Gender Roles

[Politesse]

The European obsession with female breasts is also a relatively recent cultural development, universal neither across time nor across cultures. Most people in most cultures are capable of finding beauty and sexual attraction in breasts both male and female, but they were not always obsessed over in the way they are now.

So... three cultures portray women as having breasts? What on earth is that supposed to be proving? All those figures have shoulders as well, but I presume you aren't arguing this is proof of universal fetishization of shoulders.

 

[Emily Lake]

The European obsession with female breasts is also a relatively recent cultural development, universal neither across time nor across cultures. Most people in most cultures are capable of finding beauty and sexual attraction in breasts both male and female, but they were not always obsessed over in the way they are now.

So you use a middle example of a culture not apparently enamored of the breast by the clear lack of prominence, nipples, or accentuation?

Of these three the middle stands out as a culture that isn't focused on the breasts, making your universality claims a bit suspect.

And now you are actually fighting with Politesse, whose degree is in anthropology, apparently, on universality of something in human cultures...

Poli claimed that the focus on breasts is a "new" phenomenon, despite amply breasts being used in explicitly female iconography and statues since the earliest cultures have existed. Even in the middle, the breasts are recognizable as breasts.

The notion that ample breasts being viewed as desirable in humans is something hot off the press is absurd, and is contradicted by every scrap of evidence we have from ancient human civilizations.

 

[Emily Lake]

The European obsession with female breasts is also a relatively recent cultural development, universal neither across time nor across cultures. Most people in most cultures are capable of finding beauty and sexual attraction in breasts both male and female, but they were not always obsessed over in the way they are now.

So... three cultures portray women as having breasts? What on earth is that supposed to be proving? All those figures have shoulders as well, but I presume you aren't arguing this is proof of universal fetishization of shoulders.

YOU are the one claiming that a focus on breasts in females is a "relatively recent phenomenon". Clearly, it is not.

 

[Politesse]

You - and a bunch of other people with degress that are irrelevant to the subject, as well as a crapton of activists and ideological proselytizers - are conflating the definition of sex with the proxy measures that we use to identify sex.

Wait... are you saying anthropology is a "degree irrelevant to the subject" of human evolution and biology? What would be relevant, Bullshit Political Spin Studies?

Judging by the inxomprehensible babble that is the rest of your post, I guess any degree at all is suspect. For the record, I'm not a sp---, but I have no animosity toward those who are on the spectrum, they are often a darn sight more rational minded than us normies.

Funny how anthropologists have never really had difficulty distinguishing an adult male skeleton from an adult female skeleton... at least not until gender studies decided to infuse itself into everyfucking thing, and now actual experienced anthropologists get ousted from presenting at conferences when they want to talk about identifying the sex of human remains.

I am not sure what to make of this post. It's certainly not true, whatever it is. No one has ever been expelled from a conference for sexing a skeleton, that's a routine part of the job. I did it routinely when I was working CRM in my younger days. But any experienced forensic anthropologist will quickly correct you on two points:

- Sexing remains is only possible most of the time, and the same factors that complicate sexing living organisms tend to complicate clear sexing of remains, also. Indeed, best guesses at sex can really only be confirmed some of the time. How do you know whether you got it "right" or not? Usually by comparing two or more of the several criteria used to make that guess. If they all agree, great. If they don't you've got an ambiguous case, and often no way to determine what resulted in it.

- And of course, sex is not a aynonym for gender. The forensic anthropologist cannot tell you what someone's gender was with absolute certainty, only make a best guess at how they would most likely have identified. They're not always right, and transgenderism isn't the only reason a misidentification might happen, sometimes the remains themselves simply don't contain sufficient information to make such a determination, or in the case of archaeological materials, we know too little of their culture's gender ideologies to guess.

It's weird that you're simultaneously attacking anthropology as an illegitimate discipline, while also ascribing seemingly supernatural powers of detection to laboratory bio anthropologists that they neither possess nor claim to possess.

 

[Politesse]

The European obsession with female breasts is also a relatively recent cultural development, universal neither across time nor across cultures. Most people in most cultures are capable of finding beauty and sexual attraction in breasts both male and female, but they were not always obsessed over in the way they are now.

So... three cultures portray women as having breasts? What on earth is that supposed to be proving? All those figures have shoulders as well, but I presume you aren't arguing this is proof of universal fetishization of shoulders.

YOU are the one claiming that a focus on breasts in females is a "relatively recent phenomenon". Clearly, it is not.

i guess you misunderstood my post. I wasn't claiming that breaats were only recently discovered, only that extreme erogenization of breasts is a cultural particular to some cultures and times, not a universal. I'm aware that women have always had breasts, it's why we call ourselves mammals.

 

[lpetrich]

Why do female members of our species often grow much bigger breasts than female apes and monkeys? By human standards, they are all flat-chested.

I remember an article about  Margie Profet some decades ago where she said that there is no good theory about breasts. She had come up with a theory of menstruation, that it was to periodically clear out the womb lining so that infections of it don't persist.

Scientists Still Stumped By The Evolution of Human Breasts | Discover Magazine

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I can't tell whether you're trying to deny the agency of individuals, the role of the rest of society, or both?

How about denying that a person can wish their preferred reality into being?

Of course we can't.

I can't wish my eyes perfect. The doctors can't make them perfect (even if I didn't consider the risks on surgery unacceptable my prescription isn't stable), but they can make things far better than they would otherwise be. Fundamentally, it comes down to wearing glasses is better than not wearing glasses.

The issue with the transgendered is like this. While one can dream of perfection the reality is far from it. It comes down to whether the patient has a better life with medical intervention or without. That's how basically all medical interventions should be evaluated--is the patient better off. And the low regret rate says they are. (Especially as most of the regrets stem from society, not from the individual.)

 

[Jarhyn]

The European obsession with female breasts is also a relatively recent cultural development, universal neither across time nor across cultures. Most people in most cultures are capable of finding beauty and sexual attraction in breasts both male and female, but they were not always obsessed over in the way they are now.

So... three cultures portray women as having breasts? What on earth is that supposed to be proving? All those figures have shoulders as well, but I presume you aren't arguing this is proof of universal fetishization of shoulders.

YOU are the one claiming that a focus on breasts in females is a "relatively recent phenomenon". Clearly, it is not.

i guess you misunderstood my post. I wasn't claiming that breaats were only recently discovered, only that extreme erogenization of breasts is a cultural particular to some cultures and times, not a universal. I'm aware that women have always had breasts, it's why we call ourselves mammals.

I think every person sees things they like and things they don't.

Some sculptors sculpt big breasts. Some sculptors sculpt feet. Some people are into dealing with their partner's gross body issues.

I can't say I particularly like looking at gross things. I'll absolutely stuff a brand new hole in my husband's ass full of medicated fabric, but I don't enjoy it. Some people enjoy doing that kind of stuff with/for a partner.

I think that the priests or whatever of a culture impose some creative vision on what is allowed to ultimately be built into what perseveres, the architecture and the artifacts, our public edifices of stone, and often that reflects some relationship between religion and wealthy people's tastes.

Often it depends on who gets to design the sculpture.

One of those idols is of a person with certain proportions that aren't in vogue in American media today! I daresay it was less about her breasts, and more a statement, a fetish relating to being large (hah, a fetish fetish!).

I find it so funny when people object vociferously and angrily at the proposition that even seeking a "normal" as a target is a fetish, because the size of a standard deviation is so fucking big already! And there are deviations in multiple dimensions, some mutually exclusive and some not, some as a percent normal A and a percent normal B, like if A and B as blood types came in extents occasionally, but usually as a spectrum.

Some people take more to appreciating the deviations, and some people really just want very much to bring up the deviations for other reasons.

Deviants get remembered. They have stories written about them. Joan of Ark is remembered because whatever Joan's reason, Joan decided completely and utterly to be Joan regardless of the consequences. Joan was a deviation from the norm and now people use Joan's story as a reason and example to try the idea of "be myself and fuck the haters" on for a spin.

As for a perspective informed by observation...

I think that Gender as an aspect of Sexual Reproduction of a Social Species is derived ultimately from three sorts of roles within the species, and that for one of these roles there are multiple traits which accomplish it.

One of these roles is going to organize roughly around pregnancy, "sex theoretic female", though there will be outliers and admixtures of traits.

One of these roles will arrange around sperm, all the strategies that all the animals that don't have to deal with eating/growing enough material to make a baby succeed have adopted. These will be distributed in some measure across those who can, amd again, outliers and admixtures.

One of these roles will involve doing a third thing, and I social species will see selection, especially in family organized groups: non-reproductive members.

Non-reproductive members in social and tool-using species don't have to deal with the time and effort of raising children and generally have other roles available to them, and other ways they can contribute to the success of both adults and children in their communities. This is a third way in which individuals can contribute, and especially to family.

There is a selective pressure on the other two, for their own sakes, to harbor processes or traits that can generate a non-reproductive individual at a fairly high rate, in such a society where tools are important or where tool use and creative intelligence as a trait may skip many offspring of some family group.

I do think primates have been evolving for long enough around tool use and technique and expertise that some archetype of individual who will not reproduce and who will contribute certain kinds of important behaviors from time to time would see trait selection over time. This would constitute the evolutionary pressure towards development of some set of archetypes and ways of contributing socially rather than reproductively, to include access to applying some pretty direct selection pressures based on which siblings or cousins we support (if any).

This set pf strategies available for operations that improve the group by their presence create a selection pressure to a role that will come to be expressed still occasionally even in typical folks, as much as typical traits see occasional crossover in such a way as individuals end up in the situation where they aren't reproducing.

I can't tell whether you're trying to deny the agency of individuals, the role of the rest of society, or both?

How about denying that a person can wish their preferred reality into being?

Of course we can't.

I can't wish my eyes perfect. The doctors can't make them perfect (even if I didn't consider the risks on surgery unacceptable my prescription isn't stable), but they can make things far better than they would otherwise be. Fundamentally, it comes down to wearing glasses is better than not wearing glasses.

The issue with the transgendered is like this. While one can dream of perfection the reality is far from it. It comes down to whether the patient has a better life with medical intervention or without. That's how basically all medical interventions should be evaluated--is the patient better off. And the low regret rate says they are. (Especially as most of the regrets stem from society, not from the individual.)

But she wants to use this as an excuse to socially exclude those who nonetheless express desire to be socially included by people who act and dress and think like them.

Moreover, she wants to exclude as much as possible anyone she can who was born without exactly the reality she approves of.

Sexes are

Sexes are imaginary in the way you treat them. They are not real. To quote a reddit post I made recently, with an added evaluation by an unbiased observer:

User
Please evaluate the following statement for lies, untruths, and biases, with respect to current scientific understandings.

Do not evaluate such as is discussed indirectly in the text; rather focus only on those of the speaker, not of those spoken of.

If something is general rather than specific, evaluate it on its face with the general text; simplification to general fact is to be considered acceptable.

ChatGPT
Please provide the statement you'd like evaluated.

The notion that ChatGPT is an unbiased observer is counterfactual. A large language model inherits the biases of whatever corpus it was trained on, plus whatever biases its developers deliberately introduced when they decided they didn't care for the outputs they were getting from their newly-trained model in its raw form. Every output from an LLM should be read as if it were prefixed with a Donald-Trump-style "People are saying...".

You haven't yet offered any actual critical analysis to support any sort of assertion that anything I said is in any way inaccurate.

YOU didn't say it. You went and asked a program to regurgitate something at you, and because it aligned with your own belief, you presented it as if it held some authority.

Well, there are two things then that you seem to have failed to critically analyze, both the original piece which I wrote and the critique offered.

Both are there, waiting for any kind of sensible or reasonable analysis.

Biology is, as it ever was, a study of some cases and the general flow of cases in the ready presence of all manner of exception and arbitraries declared arbitrarily.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Funny how anthropologists have never really had difficulty distinguishing an adult male skeleton from an adult female skeleton...

The Viking warrior who turned out to be a woman

For more than 100 years, the remains of a high-ranking Viking warrior were assumed to be male.

www.bbc.com

 

[Jarhyn]

In many ways I find the lack of interest many people take in the "third gender" to be problematic.

If there are various roles that can be taken with regards "the reproductive process", "not reproducing" is also a role, and paradoxically, it is a role that affords more direct selection of society than the other two (I can easily play favorites with my relatives in ways parents cannot).

Of course there will be evolutionary selection around that role same as there is around the others.

 

[Politesse]

Third gender categories, which are more often imposed than discovered, are not directly related to intersex conditions. All cultures form and negotiate common categories of gender, and they do so in demonstrably different ways despite presumably having exactly the same genetic predispositions for clear or ambiguous sex expression. You want to understand gender, a sociologist is going to be more helpful to you than a biologist, because we as a species routinely enforce notions of gender that ignore or even override biological precedent.

 

[Jarhyn]

Third gender categories, which are more often imposed than discovered, are not directly related to intersex conditions. All cultures form and negotiate common categories of gender, and they do so in demonstrably different ways despite presumably having exactly the same genetic predispositions for clear or ambiguous sex expression. You want to understand gender, a sociologist is going to be more helpful to you than a biologist, because we as a species routinely enforce notions of gender that ignore or even override biological precedent.

I would say more that there is a "natural" tendency for third gender individuals in respects to the fact that there are "natural" tendencies to the other two.

This is not about negotiation so much as simple structural and systemic fact of "sperm contributor", "egg contributor" and "non-reproducer".

This will cause rough clustering of traits to start seeing "packaging" in the same way traits cluster in "packages" around the primary genders.

I am not discussing the memes built up around these, but rather the stuff the memes themselves precipitated from, the biological reality quiet and often messy associations that cause subtle favor of the social outcomes.

To this end, we would see a clustering of strange traits in different proportions observed in the non-reproductive fraction moreso than the pregnancy theoretic females vs the pregnancy theoretic males. There will be weak trait associations in different proportions for each group.

Ultimately, all social and biological edifice is going to align over time with reproductive success, and social realities are going to eventually see reflection as a biological reality over long time frames.

Indeed additional things will pile on top of that: memes will implement the dimension of volatile change necessary for adjusting short term circumstances, but biology will make homes for those memes to live if the memes themselves as a pattern provide benefit in their existence.

Still, we can see that selective pressures will exist with a preference for such individuals who lean in particular ways. Over time trait association is going to happen, and you will tend to find people interested in things that fail to cause reproduction will also end up being paired with other biological traits beneficial specifically in that case.

The three different buckets of behavior create natural divisions within the population with different survival goals with respect to the species.

 

[Bomb#20]

Funny how anthropologists have never really had difficulty distinguishing an [intact] adult male skeleton from an [intact] adult female skeleton...

The Viking warrior who turned out to be a woman

For more than 100 years, the remains of a high-ranking Viking warrior were assumed to be male.

www.bbc.com

FIFH.

 

[Bomb#20]

As to gendering, we have a whole set of gendered features, and they are sometimes mismatched.

• Gonads (they make gametes)
• Genitals (primary features)

Gonads and genitals are not "gendered" features, they're sexed features. They're primary sexual characteristics.

"Gender" and "sex" were synonyms in English for about six hundred years, and they still are in the common usage of normal people who haven't gone down the newspeak rabbit hole. lpetrich appears to have been using "gender" in the traditional way. When a bunch of academics appropriate a term already in widespread use and make up a new technical-jargon meaning for it, that doesn't make the people using the term in its common-usage sense wrong.

 

[Jarhyn]

I'll note yet again that incessantly holding on to and enforcing "oldspeak" definitions is clearly still an available route to enforcing "newspeak" evils.

This is done wherein there are multiple terms in some domain which the disingenuous asshole wishes to PREVENT from being used to express certain ideas in some nuanced way. The idea is that by suppressing the division of the terms into distinct applications, they can suppress discussion of the new concept.

As a result, shitheels could, for instance, suppress discussion of gender by, say, trying to collapse the two concepts back into a single usage.

By depriving the world of distinctly useful terms for fairly distinct things, they prevent the new understanding from taking hold and being brought to challenge the social structures they hoped to preserve through their enforcement of Newspeak

 

[Bomb#20]

... enforcing ...

Exactly which part of "freedom of speech" don't you understand?

 

[Politesse]

"Gender" and "sex" were synonyms in English for about six hundred years, and they still are in the common usage of normal people who haven't gone down the newspeak rabbit hole.

Otherwise known as having a high school diploma...

Do you say the smae thing about all specialized language? "Astronomy" and "astrology" meant the same thing back in the day, and still do to people who know jack shit about either, so let's just ignore science!

 

[Jarhyn]

... enforcing ...

Exactly which part of "freedom of speech" don't you understand?

The one in which you think it's "speech freedom" to throw tantrums when people actually engage in "speech freedom" and attempt to justify a lack of nuance in discussion on account of your own apparent inability to parse that nuance.

You have every freedom to speak that you might imagine, but you do not have entitlement to "private facts". The world works a way and has the variations it does and all denying that does is put your head in the sand and make you look like an ostrich.

Reality contains biologies that have a feature loosely linked to but separate from the shape genitals have, and associated with behavioral support around said genital configurations. Language OUGHT have a word understood distinct and separate but still relationally linked to sex but separate from "the shape genitals have".

We landed on "gender" as the concept going towards the behavioral support structures and "sex" relating instead to the wider topic of differentiations around gamete support in general.

Trying to enforce your Newspeak to ignore the reality there is just idiotic. You're free to be that if you want, but that's your choice, if you do choose; if you make that choice, you have excluded "not being an idiot" from your possible options.

 

[Bomb#20]

"Gender" and "sex" were synonyms in English for about six hundred years, and they still are in the common usage of normal people who haven't gone down the newspeak rabbit hole.

Otherwise known as having a high school diploma...

You appear to be implicitly accusing lpetrich of not having a high school diploma.

Do you say the smae thing about all specialized language? "Astronomy" and "astrology" meant the same thing back in the day,

As you well know, the distinction between astrology and astronomy is no longer specialized language. It has filtered out from astronomers to the general public and become normalized. Sociologists may well wish for their own specialized jargon to go down the same path, but wishing for something does not equal it having happened, and does not make the people who have not jumped on the bandwagon wrong.

... so let's just ignore science!

That astronomy is a science is indisputable; sociology, not so clear. But one thing that definitely is not science is linguistic prescriptivism.

 

[Emily Lake]

You - and a bunch of other people with degress that are irrelevant to the subject, as well as a crapton of activists and ideological proselytizers - are conflating the definition of sex with the proxy measures that we use to identify sex.

Wait... are you saying anthropology is a "degree irrelevant to the subject" of human evolution and biology? What would be relevant, Bullshit Political Spin Studies?

Judging by the inxomprehensible babble that is the rest of your post, I guess any degree at all is suspect. For the record, I'm not a sp---, but I have no animosity toward those who are on the spectrum, they are often a darn sight more rational minded than us normies.

Funny how anthropologists have never really had difficulty distinguishing an adult male skeleton from an adult female skeleton... at least not until gender studies decided to infuse itself into everyfucking thing, and now actual experienced anthropologists get ousted from presenting at conferences when they want to talk about identifying the sex of human remains.

I am not sure what to make of this post. It's certainly not true, whatever it is. No one has ever been expelled from a conference for sexing a skeleton, that's a routine part of the job. I did it routinely when I was working CRM in my younger days. But any experienced forensic anthropologist will quickly correct you on two points:

Scholarly panel defending biological sexes canceled over 'transphobia' concerns

The panelists, one of whom is a lesbian, expressed their disappointment and fired back with a letter to event organizers, calling the decision 'egregious.'

abc3340.com

- Sexing remains is only possible most of the time, and the same factors that complicate sexing living organisms tend to complicate clear sexing of remains, also. Indeed, best guesses at sex can really only be confirmed some of the time. How do you know whether you got it "right" or not? Usually by comparing two or more of the several criteria used to make that guess. If they all agree, great. If they don't you've got an ambiguous case, and often no way to determine what resulted in it.

If the pelvis is destroyed and many of the fragments are missing, perhaps. Or if the skeleton is of a young child, sure. But for adults? Are you actually claiming that anthropologists just have a horrible time telling what sex a skeleton is, and it's really just a "best guess"?

The reliability of sex determination of skeletons from forensic context in the Balkans - PubMed

In this study we have tested the applicability of morphological methods for sex assessment, based on seven pelvic and nine cranial traits, using contemporary Balkans population. The material involved in the study comprises 262 pelvic bones and 180 skulls of male individuals from two mass graves...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Sex was correctly estimated by the experienced anthropologist in 100% of individuals using all of the 16 pelvic and cranial criteria. In fact, sex differences in pelvic morphology were large enough to allow sexing the individuals with 100% accuracy

- And of course, sex is not a aynonym for gender. The forensic anthropologist cannot tell you what someone's gender was with absolute certainty, only make a best guess at how they would most likely have identified. They're not always right, and transgenderism isn't the only reason a misidentification might happen, sometimes the remains themselves simply don't contain sufficient information to make such a determination, or in the case of archaeological materials, we know too little of their culture's gender ideologies to guess.

That would largely be because this newly pushed version of "gender" has only been around for a very short period of time, whereas sex has been around for millions of years. And up until very recently, anthropologists didn't actually give a fuck about "gender identity". They cared to some degree about gender roles within a given culture, but nobody gave a fuck about the "gender identity" of a thousand year old skeleton, no more than they gave a fuck about whether that skeleton was of someone who preferred strawberries over apples.

It's weird that you're simultaneously attacking anthropology as an illegitimate discipline, while also ascribing seemingly supernatural powers of detection to laboratory bio anthropologists that they neither possess nor claim to possess.

I'm not dismissing anthropology as a discipline - I'm dismissing the freshly invented notion that anthropology has a tough time determining the SEX of human remains based on some freshly invented mystical notion of a gendery soul making it really difficult to tell that the person with the tilted pelvis, with an oval opening, and angled femurs was a female.