]

Dear Deborann,
The maternal uncle often plays an important part in looking after the baby in sociieties where the father cannot be sure he really is the father. At least the wife's brother knows the baby is carrying some of his genes.

[arioch36]

Slat, for a man of your encroaching senility, you are a true reservoir of information. I can only hope that when i am an old doddering man in diapers such as yourself, I have half your memory. Youmust have been something in your prime.

Harlow definitely messed up the lives of some monkeys. but those old time experimenters did some pretty drastic things to humans as well.

So for your bonus question, who was the experimenter in conditioning that conditioned a young boy (Albert?) to be afraid of everything white, including Santa's beard?

A sad statement on humans, we really don't need the monkey studies to show what happens to human children brought up without physical contact...The wave of adoptions from some Romania and Russian orphanges years back showed the same results in children. And yes, it even happens in America. Famous case of the girl in California? kept locked in her room, often her closet for ten years. No one even knew she existed. Her struglles to act "rationally" were well documented (rightly or wrongly)

[Laura C]

I've just finished reading a new book by Oliver James, the British psychologist. It's called 'They F**k You Up', and it's about how important early contact is, and how what type of care you were given as a child shapes your adult personality. It's a very interesting read.

Interestingly, James says that, although a baby must have a good relationship with its primary caregiver in the first two years of life, that caregiver does NOT have to be the mother (or father, if he is the main carer). Therefore he feels that parents shouldn't feel guilty or be dissuaded from going back to work, because as long as their baby has a positive relationship with whomever is looking after him/her during the day, the baby will form positive patterns of attachment. And he points out that it is usually worse for a baby to have a depressed, irritable parent with them full-time, than a positive, warm carer during working hours.

Waffle waffle...but it *was* a good book...

L

[johnslat]

Dear arioch36,
"You must have been something in your prime. "
Wrong tense, I fear. I'm in my prime now - and plan to remain there for, oh, about the next 25 to 30 years. Then, I suppose I'll have to expect a slow but inevitable diminishing of my physical and mental powers, but I don't intend to : . . . go gentle into that good night . . .". As another favorite quote of mine states:

"Old age ain't no place for sissies".
Bette Davis

As for your "bonus question", well, I have to admit that I wasn't familiar with this one from personal experience. The Net, however, is a wonderful research tool - and yes, it was "Albert B":

Scroll down to " 1 year and 21 days":

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Watson/emotion.htm

Boy, those behaviorists were/are really something. Didn't Skinner put his own child in a "Skinner box"?
To answer my own question:

http://www.sntp.net/behaviorism/skinner.htm

Yup. What creeps!!!

Regards,
John

[arioch36]

yep, isn't it nice to know how far we humans have evolved as a race?

My favourite line was

.