Are Men Obsolete?

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
21

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
The hard work of building civilization has always been done by men, I mean the back breaking labor of laying bricks, digging ditches for sewer systems, etc, have always required the physical strength of men. But today a woman can operate a backhoe or a bulldozer as good as any man, so excluding women from this kind of work makes no practical sense, and having a larger labor pool drives wages down, which employers love. But technology comes and goes, and while it might allow women to do work they were incapable of fifty years ago, who knows what the next fifty years will bring.

I can tell you’re not an engineer.

The people coming up with the new tech are all men. Larry Summers was right - women are (usually) inherently disinterested in science and especially math. Go look at any undergraduate engineering class and it will be made up of 90% men. No men, no new tech. Also, women suck at handling tech. Ever seen a woman try to diagnose a car problem? Unclog a drain? Hook up a DVD player?

Don’t even get me started on the disaster that is women in management positions.

Also, it’s a lot harder for women to handle the incidents where something goes bump in the night without crying than men.

Right now, we’re in a situation of our own making in the West. We can unmake it when we collectively decide to recover our testicles.

I think we’ll be around for a few more millenia. [/quote]

Could this be a social problem though?
Women are always led astray from the scientific professions. At a young age, boys are allowed to play with cars, trucks, robots and video games. This, among other things, is part of the grand scheme that causes the male population to take an interest in science.

22

[quote]legendaryblaze wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
The hard work of building civilization has always been done by men, I mean the back breaking labor of laying bricks, digging ditches for sewer systems, etc, have always required the physical strength of men. But today a woman can operate a backhoe or a bulldozer as good as any man, so excluding women from this kind of work makes no practical sense, and having a larger labor pool drives wages down, which employers love. But technology comes and goes, and while it might allow women to do work they were incapable of fifty years ago, who knows what the next fifty years will bring.

I can tell you’re not an engineer.

The people coming up with the new tech are all men. Larry Summers was right - women are (usually) inherently disinterested in science and especially math. Go look at any undergraduate engineering class and it will be made up of 90% men. No men, no new tech. Also, women suck at handling tech. Ever seen a woman try to diagnose a car problem? Unclog a drain? Hook up a DVD player?

Don’t even get me started on the disaster that is women in management positions.

Also, it’s a lot harder for women to handle the incidents where something goes bump in the night without crying than men.

Right now, we’re in a situation of our own making in the West. We can unmake it when we collectively decide to recover our testicles.

I think we’ll be around for a few more millenia.

Could this be a social problem though?
Women are always led astray from the scientific professions. At a young age, boys are allowed to play with cars, trucks, robots and video games. This, among other things, is part of the grand scheme that causes the male population to take an interest in science.
[/quote]

No, boys play with those things because they’re boys. Girls play with the things they play with because they’re girls.

If you let a boy start playing, everything he picks up becomes a gun or a sword within 5 minutes. The mother doesn’t have to encourage the boy to do it at all. Usually, it’s the opposite, actually - the mother is trying to get the boy to play in a nonviolent manner.

If it’s two brothers playing together, they start wrestling within 5 minutes. Mothers definitely don’t like to encourage that.

23

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
legendaryblaze wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
The hard work of building civilization has always been done by men, I mean the back breaking labor of laying bricks, digging ditches for sewer systems, etc, have always required the physical strength of men. But today a woman can operate a backhoe or a bulldozer as good as any man, so excluding women from this kind of work makes no practical sense, and having a larger labor pool drives wages down, which employers love. But technology comes and goes, and while it might allow women to do work they were incapable of fifty years ago, who knows what the next fifty years will bring.

I can tell you’re not an engineer.

The people coming up with the new tech are all men. Larry Summers was right - women are (usually) inherently disinterested in science and especially math. Go look at any undergraduate engineering class and it will be made up of 90% men. No men, no new tech. Also, women suck at handling tech. Ever seen a woman try to diagnose a car problem? Unclog a drain? Hook up a DVD player?

Don’t even get me started on the disaster that is women in management positions.

Also, it’s a lot harder for women to handle the incidents where something goes bump in the night without crying than men.

Right now, we’re in a situation of our own making in the West. We can unmake it when we collectively decide to recover our testicles.

I think we’ll be around for a few more millenia.

Could this be a social problem though?
Women are always led astray from the scientific professions. At a young age, boys are allowed to play with cars, trucks, robots and video games. This, among other things, is part of the grand scheme that causes the male population to take an interest in science.

No, boys play with those things because they’re boys. Girls play with the things they play with because they’re girls.

If you let a boy start playing, everything he picks up becomes a gun or a sword within 5 minutes. The mother doesn’t have to encourage the boy to do it at all. Usually, it’s the opposite, actually - the mother is trying to get the boy to play in a nonviolent manner.

If it’s two brothers playing together, they start wrestling within 5 minutes. Mothers definitely don’t like to encourage that. [/quote]

Exactly.

24

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
Uncle Gabby wrote:
polo77j wrote:
I get what you’re saying but I’m not really buying it. Isn’t manliness inherent?

Besides, using two extremes to illustrate your point is like grasping for straws. The majority of the population aren’t taking steroids nor are they getting sex changes. The concentration of effeminate men in the authors part of the country is a lot higher than say Montana or Texas. If she had lived in a more rugged, conservative part of the country she wouldn’t have assumed there was a diminishing population of “real men” because she would be surround by predominantly men who qualify as rugged individualists. Her observation is a product of her environment and doesn’t necessarily reflect reality as a whole. Just as your juxtaposition of steroids and sex changes doesn’t reflect any real problem.

Well it’s not necessarily inherent. You have a low fat, low cholesterol diet being pushed heavily in the media and public schools, which produces low testosterone, coupled with a loss of manual labor jobs. Her views are definately skewed by her environment, but her environment is becoming the norm. There are no more manufacturing jobs, and only a very tiny segment of the population makes their living through farming anymore. The only jobs left are in the cities, behind a desk.

100 years ago this chick probably would have lived in a city, surrounded by the same kind of effeminate guys. But her kind were the minority. Today they are the majority.

People have been living in cities for 5000 years at least. Every man used to leave his house in London during the 1800s armed with a derringer. It’s not the cities that are the problem, it’s the culture itself that is feminized/homosexualized.

Advances in technology are probably going to reverse the trend towards moving into the cities as well. A lot of jobs can be done from almost anywhere nowadays.
[/quote]

10000 years, and every time human beings lived in cities for very long, they became feminized. The Perisian King Cyrus the great built his capital Pasagarde in harsh terriotory because he didn’t want his men to become soft.

25

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
The hard work of building civilization has always been done by men, I mean the back breaking labor of laying bricks, digging ditches for sewer systems, etc, have always required the physical strength of men. But today a woman can operate a backhoe or a bulldozer as good as any man, so excluding women from this kind of work makes no practical sense, and having a larger labor pool drives wages down, which employers love. But technology comes and goes, and while it might allow women to do work they were incapable of fifty years ago, who knows what the next fifty years will bring.

I can tell you’re not an engineer.

The people coming up with the new tech are all men. Larry Summers was right - women are (usually) inherently disinterested in science and especially math. Go look at any undergraduate engineering class and it will be made up of 90% men. No men, no new tech. Also, women suck at handling tech. Ever seen a woman try to diagnose a car problem? Unclog a drain? Hook up a DVD player?

Don’t even get me started on the disaster that is women in management positions.

Also, it’s a lot harder for women to handle the incidents where something goes bump in the night without crying than men.

Right now, we’re in a situation of our own making in the West. We can unmake it when we collectively decide to recover our testicles.

I think we’ll be around for a few more millenia. [/quote]

I agree with you about men creating all new tech. But you missed my point. A fat middle aged woman can drive a bulldozer as easily as a fat middle aged man. Hence construction jobs aren’t just for men any more. Of course most women don’t want to work in construction. But they can do the work, and sue for discrimination if they don’t get the job.

26

The female lack of spatial awareness makes me think we’ll be around for a while yet.

27

[quote]Uncle Gabby wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
Uncle Gabby wrote:
polo77j wrote:
I get what you’re saying but I’m not really buying it. Isn’t manliness inherent?

Besides, using two extremes to illustrate your point is like grasping for straws. The majority of the population aren’t taking steroids nor are they getting sex changes. The concentration of effeminate men in the authors part of the country is a lot higher than say Montana or Texas. If she had lived in a more rugged, conservative part of the country she wouldn’t have assumed there was a diminishing population of “real men” because she would be surround by predominantly men who qualify as rugged individualists. Her observation is a product of her environment and doesn’t necessarily reflect reality as a whole. Just as your juxtaposition of steroids and sex changes doesn’t reflect any real problem.

Well it’s not necessarily inherent. You have a low fat, low cholesterol diet being pushed heavily in the media and public schools, which produces low testosterone, coupled with a loss of manual labor jobs. Her views are definately skewed by her environment, but her environment is becoming the norm. There are no more manufacturing jobs, and only a very tiny segment of the population makes their living through farming anymore. The only jobs left are in the cities, behind a desk.

100 years ago this chick probably would have lived in a city, surrounded by the same kind of effeminate guys. But her kind were the minority. Today they are the majority.

People have been living in cities for 5000 years at least. Every man used to leave his house in London during the 1800s armed with a derringer. It’s not the cities that are the problem, it’s the culture itself that is feminized/homosexualized.

Advances in technology are probably going to reverse the trend towards moving into the cities as well. A lot of jobs can be done from almost anywhere nowadays.

10000 years, and every time human beings lived in cities for very long, they became feminized. The Perisian King Cyrus the great built his capital Pasagarde in harsh terriotory because he didn’t want his men to become soft.
[/quote]

Frankly, I feel no attachment to the megalopolises of the United States or their men, so I don’t particularly care what happens to them. They’re holding tanks of third world welfare recipients, their robber baron overlords, and SWPLs at this point. Let them draft/defend themselves.

28

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
The hard work of building civilization has always been done by men, I mean the back breaking labor of laying bricks, digging ditches for sewer systems, etc, have always required the physical strength of men.

But today a woman can operate a backhoe or a bulldozer as good as any man, so excluding women from this kind of work makes no practical sense, and having a larger labor pool drives wages down, which employers love. But technology comes and goes, and while it might allow women to do work they were incapable of fifty years ago, who knows what the next fifty years will bring.

I can tell you’re not an engineer.

The people coming up with the new tech are all men. Larry Summers was right - women are (usually) inherently disinterested in science and especially math. Go look at any undergraduate engineering class and it will be made up of 90% men. No men, no new tech. Also, women suck at handling tech. Ever seen a woman try to diagnose a car problem? Unclog a drain? Hook up a DVD player?

Don’t even get me started on the disaster that is women in management positions.

Also, it’s a lot harder for women to handle the incidents where something goes bump in the night without crying than men.

Right now, we’re in a situation of our own making in the West. We can unmake it when we collectively decide to recover our testicles.

I think we’ll be around for a few more millenia. [/quote]

This is most definitely a scenario dependent entirely on upbringing and social conditions. Girls that are coddled as children will grow up to be women who need to be coddled. The same is true for boys. This is why you see so many weak and irresponsible members of my generation…they were brought up that way.

Raise a girl to handle a gun and not be scared of things that go bump in the night and when she is a woman, she will do just that.

As a counter, ever seen a woman who was brought up without having everything done for her try to diagnose a car problem? Unclog a drain? Hook up a DVD player?

Go look at the top 10% of an undergraduate engineering class and there will be just as many, if not more, girls than boys. Trust me…I just graduated with quite a few of them recently.

This is exactly the sort of argument that misogynists use to exert their claims of superiority over women. Women are far more capable than you are giving them credit for in your post.

29

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
legendaryblaze wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
The hard work of building civilization has always been done by men, I mean the back breaking labor of laying bricks, digging ditches for sewer systems, etc, have always required the physical strength of men.

But today a woman can operate a backhoe or a bulldozer as good as any man, so excluding women from this kind of work makes no practical sense, and having a larger labor pool drives wages down, which employers love. But technology comes and goes, and while it might allow women to do work they were incapable of fifty years ago, who knows what the next fifty years will bring.

I can tell you’re not an engineer.

The people coming up with the new tech are all men. Larry Summers was right - women are (usually) inherently disinterested in science and especially math. Go look at any undergraduate engineering class and it will be made up of 90% men. No men, no new tech. Also, women suck at handling tech. Ever seen a woman try to diagnose a car problem? Unclog a drain? Hook up a DVD player?

Don’t even get me started on the disaster that is women in management positions.

Also, it’s a lot harder for women to handle the incidents where something goes bump in the night without crying than men.

Right now, we’re in a situation of our own making in the West. We can unmake it when we collectively decide to recover our testicles.

I think we’ll be around for a few more millenia.

Could this be a social problem though?
Women are always led astray from the scientific professions. At a young age, boys are allowed to play with cars, trucks, robots and video games. This, among other things, is part of the grand scheme that causes the male population to take an interest in science.

No, boys play with those things because they’re boys. Girls play with the things they play with because they’re girls.

If you let a boy start playing, everything he picks up becomes a gun or a sword within 5 minutes. The mother doesn’t have to encourage the boy to do it at all. Usually, it’s the opposite, actually - the mother is trying to get the boy to play in a nonviolent manner.

If it’s two brothers playing together, they start wrestling within 5 minutes. Mothers definitely don’t like to encourage that. [/quote]

My baby cousin likes to hit people with her toys. She’s a girl and she’s 3.
I’ve gone shopping with her and the mom and whenever the little girl pointed at a water gun or car in the store, the mom would say “that’s for boys. we’re going to get you dolls, cause you’re a girl”.
I’m sure you’ve heard of tomboys.

And your gun and sword analogy doesn’t make sense.
Did boys in the medieval period pick up sticks and pretend they were guns…back when guns didn’t exist?
It’s social upbringing.

They see G.I.JOE and transformers and fucking pokemon (animals fighting each other - every kid is a potential Michael Vicks).
And it’s not just what they see, it’s what they’re given.
How many parents do you know that give their sweet little girl water guns and plastic green army men? How many of them give the little girl comic books on wolverine, the hulk and the punisher?

How many boys do you know who are given barbies, little cabage patch kid dolls, and electric bake ovens?

All of this is brought on by social upbringing.

30

[quote]Stronghold wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
The hard work of building civilization has always been done by men, I mean the back breaking labor of laying bricks, digging ditches for sewer systems, etc, have always required the physical strength of men.

But today a woman can operate a backhoe or a bulldozer as good as any man, so excluding women from this kind of work makes no practical sense, and having a larger labor pool drives wages down, which employers love. But technology comes and goes, and while it might allow women to do work they were incapable of fifty years ago, who knows what the next fifty years will bring.

I can tell you’re not an engineer.

The people coming up with the new tech are all men. Larry Summers was right - women are (usually) inherently disinterested in science and especially math. Go look at any undergraduate engineering class and it will be made up of 90% men. No men, no new tech. Also, women suck at handling tech. Ever seen a woman try to diagnose a car problem? Unclog a drain? Hook up a DVD player?

Don’t even get me started on the disaster that is women in management positions.

Also, it’s a lot harder for women to handle the incidents where something goes bump in the night without crying than men.

Right now, we’re in a situation of our own making in the West. We can unmake it when we collectively decide to recover our testicles.

I think we’ll be around for a few more millenia.

This is most definitely a scenario dependent entirely on upbringing and social conditions. Girls that are coddled as children will grow up to be women who need to be coddled. The same is true for boys. This is why you see so many weak and irresponsible members of my generation…they were brought up that way.

Raise a girl to handle a gun and not be scared of things that go bump in the night and when she is a woman, she will do just that.

As a counter, ever seen a woman who was brought up without having everything done for her try to diagnose a car problem? Unclog a drain? Hook up a DVD player?

Go look at the top 10% of an undergraduate engineering class and there will be just as many, if not more, girls than boys. Trust me…I just graduated with quite a few of them recently.

This is exactly the sort of argument that misogynists use to exert their claims of superiority over women. Women are far more capable than you are giving them credit for in your post.
[/quote]

LOL. OK. You start your list of famous female scientists and engineers throughout history, and I’ll start mine and we’ll see whose is bigger. I’m sure that “social conditioning” goes way back for several thousands of years.

31

If you want to talk history, check out the relatively short amount of time that women have been allowed to learn to even read, then get back to me.

“Social conditioning” does, in fact, go back thousands of years.

Are you really trying to argue that women have had equal access to education and the other conditions necessary for innovation throughout the course of history? Really?

32

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:
LOL. OK. You start your list of famous female scientists and engineers throughout history, and I’ll start mine and we’ll see whose is bigger. I’m sure that “social conditioning” goes way back for several thousands of years. [/quote]

Exactly. Let us not forget that it is MEN who invented the wheel and built the Eiffel tower out of metal and brawn. Women just have small brains. A brain a third the size of ours. It’s science.

Something here smells like pure gasoline…

33

[quote]Stronghold wrote:
If you want to talk history, check out the relatively short amount of time that women have been allowed to learn to even read, then get back to me.

“Social conditioning” does, in fact, go back thousands of years.

Are you really trying to argue that women have had equal access to education and the other conditions necessary for innovation throughout the course of history? Really?[/quote]
Look, if you want to name your boy Sue and make him wear a dress, that’s your prerogative. I think there’s a couple in Sweden doing that with their kid - attempting to raise it “gender neutral.” Something tells me you’re probably going to “socially condition” your child as well though.

Don’t give me some lame cop-out about female scientists and engineers. Start making your list, and I’ll make mine.

James Clerk Maxwell
Gauss
Archimedes
Einstein
Bohr
L’Hospital
Stokes
Greene
Pasteur
Marconi
Schottky
Chebychev
Bob Noice
Gordon Moore
Coulomb
Lorentz
Ampere
Faraday
L’Chartlier
Kirchoff
Ohm
Von Braun
Von Siemens
Tesla
Celsius
Lord Kelvin
Newton
Hilbert
Volta
Fourier
Fermi
Boltzmann
Gallileo
Copernicus
Cooley
Tukey
Wingrad
Shannon
Nyquist
James L. Buie
Taylor
Rolle
Leibniz
Cauchy
Riemann
Weiestrauss
Bernoulli
Picard
Dym
Euler
Laplace
Navier
Schrodinger
Euclid
Brahmagupta
Hero
Diophantus
ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
Omar Kayyam
Watson
Crick

34

[quote]anonym wrote:
PRCalDude wrote:
LOL. OK. You start your list of famous female scientists and engineers throughout history, and I’ll start mine and we’ll see whose is bigger. I’m sure that “social conditioning” goes way back for several thousands of years.

Exactly. Let us not forget that it is MEN who invented the wheel and built the Eiffel tower out of metal and brawn. Women just have small brains. A brain a third the size of ours. It’s science.

Something here smells like pure gasoline…[/quote]

I left Gustave Eiffel off my list. Thanks for that.

I couldn’t find an inventor for the wheel. I’m sure it’s a woman, though. Lol.

35

Glad to see you value your misogyny over reality man. That takes some serious depth of uh…character?

Answer my question, do you not accept the FACT that women were not allowed to reach the same levels of education (erego innovation) until the past century? Remember that 250 years ago (a small timeframe considering you are listing ancients), only 50% of women in the US (which offered more equality to women than much of the rest of the world) could even READ. Also consider that, until the mid 1900’s, “college” for women was more like ongoing home economics training than any sort of opportunity for entering a technical field.

And then if you wanted to get REALLY tricky, you could try examining the number female innovators compared to the number of women involved in technical fields alongside the number of male innovators compared to the number of men involved in technical fields. If you were really interested in proving that men were more likely to be innovators, this would be the way to go about it since, until recently, very few women were involved in technical fields (due to social factors, NOT lack of ability).

Just as a fun aside, PRC, did you happen to vote McCain/Palin in the previous election?

36

Also, fuck Sherman.

Proud to say that I am from the last town in the Carolinas to successfully defend themselves against Sherman’s tyranny.

37

[quote]PRCalDude wrote:

LOL. OK. You start your list of famous female scientists and engineers throughout history, and I’ll start mine and we’ll see whose is bigger. I’m sure that “social conditioning” goes way back for several thousands of years. [/quote]

Classic PRC post. Fantastic. Don’t EVER stop posting

38

[quote]Stronghold wrote:
If you want to talk history, check out the relatively short amount of time that women have been allowed to learn to even read, then get back to me.

“Social conditioning” does, in fact, go back thousands of years.

Are you really trying to argue that women have had equal access to education and the other conditions necessary for innovation throughout the course of history? Really?[/quote]

I think that if women on the whole had a natural apptitude for innovation, cultures that allowed women more freedom to explore and invent would have dominated the planet long ago. Think about life back before there was institutionalized education, when children were taught by their parents around the camp fire. If women had invented the wheel, a better bow for hunting, etc, they would have been encouraged to keep on innovating. When technology was the difference between survival and extinction no culture would refuse to use half of its intellectual resources simply because of sexism.

Men and women are biologically different, and develop differently in the womb. There will always be women who have an aptitude for traditionally manly occupations, and vice versa. It would be foolish to exclude women from jobs simply because of their gender. For example, there are many good female firefighters who would not have been hired 40 years ago. Excluding them would be a great loss to the communities they serve. However, most women, because their bodies naturally produce less testosterone than most men would not make good firefighters. If you tried to create some kind of artificial equality by forcing a department to be 50/50 male/female it would be an absolute disaster.

So certainly open the doors should be open to everybody. But I think even after women have had equal access to education for thousands of years, you will still see certain fields that are dominated by men, and certain that are dominated by women.

39

[quote]Uncle Gabby wrote:
Stronghold wrote:
If you want to talk history, check out the relatively short amount of time that women have been allowed to learn to even read, then get back to me.

“Social conditioning” does, in fact, go back thousands of years.

Are you really trying to argue that women have had equal access to education and the other conditions necessary for innovation throughout the course of history? Really?

I think that if women on the whole had a natural apptitude for innovation, cultures that allowed women more freedom to explore and invent would have dominated the planet long ago. Think about life back before there was institutionalized education, when children were taught by their parents around the camp fire. If women had invented the wheel, a better bow for hunting, etc, they would have been encouraged to keep on innovating. When technology was the difference between survival and extinction no culture would refuse to use half of its intellectual resources simply because of sexism.

Men and women are biologically different, and develop differently in the womb. There will always be women who have an aptitude for traditionally manly occupations, and vice versa. It would be foolish to exclude women from jobs simply because of their gender. For example, there are many good female firefighters who would not have been hired 40 years ago. Excluding them would be a great loss to the communities they serve. However, most women, because their bodies naturally produce less testosterone than most men would not make good firefighters. If you tried to create some kind of artificial equality by forcing a department to be 50/50 male/female it would be an absolute disaster.

So certainly open the doors should be open to everybody. But I think even after women have had equal access to education for thousands of years, you will still see certain fields that are dominated by men, and certain that are dominated by women.
[/quote]

Oh, I totally agree that, generally speaking, women are less suited for more physically demanding occupations. The thing is, I’m not talking about firefighters, but about doctors and engineers.

The issue is, that until the very modern era, women have been subject to social constructions that severely limit their access to the same resources as men.

If PRC’s premise was true, we wouldn’t be seeing the trend of girls performing better in math and science classes than boys in recent years and we wouldn’t be seeing an ever increasing number of young women out performing their male counterparts in science and engineering fields. Like I said, this is happening. Three of the top 5 students in my graduating class in high school were women, and all of them went on to receive degrees in technical fields (mechanical engineering, astronomy/physics, medicine). When it comes to technical fields, I have no doubt that an empowered woman is just as capable as a man…which is the exact opposite of PRC’s assertion.

As for your “half of it’s intellectual resources” line…that’s absurd. Do you really think cultures historically act in a rational manner in order to ensure their survival? Do you think they ignore their long-held ideologies in the interest of their own sustainability?

40

All I’m gonna say is, when our economy fails and you need food or when terrorists’ attack, are the women of this country going to want men with balls or some emo/metro guy? Some will want the emo because they are stupid at first, but once their tummies start rumbling or need to feel “safe” kicks in…I’m sure you can figure out the rest