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Isn't the fact that "guy stuff = awesome stuff" and "girl stuff = too boring for Hollywood" indicative of a gender bias problem in our culture though? I mean, doesn't that seem messed up to you too?Nope. I don't expect the sexes to be the same, and I don't expect them to like the same things. A girl at a giant robot movie? Nothing unusal. A 90% female audience at a giant robot movie? Kind of odd.
And that is an accurate reading of American Hollywood culture. I would make the same assessment, with the exception that I find something really weird there. What makes a 90% female audience at a giant robot movie odd? There's no biological fact preventing that from happening. Nothing in human biology makes males like giant robots more than women do, nor is there anything in our biology that makes us associate awesome stuff like giant robots with one gender over another. The weird thing here is that we base those assumptions off of cultural fictions, not any sort of scientific fact. The thing that weirds me out about dichotomies like "awesome hollywood stuff = guy stuff and girl stuff = boring emotional stuff" is that there's no factual basis, we just assume these things because of a bunch of stories and assumptions that have been propagated through Western culture for thousands of years of history. Gender dichotomies are just fictions. Really huge fictions all based on... nothing real.
Action flicks are a good chunk of the movies.
They are, but so are rom coms. My not-so scientifically chosen list of flicks has probably been slated towards "guy" stuff (two WW II movies, two outlaw buddy movies) but I wonder what would happen if I started intentionally watching date movies and melodramas. [Shrugs]
The movie we're watching tonight, I've figured out, is not recentish at all, but Army of Shadows. I'm still taking bets.
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And that is an accurate reading of American Hollywood culture. I would make the same assessment, with the exception that I find something really weird there. What makes a 90% female audience at a giant robot movie odd?
Well, I'm of the opinion that most culture comes out of a petrie dish so I don't think you'll like my answer.
There's no biological fact preventing that from happening. Nothing in human biology makes males like giant robots more than women do, nor is there anything in our biology that makes us associate awesome stuff like giant robots with one gender over another.
Its violence, which males have every biological reason for being more interested in than women.
Gender dichotomies are just fictions. Really huge fictions all based on... nothing real.
Yeah.. no. We're a sexually dimorphic species, and I don't see any reason for thinking that biology doesn't extend to our brains.
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Also on Harry Potter, Hermione Granger is the best character and I wish she was the main character. Because damn, Harry does nothing in comparison to her!
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Sexually dimorphic species, yes. Most people can see the difference between the faces of a man and a woman. These differences are quite massive, really. We are talking about cubic centimetres of tissue. The same volume of tissue in the brain means a HUGE lump of functions. We know that the anatomy of male and female brains are VERY different. For example, women have a much larger corpus callosum (the connection between the hemispheres) than men, around 80% larger area in section, if I remember correctly.
Differences in behaviour, personality, perception are what we would expect to see from such a difference of gross anatomy. Making the claim that there are NO statistical differences in behaviour between the sexes due to biology is a HUGE claim, and would require similarly extraordinary evidence.
This is not to say that an individual cannot deviate from the average in various ways. Nothing prevents a woman from fitting a masculine personality to a T, and if she does, it's nobody's business but hers. She should certainly never be criticized for it. But... as soon as you start talking about the sexes as groups - yes. You CAN expect a large part of what differences you see to be biology.
Which shows how ridiculous the Bechdel test is. You have harry potter, which is not only written by a female author, but contains several prominent female characters including Hermoine who's by far the most intelligent, competent, capable and most importantly sane members of the main three.
However, the liberating story of female empowerment, 'Step Up 4:Miami Heat' passes the test with FLYING COLOURS. Clearly the Bechdel test is a legitimate tool to be adhered to.
To be honest... I think it's a pretty simple function of sales analysis. Movies today are EXTREMELY similar to one another. Most action movies have the same story, same thing with every genre, really. Every so often, a movie breaks the mold A LITTLE, which is apparently utterly amazing, and yet, the differences are pretty minor when you look at them. Hollywood doesn't do much for the male demographic that doesn't include the hero's journey, most or all of the expected side characters, and so on. If you think that two women not talking to each other about anything other than men is the biggest problem with movies today, I am sorry, I think you need to do some thinking about what cinema is and what it could be. Other genres aren't really that much different, though the expected narrative varies a bit between genres.
From the company's perspective: They have so and so many movie slots to fill per year. These movies need to be sold to a specific demographic. Men are easy to sell to if you produce action movies (which means not too many female side characters and certainly no female main characters), and women are easy to sell to if you produce romantic comedies and such (note that these movies will end up having the two women talking about men, of course). Remove these two categories, and you have a pretty small number of films remaining, but the Bechdel test will look sharply different in them. Another factor that hurts this is that cutting is a pretty harsh process, killing off everything that veers from the central narrative simply due to lack of time.
Do yourself a favour. Stay off Hollywood for a year, try to catch other movies, independent movies, smaller studios, and you may come to see things differently. The big movie studios are old, staid creatures of habit, and you should not expect them to change.
A male or female personality exists independently of culture? It's universal across all societies and peoples?
Pretty much. Culture certainly affects us, but it's a question of how much energy it takes to do so. Some cultures devote more energy to change certain patterns of behaviour, and there will be exceptions... but on average, yes. Across (almost) all societies and people. And, I should note that it's not a question of every part of a personality being the same, nor for every person. It's a matter of men, on average, having certain traits of their personalities far more commonly than do women.
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Do yourself a favour. Stay off Hollywood for a year, try to catch other movies, independent movies, smaller studios, and you may come to see things differently. The big movie studios are old, staid creatures of habit, and you should not expect them to change.
I only dial in some Hollywood when I want some mindless entertainment and as something to watch when I feel like switching off.
One day they might care enough about female actors to throw them a few more bones too, and that will be great! We will have even more fodder for mindless narrative and empty plots. Adding women wont make Hollywood fare any better or less mediocre - it won't advance womens causes terribly far nor portray them in some enlightened fashion which will get a sigh of relief as women everywhere are encouraged to go off to greater heights, no, they will simply be treated the same way men are - as biscuit headed 'cliche guy' aplomb.
If things are going to change, look not to Hollywood as a beginning (or an ending) for all that resides in them thar hills is false gold.
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A male or female personality exists independently of culture? It's universal across all societies and peoples?Pretty much. Culture certainly affects us, but it's a question of how much energy it takes to do so. Some cultures devote more energy to change certain patterns of behaviour, and there will be exceptions... but on average, yes. Across (almost) all societies and people. And, I should note that it's not a question of every part of a personality being the same, nor for every person. It's a matter of men, on average, having certain traits of their personalities far more commonly than do women.
I think the outliers (and those outside the "pretty much") might be problematic for claims of standard ranges of gender identities/roles.
A male or female personality exists independently of culture? It's universal across all societies and peoples?
Eyup.
Can you name ANY culture where the women are the warriors and the men stay at home when war is fought? What are the chances of that happening randomly?
I think the outliers (and those outside the "pretty much") might be problematic for claims of standard ranges of gender identities/roles.
They are not. Biology is very used to ideas being guidelines rather than hard and fast rules. Ignoring the trend is at least as bad as acknowledging the exceptions.
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Am I the only one that's finding the suggestions of men being innately violent by their very nature simultaneously hilariously ironic and incredibly offensive?
Also going to throw out a global [citation needed] for pretty much everything that's been said in the past page or so.
Am I the only one that's finding the suggestions of men being innately violent by their very nature simultaneously hilariously ironic and incredibly offensive?
No. Lots of people think that the tabula rasa hypothesis must be right because its the only fair one. Its the only hypthesis where human culture is the most important factor in the human experience.
Biology isn't fair, and it shapes a LOT of our lives.
Also going to throw out a global [citation needed] for pretty much everything that's been said in the past page or so.
Demonic males Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.
On average, in adult human males, the plasma concentration of testosterone is about 7–8 times as great as the concentration in adult human females' plasma,[6] but, as the metabolic consumption of testosterone in males is greater, the daily production is about 20 times greater in men.-wiki on testosterone
we know from mice studies and roid rage that testosterone increases aggression. It shapes the way male brains form, and then men are literally soaking in the stuff 24/7 from 13 till the grave.
Hypothesis 1: is that the behaviors are biologically influenced. That the risk/reward payoff system for males is different. We're all formed by evolution, but the game isn't the same for men and women. Men benefit greatly from trying to "shoot the moon" and go for broke: we can have hundreds if not thousands of children under the right conditions. The number of kids women can have are relatively fixed.
Hypothesis 2: is that that disparate cultures across the world ALL got together and said "Ok, guys, you're going to go out, show off, and get yourselves killed doing ridiculously stupid stuff, and women.. you're getting the boring stuff."... and then just for fun we called the chimps into the conference too. (because really everything's better with monkeys)
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Thank you for actually offering a source, BNW. I don't have the time to actually do the requisite reading to offer a response to that, but I appreciate you actually doing so. Most people just offer "common wisdom" epithets in these conversations.
EDIT: A brief reading of some articles gives me the strong impression that this demonic males idea is pure evolutionary psychology, and thus I am incredibly skeptical of it.
Also going to throw out a global [citation needed] for pretty much everything that's been said in the past page or so.
Turns out the movie we watched was Army of Crime. I fell asleep a half hour or so in, but that wasn't the movie's fault. On the ride home, I asked my comrades if it passed the Bechdel test (after first explaining what the Bechdel test was) and they thought so.
Very meticulous, my research methods.
I mean, as a guy I personally find that pretty insulting if the implication is that movie executives make movies guy-focused because they don't think I could cope with a female lead who has some other females to talk to. For other guys here, do you feel that your ability to enjoy a movie focused on a female is less than the ability women have to enjoy a movie focused on a male? Or is the argument that this kind of thing needs to be done to appeal to a nebulous group of 'other men'?
I'm fine with female characters if the story is good. The thing is though that they're aiming at the lowest common denominator. They're aiming at the fluffy bit of the bell curve, and especially with action movies they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars and don't want to risk their product not appealing.
All of which are horrible, crass, market-driven answers.
Hmmm, look at attractive woman for 1.5 hours or some guy, which would I prefer? I'll have to think on that. Not really. e.g. Mako should have been the lead on Pacific Rim, she might have even then had been able to have a line or two with the Russian.
EDIT: A brief reading of some articles gives me the strong impression that this demonic males idea is pure evolutionary psychology, and thus I am incredibly skeptical of it.
Why?
Its not like the sociology advocating tabula rasa is based on anything more.
Am I the only one that's finding the suggestions of men being innately violent by their very nature simultaneously hilariously ironic and incredibly offensive?No. Lots of people think that the tabula rasa hypothesis must be right because its the only fair one. Its the only hypthesis where human culture is the most important factor in the human experience.
Biology isn't fair, and it shapes a LOT of our lives.
Also going to throw out a global [citation needed] for pretty much everything that's been said in the past page or so.Demonic males Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.
On average, in adult human males, the plasma concentration of testosterone is about 7–8 times as great as the concentration in adult human females' plasma,[6] but, as the metabolic consumption of testosterone in males is greater, the daily production is about 20 times greater in men.-wiki on testosterone
we know from mice studies and roid rage that testosterone increases aggression. It shapes the way male brains form, and then men are literally soaking in the stuff 24/7 from 13 till the grave.
Hypothesis 1: is that the behaviors are biologically influenced. That the risk/reward payoff system for males is different. We're all formed by evolution, but the game isn't the same for men and women. Men benefit greatly from trying to "shoot the moon" and go for broke: we can have hundreds if not thousands of children under the right conditions. The number of kids women can have are relatively fixed.
Hypothesis 2: is that that disparate cultures across the world ALL got together and said "Ok, guys, you're going to go out, show off, and get yourselves killed doing ridiculously stupid stuff, and women.. you're getting the boring stuff."... and then just for fun we called the chimps into the conference too. (because really everything's better with monkeys)
Did we call the bonobos into the conference as well?
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Can you name ANY culture where the women are the warriors and the men stay at home when war is fought? What are the chances of that happening randomly?
Women warriors? Kurgans, Scythians, and Sarmatians come to mind. They weren't exclusively women-warrior society, but they did fight alongside men and held status as such.
To be honest... I think it's a pretty simple function of sales analysis. Movies today are EXTREMELY similar to one another. Most action movies have the same story, same thing with every genre, really. Every so often, a movie breaks the mold A LITTLE, which is apparently utterly amazing, and yet, the differences are pretty minor when you look at them. Hollywood doesn't do much for the male demographic that doesn't include the hero's journey, most or all of the expected side characters, and so on. If you think that two women not talking to each other about anything other than men is the biggest problem with movies today, I am sorry, I think you need to do some thinking about what cinema is and what it could be. Other genres aren't really that much different, though the expected narrative varies a bit between genres.
From the company's perspective: They have so and so many movie slots to fill per year. These movies need to be sold to a specific demographic. Men are easy to sell to if you produce action movies (which means not too many female side characters and certainly no female main characters), and women are easy to sell to if you produce romantic comedies and such (note that these movies will end up having the two women talking about men, of course). Remove these two categories, and you have a pretty small number of films remaining, but the Bechdel test will look sharply different in them. Another factor that hurts this is that cutting is a pretty harsh process, killing off everything that veers from the central narrative simply due to lack of time.
Do yourself a favour. Stay off Hollywood for a year, try to catch other movies, independent movies, smaller studios, and you may come to see things differently. The big movie studios are old, staid creatures of habit, and you should not expect them to change.
I like the hero's journey. It can be better though to try the heroine's journye (say, as in Moribito). Good suggestion to stay off hollywood for a year. Escape the sameness!
Can you name ANY culture where the women are the warriors and the men stay at home when war is fought? What are the chances of that happening randomly?Women warriors? Kurgans, Scythians, and Sarmatians come to mind. They weren't exclusively women-warrior society, but they did fight alongside men and held status as such.
No. Not women warriors. Read what I asked, read what you answered. There's an enormous gulf between the two and you KNOW that.
Having a few woman warriors in your army doesn't change the trend that most of the fighting is done by males. I am speaking of a generality, a trend, a guideline, not an inviolable law of physics.
If gender roles are an entirely social construct, how is it possible that EVERY society assigned the fighting role to men? The odds of that are (.5)^the number of societies you set.
If societies have female warriors, then every society has not assigned the fighting roles only to men.
If you want a general guideline, a partial answer, that is fine, but in some cultures the idea that women don't do the fighting doesn't hold water. Women really did cut sick and loose arrows and try to roll those 20s. The numbers seem to have been more than, "a few" in the peoples that backed their women going in hard, with enduring traditions of horse archery or spearwork across female soldiery/raiders (the nomad does not comply to our norms).
The Scythians were really cool. Also don't forget the Mongols (a lot of warrior women in the horde. I was surprised when I found that out).
If societies have female warriors, then every society has not assigned the fighting roles only to men.
There is a VAST difference between assigning assigning a gender role as male and assigning every single position in that role to a male. By that definition there are no gender roles (because not even all females have children)
If your only defense for an idea about large populations is to make it impossible to speak of trends then its a failure.
If you absolutely NEED to break it down into an individual level, do the math on every single soldier sent out to fight. Run the odds on getting that number higher than the 50 50 ratio you'd expect if it were entirely random.
What I am saying is that you need a thesis. If you want to claim the amount of warrior women in history and across cultures is insignificant or false, and that men have always been the warriors you will need a very long and thorough paper. There have also been some small peaceful island societies with warfare not being tied to gender, so that is another problem for you to address.
Gender roles, warrior masculinities and warrior femininities, there is a lot of work to be done here if you want to make widesweeping claims. I do wish you good luck, but as some cultures have been renowned for their warrior women, you are in trouble if these counter-examples come up.
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Gender dichotomies are just fictions. Really huge fictions all based on... nothing real.Yeah.. no. We're a sexually dimorphic species, and I don't see any reason for thinking that biology doesn't extend to our brains.
For all the occasional condemnation of "biological determinism" that you see come out of the wholly discredited 'culture and nurture is everything' school of thought from decades ago there are measurable differences between the male and female brain. That being said the effects of those differences are often subtle, but it's naive to ignore that it has an effect on higher orders of behavior: one effect among many including upbringing, social conventions, etc.
Those anatomical differences are also somewhat blurry for some of us.
Additionally, as ethically problematic as it is, look at some of the research involving prenatal administration of dexamethasone (as an experimental treatment for congenital adrenal hyperplasia) on both physical characteristics and behavioral characteristics in treated versus untreated children (stereotypically masculine traits versus hyper stereotypical feminine traits in untreated versus treated groups). By altering the standard hormone exposure (or effect of that hormone exposure) in the prenatal stage, you can produce a lot of downstream effects on the brain.
Without my glasses, everything is blurry.
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What I am saying is that you need a thesis. If you want to claim the amount of warrior women in history and across cultures is insignificant or false, and that men have always been the warriors you will need a very long and thorough paper.
This isn't an argument. Its an objection.. I don't think people do papers on the blatantly obvious, unquestioned facts of history. Even in the modern USA the number of frontline women is 2.7%
Natural selection (which has shaped our genetics and thus our behavior) is very rarely a binary game. Small changes in %'s, trends, and generalities add up to very significant, compounding changes in survivability without ever needing to be 100% deterministic.
A population with 3% of warriors as women may seem vastly different from a population where 100% of the warriors are men from a sociological stand point, but from a biological perspective they're almost identical.
There have also been some small peaceful island societies with warfare not being tied to gender, so that is another problem for you to address.
Citation for this oxymoron? (peaceful societies with warfare). I think I know what you're talking about but don't want to give a response to the wrong thing if I'm wrong.
but as some cultures have been renowned for their warrior women, you are in trouble if these counter-examples come up.
No I'm not if you understand my point.
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Why?Its not like the sociology advocating tabula rasa is based on anything more.
This link gives a number of reasons that sum up why I'm immediately skeptical of evo-psych. The big reasons for me are primarily that it's often incredibly difficult to falsify and has an enormous tendency to lean towards confirming existing biases - people tend to see what they want to see in EP "evidence". It's difficult to concretely link behaviour to genetics. Incredibly so.
Note that I'm not at all trying to claim that everything is socioculturally determined either. I don't have the time right now to research this stuff, as I said.
Male/female differences in statistics in battle might have more to do with physical strength differences and simple practical logistical reasons more then physiological ones. For example, the more advanced your weaponry and equipment get the heavier it usually gets, leaving few men and even fewer women capable of handling the rigors of using it. As armies became more organized and the fighting took place further and further away someone needed to stay behind and look after family and property. I suspect that if fighting were less technology driven and local you'd have seen a lot more female warriors throughout history.
I think it goes the other way. When your weapon is a club having 40% less upper body strength than your opponent is a good way to end up dead. When its an M 16 or better yet an F 16 it does a lot to even the battlefield.
Genetically speaking, what does a woman risk by fighting? Having their entire genome removed from the pool. What reproductive advantage does a woman gain by fighting? Very little. Possibly some spoils of war to help her children slightly, and keeping her chosen mate. A woman taking risks might get a better man. That benefit is incremental.
What does a man risk? Losing MOST of his genome in the pool (chances aren't that bad for "getting one for the road" and leaving his soon to be widow behind to raise his child) But what does he gain? He can kill the other guy and take his women, increasing his reproductive success. A man taking risks can get more women. That benefit is (very literally) multiplicative.
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Slave women, I read somewhere, did most of the work on American plantations. The idea that they are physically incapable of carrying 100 lbs. of battle gear seems pretty suspect to me.
What I'm saying is when you only have a club or spear and you're quarreling with another clan half a day's walk from where you live, the amount of stuff you need to bring to a fight is minimal
Which is I think a secondary concern for your ability to survive the fight.
and as some historical data and as Roman (likely anecdotal) accounts seem to show female warriors weren't all that rare. I'm not suggesting that it was a 50/50 mix but I suspect that female warriors were more common.
How common? Even if you take Ceasar at face value he's not describing legions of women alongside the men.
Once you get body armour, metal weapons, and the fights move weeks away from where you live, then you see women becoming rarer and rarer on the battle field.
This is a very circular supposition.
Also genetics might play a role in it, but usually fighting is more about property (i.e. someone's taking my stuff!) and biological reasons for fighting probably only factor into wars that were based on more abstract causes.
Biology and stuff aren't seperate: they're linked. Stuff will increase your reproductive success. (unless you're a bonobo, since they're living in chimp paradise there's a huge surplus of stuff)
Biology also doesn't separate ultimate and proximate well. If your tribe is getting fired up for war the reasons behind it really don't matter much...the triggers that get people fired up work the same regardless of the ultimate goal. This is on the very rare occasion that war isn't about stuff anyways.
edit: I think a bigger issue is whether your army is pre selected and organized to work together vs. whoever shows up to the fight. If a celtic warrior woman shows up with a chariot and armor who ever's running the melee can just throw her in "somewhere on the left over there".
If you need a tightly organized unit where everyone is trained the same exact way then you need to start with a female recruit and put the effort into her training, which is less likely to pay off than a man's AND be more problematic to boot.
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Anthropology and sociobiology are pretty much outside of my area of expertise (if you're wondering, my areas of expertise are: loading trucks, weed, rock'n'roll and the history of Marxism), but a morning's worth of google searches about Demonic Males, hunter-gatherer gender roles and tribal violence led me to this interesting article on Napoleon Chagnon.
Fun stuff.
That seems pretty suspect to me, too.
Except that, I think, the 100 lbs. of gear was referring to modern battle equipment, not medieval armor and whatnot. Not saying upper body strength doesn't come into play in modern warfare, but not nearly as much as primitive.
Ha! Wrong on both counts, Humual!