Women have also been brainwashed to allow "men who identify as women" into their private spaces and sports competitions. We're supposed to pretend they are just like us. Real women. If we object, we're transphobic.
Yes, the corporate fascists undermine our confidence to sell their products.
They also use the "don't be mean" meme to sell their products...and their ideas.
I work in a technical "man's job" and had the ability to become senior. People wanted me to act like my life would pan out like a man's. That it SHOULD pan out like a man's and if it didn't then that would be the sign of a problem. I am in my fifties now with three teenage children, back working full time, fairly senior, after many years of part time and career breaks, which limited my professional rise, which is fine by me. I don't care that men who started at the same time as me progressed differently because we chose to prioritise different things. It isn't a sign of institutional sexism. It is a sign of my reasonable rational choices. I am ever so glad I resisted the pressure to act against my own interests.
I would say this brainwashing has been in full swing since the early 1970s--by the time I graduated uni in 1980, as a business admin grad, it was taken for granted that as a young professional, my focus would be on career first, any part of traditional womanhood secondary at best. Fortunately that worked out for me, I'd recognized early that I wasn't cut out for the marriage-and-children path, but looking around now, at the next two generations' worth of young women finding themselves self-thwarted through their career commitments, either struggling to have the children they always thought they'd have, or finding themselves effectively aged out of options for marriage and creating their own families, it often hasn't served their interests well.
It is sad to say, but I view most of the World through the lens of someone trying to sell me something. Even my employer pitches my job as something more than just a way to make a living.
I wonder if anyone is interested going right back to basics with all these questions of gender and sexual behaviour. I study human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. From this perspective, the purpose of life isn't achieving pleasure, happiness, wealth, or popularity. The purpose is to produce "offspring" that grow up healthy and produce offspring themselves. We exist because our ancestors were part of cultures that "brainwashed" their members to believe that it was right and normal to want to produce children and succeed in raising them in conditions much harder than anything we experience today.
I agree 100%. I think the idea of men and women wanting the same thing is because Corporations want cheaper labor. WW2 told women and Corporations they could do the jobs of men. And corporations decided they would pay them less.
I'm 70 and have had a successful career in what (when I started out) was a 'man's job'. I've never tried to act like a man.
It should be so simple. Men and women are different but - in an ideal world - equal. And therein lies the problem. For some reason, it all seems to have become a bit of a battle. Rather than the sexes seeing each other as, primarily, another human being they see first either a man or a woman (I'm deliberately not getting side-tracked into however many other labels I could/should list) - the balttle lines are drawn and it all becomes a bit heated and silly.
All most decent people want is for every human being on the planet, regardless of whether they are male or female, to have food in their stomach, a roof over their head, an education, employment and security. How we get there is another matter entirely, but in the meantime let's try to concentrate on the basics.
I agree with most of what you say but not your insistence that following a goal of reproduction is "one of the strongest instincts we have." Like other mammals, humans experience the emotion of "lust," but most humans are able to control this emotion, just as we are able to control emotions like anger and fear. We evolved the ability to do this because as, you point out, our ancestors who were able to do this has more surviving offspring. They produced offspring at a rate close to what they and their group could support. Successful groups produced cultural norms that regulated sexual behaviour and our ancestors were successful because they mostly conformed to them.
The Western belief that we have evolved a strong instinct to have reproduce (i.e. have sex) is a norm of our culture. It's an unhelpful norm, I think, because people don't know how to interpret the word "instinct". To some it sounds like we are driven to find sexual partners. For a species like ours, it is clearly more useful to maintain friendships and families than to compete for mates but Western culture makes many of its members blind to this. It encourages us to be obsessed with sex. Unfortunately, the belief is encouraged by some of my colleagues who call themselves "evolutionary psychologists."
OK, but what are we going to do about it besides complain and make money on our substack? Can we get beyond the "chaotic breakdown" attractor that global capitalism causes? We need a third attractor, besides that one and totalitarianism. I have some idea of what that would look like, based on the science of emergence and multi-level-selection.
Women have also been brainwashed to allow "men who identify as women" into their private spaces and sports competitions. We're supposed to pretend they are just like us. Real women. If we object, we're transphobic.
Yes, the corporate fascists undermine our confidence to sell their products.
They also use the "don't be mean" meme to sell their products...and their ideas.
Be mean, ladies.
Speak the truth.
Embrace and defend your beliefs without apology.
You know, act like a man.
I work in a technical "man's job" and had the ability to become senior. People wanted me to act like my life would pan out like a man's. That it SHOULD pan out like a man's and if it didn't then that would be the sign of a problem. I am in my fifties now with three teenage children, back working full time, fairly senior, after many years of part time and career breaks, which limited my professional rise, which is fine by me. I don't care that men who started at the same time as me progressed differently because we chose to prioritise different things. It isn't a sign of institutional sexism. It is a sign of my reasonable rational choices. I am ever so glad I resisted the pressure to act against my own interests.
I would say this brainwashing has been in full swing since the early 1970s--by the time I graduated uni in 1980, as a business admin grad, it was taken for granted that as a young professional, my focus would be on career first, any part of traditional womanhood secondary at best. Fortunately that worked out for me, I'd recognized early that I wasn't cut out for the marriage-and-children path, but looking around now, at the next two generations' worth of young women finding themselves self-thwarted through their career commitments, either struggling to have the children they always thought they'd have, or finding themselves effectively aged out of options for marriage and creating their own families, it often hasn't served their interests well.
It is sad to say, but I view most of the World through the lens of someone trying to sell me something. Even my employer pitches my job as something more than just a way to make a living.
I wonder if anyone is interested going right back to basics with all these questions of gender and sexual behaviour. I study human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. From this perspective, the purpose of life isn't achieving pleasure, happiness, wealth, or popularity. The purpose is to produce "offspring" that grow up healthy and produce offspring themselves. We exist because our ancestors were part of cultures that "brainwashed" their members to believe that it was right and normal to want to produce children and succeed in raising them in conditions much harder than anything we experience today.
Whar about the dupiclity of women's magazines that feature lucious food on the cover and feature a new diet on the inside.
I agree 100%. I think the idea of men and women wanting the same thing is because Corporations want cheaper labor. WW2 told women and Corporations they could do the jobs of men. And corporations decided they would pay them less.
Bill Hicks said this many years ago, with humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0. His solution was that marketers should kill themselves, not very practical.
I'm 70 and have had a successful career in what (when I started out) was a 'man's job'. I've never tried to act like a man.
It should be so simple. Men and women are different but - in an ideal world - equal. And therein lies the problem. For some reason, it all seems to have become a bit of a battle. Rather than the sexes seeing each other as, primarily, another human being they see first either a man or a woman (I'm deliberately not getting side-tracked into however many other labels I could/should list) - the balttle lines are drawn and it all becomes a bit heated and silly.
All most decent people want is for every human being on the planet, regardless of whether they are male or female, to have food in their stomach, a roof over their head, an education, employment and security. How we get there is another matter entirely, but in the meantime let's try to concentrate on the basics.
I agree with most of what you say but not your insistence that following a goal of reproduction is "one of the strongest instincts we have." Like other mammals, humans experience the emotion of "lust," but most humans are able to control this emotion, just as we are able to control emotions like anger and fear. We evolved the ability to do this because as, you point out, our ancestors who were able to do this has more surviving offspring. They produced offspring at a rate close to what they and their group could support. Successful groups produced cultural norms that regulated sexual behaviour and our ancestors were successful because they mostly conformed to them.
The Western belief that we have evolved a strong instinct to have reproduce (i.e. have sex) is a norm of our culture. It's an unhelpful norm, I think, because people don't know how to interpret the word "instinct". To some it sounds like we are driven to find sexual partners. For a species like ours, it is clearly more useful to maintain friendships and families than to compete for mates but Western culture makes many of its members blind to this. It encourages us to be obsessed with sex. Unfortunately, the belief is encouraged by some of my colleagues who call themselves "evolutionary psychologists."
OK, but what are we going to do about it besides complain and make money on our substack? Can we get beyond the "chaotic breakdown" attractor that global capitalism causes? We need a third attractor, besides that one and totalitarianism. I have some idea of what that would look like, based on the science of emergence and multi-level-selection.